Taking Comedy Seriously: Laughter and Pathos in Beaumarchais's Eugénie

This article explores Beaumarchais's conflicting impulses towards comedy and pathos through the dynamics of onstage laughter in his problematic play Eugénie . While this drame 's early scenes encourage a broadly comic response, the audience becomes progressively aware of laughter's moral shortcomings – not least in one crucial scene, where the pitiful heroine looks on in agonised compassion as her father's cruel mockery of her own seduction and abandonment unwittingly backfires upon himself. Father and daughter thus come to embody two conflicting spectatorial modes, those of comedy and the drame respectively, and Beaumarchais paints a touching portrait of the latter's moral superiority.