Invisible agents in translation history: Censors and actors in performed drama of eighteenth-century England

ABSTRACT

In dialogue with the social turn in translation studies, this article uncovers the work of invisible agents shaping the translation of performed drama in eighteenth-century England. Unlike other genres, performed drama was subject to a system of state censorship that shaped translation practices in ways that have not been fully accounted for by translation historiography. Using Carlo Goldoni as a case study, the article reveals the intervention of censors and actors in shaping Goldoni’s translations, making visible for the first time the central role they played as ‘rewriters’ in English theatrical culture. In reading translation through the material conditions of eighteenth-century theatre, an argument is made for a re-evaluation of performed drama in the historiographical account of eighteenth-century translation in English.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation
• history
• eighteen-century
• theatre
• censorship
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a fuller discussion of cultural approaches and, in particular, Lefevere’s notion of rewriting as a precursor of the “social turn” and the notion of translation agency, see Marinetti (2011).

2 Lefevere’s work on Brecht charts the intervention of multiple translators and literary critics in the rewriting of Brecht’s drama but does not venture into how the text was rewritten through the process of performance and staging (Lefevere 1998).

3 Lawrence Venuti’s influential The Translator’s Invisibility furthers this myth of uniformity in eighteenth-century translation practice, whist completely neglecting the translation of performed drama. He unambiguously states that: “In Dryden’s wake, from Alexander Pope’s multi-volume Homer to Alexander Tytler’s systematic Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), domestication dominated the theory and practice of English language translation in every genre, prose as well as poetry” (Venuti 1995, 65).

4 The Larpent collection consists of official manuscript copies of plays submitted for licensing between 1737 and 1824 that were in the possession of John Larpent, the Examiner of plays, at the time of his death in 1824. The manuscript collection of the Larpent plays is held at the Huntington library in San Francisco but is also available, via subscription, through the Eighteenth Century Drama collection online (ECD) and at the British library in microfiche format.

5 The Patent Theatres, or Royal Theatres (Drury Lane and Covent Garden) were the only two theatres which had permission to perform prose drama in London after 1737.

6 On this point, see Nicoll’s account of foreign influences on drama (1927, 56–73, 110–124) and also Hogan (1968, 354–360).

7 The success of Goldoni’s plays in translation is evidenced by both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century catalogues, such as Baker, Reed, and Jones (1812), and more contemporary bibliographies (Nicoll 1927).

8 Several of Goldoni’s opere buffe were published by London printers in bilingual editions as well as in the Italian original. For an overview of the circulation of Goldoni’s operatic repertoire in this period, see Sciullo (1976) and Cope (1995).

9 Like many of his Parisian plays, Le bourru is an example of how Goldoni’s writing was maturing towards the representation of more psychologically developed characters which were part of his larger intellectual project of riforma (reformation) of Italian theatre away from the most subversive aspects of commedia dell’arte. For an authoritative contextualization of the plays within Goldoni’s riforma, see Mangini (1965).

10 The consequences of the Licencing Act of 1737 on the systematization of censorship practices under the Office of the Examiner of Plays are well documented; see Worrall (2006, 1–3) and Conolly (1976, 13–47) but also McConachie (2006, 190–191) and Thomson (2000, 336–337).

11 For a full discussion of the censor’s approach to continental sources, see Conolly (1976, 54–66).

12 In-depth explorations of historical sources on the dominance of the actor on the eighteenth-century London stage can be found in Taylor (1972) and Nicoll and Rosenfeld (1980), whilst for more recent discussions of the social and material contexts underpinning the shift from textual to performance authority, see West (1991) and McConachie (2006).

13 According to the Drury Lane records of the season of 1776–1777 and 1779-1780, actor Thomas King played the lead roles of many main pieces such as Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Richard III and, together with W. Smith, was the highest earning male actor with a salary of £12 per season. (Hogan 1968).

14 For a full discussion of rehearsal practices on eighteenth-century English stage, see Milhus and Hulme (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cristina Marinetti

Cristina Marinetti is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and the director of the MA Translation Programme at Cardiff University. Her main research interests are in translation studies and theatre history. She has published on the theory and practice of theatre translation, on the transnational circulation of Carlo Goldoni and commedia dell’arte and on the role of translation in multilingual and migrant theatres.