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, 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 jumble of overlapping fragments. Behind the character of Figaro stands a virtually endless line of impudent theatrical valets stretching from the plays of Marivaux, Dancourt, Regnard, and Molière all the way back to the comedies of Terence and...