English, French, or Frenchy? Adaptation, The Irish Lion, and The Corsican Brothers

This essay aims to examine the most characteristic aspect of the nineteenth-century Anglophone theatre, its dominance by the adaptation of French plays. It lays out some of the underlying theatrical conditions in both Paris and London, and examines the British discourse about adaptation, which covered a spectrum from condemnation to roguish delight. Using two case studies, John Buckstone’s The Irish Lion and Dion Boucicault’s The Corsican Brothers, the essay argues that “adaptation from the French” was not a singular or consistent process. It could range instead from the appropriation of a single idea to something close to direct translation. More than this, the essay suggests that attention to adaptive processes can illuminate national difference, cultural equivalence, and aspects of theatre history. Thus it becomes clear that the Irish Lion transforms a spoof on the Parisian celebrity of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into a joke about the London lionization of the Irish poet Thomas Moore. Meanwhile, close examination of The Corsican Brothers reveals that the most famous ghostly effects of Charles Kean’s 1852 staging were not solely attributable to Boucicault, or to Kean. Instead, they responded to the dramaturgy of Eugène Grangé and Xavier de Montépin, who adapted the novel by Alexandre Dumas père for the Parisian Théâtre Historique. In this case, the most critical work was not translation, but transmediation. At the same time, adaptation was necessarily responsive to local expectations. The Corsican Brothers reflected cultural shifts occasioned by the Theatres Act of 1843, and fed a new British appetite for “gentlemanly melodrama.” Above all, the dominance of “adaptation from the French” relied on personal links and cultural parallels which tied London to Paris, not least in the reputational likeness observable between Boucicault and Dumas.