William D. Howarth - Beaumarchais and the Theatre

BEAUMARCHAIS AND THE THEATRE

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (173299) led a colourful and remarkable life: he worked as a watchmaker, a musician, a pamphleteer, a businessman, an arms dealer, and a publisher. But above all he was a playwright, and his work includes the most outstanding and significant play of the eighteenth century: Le Mariage de Figaro. In Beaumarchais and the Theatre William D. Howarth sets this and his other dramatic works in the broad historical context of pre-revolutionary France, providing a unique and authoritative study of the dramatist and his plays.

After outlining the life of Beaumarchais, Howarth considers the dynamic and momentous events of eighteenth-century France which shaped both political and theatrical history. He then presents detailed analyses of the plays themselves, discussing their critical reception, their influence on contemporary drama and their legacy. This includes a discussion of Mozarts operatic adaptation of Le Mariage de Figaro and that of Le Barbier de Sville by Rossini. Howarth also analyses sketches and fragments only recently rediscovered.

Beaumarchais and the Theatre is a comprehensive, much-needed study of one of the most significant European playwrights to come out of the turbulent late eighteenth century. It will be invaluable reading for the student of theatre history.

William D. Howarth is Emeritus Professor of French at Bristol University and Honorary Professor of French at the University of Warwick. He has written widely on the subject of French drama, and previous publications include Life and Letters in France: The Seventeenth Century, Sublime and Grotesque: A Study of French Romantic Drama, Molire: A Playwright and his Audience and, as editor, Comic Drama: The European Heritage.

The statue of Beaumarchais in the rue St Antoine, Paris

BEAUMARCHAIS AND THE THEATRE

William D. Howarth

The most brilliant play, not only
of the eighteenth century, but
possibly of the whole French theatre:
Le Mariage de Figaro.

Le duc de Castries, 1985

First published 1995
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

1995 William D. Howarth

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Howarth W. D. (William Driver)
Beaumarchais and the Theatre / William D. Howarth.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 17321799.
2. Dramatists, French18th centuryBiography.
3. TheaterFranceHistory18th century.
I. Title.
PQ1956.H68 1994
842.5-dc20 9422876

ISBN 0415007518

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

It has been impossible to work on the text of Beaumarchaiss plays since 1988 without incurring a considerable debt to the revised edition of the Oeuvres prepared by P. Larthomas and published by Gallimard in the Bibliothque de la Pliade in that year. I am happy to express my indebtedness to this invaluable work, and at the same time to acknowledge a debt to the critical apparatus relating to Le Barbier de Sville and Le Mariage de Figaro presented respectively in La Gense du Barbier de Sville, ed. E.J. Arnould, (Dublin, University Press/Paris, Minard, 1965) and in Le Manage de Figaro, ed. J. B. Ratermanis (Geneva, Institut et Muse Voltaire, 1968). Acknowledgement must also be made to Monsieur J.-P. de Beaumarchais, both for his scholarly work on his distinguished ancestor in general, and in particular for his service to other Beaumarchais scholars in publishing the text of Le Sacristain contained in the family archives (Revue dHistoire Littraire de la France, LXXIV, 1974, pp. 97699).

I am grateful to the administration of the Grand Thtre, Geneva, for kindly providing me with a copy of the programme of the operatic version of La Mre coupable from which the note by Darius Milhaud is taken.

Finally, my grateful thanks are due to my wife Barbara for her most valuable assistance with proofs and index.

Notes to the Reader

Note on Quotations in the Text

In order to cater for readers who are French specialists as well as for those who have a general interest in European theatre but who may not read French with ease, quotations from Beaumarchaiss own writings (and from contemporary texts by other authors, in cases where the literary style of a passage is an important consideration) are given in the original French but translations of these will be found in the Appendix. (Each quotation, or group of short quotations, is followed by a number in bold print, corresponding to the number of the translation in the Appendix.) Other quotations from contemporary sources, and all quotations from modern secondary literature, appear in the text in translation.

Note on Eighteenth-Century Money

Until decimal coinage was introduced into France in 1795, French currency was based on the division of the livre into 20 sols, the sol (or sou) being further divided into 12 deniers. (The origin of this system, which also provided the source for the British . s.d. which survived until the 1970s, goes back to the time of Charlemagne.) In the eighteenth century, the following terms are found:

louis (or louis dor)	= 20 livres;
cu	= 3 livres;
franc: an alternative name for the livre;
sol	= of a livre;
denier	= of a sol.

Introduction

For too long, Beaumarchais the playwright and man of the theatre has run the risk of being overshadowed by Beaumarchais the man of intrigue and adventure. While the colourful narrative of his life has constantly been renewed, in English as well as in French, in a whole series of biographies ranging from the serious and scholarly to the imaginative and sensational, the details of his career as a dramatist, and even his achievements in the theatre, remain relatively unknown outside the professional circles of drama specialists and their students. One difficulty is, of course, that the two Figaro masterpieces, Le Barbier de Sville and Le Mariage de Figaro, were from a very early date hijacked by the composers of the operas and their librettists; this is particularly the case with Le Mariage, to the extent that for every connoisseur of Beaumarchaiss original play there must literally be hundreds who know the Da Ponte/Mozart adaptation. To quote Irving Wardle, on the occasion of a recent British performance of the Beaumarchais text in translation: