Amphibious Author: Abel Boyer, Iphigénie, and Huguenot Migration

Abstract

This article centres on the idea of an ‘amphibious author’, an epithet applied to the London-based Huguenot writer, lexicographer, and translator Abel Boyer (1667?–1729). Cross-channel migration of word-usages corresponded with the migration of people. While the French term ‘amphibie’ was used in relation to suspected Huguenot status in early modern France, the English counterpart, ‘amphibious’, could be used to keep a French migrant writer at bay. The ‘amphibiousness’, the half-Englishness, half-Frenchness, of Abel Boyer was negotiated through his translation of Racine’s Iphigénie, a play which presents characters displaced by state politics. While Boyer adapted the surface to English taste for varied spectacle, the undercurrents of his translation – repeated emphasis on the transitional setting and character duality – reveal an interpretation which resonates with his own status. The satirical epithet is not merely a label, but a productive means of investigating the translation work and reception of a Huguenot migrant.

KEYWORDS:

• Abel Boyer
• amphibiousness
• Anglo-French relations
• Huguenots
• migration
• Racine
• translation

In a dialogue titled A Comparison Between the Two Stages, published in London in 1702, a satirical character called ‘Critick’ outlines a common occurrence on the capital’s theatre scene of the era. Two plays on the same character or theme would often appear at rival playhouses at around the same time. Critick states that he must compliment the dramatist John Dennis on the success of his adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, and he goes on to compare it to Abel Boyer’s translation of Racine’s Iphigénie, a reworking of various Iphigenia narratives and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. Both of the newly adapted plays were first performed in December 1699, but the anonymous author phrases his comments to suggest that Boyer (and his friend Thomas Cheek) had the cheek to follow Dennis’s lead in choosing to mount an Iphigenia play:

This Forreign Author, having a plaguey deal of Spite in him, Clubs with an honest gentleman to write a Tragedy on the same Subject: I don’t say the Story was the same, because indeed they are directly contrary; Why, so were the Stages, Ergo, so should the Plays be. This Amphibious Author, half English, half French, looks over his own French Dictionary, and finds Madam Iphigenia very much degraded in t’other Play.¹

‘Critick’ by name, critical by nature, the character’s remarks betray xenophobic and snobbish prejudices. He claims that Boyer, who had brought out a bilingual French–English, English–French Royal Dictionary in May 1699, was at a loose end and searching for a different kind of project. The image of Boyer looking over (as in above and beyond) his own dictionary and moving from lexicography to drama, implies that he is getting above his station. Alongside this perceived presumption, the character of Critick is troubled that Boyer is, in his terms, ‘an amphibious author’, half English, half French.² In this article I linger on this idea to explore the duality of this Huguenot lexicographer, translator, and writer and to ask whether his ‘amphibiousness’ reveals motives, anxieties, and political reflections in his translation of Racine.

Concrete information about Boyer’s early life in France is sparse, but since he worked tirelessly to document his experiences in England, historians have been able to piece together his biography.³ Boyer was born in Castres in Languedoc, in the mid-1660s. His father was a local magistrate who was killed in the persecution of Huguenots, and his mother was sister to a Protestant minister, Fra Campdomerius. Boyer attended the Protestant Académie de Puylaurens, where he studied Latin and Greek. But as anti-Huguenot persecution accelerated into the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, he was sent to the Netherlands under the protection of his minister uncle to become a student at the University of Franeker in Friesland, studying a variety of subjects ranging from theology and philosophy to languages, history, mathematics, and the architecture of fortifications. When his uncle died in 1688, Boyer went to work as a translator at the publishing house of van Bulderen in The Hague.⁴ After a year, and encouraged by the ascension to the English throne of Protestant William III, he moved to London with limited resources. Over the course of the next four decades, he learned English thoroughly and promoted himself as an Anglo-French man of letters. He worked for the nobility as a French tutor and produced language-learning texts.⁵ He was a prolific writer and tackled a range of topics, from character portraits, architecture, and histories of William of Orange and Queen Anne, to Whig-leaning parliamentary chronicles published in a journal called The Political State of Great Britain.⁶

