Translations, Exchanges, and Afterlives: Early Modern French and English Drama

Dodds, Lara A.; Dodds, Lara A.

From the late Middle Ages on, France and England saw an immense amount of literary and cultural exchange. In both countries, authors worked within state institutions to build a distinctly national literature as part of bolstering imperial prominence. As France and England vied for domination of Western Europe, several times at war with each other, their rivalry was often accompanied by literary borrowing and imitation. Scholars have long recognized the steady flow of French writing into England, usually in translation, though also in the original language: among English people of letters, fluency in French was often a mark of erudition. Since the 1970s, studies have regularly appeared demonstrating the reading, rewriting, and adaptation of French literary sources among early modern English authors. Most prominent among the French authors scholars have addressed are poets Clément Marot, Joachim Du Bellay, and Pierre de Ronsard, playwright Robert Garnier, and essayist Michel de Montaigne; among the English authors who drew from this work, poets Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, and poet John Milton. Because theater became the state-sanctioned form of public entertainment in both countries, it has attracted the most scholarly attention. The aim of this panel is to expand knowledge of these exchanges, as well as to broaden the field to consider ways that cultural exchange also worked in the other direction, from England to France, that it often involved genre cross-pollination, and that it included other types of texts and discourses than those traditionally termed “literary.”

Since the scholars on the panel work in different disciplines, part of the aim is for them to enhance each other’s research and to present their variety of methodologies and strategies to the audience. The panel brings together specialists in French, English, and comparative literature, disciplines often more separate than they should be, given the amount of material they share. Toby Wikström, a mid-career scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French literature, brings a new perspective to one of the most discussed scenes in French classical drama, the “Turkish ceremony” that concludes Molière’s 1670 comedy-ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman). The episode, involving a wealthy merchant who is easily conned through appeal to his aspirations to nobility, is usually viewed as a satire of bourgeois social climbing. But Wikström signals that the scene is a blasphemous rendition of a ceremony of conversion to Islam; he will argue his case through comparison with the serious depiction of a conversion ritual in Robert Daborn’s 1612 tragedy A Christian Turn’d Turk. Jessica Wolfe, an established comparatist who teaches in an English department, will demonstrate that George Chapman, one of England’s major pre-Shakespeare playwrights, developed his plots from French and Italian ambassadorial reports known as relazioni. Her examples are two Chapman plays about the murder of a member of the entourage of King Henri III of France that show strong influence of ambassadorial discourse. Wolfe will examine the question of how such sources, outside what is traditionally termed “literature,” are transmitted and received across national borders. The panel’s third presenter is Alexander Brock, PhD candidate in comparative literature, who will expand on current knowledge of Molière as a literary model for English Restoration comedy. He will demonstrate the role of another writer, Paul Scarron, who has a lower profile in the French canon and whose plays emphasize the burlesque rather than the social types Molière satirizes. But beyond Scarron’s dramatic works, Brock will show, Scarron’s prose fiction, especially the Roman Comique, a novel in the vein of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, offered a model of how to incorporate theatrical gags into narrative prose, leaving a lasting influence on the English comedic tradition. Collectively, the panelists explore the influences and exchanges of French and English drama of the early modern period and provide opportunities for cross-disciplinary consideration of methods and materials.

After each presenter speaks for seventeen minutes, the presider will open the session to questions from the audience.

566 Translations, Exchanges, and Afterlives: Early Modern French and English Drama: Calls for Papers