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Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was born in Paris in 1732. The son of a clockmaker, he was early appointed to horologist ot the French court, where a rich marriage established his fortunes. Having had a career as financial speculator, confidential agent and gun-runner, he became a man of letters. His most famous works, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, formed the basis of the operas by Rossini and Mozart. He died in 1799. John Wood was a producer of plays and a translator, with a particular interest in Moliere.
On the basis of these two plays alone, Beaumarchais can be placed alongside Voltaire as a truly great satirist. It is a shame that they are now known, outside France, merely as providing the libretti for two famous operas - but three or four pages into the scripts, in an excellent translation, and one realizes that they deserve to stand on their own merits as anti-aristocratic comedies at the centre of which stand a major comic creation: Figaro, the scheming and resourceful valet of Count Almaviva. Perhaps especially for the lovers of the operas, for whom it is a pleasure to know more about the lovely Countess, the beautiful Rosine, the cheeky Cherubin, these plays are a real pleasure to read, and come to life, as the greatest plays do, with the reader playing all the parts. (Kirkus UK)