Boyer made a point of drawing attention to his French background to present himself as having a distinctive perspective on life in England. For example, the eighteenth-century finely executed portrait of the writer engraved by François I Chéreau after a portrait by Hans Hysing bore the Latin epithet ‘Gallo-Anglus’. In the 1708 frontispiece of the Royal Dictionary Abridged, a portrait of Boyer is placed in the centre foreground of a wall of portraits of well-known French writers to the left from the viewer’s perspective, and English writers to the right.⁷ The character of Critick in A Comparison Between the Two Stages is likely mocking Boyer’s own marketing strategies in emphasizing his Anglo-Frenchness. But how should the label ‘Amphibious Author’ be interpreted? Does it relate to the French equivalent ‘amphibie’, a term which had already been associated with the double lives of Huguenots in France, and does Boyer draw on his simultaneously settled and unsettled dual status in his translation work?

One place to start when thinking about the meaning of ‘amphibious’ is Boyer’s own bilingual dictionary. He straightforwardly defines ‘amphibious’ as ‘qui vit dans l’eau et sur la Terre’ and ‘amphibie’ as that ‘which lives as well on water as on land’.⁸ Moving to a monolingual French dictionary also published in the 1690s, but after the compiler’s death, Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel alludes to a broader usage of the term ‘amphibie’ by recording its Greek etymology, ‘où il signifie, Vie en deux manières, ou en deux endroits’.⁹ As I shall mention below, Furetière in fact applied the term in this broader metaphorical sense in his own literary work.

Amphibiousness and ambition

In several mid-seventeenth-century French texts, the term ‘amphibie’ could be used to describe people perceived as being duplicitous and wily, those who can get along easily in different settings. In the 1658 La précieuse, ou, le mystère de la ruelle, Michel de Pure described the figure of the coquette as ‘une espèce d’amphibie, tantôt fille et tantôt femme, qui a pour objet d’attaquer la Dupe ou le Galant’.¹⁰ In Furetière’s 1666 text Le Roman bourgeois, the character of Nicomède is described as ‘amphibie’ because he frequents both the City and the Court: ‘à cette solemnité se trouva un homme Amphibie, qui étoit le matin Advocat et le soir « Courtisan »’.¹¹ Le Roman bourgeois was translated into English as early as 1671, and the term ‘homme Amphibie’ was rendered as ‘amphibious Animal’.¹² Perhaps the translator was inclined towards alliteration, but the term ‘amphibie’ also dehumanizes subjects since it had long since been used in natural-historical contexts.¹³ It is not within the scope of this article to write a history of the word’s usage, but instead I explore some of its resonances in relation to Boyer’s status and his strategies as Huguenot writer, translator, and migrant.¹⁴

In using the term ‘amphibious’, the writer of A Comparison Between the Two Stages is also suggesting the near-homophonous adjective ‘ambitious’. In Les Caractères La Bruyère describes ‘des homme avides’ at court, those who would be willing and able to follow a clerical, military, or administrative career depending on whichever would offer the most advancement: ‘il se sont si bien ajustés, que par leur état ils deviennent capables de toutes les grâces, ils sont amphibies, ils vivent de l’Église et de l’Épée et auront le secret d’y joindre la robe’.¹⁵ Like Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois, this text was translated into English in the late seventeenth century.¹⁶ Owing to Anglo-French political and social interactions, translation, and the development of bilingual French–English dictionaries, uses of ‘amphibie’ in French migrated, correlated, and evolved with uses of ‘amphibious’ in English.

Amphibiousness and ambiguity

Some uses of the idea of amphibiousness related to Huguenot status since many early modern French Protestants had to live a double life to avoid persecution. In this context, any individuals who kept an open mind regarding religious views could be accused of having covert Huguenot leanings. A search of seventeenth-century texts reveals examples where ‘amphibie’ is applied to figures who are either suspected of Huguenot tendencies or their flexible thinking is denounced as Protestant and therefore dissenting in seventeenth-century France. The epithet ‘amphibious author’ is of course written in English, but meanings and usages, like people, migrated across the Channel.

