This section contains 7,214 words (approx. 25 pages at 300 words per page) |
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SOURCE: “The Marriage of Figaro,” in The Attraction of the Contrary: Essays on the Literature of the French Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 184-96.
In the following excerpt, Rex discusses the unique role of The Marriage of Figaro within French literature.
A. Games
Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro is a mixture of ingredients so perfectly combined, it would be almost perverse to strain out any single element and call it the essence. The play is everything at once: situation comedy, farce, comic opera, parade, comedy of manners, erotic comedy, social satire, drame bourgeois, comédie larmoyante, revolutionary indictment of the system,1 plea for unwed mothers and women's liberation, and so on. The action shifts focus constantly, and each time a new strand comes by the audience must catch on as best it can. If we look behind the play to its literary “sources” we find likewise a pleasantly heterogeneous...
This section contains 7,214 words (approx. 25 pages at 300 words per page) |
![]() |