The plot of the play is as follows:  A fairy, enflamed with love for Harlequin, on account of his beauty, has caused him to be brought to her realm, but, in spite of all her charms and graces and her assiduous attentions, she cannot awaken love in him, nor change him from the rude and clownish fellow that he is; and it is not until he meets with Silvia, the shepherdess, that love is seen to be more potent than all the charms of fairy-land to make of simple Harlequin, as of Hawthorne’s Faun, a man.  The developing influence of love is the theme of the comedy, and, although the development is rapid, as befits a play, it is nevertheless by graduated stages.  Each meeting of the lovers fans the flame, and the need of secrecy but stimulates their wit, until, at last, by a cunning wile, Harlequin gains possession of the fairy’s wand and with it, of her power.  This, of course, brings about the natural denouement, and the play ends to the satisfaction of the lovers.

Many of the scenes are characterized by an artlessness and grace that recall Florian’s les Deux Billets or Musset’s A quoi revent les jeunes Filles.  It is the poetry of an epoch of prose.  “All the poetry of the first half of the eighteenth century is in Marivaux, as all the poetry of the second half is in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre."[64] The first two plays of Marivaux presented to the public were performed upon the stage of the Theatre-Italien, and throughout his life he showed a marked preference for that theatre.

His success was brilliant, and Arlequin poli par l’Amour had twelve representations.  At last Marivaux appears to have found his true sphere; but no, he has still to feel his way, and to experience another check, before entrusting himself to the promptings of his genius.  His was not a talent to blossom in a night, and only an over-zealous friend could say of him:  “Il ne se decida point pour les lettres, il fut entraine par elles.  Il ne chercha point a devenir auteur, il fut etonne de l’etre devenu."[65]

At this time tragedy still held sway over the hearts of the French, although the period of its glory was past.  As nearly every writer of the century had produced his tragedy, not to mention the immediate friends of Marivaux, Fontenelle with his Aspar and La Motte with his Oedipe and Romulus, it is not strange that Marivaux felt tempted to try his wings in this upper sphere.  His Annibal, a tragedy in five acts and in verse, was produced at the Theatre-Francais on December 16, 1720.  In this play the very qualities, destined later to procure for the author such splendid successes in his comedies, were either lacking or out of place.  It survived four representations, three at the Theatre-Francais and one at Court, and then disappeared from the repertory, not to be taken up again until Marivaux was an academician, and as such, in the minds of many, of course worthy of applause.