An early seventeenth-century example of ‘amphibie’ as a term denoting Protestant leanings emerged in 1622, the year in which the Peace of Montpellier was signed, concluding a Protestant uprising in Languedoc and confirming the terms of the Edict of Nantes, which granted official tolerance to Huguenots.¹⁷ The Jesuit polemicist, François Garasse, wrote a series of attacks on the Gallican parlementaire Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615). It is unsurprising that he should have done so because Pasquier had produced numerous anti-Jesuit works in his lifetime. Garasse writes:

Or le plus excellent amphibie d’esprit que je vis oncques c’est le sieur Pasquier, lequel soustient toutes choses indifferamment suyvant les bizarreries de ses humeurs, et les occasions qui se présentent […] [il] dit […] De ma part je seray touijours pour le mariage contre la vie celibe […] Voyla l’advis de Pasquier, c’est à dire, l’advis des Huguenots.¹⁸

Garasse is alluding to debate on the relative values of marriage and celibacy to align Pasquier with Huguenots, since Calvinists sought to improve marriage’s standing in the comparative assessment. The label ‘esprit amphibie’ clearly stung because Pasquier’s son Nicolas brought it up again (in both adjectival and nominal form) in a published letter in defence of his father. He notes Garasse’s own inconsistencies in arguing in one instance that Pasquier was a would-be Huguenot, and in other instances that he was neither Huguenot nor Catholic: ‘Qu’il est libertin & partant Huguenot […] et toutesfois qu’il n’est ny Catholique ny Huguenot, qu’il assiste à la Messe à laquelle il ne croit pas, Qu’il est une peste amphybie, Un excellent Amphibie d’esprit’.¹⁹ The perceived problem with the ‘esprit amphibie’ is that it doesn’t settle in one place, and that it might be more than one thing or, more troublingly, neither one thing nor another.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, another posthumous attack employs the idea of amphibiousness. The author Paul Pellisson was born a Calvinist and practised at the bar at Castres, Abel Boyer’s birthplace. Pellisson moved to Paris in the 1650s and converted to Catholicism in 1670. But upon his death in 1693 rumours swirled that he had refused the sacraments. Songs and poems circulated on this topic, including these verses:

Pelisson ce monstre amphibie,

Au dehors catholique, au-dedans Huguenot,

Vient de finir la comédie.

En hypocrite et faux dévot.²⁰

Again, the idea of ‘amphibie’ relating to uncertain religious status emerges. The verses were relayed to the British Secretary of State in papers from his intelligence service. The agent writes that ‘il faut estre bien malicieux pour parler si mal d’un si galant homme’.²¹ It is clear that ‘amphibie’ could be applied negatively in that period and was used to emphasize uncertain religious identity and difference.

By using the English equivalent ‘amphibious’ to describe a Huguenot beyond the borders of France, the author of A Comparison Between the Two Stages confronts the duality of being French and English. After all, many Huguenots ended up living in ‘deux manières’ in the sense of sharing multiple cultures when they were forced to migrate across Europe or on to the Americas.²² The idea of amphibiousness holds particular sway in an island state. In 1701, just a year before the publication of A Comparison, Daniel Defoe described the longstanding mixed heritage of England’s population in a satirical poem against the cultural xenophobia which was particularly prevalent after the arrival of the Dutch William of Orange alongside Mary, daughter of James II of England. The succession of the Protestant king and queen in turn encouraged the arrival of displaced French Protestants. In The True-Born Englishman, Defoe explains that the English nation was already formed of different ethnic groups, from Ancient Britons, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and others: ‘From this amphibious, ill-born mob began / That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman’.²³ William Pittis, in his analysis of the satire, wrote: ‘The Epithet of Amphibious to People who live in an Island, when the Sea is its defence is not so scandalous as he design’d it, though the Title he gives our Ancestors of an Ill-born Mob sounds very hard’.²⁴ Pittis seems to miss the irony of the remarks, and chooses to explain away the idea that amphibious people have no fixed single identity or place of origin and are all linked to the waters across which their ancestors travelled as well as the land(s) on which they lived. He reads ‘amphibious’ solely in terms of geography without taking into account its sense of complex doubleness.

