Useless Precaution

The subtitle of The Barber of Seville is "The Useless Precaution." The useless precaution theme in drama focuses on an old man trying to isolate his young wife or intended wife, and it harkens back to the days of Roman theater. By the 1770s, the useless precaution premise was a stock element of French literature, found in countless plays and stories, and while Beaumarchais's theme was highly derivative, his treatment of it was wholly original. As Frédéric Grendel wrote in Beaumarchais: The Man Who Was Figaro, "The thing that matters is that Beaumarchais made the theme his own. No one before him, not even Molière, had used the devices of ellipsis and punning so freely and so naturally." John Dunkley concurred, writing in the Reference Guide to World Literature, "Beaumarchais infuses it [the theme] with new life through memorable characters and...