Beaumarchais in Seville
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An Intermezzo
Hugh Thomas
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Format: PaperPrice: $21.00
In 1764-65 the irrepressible playwright Beaumarchais traveled to Madrid, where he immersed himself in the life and society of the day. Inspired by the places he had seen and the people he had met, Beaumarchais returned home to create The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, plays that became the basis for the operas by Rossini and Mozart that continue to delight audiences today. This book is a lively and original account of Beaumarchais’s visit to Madrid (he never went to Seville) and a re-creation of the society that fired his imagination.
Drawing on Beaumarchais’s letters and commentaries, translated into English for the first time, Hugh Thomas investigates the full range of the playwright’s activities in Madrid. He focuses particular attention on short plays that Beaumarchais attended and by which he was probably influenced, and he probes the inspirations for such widely recognized characters as the barber-valet Figaro, the lordly Count Almaviva, and the beautiful but deceived Rosine. Not neglecting Beaumarchais’s many other pursuits (ranging from an endeavor to gain a contract for selling African slaves to an attempt to place his mistress as a spy in the bed of King Charles III), Lord Thomas provides a highly entertaining view of a vital moment in Madrid’s history and in the creative life of the energetic Beaumarchais.
"Hugh Thomas's joyous, elegant and stylish Beaumarchais in Seville shows how much fun history can be."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
"Grimy streets, grim politics, greedy aristos, grasping parvenues, a grand guignol. Hugh Thomas's disciplined imagination conjures vividly Beaumarchais' world and mind."—Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Tufts University
“Thomas follows Beaumarchais to Madrid for a year to plumb the playwright’s cultural and professional exploits and chart his megalomaniacal ambition. Along the way, Beaumarchais introduces us to situations and people that will eventually make their way to the stage. However fascinating the fictional lineage of Figaro and Almaviva, the book’s deeper gratification exists in a nuanced, critical, conscientiously researched portrait of the driven man who gave them birth.”—Booklist (starred review)
“Mr. Thomas is fascinating in his discussion of the Spanish influence on Beaumarchais’s work. . . . [He] has given us the gift of a superb romp through a mesmerizing but neglected interlude in history.”—Barbara Probst Solomon, Wall Street Journal
"This book is tremendous fun to read. It is nourished, moreover, by an extensive root system: Beaumarchais's plays, personal correspondence and memoirs (not least his Mémoire d'Espagne), together with meticulous familiarity with earlier biographies of the dramatist, contemporary travellers' accounts, and scholarly historical work about eighteenth-century Spain."—Eric Southworth, Times Literary Supplement
“… [a] hugely entertaining little book.” - London Review of Books
Publication Date: January 6, 2009
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