Writing a year later, the author of A Comparison could have been playing on Defoe’s popular text, but it is also possible that the author was aware of the uses of ‘amphibie’ in relation to Huguenot status.²⁵ Cross-channel migration and evolution of word-meanings from French to English were frequent in the period, so connections between uses of ‘amphibie’ and ‘amphibious’ are not tenuous. By 1718 the pastor of the Savoy French Church paraphrased the critical remarks directed at his institution by another Huguenot minister: ‘an amphibious church’, a ‘composition of an Episcopal face and a Presbyterian heart’.²⁶ The sense of troubling duality persisted in the Huguenot churches’ attempts to sit alongside Anglicanism.

Amphibiousness, drama, and translation

Linking the two principal senses of amphibiousness, the one relating to land and water, and the other to dual identity, I turn now to consider how the political status of a Huguenot migrant is reflected in Boyer’s 1699 translation of Racine’s Iphigénie, first published under the title Achilles: or, Iphigenia in Aulis.²⁷ It is worth pondering on the continued resonance of the sources of inspiration for Racine’s Iphigénie. The title page of Boyer’s edition of his translation includes a Latin motto taken from Horace’s Ars Poetica, stating that ‘you are doing better in spinning into acts a song of Troy than if, for the first time, you were giving the world a theme unknown and unsung’.²⁸ Many after Boyer have also followed Horace’s guidance. The threads of the story of Iphigenia have been repeatedly re-spun in new historical contexts. According to Greek mythology, the story goes that Iphigenia and her mother, Clytemnestra, are called to Aulis in Boeotia, on the pretext that her father, Agamemnon, plans to marry her to Achilles before the Greeks set off to fight in Troy. The military fleet’s departure has been delayed by a curious absence of winds at sea. Initially unbeknownst to his family, Agamemnon has discovered that Artemis/Diana has stilled the winds in revenge for an offence. The only way to appease the goddess is to sacrifice his daughter. In Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, the heroine accepts her fate and goes to her death, though an apparently post-Euripidean section recounts that she was replaced by a deer at the last moment. The beginning of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, written before the other play, reveals that Artemis/Diana saved Iphigenia at the last moment but sent her into exile in Tauris. In both versions the character is displaced by war and is forced to endure personal sacrifices.

Iphigenia in Aulis has recently been adapted and interpreted in order to explore the experience of refugees. An ongoing project based at the University of Iowa, Iphigenia Point Blank, identifies Iphigenia as the first refugee in Western drama and uses the character to explore human migration across time in an immersive theatre experience.²⁹ In 2018 the director Tonino de Bernardi produced a film montage where passages of the play were performed and intercut with images of migrants at sea.³⁰ While Boyer does not so overtly connect his translation of Racine’s version of the Iphigenia story to the experience of Huguenot refugees, there are instances in the paratext and translation choices which emphasize the transitional position and dual status of migrants.

Boyer’s translation of Racine’s Iphigénie was first published in 1700. The paratext included a list of ‘persons represented’ alongside the actors who performed the roles, and a dedication to an unidentified female figure addressed by the pseudonym ‘Diana’. Boyer writes ‘as ancient Poets tells us, the Greek Iphigenia owning its Preservation to Diana in Aulis, I hope the Person who is willing to borrow the Name of that Goddess, will likewise receive the English Iphigenia under her Patronage’ (sig. A2^v). In the following preface Boyer extends the network of reception by ostensibly referring to the play but also alluding to his own status as Huguenot migrant:

