SOURCE: “The Significance of a Comic Pattern in Plautus and Beaumarchais,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 88, No. 6, December, 1973, pp. 1262-87.

[In the essay below, MacCary compares Plautus's play Casina with The Marriage of Figaro, arguing that the plays are structurally and thematically similar.]

In writing the introduction for a new edition of Plautus' Casina,¹ I was concerned to show by analogy with more familiar material the sorts of changes the Roman poet worked in his Greek original, Diphilos' Kleroumenoi (The Lot-casters). I took my cue from E. Fraenkel, who compares Plautus' technique of transforming Greek speeches into Latin songs to Da Ponte's adaptation of Beaumarchais' Figaro for Mozart's opera.² In developing this comparison—Diphilos is to Plautus what Beaumarchais is to DaPonte and Mozart—I was most concerned with the expansiveness of the lyric mode, the fact that arias or songs, by their very nature, do not advance the dramatic action of an opera or musical comedy, but serve rather to elaborate themes inherent in the action, to develop characterization and, in general, offer a pause for reflection on emotional aspects of the situation.³ Since we do not have Diphilos' Kleroumenoi, but can only make deductions from the Casina itself and what we know of Plautus' technique in other plays, the comparison is a useful one.

The similarities among the four plays are not, however, restricted to the musical element in the Casina and Le Nozze, the lack of it in the Kleroumenoi and Le Mariage. I have been surprised to find that the criticism of Beaumarchais' play and the search for its sources do not include a careful analysis of the structure of the Casina, nor do scholars interested in Plautus' influence on later comedy define a relation between Figaro and Casina.⁴ What comment there is on the two plays centers on the character of Figaro compared with Plautine slaves. In this discussion I mean to point out important parallels of plot structure and characterization in the two plays as preface to a consideration of the basic pattern which both plays follow. I am convinced that the plays are more than superficially alike, that the combination of dramatic circumstances which they share is the cause of their also sharing both major and minor themes, that these circumstances carry in them the determination of these themes. If this determination can be shown to operate in these two plays, then their comparison will elucidate both, just as two different treatments of the same myth can be compared to elicit its essential significance.

I do not intend to apply structural analysis to the Casina and Figaro, though the approach I take does have in common with the approaches of C. Levi-Strauss and R. Barthes a concern for the relations within the material. I shall concentrate on the relations between Figaro and Count Almaviva, and between men and women in Figaro, but I shall not suggest that they are symbolic of other relations or that other relations are symbolic of them; rather I shall examine and interpret them in the light of evidence from psychoanalysis.⁵

The basic situation in the Casina is the reaction of a family, its slaves and neighbors to the love of an old man for a young girl. The old man is Lysidamus, who has a wife Cleostrata and a son Euthynicus. Euthynicus is in love with Casina, a foundling, whom Cleostrata has raised as she would her own daughter. Lysidamus is in love with the same young girl and, as Plautus' prologue-speaker puts it, nunc sibi uterque contra legiones parat (50). Cleostrata supports her son, who suggests that Casina be allowed to marry his arms-bearer, since he himself could never marry a girl whose citizenship is uncertain. Lysidamus proposes a match with his bailiff Olympio. Both expect to enjoy the favors of Casina by arranging these marriages as a convenience. Euthynicus, however, has been rusticated by his father so his claims are maintained by his mother. One has, then, as a central theme of the play the droit du seigneur or ius primae noctis, for Lysidamus is desperate for the enjoyment of Casina for the first night only and cannot see beyond this, while Euthynicus' plans are unclear and, due to his absence from the rest of the play, undeveloped.

This prerogative of the master to enjoy the bride of a slave is a custom whose prevalence and significance has been much discussed. W. D. Howarth has shown that its use in the eighteenth century in France, as both dramatic theme and essay topic, was ungrounded in clear evidence that it had ever been widely practiced in the centuries before “enlightenment.”⁶ Anthropological investigations show that the ritual defloration of brides is wide-spread among primitive peoples,⁷ and that certain deductions on the motivation behind these rituals are possible. The most important is that this prerogative was in fact a service or duty performed by some man of authority to protect the bridegroom against the danger inherent in shedding the hymeneal blood. This explains the prevalence of priests and holy men among the practicers of ritual defloration, but there are sufficient cases of fathers performing this service for their own daughters to cause some question as to whether the avoidance of taboos on the shedding of blood and the related apotropaic function of replacement in initiation proceedings offer a full explanation:

Among certain peoples it is said to be the custom for a father to deflower his daughter. This has been represented as a right belonging to him. Herport wrote in the latter part of the seventeenth century that when a Singhalese gave his daugher in marriage, he first slept with her himself on the plea of having a right to the first fruit of the tree he had planted. Miklucho-Maclay was told that among the Orang Sikai of the Malay Peninsula the fathers of grown-up daughters claimed for themselves the ius primae noctis, and he heard of the existence of the same custom in the Eastern Moluccas.⁸

In tracing the origins of these customs one wonders whether the priests of African tribes and the lords of medieval villages are not, in fact, replacements for the father, who, through social and religious pressure, has been forced to relinquish his prerogative.

If the father feels justified in his claim to first intercourse with his daughter, then there is evidence that the daughter concurs in this opinion. Freud has expressed it this way:

It is a question of sexual wishes active in childhood and never relinquished—in women generally a fixation of the libido upon the father … A husband is, so to speak, never anything but a proxy, never the right man; the first claim upon the feeling of love in a woman belongs to someone else, in typical cases to her father; the husband is at best a second.⁹

This reciprocal emotional demand between father and daughter for sexual satisfaction would seem to have contradicted primitive man's stringent sanctions against incest, but it has been shown that, in fact, this particular act of incest can have a therapeutic effect on fears of incest in general:

It would seem that the girl not only has the wish to have intercourse with the father and therefore primitive society recognizes this by allowing the father to have the first intercourse with her; but further that she feels she belongs to her father and only an initiation into intercourse by him can allow her to belong to another. Unless she is initiated in this way some harm will befall her, for intercourse is always associated with incest and the guilt feelings attached thereto, and so requires to be formally sanctioned in some way before it may be indulged in.¹⁰

This is, in fact, one of the best examples of the source of guilt containing its own corrective: society imposes incest taboos upon its members precisely because it recognizes the power of sexual attraction between members of the same family; in ritual it gives restricted opportunity for gratification of these impulses, thus saving itself from the catastrophe of ignoring their existence and thereby encouraging their free and open expression.¹¹

The relation between Casina and Lysidamus is like that between father and daughter in so far as Cleostrata has raised her in the house as her own child. Her reaction to his claim of ius primae noctis and to the right to marry her off to whoever of his slaves will accommodate him in exercising this prerogative is treated in three successive stages in the action of the play. I have shown elsewhere that each of the three major or spectacular scenes in the Casina is derived ultimately from an episode in myth which has a long history in Greek tragedy and comedy.¹² The first of these spectacular scenes is the lot-casting for the bride: since neither Cleostrata nor Lysidamus will relent in support of their candidates, this means is decided upon for settling the argument. Lot-casting for a bride is a motif confined in previous drama to the treatment of the myth of Aiolos. Aiolos lived on an island with his seven sons and seven daughters. One of the sons, Makareus, loves his sister Kanake and she has a child by him. In order to legitimize their union he persuades his father to allow his sons to marry his daughters, but Aiolos determines which son should have which daughter by lot and Kanake's lot falls to another. The child is discovered, Aiolos sends Kanake a sword with which to commit suicide and drives Makareus into exile.

