“Adding cayenne to curry”: Intertextuality, Transfictional Character and Sensational Parodies in Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault’s Foul Play (1868)

Both Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault were well-known in the nineteenth century as writers who adapted and re-fashioned across multiple sources and media. Foul Play (1868) brought these two successful cultural producers together and this article discusses their collaboration and its parodies as intertextual, transfictional, and transmedial enterprises. I suggest that sensational narratives like Foul Play are particularly alive to intertextual and transmedial strategies because the aims of both sensation writers and transmedial producers were aligned: creating affective bonds and encouraging increased engagement and consumption. This article explores three different versions of Foul Play (one novelistic and two dramatic) as well as the parodies that almost immediately followed. Examining transfictional characters and plot tropes across these productions reveals that transfictionality can have significant consequences on the distribution of power in a collaborative venture and on the scope and success of its cultural reverberations.