SOURCE: “Rewriting Bourgeois Drama: Beaumarchais's ‘double plan,’” in The Age of Theatre in France, edited by David Trott and Nicole Boursier, Academic Printing & Publishing, 1988, pp. 41-51.

In the following excerpt, Hayes examines Beaumarchais's general perspective on the theater and assesses the influence of Diderot's theories on Beaumarchais's works.

Beaumarchais's publicly acknowledged debt to the author of Le Père de famille brought him cruel raillery from Palissot: ‘Beaumarchais, trop obscur pour être intéressant, / De son dieu Diderot est le singe impuissant.’¹ However, although Eugénie and Le Père de famille enjoyed roughly equal popularity, both were displaced in the 1780's by Le Barbier de Séville and Le Mariage de Figaro and today it is as the creator of Figaro that Beaumarchais is accounted the dramatic luminary of late eighteenth century France. In this paper, however, I should like to look at Beaumarchais's ideas on the...