This myth offers an extreme statement of the sexual attractions within the family. In the absence of the mother, the son is attracted to the sister. She responds to the brother insofar as he reminds her of the father. The father resents this oedipal attack—the son has usurped his sexual prerogative over the daughter—and takes revenge by forcing the daughter to commit suicide. In the Casina the situation is the same except that Lysidamus' attraction for his “daughter” is explicit; his resentment of what he considers an attack by his son on his prerogative as a father is equally explicit: Cleostrata argues that Lysidamus should yield first to her and then to his son in this affair, but Lysidamus refuses:

                                                            Cl. …
si facias recte et commode,
me sinas curare ancillas, quae mea est curatio.
Ly. qui, malum, homini scutigerulo
dare lubet? Cl. quia enim
filio nos oportet opitulari unico. Ly.
at quamquam unicust,
nihilo magis unicus est ille mihi quam ego illi pater:
illum mi aequiust quam me illi quae uolo concedere.

(260-5)¹³

In insisting on her control of the women slaves Cleostrata introduces a theme which is developed to an important degree later in the play: women unite to protect one of their own against men. In encouraging the son against the father she antagonizes the oedipal conflict between them by re-asserting her own importance as the original cause of that conflict: Casina has taken her place as the woman desired by both father and son.

In the second spectacular scene of the play—Pardalisca's false report of Casina's madness—we have a recollection of the revenge of the daughters of Danaus, a theme popular in Greek tragedy and comedy of the fifth and fourth centuries. In Aeschylus' treatment of the theme, the importance of the daughters' debt of chastity to their father is explicit.¹⁴ Only the first play of the trilogy is extant, the Supplices, but the outline of the action in the Aepyptioi and the Danaides can be reconstructed to some extent from fragments and ancient commentaries.¹⁵ The fifty daughters of Danaus are pursued to Argos by the fifty sons of Aegyptos. They refuse marriage at first but the elders of Argos force it upon them. On their wedding night all but Hypermnestra slay their husbands with swords. Hypermnestra is then tried for impiety—she did not follow her father's orders to protect her chastity by slaying her husband—and acquitted.

In the Casina Pardalisca, a slave woman of the household, is sent by Cleostrata and her neighbor Myrrhina to announce to Lysidamus that Casina has gone mad with grief at the prospect of her forced marriage and is running through the house with a sword:

                    per omnis does et deas deieravit,
occisurum eum hac nocte quicum cubaret.

(670-1)

The punishment which Casina is said to have determined for Lysidamus and Olympio is that which the Danaids visited upon their husbands. It is uncertain in Aeschylus whether the mass-murder, which took place at the end of the second play of the trilogy, preceded or followed consummation of the marriages, i. e. whether the daughters of Danaus slew their husbands to protect their virginity or to revenge its loss. An ancient commentator, however, in explaining the reference to Hypermnestra in Pindar's Tenth Nemean Ode, suggests that she relented because her husband Lynceus spared her virginity,¹⁶ which seems to imply that at least one version of the myth told of the other daughters being first attacked and then retaliating with their swords. It is clear that Casina's threat is one of revenge; at least cubare cum aliquo in Plautus usually carries the sense of “to lie in love with someone,” coucher avec quelqu'un:¹⁷ “she swore that she would kill anyone who had intercourse with her tonight.” One is reminded of Freud's citation of Hebbel's play Judith:

Judith is one of those women whose virginity is protected by a taboo. Her first husband was paralyzed on the wedding night by an inexplicable fear and never again dared touch her. “My body is like the deadly nightshade,” she says, “enjoyment of it brings madness and death.” When the Assyrian general is besieging the city, she conceives the plan of enticing him with her beauty and destroying him, thus using a patriotic motive to mask a sexual one. After being deflowered by the masterful man who makes a boast of his might and his ruthlessness she in her fury finds strength to strike off his head and so becomes the saviour of her people. Decapitation is to us a wellknown symbolic substitute for castration, so Judith is a woman who castrates the man by whom she was deflowered.¹⁸

The fear of defloration, which we have given as partial justification of the ius primae noctis, is then shown to be based in fact for Lysidamus. He is not Casina's true father so he has no claim upon her. Furthermore, it is Cleostrata who concocts the deception; she is punishing Lysidamus for the wrong he has done her in taking her virginity, then deserting her and replacing her with a younger woman. She does not blame Casina for attracting her husband, but rather makes common cause with Casina, Myrrhina and Pardalisca against Lysidamus. He becomes the pharmakos or whipping boy for all the sexual antagonism which they in their repressed social circumstances must bear.¹⁹

The real revenge takes place in the third and final spectacular scene of the play, the wedding and its aftermath. Pardalisca tells us of the preparations within: Chalinus is being dressed up as the bride and the women will see to it that after much delay and confusion, without anything to eat of the wedding feast, the wedding party will depart for the assigned place for the first night. (Lysidamus has said he will escort the couple to his country home but he has arranged with his neighbor Alcesimus, Myrrhina's husband, to vacate his house for the purpose; his lust will not allow time for any great journey.) Lysidamus will assualt a member of his own sex, a fitting revenge for the women to take, resentful as they are of the sexual exploitation they have suffered from him and other men. The inspiration for this scene seems to have come from the various dramatic treatments of the transvestite marriage of Herakles and Omphale. Herakles was in bondage to Omphale, Queen of Lydia, and she forced upon him certain women's tasks, such as weaving. She also entertained herself with pageants; in one of them she dressed Herakles in her veils, herself in his lion-skin and club, and they were married in an elaborate ceremony. They retired to a grotto to consummate their marriage, but were interrupted by Pan, who, thinking Herakles to be Omphale, made a sexual assault upon the hero.²⁰

There is in the myth perhaps a recollection of transvestism in actual marriage ceremonies;²¹ it has even been suggested that the myth contains some vestige of matriarchy and its gradual replacement by male rule;²² and there is quite possibly an allusion to the worship of some female deity. There is certainly great significance in the homosexual assault. Herakles, for whatever reason, has been placed in the female position in marriage—that Omphale should wield the club must be taken metaphorically for sexual dominance, if not in the act of intercourse itself, at least in the view of who is subject to whom—and Pan, synonomous with lechery, attacks him. The hero is, of course, easily able to fend off this attacker, but he would then have known the feelings of a sexually abused female just as in doing Omphale's housework he has known the frustration of social and economic oppression.

