Marivaux's best comedy

Half a century after the French Revolution, the extraordinary degree of refinement of Marivaux’s language entered undefined, uncertain and sterile territories that would herald an end of an era in terms of understating language in human relations and, at the same time, how the community was conceived. At a time when bourgeois practical reason began to revolutionise how social codes were understood, the marivaudage is a chant of celebration to amorous gallantry that explored the balances with the popular art of the Commedia dell’Arte and the aristocratic parlour language, while constructing labyrinths that concealed shadows among which some of the major tensions of the era lie.