Channel Crossings: The drame bourgeois in English and French
Mechele Leon
Associate Professor of Theatre
University of Kansas
It is common to regard cross-Channel voyages of drame bourgeois as a transparent affair. With seemingly little trouble, middle-class drama and theory of the eighteenth century passed back and forth between England and France. George Lillo’s The London Merchant became Louis-Sébastien Mercièr’s Jenneval; Denis Diderot’s Le Fils naturel became Dorval, or The Test of Virtue—just two examples from over fifty years of active transcultural exchange involving both plays of and theory about domestic drama. Yet, was the movement of this genre as transparent as our theatre history textbooks would have it? This paper will look comparatively at some of the first translations of French and English middle-class dramas. What was involved in translating domestic existence in France to an English context, and vice-versa? How do these texts negotiate both culture and language? How are paratexts (prefaces, etc.) employed to support these translations? What is assumed in the translation of terms like genre mixte or domestic tragedy? And as a matter of theatre historiography, how do competing claims to English or French origins of domestic drama continue to shape our notions of the status of drame as an ancestor of modern realism? This paper will discuss these and other key questions in an effort to explore the transnational liminality of the drame bourgeois.
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