Homosexual assault is a theme elsewhere in the play. Chalinus, in overhearing plans for the wedding night being made by Lydidamus and Olympio, misconstrues Lydidamus' remarks:

Ol. ut tibi ego inventus
sum obsequens! quod
          maxume
cupiebas, eius copiam feci tibi.
erit hodie tecum quod amas clam uxorem. Ly.LY. tace.
ita me di bene ament ut ego uix reprimo labra
ob instanc rem quin deosculer, uoluptas mea.
CH. quid, deosculere? quae res? quae uoluptas tua?
ecfodere hercle hic uolt credo uesicam uilico.

(449-55)

The violence of this description of homosexual intercourse is in keeping with the attitude Lysidamus shows elsewhere towards his sexual victims. There is no question as to the sexual roles Chalinus thinks the two men will assume—which, in fact, Lysidamus seems ready to assume if Olympio would yield; instead the slave admonishes his master:

ultro te, amator, apage te a dorso meo!

(459)

Chalinus knows this role as well:

illuc est, illuc, quod hic hunc fecit uilicum:
et idem me pridem, quom ei aduorsum ueneram,
facere atriensem uoluerat sub ianua.

(460-62)

Lysidamus is then like other overbearing lovers in Plautus, such as Pyrogopolinices, the miles gloriosus, whose slave accuses him of chasing after both sexes indiscriminately:

                                                                                … nam tu quidem
ad equas fuisti scitus admissarius,
qui consectare qua maris qua feminas.

(Miles 1111-13)

The objects of Lysidamus' attacks are all slaves, male and female. They are victims of his social, economic and sexual tyranny.

The play ends with the return of Lysidamus from Alcesimus' house in ridicule. Chalinus is beating him from behind with his own walking stick:

Ly. periil fusti defloccabit
iam illic homo lumbos meos.

(967)

The women then appear and abuse the old man verbally, until finally Myrrhina suggests that Cleostrata forgive him:

Ly. non irata's? Cl. non sum irata. Ly. tuaen fide
credo? Cl. meae.
Ly. lepidiorem nemo uxorem quisquam
ego habeo
          hanc habet.
Cl. age tu, redde huic scipionem
et pallium. CH. tene,
          si lubet.

(1007-9)

The walking stick is a symbol of Lysidamus' social status as well as of his masculinity. That it is returned by a slave at the request of his wife is a fitting conclusion for a play concerned with the relations between sexes and classes. Lysidamus can be returned to his previous position as head of the household and lord of the manor only after enduring the abuse which, ritualistically administered and carefully planned to completely reverse normal roles, somehow satisfies those who usually suffer abuse at his hands.²³ As in most comedy nothing has been drastically or permanently changed, but there has been a catharsis characteristic of “the ritual which avoids the catastrophe of society.”²⁴

There is some indication at the beginning and end of the play of Plautine changes in the Greek orginal. A seven-line epilogue informs us that Casina will be recognized as the lost daughter of Alcesimus or Myrrhina or both, and she will marry Euthynicus. She thus replaces the false father with the true father and his blessing upon her match with Euthynicus serves as that sort of initiation into intercourse which the ius primae noctis itself seems to serve.²⁵

The fact that Euthynicus never appears accounts for two themes missing in Plautus' play which might have been developed in Diphilos': the romantic attachment of Euthynicus and Casina, and the oedipal conflict between Lysidamus the father and Euthynicus the son for possession of Casina, the daughter or mother-replacement figure. The romantic element has been eliminated to give greater scope to the satiric element: the conflict between husband and wife in particular, between men and women in general. We know this kind of cutting of cast and scenes from DaPonte's adaptation of Beaumarchais' play. It would seem almost essential in revising a script for a musical comedy to focus the action more sharply and concentrate on the high points of the action where music can accentuate the emotional content and illuminate certain themes. Other themes which are inherent in the pattern of the action are left undeveloped.

The satire of Beaumarchais' Figaro seems to be more thoroughgoing, more developed and more central to the play's essential significance. This is true at least of the political satire. Figaro himself is conventionally referred to by critics as a revolutionary and his great monologue in Acte V, scène iii²⁶ can leave no doubt that the character embodies some of that spirit which was to bring about a great social revolution only four years after his first appearance on the stage. His essential objection is against rank and privilege; he contrasts himself with his master:

Parce que vous êtes un grand Seigneur, vous vous croyez un grand génie! … Noblesse, fortune, un rang, des places: tout cela rend si fier! Qu'avez-vous fait pour tant de biens! Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître, et rien de plus; du reste, homme assez ordinaire! tandis que moi, morbleu! perdu dans la foule obscure, il m'a fallu déployer plus de science et de calculs pour subsister seulement, qu'on n'en a mis depuis cent ans à gouverner toutes les Espagnes: et vous voulez jouter …

It is true that the Count is no clever fellow and that Figaro does manage to make a fool of him several times during the progress of the play. The Count must finally beg forgiveness for the folly of trying to seduce Suzanne, but is it Figaro who puts him in this suppliant posture? Just how efficient is Figaro at intrigue? Is the play only or even essentially social and political satire? And should its significance be sought only in the character of Figaro? If not, what are its basic themes and patterns, the center of its emotional content?

The action of Figaro proceeds from the notion of ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur to a meeting between master and “false bride” just as does the Casina. It is this combination of motifs which makes an examination of further similarities between the two plays worthwhile, for taken separately they are traceable to various sources in French comedy of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. J. Vic has shown that Beaumarchais' Figaro has in common with DuFresny's La Noce Interrompue (1699) the theme of the droit du seigneur²⁷ and that the theme of a husband seducing his own wife in disguise is found in DuFresny's La Double Veuvage (1702).²⁸ E. Lintilhac finds the latter repeated in La Trompeur trompé ou la Recontre imprévue by Vadé, produced only thirty years before Figaro,²⁹ and Howarth finds the theme of the droit du seigneur popular throughout the eighteenth century, citing plays by de Boissy, Voltaire, Nougaret and Desfontaines.³⁰ He also stresses the fact that this theme was attractive for its social and political significance to essayists and contributors to the Encyclipédie from the sixteenth century onwards. (Voltaire treated it in both dramatic form and as an encyclopaedia article.)

