Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux 1663-1732

The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux 1663-1732

Jones, Suzanne

Paperback

Series: Transcript, Book 13

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 178188840X
ISBN13: 9781781888407
Publisher: Legenda
Published: Jan 9 2023
Pages: 218
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.46 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

As the most successful comic dramatist at the court of Louis XIV, Molière was certainly known to his London counterparts. During his early acting years in a touring troupe, the English theatres had been closed by the Civil Wars, but after 1660 viable plays were in great demand, and Molière was translated almost at once. Dryden, Behn, Fielding and many others took him up. All the same, his plays only began to be printed in English as immutable classics from around 1732 when a landmark edition was published in parallel text. Even then, English writers felt able to offer other translations that were free in their handling of the source material. The result, as Jones shows in her ground-breaking study, was a rich diversity of translation practices, and an influx both of new vocabulary and new cultural currents. She ranges from theories of plot formation, translation, and prosody to an analysis of lexical terms evoking contentious social themes: marital discord, religious hypocrisy, the medical profession, and social pretension.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Jones, Suzanne

View All

Also in

Literary Criticism

View All