ABSTRACT

As John Shanahan reminds us, “the adapted Tempest was the most performed play of the Restoration, and constituted a tenth of all live performances on both stages in its rst season” (91). We know from Pepys’s diary that Charles II “and Court” attended its premiere on November 7, 1667. Pepys describes The Enchanted Island as “the most innocent play that I ever saw; and a curious piece of musique in an echo of half sentences, the echo repeating the former half, while the man goes on to the latter, which is my pretty” (75). The device that catches Pepys’s attention is worth pausing over: it is an apt emblem upon which to bring our study of adaptation to a close. The device of call and refrain facilitates a crucial insight into how adap tation works. The addition works to alter the original, changing it from an isolated instance to an element within a set. This new set will continue to expand as other elements are seized upon and inserted into the set that becomes the adapted play. Although we began our investigation with a sense that an adaptation is a subsequent manipulation of the single-source text, we have instead come to recognize that the adaptive impulse does not respect such bonds and that it is more common, and thus more accurate, to characterize adaptations as mash-ups that draw together desperate source texts, yielding a new composite text. Indeed, The Enchanted Island is a bravura example as the 1667 production was, in short order, further adapted into an opera, the authorship of which remains controversial, though the most accepted identication for the author of the 1674 published libretto is Thomas Shadwell. Thus, it is fair to say that the most popular incarnation of The Tempest prior to the Victorian era was the result of a team made up of Shakespeare, Davenant, Dryden and Shadwell.