At the same time, he was writing The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, two somewhat subversive plays that soon became more famous as the source for Mozart’s adaptation. I recall reading the first in school at some point and liking it, though I haven’t gone back to the whole series.
At Kickstarter, Talia Felix is inviting people to support her project to translate all of Beaumarchais’s plays from the French and release the new English texts into the public domain.
Actually, The Marriage of Figaro was adapted by Lorenzo da Ponte who translated it into Italian and removed the political references. Da Ponte is a fascinating character who later emigrated to the United States to escape his creditors in London and ran a grocery store and distillery in Pennsylvania. Those enterprises failed and he moved to New York where he became the first professor of Italian Literature at Columbia. Born a Jew, he converted to Catholicism and became the first Roman Catholic priest appointed to the faculty at Columbia. He died at roughly ninety years of age a naturalized American citizen. His funeral in New York was enormous.
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