Its other significance has been discussed above in the analysis of its use by Plautus: the father feels entitled to a certain sexual prerogative over his daughter and she feels herself that he has first claim on her affections. Primitive societies recognize this mutual attraction by assigning to some father figure the task of ritual defloration of brides, thus protecting a groom from the anger of the deflowered virgin and from the wrath of the discarded father. Count Almaviva is just such a father figure, but, like Lysidamus, because he is a false father the bride resents his insistence. Also, like Casina, Suzanne has pledged herself to a young lover who is dependent upon her master: Euthynicus is Lysidamus' son while Figaro is the Count's valet. It was argued above that in the Casina this young girl, over whom father and son come into conflict, is a replacement for the mother. In Figaro this is quite clearly felt to be the relation between Suzanne and the Countess. Chérubin, who serves as an indicator of sexual attraction in the play, easily replaces the Countess with Suzanne. In Acte I, scène vii, he tells Suzanne that the Count will force him to leave and …

Chérubin. Si Madame, si ma belle marraine ne parvient pas à l'apaiser, c'est fait, Suzon, je suis à jamais privé du bonheur de te voir.

Suzanne. De me voir! moi? c'est mon tour! Ce n'est donc plus pour ma maîtresse que vous soupirez en secret?

Chérubin. Ah! Suzon, qu'elle est noble et belle! mais qu'elle est imposante!

This is a remarkable passage not only in its emphasis on the identity between the Countess and Suzanne, but in its recognition of the taboo which makes the mother figure unapproachable, thus forcing replacement by a daughter figure. Later, to the Countess, Suzanne expands on this theme (Acte II, scène i):

Suzanne. Eh bien, Madame, est-ce qu'on peut faire finir ce petit démon-la? Ma marraine par-ci; je voudras bien par l'autre; et parce qu'il n'oserait seulement baiser la robe de Madame, il voudrait toujours m'embrasser moi.

Chérubin is a demon; he is Eros or Cupid³¹ who stimulates sexual attraction and confuses its direction. He acts generally as a barometer of erotic pressures, but sometimes as a conductor for erotic currents; he can also intercept erotic messages being passed between two other characters. Whenever there is a sexual confrontation, Chérubin is there and he tells us exactly what is going on. Here he tells us that Suzanne is a replacement for the Countess and is the object of an oedipal conflict between Figaro and the Count.

This alignment of characters is not irreconcilable with their surface roles. Figaro and the Count are of about the same age but the social superiority of the Count and the coloring this gives the characterization make him seem older.³² So, too, with the Countess and Suzanne; what slight difference in age there might be between the mistress and her maid is accentuated by their social distance and by the fact that the Countess, though recently a bride herself, has been forced permaturely into the position of the neglected dowager by her husband.³³ Again it is Chérubin who exposes the essence of her role, as R. Pomeau has pointed out:

N'est-il pas naturel qu'elle [la Comtesse] tourne ses regards vers Chérubin? Ce garçon de treize ans émeut ses instincts de mère. Pourtant elle sait qu'il l'aime d'amour. Elle se laisse aimer: Chérubin est si jeune, que risque-t-elle?³⁴

Can the Count be truly jealous of Chérubin, as he appears to be in the cabinet scene? Is he not actually afraid that the relationship which exists between the Countess and Chérubin³⁵ might develop between her and some young man more threatening? This is proved the case in the last act of the play. The Count is convinced that he has caught Figaro with his wife. Figaro, his equal in age, his social inferior, is the true oedipal threat to the Count. Both the Count and Figaro can easily confuse Suzanne and the Countess in the climactic scene; they both believe themselves to be in love with Suzanne, but it is essentially the Countess as the mother-figure over whom they come into conflict.

The consistency of the oedipal pattern with the events of Figaro is only clear if the pattern itself is extended beyond the most celebrated episode of the myth to other episodes and their significance.³⁶ Laios was cursed to die by the hand of his son, a curse laid upon him by Pelops, whose son Chrysippos he had sexually assaulted. (Pelops himself had been homosexually raped as a boy by Poseidon.) Laios then lay apart from his wife to avoid procreation of that son, but she managed to intoxicate and seduce him; the child was exposed, but raised abroad by foster parents. He then returned to Thebes, killing his father en route, some say out of jealousy for the love of Chrysippos, i. e. Oidipous, like his father, was attracted to the son of Pelops. He then marries his mother assuming his father's position as King of Thebes. Setting aside, for a moment, the aspect of homosexuality, and concentrating on the relations between Laios and Iokaste, and Oidipous and Iokaste, one finds a similarity with the relations between the Count and the Countess, and between Figaro and the Countess: Laios deserts his wife in an attempt to keep her childless. The Countess is neglected and childless; in Chérubin she finds the boy-lover who replaces both husband and child.

The Count fears that Figaro will take Chérubin's place and this fear is not unreasonable if one considers Figaro's oedipal background. In Le Barbier he helped the Count win Rosine, his Countess, from the control of Bartholo. Figaro thus played Myrtilos to the Count's Pelops, aiding in the deception of the girl's guardian, who, like a father, claimed a sexual prerrogative over her.³⁷ In Figaro it becomes clear that this old man whom he had deprived of a young girl is in fact his father. The pattern is reversed when Marceline pursues Figaro in Figaro, a mother seeking sexual satisfaction from her son in the absence of the father, Bartholo, who has forsaken her. Beaumarchais knows what he is doing; after his recognition Figaro apostrophizes the law and embraces Marceline (Acte III, scène xvi):

Elle allait me faire faire une belle sottise, la justice! après que j'ai manqué, pour ces maudits cent écus, d'assommer vingt fois Monsieur, qui se trouve aujourd'hui mon père! Mais, puisque le ciel a sauvé ma vertu de ces dangers, mon père, agréez mes excuses. Et vous, ma mère, embrassez-moi … le plus maternellement que vous pourrez.

Figaro refuses the mother Marceline whom the father Bartholo has offered him (in vengeance for taking Rosine) and prevents the father figure (the Count) from claiming unjustly the sexual prerogative over the mother-replacement (Suzanne). These are the second and third variations on the oedipal pattern established in Le Barbier. Having spoken of the sexual attraction in these variants, we must now consider the antagonism between Bartholo and Figaro, Figaro and the Count.

Bartholo will avenge himself on Figaro for interfering in his plans to marry Rosine by interfering in Figaro's plans to marry Suzanne. His motivation is, then, entirely negative. With the Count there is the positive aspect of his love for Suzanne. She has all the attractions which the Count once found in the Countess but the great temptation is that she is a virgin,³⁸ “the whole point of the droit du seigneur being that it is the seigneur who claims the superior pleasure of inflicting the pain of defloration,” as B. Brophy has observed.³⁹ The agressive nature of sexual attraction must be considered here just as it was above in the Casina; the custom of the droit du seigneur emphasizes defloration, not a permanenent arrangement for enjoying the bride. The Count is notorious in the neighborhood for his seduction of young girls⁴⁰ and his appetite for them is insatiable, but, as Pomeau has pointed out, he enjoys only the first fruits:

“L'amour, dit-il, n'est que le roman du coeur”: un roman qui l'ennuine. “C'est le plaisir qui en est l'historie.” Il déchiffre auprès de chaque conquête cette histoire sans fin.⁴¹

He is to be compared to Don Giovanni in his endless assaults upon women and his constant dissatisfaction with each conquest. He says as much to the Countess (disguised as Suzanne) in trying to explain his love for both the Countess and Suzanne (Acte V, scène vii):

Le Comte. Je l'aime beaucoup, mais trois ans d'union rendent l'hymen respectable!

