Part front matter for 6 Drama

Extract

Introduction

In an enterprise as volatile as drama, translation in the most spacious sense involves much that is never recorded in any durable form. Foreign theatre companies performed in England, and English companies performed on the Continent; travellers went to see plays in foreign countries, had impressions, and brought back reports. Such commerce could be profound in its effects even without any particular comprehension of what was being said on stage; blocking, gesture, pacing, costuming, set decoration, vocal timbre can be as important to dramatic success as anything in the dialogue, and as important a part of what practitioners might want to reproduce on their home ground. Dramatic translation of this sort is almost beyond studying for our period, except indirectly and mostly by guesswork; inevitably, what is for the most part discussed here is the translation of dramatic scripts.

That, however, is not a small subject. Quite a number of scripts found their way into print. The format itself was congenial to the reading public, even in what by modern standards is a severely minimalist form. These scripts usually resemble the surviving texts of classical Greek and Latin drama in being simple transcriptions of dialogue, with minimal or non-existent stage directions. Such presentation is used on occasion for works with no real pretence to theatrical performance: James Mabbe’s Celestina, or the Tragicke-comedy of Calisto and Melibea (1631), for instance, is effectively a work of prose fiction, and is discussed under that rubric elsewhere (§8.2). With translations of genuinely theatrical texts, strictly readerly and scholarly interest mingles variously with the appetites of contemporary theatrical practice. Translated plays, classic and contemporary, have a recurring role in the secondary dramatic venues of English drama, in the universities, the Inns of Court, and (though clear documentation here is elusive) private homes. Greek and Italian plays are sometimes translated into Latin, which has a steady role in college theatricals and perhaps elsewhere. An English version of Corneille’s Le Cid appears to be the only instance during our period of a more or less straightforward translation of a foreign drama being performed on the public stage, though there are several occasions in the London playhouses where a clear antecedent looms in the background: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors most famously, but also plays such as George Chapman’s May-Day and Thomas Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, which are unmistakably informed by Italian originals (respectively Alessandro Piccolomini’s L’Alessandro and Giambattista della Porta’s La sorella). During the enforced closure of the public theatres between 1642 and 1660 there is a modest flurry of translations of recent French drama of all genres, in anticipation of tastes that will prevail on the Restoration stage.

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Part front matter for 6 Drama

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Introduction

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