The Stage Against the Scaffold: French Adaptations of George Lillo’s London Merchant

Abstract

This article considers French theatrical adaptations of George Lillo’s 1731 tragedy, The London Merchant, or, The History of George Barnwell. It asks how authors engaged with concepts of crime and punishment in the process of translation across cultures, genres and theatrical traditions. Following analysis of Lillo’s play, itself adapted from a seventeenth-century ballad, the article focuses on French rewritings of the George Barnwell story in the years following Diderot’s theorization of the drame. I suggest that by the 1760s and 1770s, the more French playwrights attempted to humanize Barnwell’s crime, the harder it became to preserve the meaning of the executions that conclude Lillo’s play. The ways in which the meanings of the scaffold shifted in these theatrical adaptations suggest broader changes in discourses of punishment in 1760s and 1770s France.