La Comtesse. Que vouliez-vous en elle?

Le Comte. Ce que je trouve en toi, ma beauté …

La Comtesse. Mais dites donc.

Le Comte. … Je ne sais: moins d'uniformité peut-être; plus de piquant dans les manières; un je ne sais quoi qui fait le charme; quelque fois un refus; que sais-je?

Brophy has explained this ennui convincingly:

A woman once conquered was no longer attractive to the seducer—as Don Giovanni demonstrates when the woman who attracts him in the street proves unattractive the instant he recognizes her for Donna Elvira, whom he has already seduced. The seducer has already risked and proved ineffective the punishment to be apprehended from sleeping with that particular woman. She is truly conquered in that she holds no more danger for him, and unattractive since it is really danger he is courting.⁴²

The danger she originally held, of course, was that associated with virgins, the revenge she might take upon him for defloration. (This danger is felt by the seducer of a non-virgin as well, in that she will renew the wrath she felt when first deprived of her virginity.) Count Almaviva delights in the prospect of deflowering Suzanne and also in the incestuous attraction she holds for him as a daughter figure. The danger is then double: he transgresses taboos of virginity and incest. The greatest danger—and it too is an attraction—is Figaro, and one must understand this if one is to understand the Count's relation to Suzanne.

Figaro is a threat to the Count in that he is clever, energetic and capable of constant change in direction to achieve his purpose. All these qualities are associated with youth and in this the relation between the Count and Figaro is the standard oedipal conflict between age and youth. This conflict is clearly and consistently duplicated on the social level; as Figaro says in his great monologue, cleverness and energy and change are the qualities which keep a man of obscure birth alive. The Count considers Figaro a threat to his marriage, a marriage which he himself has lost interest in. The Count sees Figaro as a barrier to his seduction of Suzanne, whom he will discard as soon as he conquers her. That the seduction of Suzanne is an acte gratuit indicates the motivation behind much of the Count's behavior. Brophy has described Don Giovanni's seductions as so many actes gratuits:

… Don Giovanni not only lacks any strong wish to succeed in his seductions but has so positive a desire to be found out and foiled that his mismanagement can only be accounted for by taking them to be unconsciously intended. Not that Don Giovanni is lying when he boasts that women are more necessary to him than the bread he eats and the air he breathes. But what he really needs are the jealous fathers, fiancés and authorities who protect these women; the pleasure of matching wits against these paternalistic figures, and the hope—which makes it necessary for him to bungle his seductions—of being caught and punished … His crime is gratuitous in the sense of being superflous. It is necessary merely to precipitate about his head the punishment he earned long before—by the undiscovered crime which he committed not in fact, but in unconscious wish, of his homosexual advances to the father. Of course, in seeking unconsciously to bring on his own punishment, he chooses a method which (by the common mechanism of neurotic compromise formations) allows him to repeat the crime which originally incurred the guilt; and he exploits the masochistic quality in his erotic desires.⁴³

Brophy then sees Don Giovanni as inviting sexual assault by various father-figures. If we return to consider the homosexual aspects of the Oidipous myth, we can see Don Giovanni as Oidipous and these father-figures as replacements for Laios. In Figaro, however, the Count is Laios, Figaro is Oidipous and Chérubin is Chrysippos. Chérubin is sexually ambivalent: the Countess is attracted to him, Suzanne seems to find in him an attractive image of herself (Acte II, scènes iv-vi), Figaro kisses him (Acte II, scène xi) and he kisses the Count (Acte V, scène vi). Devereux has pointed out that “Chrysippus is, in a sense, the representation of Oedipus' own passive homosexual characteristics, which were brought into being, or were at least aroused, by Laius' agressive and homosexual impulses towards his son.”⁴⁴ Just as we find, in some variants of the myth, Oidipous and Laios in conflict over Chysippos, so, in Figaro, we find the Count and Figaro in conflict over Chérubin as Suzanne's replacement. This aspect of the situation, however, is not so developed as the aspect of violent and agressive sexual attack. The Count's seduction of Suzanne is an acte gratuit in that he will have no interest in her after he has deflowered her: his real pleasure is in the defloration itself in so far as this represents to him a sexual assault upon Figaro. Whereas Don Giovanni's pleasure is masochistic in the anticipation of the father's assult upon him, the pleasure of the Count is purely sadistic: in assaulting Suzanne he assaults Figaro.

This would not seem so outrageous if one were to use conventional terms of literary criticism and say simply that the social themes of the play (the Count's repression of Figaro's talents and ambition) are emphasized by the amorous arrangements of the plot: the Count metaphorically assaults Figaro in his sexual attack upon Suzanne. But this is not the point. What one must insist upon is the power of a chosen pattern of dramatic action to determine themes which are developed in its treatment. The analogies with the Casina and the Oidipous myths, then, are not used strictly for analogy, but rather to stress identity. Certain aspects of the essential problem are clearer in one version than in another, but all the same aspects are present in all the versions, and the sexual-familial pattern is the determining factor of all the other related themes. For instance, in the Casina there is the straight-forward treatment of homosexual rape: the master Lysidamus assaults his slaves Chalinus and Olympio. He also assaults his son's intended bride. In this violent manner he is asserting his sexual prerogative over those who are his dependents—by blood, sex and class. The completion of the pattern is to admit what various critics of the Oidipous myths admit, that homosexual attraction and antagonism between father and son is an important element in the play, just as one must admit that in assaulting Casina, his wife's maid, Lysidamus is asserting his sexual prerogative over his daughter. All of these observations are predicated on the basic assumption that all subsequent sexual attachments are patterned after those which the child forms initially to his parents, and, furthermore, that all essential ideas about society at large are patterned after these same erotic relations. It is simplistic to suggest that Figaro is a revolutionary because he grew up without the domination of a father, but simple-minded not to admit that there is some truth in such a suggestion. When Figaro challenges the Count for Suzanne, Oidipous has met Laios at the crossroads on his return to claim Iokaste, … or is it Chrysippos?

