Marivaux’s Archipelago: L’Île des Esclaves, L’Île de la Raison, and Colonie

Jeu de I’amour et du hazard, the play considered by many to be Marivaux’s best, while using a well-known comedic motif of dressing up (employed, inter alia, in Les Précieuses ridicules byMolière) goes a step further by doubling the dressing up as not only gentlemen dress up as their servants but the servants dress up as well. Vesting a servant girl and a butler with powers of giving orders seems to herald revolutionary plays but in this case brings the comedy closer to the genre of utopian philosophical tales. It is all the more surprising that the play was put on at the magnate theatre in Dukla, probably without any relation to the same comedy, in another translation, being played at the public theatre in Warsaw. Included in a collection of plays translated for the stage at Dukla (dated 1777), it is an interesting example of adapting a foreign text to Polish circumstances even though the text itself resisted such attempts and was didactic in a very limited way.Research financed by Polish National Centre Science (KBN; DEC --2012/04/S/HS2/00161