Tho’ the First Run of the Play was but short, yet I must own my self oblig’d to the Civility of the English Nation; for on this Occasion, as on many others, I found that the Imputation of being inhospitable to Strangers which Horace charges on the Britons, reaches no higher than the Mob. (sig. [A3]^r)

This opening of the preface draws on the idea of hospitality, a common theme for describing the reception of a theatrical piece at the time.³¹ Boyer doesn’t discount the potential for inhospitality amongst the ‘mob’, a term which matches Defoe’s ironic label for the whole English nation (‘that ill-born mob’³²). Boyer betrays some underlying anxiety about his status in his host nation.³³ To explain the certainly short-lived hospitality on stage for his translation, he goes on to refer to the competition from John Dennis’s Iphigenia in Tauris and a popular comedy, George Farquhar’s The Constant Couple, but he does not quite conclude that these were the sole circumstances for its short run.

Boyer’s ‘amphibiousness’, his ‘half-Frenchness, half-Englishness’, and status as a Huguenot migrant are presented both as a source of privilege as well as of underlying anxiety in his preface to his Racine translation. He writes:

Now when I call this Play mine, let me not be thought so arrogant as to assume the Honour of the Composition wholly to my self. The Subject of it is taken from a Greek Tragedy of Euripides: This Monsieur Racine brought upon the French Stage […] The great success of Racine’s Iphigenia, and the Encouragement I receiv’d from some Persons of a just Discernment, made me venture to make her appear upon an English Theatre […] She speaks English like a genteel well-bred Lady, and not like an affected, pedantick Would-be-Wit. But in this I must own my self oblig’d to my honour’d and ingenious Friend Mr. Cheek, to whom I owe some of my smoothest Lines. I wish he had a greater share in the whole Play, for then I am sure the Town would have lik’d it a great deal better. (sigs [A3]^r–v)

Boyer is unusual for the time in emphasizing the overall collaborative nature of the translation – pointing out that Euripides, Racine, his judicious advisors, and his friend Thomas Cheek all had a part in it. Furthermore, the preface is followed by a prologue by Cheek and an epilogue by Boyer’s fellow Huguenot refugee, Piere Antoine Motteux, who revised and completed Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais’s works. Such features demonstrate that the Anglo-French collaboration is emphasized in the paratext of Boyer’s translation. Yet his concluding remark in the preface that the play might have been better received if the native Englishman Thomas Cheek had had more influence in the production, betrays anxiety that the text’s ‘amphibiousness’ was its weakness rather than its strength.

Amphibious imagery

Racine’s works are well known for being set in places of transition. Iphigénie’s location is on the coast at the port of Aulis, as Agamemnon’s Greek fleet awaits favourable winds to sail to Troy. The anticipation and description of displacement and movement across the sea is ever-present in the play. The décorateur Michel Laurent recorded this note for productions of Racine’s tragedy: ‘Théâtre este des tentes, et dans le fonds, une mer et des vaisseaux’.³⁴ In his translation, Boyer emphasizes the coastal setting by including a scene note at the beginning of the printed play text: ‘A camp near the Sea Shore. A Fleet at a distance’ (p. 1). What is curious is that Boyer continues to accentuate this doubly transitional situation in the translation, even though Racine’s text itself already makes many references to ‘rivages’ (ll. 46, 208, 514, 737, 739, 1650), ‘rives’ (ll. 206, 845, 1377, 1781), and ‘bords’ (ll. 26, 104, 272, 599, 935, 1750).³⁵ The imagery of Iphigénie constantly recalls the relationship between land and water, stagnation and displacement; Jean-Paul Apostolidès offered an invented subtitle for the play, ‘la belle aux eaux dormantes’, switching the earthy ‘bois dormant’ of Perrault’s title for the sleeping beauty fairytale for a reference to the still waters off the coast of Aulis, which in their turn create a temporal stagnancy in which the emotional crises of the characters play out.³⁶