How do these patterns make themselves felt in Figaro? Most notably we see that, especially in the Count's asides, he is more interested in the success of his intrigue as a means of tricking, ridiculing and reducing Figaro to a level less threatening to himself, than in seducing Suzanne. For instance, at the end of the cabinet scene, the Count would use the same revenge against Figaro which the other father figure Bartholo, similarly cheated of his chance to sexually assault a young girl in his charge, would use: the marriage with Marceline:

Le Comte. Allons, il est écrit que je ne saurai rien. (à part) C'est ce Figaro qui les mène, et je ne m'en vengerais pas?

Figaro. Vous sortez, sans ordonner mon mariage?

Marceline. Ne l'ordonnez pas, Monseigneur, avant de lui faire grâce, vous nous devez justice. Il a des engagements avec moi.

Le Comte. (à part) Voilà ma vengeance arivée.

(Acte II, scènes xxi-xxii)

The count is willing to give up his chance to claim ius primae noctis from Suzanne in order to avenge himself on Figaro for his part in the suspicions aroused by the cabinet scene, for without a marriage there can be no first night.⁴⁵ Suzanne convinces him of this in Acte III, but then again his antagonism with Figaro causes him to determine, after overhearing Suzanne tell Figaro all is well, that there shall be no marriage, no first night with Suzanne:

Le Comte. Tu viens de gagner ton procès!—Je donnais là dans un bon piège! O mes chers insolents! je vous punirai de façon …

(Acte III, scène xi)

The same cry for revenge signals the Count's recognition of Figaro with the Countess (Suzanne) in the garden.

Le Comte. (à part) Un homme aux pieds de la Comtesse … Ah! je suis sans armes. …

Le Comte. (à part) C'est l'homme du cabinet de ce matin. …

Le Comte. (à part) Massacre, mort, enfer! …

Le Comte. (à part) Ah! tout se découvre enfin. …

Le Comte. (s'encrie) Vengeance!

(Acte V, scène ix)

After calling witnesses to the shame of being proved a cuckold, he announces:

Le Comte. (avec fureur) Or, quand le déshonneur est public, il faut que la vengeance le soit aussi.

(Acte V, scène xii)

The Count is obsessed with vengeance against Figaro and will sacrifice his seduction of Suzanne, his own honour as a husband as well as the honour of his wife, to this goal. That vengeance would take the form of a physical attack if only he had his sword. This sword reminds us of Lysidamus' walking stick at the end of the Casina. It is not simply a phallic symbol—it is also a symbol of social position—but it is essentially a phallic symbol, and, further, it characterizes all the sexual instincts of the Count as being violently aggressive. Like Laios in his rape of Chrysippos, and, later, when he meets Oidipous at the crossroads and thrashes him in the face with his whip, the Count is violent by nature. He is also paranoid. Figaro's letter drives him mad with jealousy and rage and fear of being made a cuckold. His outlet for these energies is to take to horse and hunt, and Figaro and the women delight in the spectacle of him impotently chasing about (Acte II, scène ii).⁴⁶

Figaro shows the same obsession with tricking the Count which the Count shows with revenge on Figaro. This is the cause of the failure of his brilliant initial intrigue, exactly parallel to the intrigue in the Casina, to dress Chérubin as Suzanne and thus put the Count in the position of making love to a male servant. He aborts this plan by writing the letter and arousing the Count's suspicions. From then on Figaro is an on-looker in the development of subsequent intrigues, and a participant only when the women need him. Finally, it is the women who plan the ultimate deception, the exchange of clothes between Suzanne and the Countess, and Figaro suffers almost as much in this episode as does the Count. How is it that the personification of the revolutionary spirit, the man whom experience has taught to overcome all obstacles with cleverness and subtlety, cannot come through in a simple domestic farce? The answer lies in Figaro's past—he has never succeeded at anything but has moved from one post to another, always the victim of chance or prejudice—and in his pre-occupation with the Count, the father figure who must be dealt with.

While Figaro and the Count direct their energies toward subjecting each other to ridicule and unconsciously intended sexual assaults, the women in the play are busy working toward a resolution of its difficulties. The Countess is responsible for the plan of disguise which brings the play to its conclusion, and Suzanne is her accomplice, along with Marceline and Franchette. Just as in the Casina, we find in the finale essentially a women-against-men situation, and this is to be expected from the theme of ius primae noctis as explained above: it involves the sexual prerogative of the father over the daughter, but more generally the random assignment of women to unchosen lovers. To right this wrong requires a reversal of the conventional sexual roles, the women assuming the role of the clever slave who, in a Saturnalian upheaval, will overcome his master. The Saturnalian element is just as strong in the Casina and Figaro, where the suppressed sex in place of (and in addition to) the suppressed class and the suppressed generation, revolts and conquers. The Count then, like Lysidamus, must beg forgiveness, and the Countess, like Cleostrata, will grant it. This theme of women's righting the sexual wrongs done them by their husbands is so strong in Figaro that it challenges the class conflict as a central issue of the play. Marceline's great monologue on society's unjust treatment of women in the recognition scene (Acte III, scène xvi) was, of course, cut from the text for the original production, but by replacing it we see that it balances Figaro's great monologue exactly. Marceline gives a brief autobiography, with emphasis on what she has suffered because of her sex, just as Figaro, in his autobiography, catalogues what he has suffered because of his questionable birth. It would seem that as a tract within the play, a call for the liberation of women was felt to be otiose and unnecessary in the years before the Revolution, whereas the message of the Revolution itself could be delivered in that fashion and account for some of the play's success. As a comic theme, however, the rights of women to sexual self-determination are as powerful, and structurally as important, as the rights of the lower classes.

The women in Figaro and Casina punish the men for infidelity, desertion and exploitation (the Count), but also for suspicion and jealousy (Figaro). All of these masculine affronts against women are aspects of the same central problem, which is the treatment of women by men as sexual property. This central concern of the plays is predicated on the choice of the ius primae noctis as basis for their plots. In the Casina we are shown three distinct stages in the development of the young girl's attitude toward the loss of her virginity and each of these is based on a mythical proto-type: she is randomly assigned to a partner by lot (Aiolos); she threatens that partner with death or castration (Danaids); she achieves perfect vengeance by arranging for the partner to sexually assault another male and be physically abused as a consequence (Herakles and Omphale). Essentially, then, she has managed to turn man's sexual agression upon men, and agressive homosexual behaviour is a minor theme of the play. In Figaro we see the same original arrangements: the Count, expecting Suzanne, will sexually assault Chérubin—and even these arrangements are in large part due to Suzanne, who must alert Figaro to the danger the Count poses to her chastity. This plan is off-set, however, by a second plan, one which has no positive advantage—the first plan protected Suzanne—but only negative, to arouse the jealousy of the Count against a possible seducer of his own wife. While the women plot their punishment for both men, Figaro and the Count become involved in mutual agression which has all the characteristics of an oedipal conflict, with its attendant homosexual antagonism, i. e. its mythical proto-type is the complete cycle of Oidipous myths. There is a vestige of the completion of the original plan in the confusion of the finale: Chérubin embraces the Count. The more significant action, however, is the purely aggressive one: the Count would draw his sword against Figaro. Just as in the Casina, the women have manipulated the men into turning their sexual aggression on each other, but unlike the Casina, Figaro shows the fully developed theme of oedipal conflict.

