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  • 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
Two Shakespeare Adaptations: Le Vieillard et ses trois filles and Timon d'Athènes

Two Shakespeare Adaptations: Le Vieillard et ses trois filles and Timon d'Athènes

Harris, Joseph
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien

Paperback

Series: Mhra Critical Texts, Book 82

Literary CriticismPlaysShakespeare

ISBN10: 1839542330
ISBN13: 9781839542336
Publisher: Texts and Translations
Published: Mar 13 2023
Pages: 164
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Over the course of his prolific life, the playwright Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) wrote several plays based on works by Shakespeare. This volume brings together two very different adaptations of Shakespearean tragedies, written within two years of each other. Le Vieillard et ses trois filles (1792), in line with eighteenth-century French aesthetic and political tastes, strips the masterpiece King Lear of all its regal trappings and complex subplots to produce a pared-down three-act bourgeois 'drame' about a father who foolishly surrenders his fortune to his mercenary daughters, before an unexpected (and un-Shakespearean) happy ending. Timon d'Athènes (1794), conversely, follows the plot of Timon of Athens rather more closely, tracing its protagonist's shift from profligate socialite to bitter, misanthropic outcast; Mercier, however, accentuates the political dimension of Timon's bankruptcy, exile, and eventual suicide as an implicit critique of the violence and abuses of the post-Revolutionary Reign of Terror. What both plays have in common is a narrative arc leading from generosity exploited, via disillusionment and despair, to a misanthropic attempt to escape from civilisation altogether. This edition offers explanatory footnotes comparing the texts with the Shakespearean originals, and an introduction outlining Mercier's complex contributions to eighteenth-century Shakespeare reception in France.

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