Don Quichotte et Sanche sur la scène française (xviie et xviiie siècles)

This paper presents a review of the principal stage adaptations that have been made of Cervantes’ great novel. Two major landmarks in the history of such adaptations are Pichou’s Les Folies de Cardénio (1628), a tragicomedy which still has a strongly-marked pastoral flavour, and the later trilogy by Guérin de Bouscal, in which practically all of the adventures related in the two parts of the Quixote are transposed or narrated on the stage. Just as this occurs in more secondary works where the heroes are Don Quixote and/or Sancho, in such transpositions of a romantic subject to drama we come across a phenomenon that is characteristic of all cultural transfer in the classical age: namely the tendency to relate the unknown with the known – to relate novelty with pre-existing archetypes and with received ideas which go to build up a horizon of expectation for French audiences in the 17th and 18th centuries.