The Preface to “The Marriage of Figaro”

Extract

In writing this preface, my purpose is not to conduct a futile investigation to determine whether I have written a good play or a bad one. It is too late for that. Rather, it is scrupulously to subject it to examination (and I should do this under any circumstances), in order to discover whether I have written a blameworthy piece of work.

Since no one is obliged to write a comedy in strict imitation of other comedies, if I have strayed from the well beaten path for reasons I felt to be sound ones, am I to be judged, as the Messrs. so & so have judged me, by rules which are not my rules? Or, as they fatuously proclaim in print, for taking art back to its infancy, because I am attempting to blaze a new trail for that art whose first, perhaps whose only law, is to entertain while instructing? But that is not the question.