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...