Beaumarchais: The Figaro Plays - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0460879235 ISBN 13: 9780460879231

Publisher: J M Dent & Sons Ltd, 1997

Synopsis

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. The Figaro Plays, hardcover, Very Good, 1st Edition. Large 8vo. xxx, 290pp. Very good clean tight sound square, no bookplate, inscriptions or marks of any kind. In very good bright gilt lettered green boards with colour pictorial dustwrapper. A great addition for reader, scholar and collector alike.

About this title

About the Author

John Wells was born in 1936 and sadly died in January last year. He was an important member of that small but influential group centred around Private Eye magazine and Beyond the Fringe, which included Peter Cook, Richard Ingrams,John Bird, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. He was clever, erudite, entertaining, funny, outrageous and abrasive - not to mention a keen linguist with adeep love of music. He taught French and German at Eton, before going on to co-edit Private Eye, so when Jonathan Miller asked him to translate Beaumarchais' Figaro Plays for a radio production, he was able to fuse a number of hispassions in a single project. It is these texts, revised just before his death, which are published here. It was to be his last book, a fitting tribute to the man and his legacy.Editor Biography John Leigh is a fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and a specialist in eighteenth-century French literatur

Review

[Beaumarchais ] fame rests on Le Barbier de Seville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only French plays which his stage-struck century bequeathed to the international repertoire. But his achievement has been adulterated, for Beaumarchais has long been the brand name of a product variously reprocessed by Mozart, Rossini, and the score or so librettists and musicians who have perpetuated his plots, his characters, and his name. The most intriguing question of all has centered on his role as catalyst of the Revolution. Was his impertinent barber the Sweeney Todd of the Ancien Régime, the true begetter of the guillotine? [. . .]
Beaumarchais plays have often seemed to need the same kind of shoring up as his reputation, as though they couldn t stand on their own without a scaffolding of good tunes. Yet, as John Wells lively and splendidly speakable translations of the Barber, the Marriage, and A Mother s Guilt demonstrate, they need assistance from no one.
[Beaumarchais] thought of the three plays as a trilogy. Taken together, they reflect, as John Leigh s commentaries make clear, the Ancien Régime s unstoppable slide into revolution. --David Coward in The London Review of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: J M Dent & Sons Ltd
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0460879235
• ISBN 13: 9780460879231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 290
• Editor: Leigh John