Turcaret

It had turned out that the play put on by Northern Broadsides, just noticed, was an adaption of a French play, perhaps farce, from the age if not the time of Molière, the 'Turcaret' of reference 1.

A play which I was able to download, in the French, onto my Kindle for the modest sum of 99p that very evening. Curiously, from 'Les Éditions de Londres', people who are twittered at reference 2 and sited at reference 3. For some reason Bing turned up the former in preference to the latter; clearly has not yet worked out that I don't do twitter.

A publishing house based somewhere in England and Wales, if not in London, with a very French and political flavour: '... Londres, c'est aussi la capitale de la proscription européenne. Comme aujourd'hui pour les jeunes réfugiés politiques français, c'est la capitale des anarchistes, des communistes et de tous les révoltés européens au milieu du Dix Neuvième siècle. C'est le lieu de refuge des anarchistes français chassés par les lois scélérates de 1894...C'est le point de rencontre de tous les opprimés, de tous les résistants de l'Europe pendant la seconde guerre mondiale...'.

A rather cheaply produced edition with a lot of white space between each line of text, at least on my Kindle.

Nevertheless, an easy enough read, with early 18th century French being a lot easier to read than that in their newspapers of today. The only serious difficulty with the French being that the male lead is someone called a traitant. Rendered in translation to a dodgy banker. In modern French 'traitant' seems to be a word for a medicated shampoo and, sharing its roots with our 'treatment', a word for your GP. But, according to Littré, it also seems to be a word for a tax farmer, something of a pest, scourge even, in pre-revolutionary France, with the relevant entry, now turned up, in Wikipedia mentioning this very play. See reference 4.

The adaptor has translated the action from Paris to a big Northern town, vaguely in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the dodgy aristos. have been replaced by spivs and bourgeois, but otherwise the general tone, the general scheme of things has been preserved. Except that there was a shift in tone in the female lead, the widow who was milking the banker to the advantage of her spiv. In the Northern Broadsides version, she is a slightly vague, inoffensive woman, perhaps a little stupid, but not really nasty. Whereas in the French she seems to be a cocotte on the make, in time honoured French fashion.

I wondered how the play scored in the Commedia dell'arte tradition, with a bunch of stock characters being thrown together, stirred up a bit and spat out as a new play. A tradition claimed for France at reference 5. In which connection, I came across some talk of Lesage and Vaudeville, but Wikipedia claims that this last was invented at the end of the 19th century which does not fit at all. More digging needed.

PS: I have now moved onto 'Gil Blas de Santilanne', delivered to my PC by Amazon for no charge, no VAT and no P&P. Not yet clear who did the work involved in getting the text into Kindle format and into the Amazon shop. That apart, never before heard of by me, but according to Bing: 'Gil Blas was written in French between 1700 and 1730 by Alain-René LeSage. Although nominally set in Spain, it is in fact French through and through. The picaresque [relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero] adventures of its hero are described from naive youth through cunning servant to landed proprietor and nobleman, with a spell in jail, bereavements and fits of remorse along the way. It was an immense hit on publication, and was translated into most European languages. The version by Tobias Smollet was the first in English and one of the best, although rather free in parts. Its influence on Smollett's own work is clear ... Fielding (Tom Jones) and Dickens (Nicholas Nickleby) were also heavily influenced by it or its numerous imitators'.

Reference 1: Turcaret - Alain-René Lesage - 1709.

Reference 2: https://twitter.com/editionslondres.

Reference 3: https://www.editionsdelondres.com/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferme_générale.

Reference 5: https://www.britannica.com/art/commedia-dellarte.

Reference 6: Gil Blas de Santilanne - Alain-René Lesage -1735.

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