I got this book so that my family could do a living room performance in one night. Although I am fairly pleased with how it was shortened, I found many typos that needed to be corrected before we could even read it. I had to sit down with the full text to check it all the way through. An obvious example is when Beatrice says to Benedick "You always end with a jade's trick. O know you of old." (It should be "I know you of old.") If you are only buying one copy, this isn't too hard to do and is easier than buying the full text and cutting the lines yourself. If you are buying several copies for a classroom, however, correcting the typos would be a lot of work. If you are buying this book to read the play, buy the full text, this in one of Shakespeare's shorter plays and one of our favorites.

The book is very interesting, much like other from Shekspeare. The story of two cuples gettig maried is very old. But the way the two cuples fall in love is very new and refreshing. This work has the characters of drama as well as those of drama. This book falls in to chategory of must read it!

Odon Von Horvath was an Austrian contemporary of Brecht's, and although he rejects ideology and the formal principles of Epic theatre, there is something Brechtian in the way his characters argue by hurling dialectical aphorisms at each other.

'figaro gets divorced' is his most famous play, and reintroduces the famous quartet of Beaumarchais' 'Barber of Seville' and 'Marriage of Figaro' - the Count and Countess Almaviva; their married servants, Figaro and Susanna - seven years later, or over a hundred - we first see them flee an unnamed Revolution, not unlike the Russian one.

It may be distressing to see Beaumarchais' farcical subversion made heavy and Germanic in a three-hours, thirteen-tableaux political drama. The impish Figaro soon leaves his anachronistic employers to become, once more, a barber, this time in a sleepy, ultra-conformist, soon-to-be-Nazi German town. The bourgeoisification of this free, cynical spirit stifles his wife, and she has a brutal affair. Sex in this play is no longer, as in Beaumarchais, an expression of power, just an admission of defeat.

Figaro returns to the Communist State to become a prominent apparatchik; Susanna waitresses at a White cabaret where all the menials are ex-royalty; Almaviva gets embroiled in debilitating gambling and criminal activities. A lot of goodwill for these characters is carried over from Beaumarchais, Mozart and Rossini, so when we watch their inexorable decline, it's hard to know whether it is our memories, or Von Horvath's writing that affects us.

Certainly, there is something powerful about watching the spirit of one Revolution grimly debased in the age of another; and there is a vivid intensity to the playwright's expert tableaux. The dialogue initially seems lumpenly didactic until we realise that it is didacticism he analyses and undermines. Hearteningly, despite all the despair and misery, Von Horvath doesn't forget he's writing in an important tradition of comedy. More please.