The Countess is more mother than wife in the final scene:

Le Comte. Quoi! c'était vous, Comtesse? Il n'y a qu'un pardon généreux. …

La Comtesse. Vous diriez non, non, à ma place; et moi, pour la troisième fois aujourd'hui je l'accorde san condition.

The Count had just previously refused to forgive Suzanne disguised as the Countess. Childish male aggression would continue but comedy insists on reconciliation, and this is presented as a female virtue: as a mother figure the Countess settles the conflict between father and son for possession of her. (In tragedy she exacerbates that conflict, encouraging her son to replace his absent father: Aeschylus' Persai, Sophocles' Oidipous Tyrannos, Euripides' Hippolytos.)

One can distinguish, to some extent, three different types of patterns in these two comedies. There are the over-all patterns of action and these are the same, based on the ius primae noctis and the transvestite marriage: their combination insures the similarity of themes within the two plays. Then there are the subordinate patterns which receive greater or lesser emphasis in each play. There is little of the Danaids in Suzanne and no use of Aiolos' device of lot-casting for a bride; there is no Oidipous in the Casina because Plautus has suppressed the father-son conflict, not even allowing Euthynicus to appear. Nevertheless the themes which these subordinate patterns suggest, just like the themes associated with the major patterns, lie under the surface of both plays, though not fully developed or at least not explicitly developed in sexual terms; Suzanne is resentful of the Count's insistence and of his ability to break off her marriage with Figaro, but this is expressed as social rather than sexual or familial resentment; Lysidamus' antagonism with his son is displaced upon his slaves as sexual and social subordination. The third type of pattern is the pattern of comedy. We see some of the basic frustrations and antagonisms of social and familial life acted out, in this case the release of men's sexual aggression against other men rather than against women. The men then return to their women for forgiveness and there is the beginning of a new life. It will not, perhaps, be a different life, but at least it is one which has been purified, for the time being, of the taint of hostile sexual possession which has characterized the old life. This pattern of comedy is a ritual pattern, “the ritual which avoids the catastrophe of society.”

Notes

1. Plautus: Casina, edited with introduction and commentary by W. T. MacCary and M. M. Willcock (Cambridge, 1975).

2. E. Fraenkel, Elementi Plautini in Plauto (Florence, 1961) 151, n. 1.

3. On this contrast between spoken and sung dialogue in Greek tragedy, see A. M. Dale, “Words, Music and Dance,” Collected Papers (Cambridge, 1969) 156-69.

4. M. Monnier (Les aïeux de Figaro (Paris, 1868) (21-34) and P. Toldo (Figaro et ses origines (Milan, 1893)) (47-48) discuss the slave parts in the Casina and summarize the plot. Other critics mentioned by J. Hampton (“Research on Le Mariage de Figaro,” French Studies 16 (1962) 24) as being particularly concerned with sources do not even refer to the Casina. K. von Reinhardstoettner (Plautus: Spätere Bearbeitungen plautinischer Lustspiele (Leipzig, 1886)) does not compare Casina and Figaro. E. Paratore (Plauto (Florence, 1961) 111) mentions in passing “echi delle Casina persino nel Mariage de Figaro.” The tradition needs more attention. Monnier has traced it but there are great gaps in his fanciful treatment, as there are in the more scholarly treatment of Toldo. It is too naive to treat characters as independent of the action of their plays. We know that Machiavelli followed the Casina fairly closely in his Clizia (1494). So did Belleau in his La Reconnue (1564). Both of these authors of literary comedy were much influenced by popular comedy, as was Beaumarchais himself. We know that the theme of the transvestite marriage entered the repertoire of Atellan farce under such titles as Maccus virgo and that Atellan farce shares with the later Commedia dell' Arte many stock types and situations. Although I have not been able to trace the transvestite marriage theme in any scenario of the Commedia, I am convinced that a “Harlequin as Bride” is quite likely; cf. “The Marvellous Malady of Harlequin,” in which he gives birth. For the more central theme of the two plays, the ius primae noctis or droit du seigneur, one has the pattern of the lecherous old man trying to marry the young girl in countless popular and literary versions from Plautus to Beaumarchais. The aspect which both Plautus and Beaumarchais emphasize, however, as Machiavelli and Belleau do not, is that the old man wants only the first night with the bride. He is not after her money; he is not in love with her to the extent that he would live with her as his mistress; rather he wants only the pleasure of defloration. On the importance of this theme, which appears to be almost unique to the Casina and Figaro among plays of their general pattern, see below.

5. The difference between a structural critic's attitude toward the material of myth and that of a psycho-analytical critic can, perhaps, be shown by comparing two studies of the Oidipous myth, one by Levi-Strauss, the other by G. Devereux. Levi-Strauss does not distinguish between literary treatment of a myth and analysis of that myth's significance: “… not only Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be included among the recorded versions of the Oidipous myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more ‘authentic’ versions.” (Structural Anthropology (New York, 1963) 213). Devereux recognizes that all occurences of the myth are worth considering but he would obviously consider Freud's analysis of the myth a first step toward definitive interpretation: “… variants … help us obtain a deeper insight into the latent meaning of the basic theme, motif or plot-element … a given theme has an inherent and specific latent significance, which no amount of voluntary or involuntary, or else conscious or unconscious, distortion can obliterate” (“Why Oedipus Killed Laius,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1953) 139-40). Levi-Strauss goes on to offer an interpretation of the Oidipous myth which only semantic and conceptual quibbles can bring into line with Freud's, whereas Devereux expands on Freud's interpretation.

6. W. D. Howarth, “The Theme of the “Droit du Seigneur” in the Eighteenth Century Theatre,” French Studies 15 (1961) 228-40.

7. Many examples are cited by E. Westermarck, The History of Human Marriage (London, 1921) I. 166-206.

8. Ibid., I. 188-89.

9. S. Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1954-) XI. 203.

10. S. Yates, “An Investigation of the Psychological Factors in Virginity and Ritual Defloration,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1930) 174.

11. This comment on rituals of sexual abstinence can be made as appropriately of ritual defloration: “There are the never-dying tensions between young and old, and also between the sexes; they necessitate periodically some sort of “cathartic” discharge; it may be possible to play off one conflict to minimize the other … This is ritual which avoids the catastrophe of society.” W. Burkert, “Jason, Hypsipyle and New Fire on Lemnos,” Classical Quarterly XX (1970) 15.

