Beaumarchais and the Theatre (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beaumarchais and the Theatre Jim Carmody Beaumarchais and the Theatre. By William Driver Howarth. London: Routledge, 1995; pp. viii + 273. $79.95 cloth. William Howarth writes that the bibliography of the 1988 Pléiade edition of Beaumarchais’s Oeuvres by Pierre Larthomas (Paris: Gallimard) lists sixteen biographies but no more than a “mere half-dozen monographs devoted to a critical appreciation of the Figaro trilogy” (226). He adds that there are even fewer studies of Beaumarchais’s “dramatic output considered as a whole” and that his own Beaumarchais and the Theatre is an attempt to correct that imbalance. In spite of Beaumarchais’s enduring high standing in French culture and the continued popularity of his plays in the theatre, especially Le Mariage de Figaro, his playwriting has not in this century received nearly as much critical attention as that of Marivaux. Howarth’s Beaumarchais and the Theatre is the only major study in English of this subject to appear in several decades and is, therefore, doubly welcome; it is an excellent discussion of Beaumarchais’s drama that both takes full account of the most recent scholarship and makes much of it available in English for the first time. Howarth also provides accurate and often elegant translations. Appearing toward the end of Howarth’s very successful career—the author is now Emeritus Professor of French at Bristol University—this discussion is enriched on virtually every page by decades of scholarship on French classical theatre. This book will probably exert considerable influence on the interpretation of Beaumarchais in the non-francophone world for a long time to come. From the very beginning of the book, Howarth is concerned with correcting what he sees as the unfortunate tendency of biographers to confuse Beaumarchais with his characters, a trend exemplified by Frédéric Grendel’s 1973 biography, Beaumarchais ou la Calomnie, which appeared in English in 1977 under the title Beaumarchais: The Man Who Was Figaro. This tendency to conflate the author with his most famous character has, Howarth argues, led to an underappreciation of both the man, whom Howarth calls the “supreme all-rounder of his age . . . the Enlightenment’s nearest approximation to that Renaissance ideal, the Universal Man,” and of his drama (2). Howarth is also concerned with correcting what he sees as the tendency to overemphasize the “subversive” or “revolutionary” aspects of Le Mariage de Figaro at the expense of the work as a whole, leading readers and theatre artists to lend undue weight to aspects of the play that “the original audience may well have considered to be much less provocative” (4). Howarth’s concerns dictate the tripartite structure of the book. Part 1 is devoted to a relatively brief examination of Beaumarchais’s life; part 2 offers a multi-faceted exploration of eighteenth-century French theatre, its writers, actors, and audiences; and part 3 provides a chapter-length discussion of each of Beaumarchais’s works for the theatre. While it breaks little new ground, the account of eighteenth-century French theatre is certainly one of the best available. Howarth’s style is crisp and [End Page 403] unpretentious throughout, and although the book is relatively short, it is strikingly rich in both historical fact and detailed interpretive commentary. The biographical material gives us enough scenes from an extraordinarily eventful life to persuade us that any facile correlation between Beaumarchais and Figaro is worse than misleading. Finally, the section dealing with the individual plays contains not only adroitly nuanced readings of the major plays, but also valuable commentaries on the variety of minor works Beaumarchais wrote for the theatre, such as Jean-Bête à la foire, a parade written in the 1760s that may be “the outstanding representative of the genre” (112). Indeed, one of the considerable achievements of Howarth’s Beaumarchais is that he has given us a sufficiently detailed account of the playwright’s multiple cultural and theatrical environments—in the case of Jean-Bête, for example, a mini-history of the parade—that we are in a much better position to appreciate Beaumarchais’s contributions to French dramaturgy than ever before. All of Howarth’s chapters are relatively short, with the longest at...