Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jack Undank

Critical Essay by Jack Undank

SOURCE: “Beaumarchais' Transformations,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 100, No. 4, September, 1985, pp. 829-70.

In the following excerpt, Undank traces the development of Beaumarchais's literary style and philosophies.

How does it happen that in Beaumarchais, the energetic heir of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and scores of others—as if a predictable ripeness were not all—there appears a series of startling gaps and disabilities: effort without depth of principle, action emptying instead of filling and fulfilling the self, language hopelessly adrift. The very question is unorthodox and, if conscionable, raises others about the perils that had all along been incubating in those literary and ideological traditions Beaumarchais absorbed with the appetite of a self-interested, though intellectually complacent, disciple. The battle for men's minds was not yet won; nor were the corollaries of the new metaphysical, “scientific,” economic, or “natural” principles of the philosophes fully worked out in theory or application. But for...
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