UCLA

Furbish’d Remnants argues that eighteenth-century theatrical adaptations set in the Orient destabilize categories of difference, introducing Oriental characters as subjects of sympathy while at the same time defamiliarizing the people and space of London. Applying contemporary theories of emotion, I contend that in eighteenth-century theater, the actor and the character become distinct subjects for the affective transfer of sympathy, increasing the emotional potential of performance beyond the narrative onstage. Adaptation as a form heightens this alienation effect, by drawing attention to narrative’s properties as an artistic construction.

A paradox at the heart of eighteenth-century theater is that while the term “adaptation” did not have a specific literary or theatrical definition until near the end of the period, in practice adaptations and translations proliferated on the English stage. Anticipating Linda Hutcheon’s postmodernist theory of adaptation, eighteenth-century playwrights and performers conceptualized adaptation as both process and product. Adaptation created a narrative mode that emphasized the process and labor of performance for audiences in order to create a higher level of engagement with audiences. Bringing together theories of emotion by philosophers such as Adam Smith and David Hume, and modern performance studies scholarship, I demonstrate how competing discourses of sympathy produced performance practices that linked stronger emotional response with theatrical artifice.

One of the major changes in English stage adaptations, I contend, is a new emphasis on strong emotion and a new set of strategies for rendering feeling onstage. The Restoration tragedy’s emphasis on pathos significantly preceded the cult of sensibility expressed in the sentimental novel, as shown by Elkanah Settle’s transformation of the character Roxolana from virago to tragic heroine in his stage adaptation of Madeleine de Scud�ry’s novel Ibrahim. Reading the English translations of Voltaire’s Oriental tragedies, I illustrate how the metatheatrical distance created by and eighteenth-century stage practices and Orientalist settings increases the opportunity for sympathetic exchange, by offering both the character and the performer as recipients simultaneously. This expansive vision of emotional sharing enlivens tragedy, but it also opens up the more dangerous possibilities of an uncontrollable contagion of feeling at a historical moment when contact with strangers increases. The exotic settings in adaptations of the Arabian Nights’ frame tale of Scheherazade paradoxically domesticate these stories of marital cruelty, unfamiliar aesthetics on top all-too-recognizable sexual violence. At other moments in the period though, as in John O’Keeffe’s adaptation of “The Little Hunch-Back,” those blurred boundaries between individuals and nations enable cross-cultural sympathetic identification along with their exoticism. In adaptations portraying the Orient, 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.