When Ulysse persuades Agamemnon not to turn back on the Troy campaign and to go ahead and sacrifice his daughter, he points out that it was Agamemnon who had called the troops to wage war on the plains of the river Xanthus in Troy: ‘N’est-ce pas vous enfin, de qui la voix pressante / Nous a tous appelés aux campagnes du Xanthe ?’ (ll. 297–98). ‘Campagnes’ evokes the planned military campaigns as well as the land on which they will take place. Boyer translates this thus: ‘Yet more, my Lord, it was your pressing Call, / Has Summon’d all the Grecians to this Shore’ (p. 7). Boyer emphasizes the immediate shore, and the stage space set in Aulis, in which they are waiting to set sail for Troy, rather than alluding to the future warfare through the metonym for Troy (the plains of the river Xanthus). Further references to the space of the shore emerge in Boyer’s translation.

Once Agamemnon has sent a false message to Clytemnestra that Achilles no longer wishes to marry Iphigenia until his return from the war, Clytemnestra encourages her daughter to leave: ‘Lui ferons-nous penser par un plus long séjour, / Que vos vœux de son cœur attendent le retour ?’ (II. 4. 647–48), which becomes ‘Let’s […] / […] fly this hated Shore; lest he should think, / We stay to court his dull Indifference’ (p. 15). In turn, Achille, who has been kept in the dark about Agamemnon’s dilemma, is shocked to see Iphigénie: ‘Vous en Aulide ? Vous ? Hé qu’y venez-vous faire ?’ (II. 6. 725). Boyer translates thus: ‘[…] But, Madam, What concern / Has brought you to this Shore […]?’ (p. 17). When Achilles learns of Agamemnon’s subterfuge and still asks to marry Iphigenia, whom he vows to defend at all costs, he declares: ‘Je voulais votre fille, et ne pars qu’à ce prix’ (IV. 6. 1400). Boyer’s Achilles cries ‘She, She’s the Prize for which I’ll quit this Shore’ (p. 36). Boyer repeatedly adds in the word ‘shore’ where the source text does not obviously prompt such a translation choice, thus repeatedly emphasizing the unsettled status of the characters by alluding to both land and water in one term.

Amphibious identity

Boyer notes Racine’s main innovation on the classical sources of the Iphigenia myth. In the preface to his translation, he writes that the French playwright made the ‘Addition of the Episode of Eriphile, Achilles’s Captive, which renders his Plot more full and compleat’ (sig. [A3]^v). Boyer is drawing on Racine’s own preface in which he explains that he came across a passage in Pausanius which claimed that Helen and Theseus had had a secret daughter, whom the poets Euphorian of Calchis and Alexander of Pleuron identified as Iphigenia. Racine expands this figure into the character of Ériphile and, inspired by a passage in Euphorian of Calchis, makes her Achilles’ captive from Lesbos, as well as Iphigénie’s rival for his love:

Je puis dire donc que j’ai été très heureux de trouver dans les Anciens cette autre Iphigénie, que j’ai pu représenter telle qu’il m’a plu, et qui tombant dans le malheur où cette Amante jalouse voulait précipiter sa Rivale, mérite en quelque façon d’être punie, sans être pourtant tout à fait indigne de compassion. (p. 698)

In Act V of Racine’s play, Ulysse recounts that Ériphile, having discovered her parents were Hélène and Thésée, and that she was first named Iphigénie, has committed suicide at the sacrificial altar. Calchas’ prophecy stated that a ‘fille du sang d’Hélène’ named Iphigénie was to be sacrificed, and this comes to pass with the unexpected twist.

