Intergenre and intercultural relations of Jeorge Colman's “The jealous wife”: from Fielding to Desforges

The popular playwright of the 18th century G. Colman the Elder is known in the history of English drama as the author of two famous comedies - The Jealous Wife and The Clandestine Marriage (in collaboration with D. Garrick). Though neither of these plays was ever considered a masterpiece Colman left his mark in the European drama of the 18th century, mostly due to his comedy The Jealous Wife, which generated many adaptations and imitations on the continent. As the author of the article shows, one of the main reasons of the play’s appeal to the imitators was that Colman rather aptly adapted in it the well-known novel by H. Fielding - The History of Tom Jones, contributing thus to the perpetuation on the scene of the character of the “good-natured rake”, going back to the hero of the book and gaining great popularity in the English comedy of the second half of the 18th century. In the literature of this period The Jealous Wife opens a series of dramatic adaptations of the novel (mainly foreign), and some of them were presumably inspired by Colman’s example. The other reason of the play’s popularity might consist in the growing attention of the theatrical audience to the family matters, which, being aptly treated in the second plot line, attracted dramatists of different trends - from Rococo to Sentimentalism. The transformation of Tom Jones’s plot and characters in The Jealous Wife, conditioned by their accommodation to the genre canon of the English comedy of manners, was complemented in the French translations and adaptations of the play (written by M.-J. Riccoboni and P. J.-B. Desforges) by some new shifts caused by domestic scenic and cultural norms and by the sentimentalization of motifs and images, accompanying the transition from the grotesque “humour” comedy to the reduced comic effect of sentimentalist “serious” comedy, or drama.