From Foreign Shores: Eighteenth-Century Adaptation and the Theater of Empire

My book argues that eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations set in the “East” introduce Oriental characters as subjects of sympathy while at the same time defamiliarizing the people and space of Britain. A paradox at the heart of eighteenth-century performance studies is that while in practice adaptations and translations proliferated on the English stage, the term “adaptation” did not possess a specific literary or theatrical definition until near the end of the century. This was in part because the historical and economic circumstances of the moment: the loss of a generation of playwrights during the Civil Wars; the creation of the patent theater monopoly during the Restoration; and the 1737 reaffirmation of state censorship. This book argues, however, that adaptation also offered a productive framework for staging difference among Britain’s nascent imperial interests. Anticipating Linda Hutcheon’s postmodern theory of adaptation, eighteenth-century playwrights and performers created a mode for drama that did not hide from audiences the process and labor of performance, but rather emphasized it in order to create a higher level of engagement with audiences. Within the context of contemporary theories of emotion by Adam Smith and David Hume, this proto-Brechtian alienation presented the actor and the character as distinct objects of sympathy, thereby increasing the emotional potential of performance. In adaptations portraying the Orient, this emotional distance is mapped onto physical distance, and these settings provide a reflexive space for eighteenth-century English texts to explore questions of genre, nation, and feeling as British imperial power expanded, but before European hegemony was a foregone conclusion.

Introduction: Theorizing Adaptation and Historicizing Orientalism 

The introduction situates the book’s argument within three critical conversations that must come together in order to fully understand eighteenth-century adaptation: adaptation and translation theory, postcolonial theory of Orientalism and hybridity, and eighteenth-century theater history. Contemporary theory has defined adaptation as inherently theatrical, as a repeating theme with variations, while marginalizing discussion of the non-film performing arts and texts from before the twentieth century. Applying modern definitions to eighteenth-century stage practice offers a useful theoretical framework to view adaptation not just as an editorial product, but also as an ongoing process that reveals an active engagement with both the works themselves and with their own contemporary moment, which coincided with the first English imperial century. The introduction historicizes both processes—adaptation and empire—within eighteenth-century theories of the emotions, as English anxieties around theatrical form and the potential loss of true English feeling were mapped onto contradictory feelings about Britain’s expanding global reach.

Chapter 1: Adapting Emotion for the Restoration Stage: Roxolana and Other “Female Suff-rers”

The first chapter shows how the practice of adaptation in Restoration theaters was instrumental in creating a new definition of tragedy. While plays like William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (1656, revised 1663) and Elkanah Settle’s Ibrahim (1677) have been interpreted as exemplars of the Oriental tragedy, they have not been read together as adaptations of Madeleine de Scudéry’s popular romance Ibrahim (1642, trans. 1652). In bringing them together, this chapter argues that these plays “translate” romance to tragedy by increasing the display of female pathos, giving the passions external signifiers that become legible on the stage; in doing so they make actress’s emotional performances a defining characteristic of Restoration tragedy, demonstrating how the drama of sensibility preceded the novel of sensibility. Adaptation crystallizes the generic necessity of female pathos to all Restoration tragedy, centering the actress in the important contemporary generic debates that emerged from the Interregnum’s artistic and political chaos.

Chapter 2: Voltaire’s Oriental Tragedies and British National Sympathies: Translating Genre 

The second chapter considers the next generation of Oriental tragedies in the mid-eighteenth century. English translations of Voltaire’s Oriental tragedies increase the display of sentiment in language and staging when they appeared in the London theater, and in doing so created a national form of sensibility where Shakespeare’s naturalism contrasted with the French neoclassicism of Voltaire. Focusing on Aaron Hill’s Zara (1735) and James Miller’s Mahomet the Imposter (1744), I chart how the many English adaptations of Voltaire increase the representation of sentiment in order to heighten the potential for sympathetic exchange, with both character and actor. In doing so these adaptations “translate” the French form of tragedy into an English one defined by the performance of emotion. These adaptations show how British interest in empire was not only centered in the material for the promise of global trade but also included the exciting potential for greater emotional connection.

Chapter 3: Scheherazade and Other “Padlock Tales”: Heads and Maidenheads 

The book then shifts to examining eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century adaptations of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1706-1721), the English translation of Antoine Galland’s groundbreaking first European language-edition of Alf layla wa layla. This chapter shows how Scheherazade becomes a trope in representations of marital violence against women that synthesized with European narratives of the “padlock” like Perrault’s Bluebeard and Cervantes’ The Jealous Husband. Delarivier Manley’s Oriental tragedy Almyna (1706) follows the structure of the Oriental tragedy but infuses it with the then-new story of Scheherazade to articulate a vision of heroism for women that combines pathos and Roman virtù. Eliza Haywood’s The Padlock (1728), an adaptation of Cervantes, incorporates the imagery of Oriental tales in order to articulate a powerful and realizable form of female sexuality. I argue that these adaptations, instead of opposing a despotic East with a free England, make the violence of domestic patriarchy real and immediate. 

Chapter 4: The Arabian Nights and the Popular Stage

The fourth chapter links the increasing disintegration of the patent theater monopoly in the Romantic period to the way in which adaptations of the Nights in popular theater genres like pantomime, farce, and burletta undermined the markers of difference between their Eastern-set tales and the urban experience of their London audiences. While Orientalist now-clichés such as the despotic sultan and the seraglio became stock tropes, they sometimes gestured to a larger cosmopolitan cultural world, as in the Irish Catholic John O’Keeffe’s trio of Arabian Nights afterpieces. In The Little Hunch-back, his Baghdad represents an Oriental metropolis where ethnic and religious differences coexist with comedic friction, while The Dead Alive is a completely indigenized retelling of “The Sleeper Awakened” set in contemporary London. The pleasure of Orientalist popular theater productions, then, derived as much from the commonalities of Oriental and Occidental cities as it did from exotic appeal. 

Conclusion: Adaptation and the Imperial Century

The turn to adaptation in the face of these laws however interacted with imperial and scientific discourses that were comparatively open and only consolidated later. Nineteenth-century science became more precise and codified, taking the possibilities offered by Humean sympathy out of the discourse. These possibilities of sympathetic connection across borders were also foreclosed as Britain’s imperial century solidified as the relationship between colony and metropole coalesced around difference. At the same time as the theater monopoly ended in 1843, the British Empire’s own monopoly consolidated and expanded its unprecedented global dominance. “From Foreign Shores” brings together performance texts and histories together with affect theory and the history of empire to illuminate complex approaches to a world that saw more contact between different bodies, both onstage and off.