The significance of duality in the play cannot be underestimated. As Georges Forestier points out, the apparent opposition between Iphigénie and Ériphile in terms of their personalities and reactions (‘la douceur face à la fureur jalouse ; une inactivité résignée face à des entreprises hostiles’) belies their many parallels in situation:

Toutes deux profondément amoureuses d’Achille, toutes deux venues en Aulide pour le retrouver, toutes deux sujettes au sentiment de « la mort acceptée », liées l’une à l’autre dans leurs déplacements […] on croit qu’Iphigénie vient retrouver Achille, alors qu’elle vient à la rencontre de son destin ; on croit qu’Ériphile vient consulter son destin, alors qu’elle vient retrouver Achille. (p. 1571)

It is significant that Forestier should focus on the parallels in their ‘déplacements’. When Iphigénie confronts Ériphile, whom she suspects has had designs on Achille, she emphasizes her displacement. She accuses Ériphile of being complicit in this, but her speech reads as though she is also indirectly upbraiding herself for allowing herself to be led into a trap:

Mais que sans m’avertir du piège qu’on me dresse

Vous me laissiez chercher jusqu’au fond de la Grèce

L’Ingrat, qui ne m’attend que pour m’abandonner,

Perfide, cet affront se peut-il pardonner ? (II. 5. 697–700)

In Boyer’s version the shore setting is once again accentuated – the ‘fond de la Grèce’ is changed to ‘this detested shore’, repeating a phrase which Boyer’s Clytemnestra had used:

But to be brought to this detested Shore,

To meet th’ungrateful Man who now forsakes me,

And grace the Triumph of a treacherous Friend,

This, this is an Abuse I cannot bear. (p. 17)

The imminence of displacement is frequently foregrounded in Boyer’s translation, but in this instance that focus removes the subtlety of Racine’s combination of the accusation directed at Ériphile and the hints of self-reproach directed at Iphigénie, since the idea of the one letting the other walk into a trap is replaced by a passive infinitive structure without an agent (‘to be brought’). Boyer instead finds other ways of accentuating the ‘jeu du dédoublement’ regarding Iphigénie and Ériphile.

Boyer is aware that he is caught between two theatrical cultures, so he aims to suit English theatre audiences while conveying the themes of Racine’s innovative treatment of the Iphigenia myth. In seeking to satisfy the English taste for theatrical variety, Boyer adds in a song written by Thomas Cheek and set to music by Daniel Purcell. It was performed by a professional singer, not an actress, but it represents the torments of Ériphile’s mind. Preceding the song is a stage direction for Ériphile and her confidante, instructing them to ‘sit on a green Bank near the Sea-Shore’, a space which reflects the threshold on which Ériphile’s thoughts linger. The last line of the song emphasizes the duality of the Ériphile/Iphigenia pairing: ‘I must my Rival or my Self destroy’ (p. 27). The line as it appears in the play text does not convey the conflation of the characters as strongly as it does when sung. The score of the song has survived, revealing that the references to ‘rival’ and ‘self’ are sung three times over with variations in ordering: ‘I must my Ri-vall or my Self, my Self or my Ri-vall, my Ri – vall or my Self de-stroy’.³⁷ The conflation and confusion of the characters at the end of the song chimes with an assertion in Jean-Marie Apostolidès’ seminal article on ‘la belle aux eaux dormantes’: ‘l’une et l’autre entonnent un lamento en parallèle et se font écho sans le savoir. De fait, elles ne forment qu’un seul être, ambivalent et monstrueux’.³⁸ The Ériphile-Iphigénie figure could also be described as ‘amphibie’.

Erec R. Koch expands on Apostolidès’ arguments to link the duality of the characters to ideas of legitimacy and illegitimacy in the state:

In Racine’s play, Agamemnon’s daughter is the insider to the Greek camp, and Ériphile the outsider; the latter is (improperly) named for the minor deity, Eris, the sower of discord that threatens the political order, and the former is submissive to the laws of state; the origins of the latter are uncertain, and the legitimacy of the former unquestioned.

The picture is more complicated at the end of the play:

What is disclosed in the proper naming of Ériphile and the revelation of her origins neither clarifies nor fixes the difference between the two women. What is revealed is not Ériphile’s difference from both the Greeks and her rival but her sameness: Ériphile’s status shifts from outsider to insider, from barbarian to Greek, from another blood to the same blood of Helen as her rival. It is as if, in learning that Agamemnon’s daughter and Ériphile are two bloods that are one, we discover that the two women are not separate agents but two parts of one character. […] Iphigenia is the name of both women as if virtue and passion, legitimacy and illegitimacy, self and other, constitute one identity.³⁹

Koch argues that the play problematizes the very idea of self and other, domestic and foreign, insider and outsider. Boyer’s translational exploration of the themes of Racine’s play resonates with the complexities of being a so-called ‘amphibious author’. His translation of Iphigénie was a negotiation with dramatic material that interrogates the terms of political and social inclusion and exclusion.

