Customer Reviews

The Figaro Trilogy: The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, The Guilty Mother (Oxford World's Classics)

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For any Mozart/Rossini opera fan who wants to read the book from which
the "Barber or Seville" and the "Marriage of Figaro "came from, this
book is for you. It is a good background to understanding these works.
Best of all, the concluding play in the Trilogy "The Grieving Widow"
brings to close the story of these beloved opera characters. It's light
reading and fun.

This is a pretty good new translation, although it does have some grammatical errors. So, have a pencil in hand when you read it if you want to touch up the missing conjunction words and misused words. I'm sure translating from the old French is not easy, so I don't hold it against Mr. Coward. But he should have not been a coward when it came to proofreading...his editor should have been reading more carefully as well.
Enjoy!

I'm a huge Beaumarchais fan, having even gone so far as to translate his play Eugenia: Eugénie -- and I actually just collect English translations of the Figaro plays for the fun of it. This particular version is definitely the best translation I've found of any! It's the most readable and most well-translated for humor's sake. There are a couple mistakes, but they're typical ones (even native French speakers have trouble understanding Beaumarchais.) At present, this is the version I would probably recommend to anyone looking to read or perform the plays.