12. W. T. MacCary, “Comic Structure and the Comic Tradition in Diphilos' Kleroumenoi,” Hermes 101 (1973) 194-208.

13. References are to the edition of MacCary and Willcock (above, note 1).

14. See especially Supplices 980-1015, but also passim, and R. S. Caldwell, “The Psychology of Aeschylus' Supplices,” Arethusa 7 (1974) 45-70.

15. See A. F. Garvie, Aechylus' Supplices, Play and Trilogy (Cambridge, 1969) 163-233.

16. Ibid., 165.

17. Cf. Amphytruo 112, 287; Miles 65.

18. S. Freud (above, note 9) 204.

19. In an early scene Cleostrata is lectured by Myrrhina as to the proper behavior of a wife: she should claim no property of her own, thus acknowledging her economic dependence upon him, although she might have brought with her a large dowry; she should not interfere with his extra-marital affairs, but allow him to satisfy his desires where he pleases, once he has lost interest in her own bed (195-207). (Myrrhina has changed her tune by the middle of the play and takes as much delight as any other woman in the ridicule of Lysidamus at the end, calling him moechus and dismarite (974-6). Cleostrata is forced to yield to Lysidamus' demand that wedding preparations be made after she loses in the lot-casting:

    Ly. intro abi, uxor, atque
    adorna nuptias. Cl. faciam ut iubes.
    Ly. scin tu rus hinc esse ad uillam
    longe quo ducat? Cl. scio.
    Ly. intro abi et, quamquam hoc
    tibi aegre est, tamen fac accures. Cl.
    licet.

    (419-21)

20. See MacCary (above, note 12), for evidence of the treatment of these episodes in comedy and non-dramatic poetry.

21. P. E. Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston, 1968) 379. Westermarck (above, note 7) II. 519-21, cites examples of transvestite ceremonies, and II. 521-32, of ceremonies with a subtitute or false bride.

22. R. Graves, The Greek Myths (London, 1955) II. 167.

23. The Saturnalian element in Plautine comedy is a major theme of E. Segal's Roman Laughter (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), but he says little of the Casina.

24. See above, note 11.

25. This would appear to be the essential significance of all such recognitions in Greek New Comedy: in recognizing his daughter a father relinquishes his sexual prerogative over her, thus assuaging her fear of taking a lover without the father's permission. This pattern is particularly clear in Menander's Sikyonios and Plautus' Rudenens, based on a play of Diphilos.

26. All references are to the edition of J. Meyer (Paris, 1953).

27. J. Vic, “Les Idées de Charles Rivière Dufresny,” Revue du XVIIIe siècle 3 (1915-16) 138.

28. Ibid., 135. Here he follows E. Lintilhac (Beaumarchais (Paris, 1887) 261, n. 2).

29. E. Lintilhac (above, note 28) 261.

30. See above, note 6.

31. See the description by B. Brophy, Mozart the Dramatist (London, 1964) 103-15.

32. R. Pomeau, Beaumarchais (Paris, 1966) 176: “Le maître qui dans le Barbier se montrait novice en comparaison du valet paraît ici plus vieux que lui, et moralement blasé. C'est Figaro maintenant qui a la naïveté du jeune premier. Almaviva tient dans l'intrigue la place qu'occupait autrefois Bartholo, et Bazile en passant du service du vieux docteur à celui du comte souligne ce renversement. Le compte est devenu défiant, jaloux, cynique, un peu comme l'était le tuteur de Rosine.” The situation in Le Barbier is, of course, one which resembles that of Figaro to the extent that it shows a false father making claims on a young girl and trying to prevent the advances of a young lover.

33. Ibid. 178.: “La comtesse est une figure attachante dans la galerie des ‘femmes de trente ans’, bien qu'elle soit sensiblement plus jeune. Sans enfant, négligée par son mari, elle ‘languit', elle est ‘incommodée'; mais c'est le coeur qui souffre.”

34. Ibid. 178.

35. Chérubin's love for his marraine is an oedipal fantasy and this is clearest in his “Romance” (Acte II, scène iv):

    Le Roi vint à passer, …
    J'avais une marraine,
    Que toujours adorai. …
    Je sens que j'en mouttai.

    He fears the Count (le roi) whereas Figaro does not.

36. For references to classical sources of the variants, see Graves (above, note 22) II. 9-15.

37. One of the few instances of ius primae noctis in Greek mythology occurs in this context. Oinomaus will not give up his daughter to any man but the one who beats him in a chariot race. Pelops bribes Oinomaus' charioteer Mrytilos to replace an axle pin with wax: his reward is to be the ius primae noctis with Hippodameia, but Pelops kills him first. See especially Hyginus, Fabula 84; Scholiast on Horace Odes I. i; Pausanias VIII. 14.7.

38. Figaro shows his appreciation of this fact when he taunts the Count with Suzanne's togue virginale (Acte I. scène x). The contrast between this headgear and the Countess' ruban de nuit, which Chérubin cherishes and bloodies, is suggestive. (I owe this observation and other helpful suggestions to Professor Peter Rose.) Chérubin's love for the Countess is a parody of medieval conventions of courtly love, as his “Romance” makes clear (see above, note 35). This is appropriate to a play which has as its major theme a custom which eighteenth century intellectuals associated with the social abuse of those “dark ages.” If the ius primae noctis is based on the father's sexual prerogative over the daughter, the pattern of courtly love is based on the son's oedipal attachment to the mother.

39. Brophy (above, note 31) 112-15.

40. Acte I, scène i: SUZANNE. Il y a, mom ami, que, las de courtiser les beautés des environs, M. le Comte Almaviva veut rentrer au château, mais non pas chez sa femme; c'est sur la tienne …

41. Pomeau (above, note 32) 176.

42. Brophy (above, note 31) 88.

43. B. Brophy, Black Ship to Hell (London, 1962) 28-29.

44. “Devereux (above, note 5) 134.

45. The Count has renounced his right but it has been replaced by a bargain with Suzanne similarly contingent upon her marriage with Figaro: she will meet the Count if he provides her with a dowry. See Acte I, scène viii, where the Count is about to suggest the bargain: Acte II, scène i, where Suzanne tells the Countess, “He wanted to buy me,” and Acte III, scène ix, where Suzanne refers to “the dowry you promised me,” and the Count insists upon the condition, “Only if you consent to obey me.” Later in this last scene Suzanne identifies this obedience with the ius primae noctis and draws the conclusion I have taken for granted: “Mais aussi point de mariage, point de droit du Seigneur, Monseigneur.”

46. On the relation between violence and homosexuality see Devereux (above, note, 5) passim, and Brophy (above note 31) 23-34. On the relation between paranoia and homosexuality, see S. Ferenczi, Sex in Psychoanalysis (Boston, 1916) 154-86.