In tune with the English taste for on-stage action and spectacle, Boyer brings Ériphile’s sacrificial suicide on stage rather than retaining Ulysse’s spoken account of it at the end of Racine’s play. Furthermore, he adds another song ahead of Calchas’ shocking revelation about Iphigénie/Ériphile. ‘While a Symphony is playing an Altar is rais’d near the Sea-Shore’, before a chorus of priests (who are professional singers) perform an invocation to Diana. This includes the lines.

And to the Phrygian Coast

Convey the Grecian Host;

That with avenging Arms they may destroy,

Th’adulterous Guest, with his perfidious Troy. (p. 45)

‘Host’ here means ‘an army’ and the term ‘guest’, employed as an epithet for the Trojan prince Paris, is used in the sense of a ‘stranger’, thus problematizing the idea of hosting and guesting as well as resonating with the remarks at the beginning of Boyer’s preface (‘the Imputation of being rude and inhospitable to Strangers, which Horace charges on the Britons, reaches no higher than the Mob’, sig. [A3]^r). According to the second edition of the play-text, this part of ‘The Invocation to Diana’ was sung by Mrs Erwin, the professional singer who also sang of Ériphile’s torment, connecting the character and the theme of uncertain insider/outsider status.⁴⁰

Boyer follows the Racinian Ulysse’s account of Ériphile’s final speech in which she demands that Calchas stay away from her: ‘ne m’approche pas. / Le sang de ces Héros, dont tu me fais descendre, / Sans tes profanes mains saura bien se répandre’ (V. 6. 1772–74), but Boyer makes her more ‘digne de compassion’ at this moment by adding the lines, delivered on stage, ‘I fall a Victim to a greater Power, / Almighty Love now strikes the fatal Blow’ (p. 47), thus attributing the motivation for the suicide principally to her amorous jealousy. Boyer’s Iphigenia has the final line ‘Unhappy maid’ (p. 47) to convey the idea that ‘la seule Iphigénie / Dans ce commun bonheur pleure son Ennemie’ (V. 6. 1789–90). The importance placed on Ériphile, the character who, in the interplay with Iphigénie, complicates the idea of self/other, insider/outsider, host/guest, is indicated in an unsigned ‘advertisement’ to the second edition of Boyer’s translation (it may well have been written by Boyer in the third person):

the reasons why this Excellent Play stopt, on a sudden, in a full Career, are, in some Measure, accounted for in Mr Boyer’s Preface: To which he might have added […] that this Tragedy receiv’d no small Prejudice, from the Person that acted Eriphile, who sunk under the Weight of so great a Part.⁴¹

This is not very obliging to the Mrs Wilkins who took on the role, but it indicates that Racine’s innovation in creating the character was intended to be showcased in the translated play, perhaps because it offers a striking representation of the duality or ‘amphibiousness’ of human character and situation.⁴²

Conclusion

In Boyer’s translation, in response to the sacrificial suicide of Ériphile, the goddess Diana appears. For vraisemblance this is recounted in the French text, but Boyer goes all out and involves elaborate stage directions and effects: ‘Thunder and Lightning; The Altar is lighted; The flat scene opens, and discovers a Heaven at a distance; Diana, in a Machine, crosses the Stage’ (p. 47). Huguenot artist Louis Chéron, who had also moved to London, conjured up a stylized image of this scene, with a hint of the sea in the distance. It was commissioned for the 1723 French-language edition of Racine’s works, published in London. This edition was overseen and edited by another Huguenot migrant, Pierre Coste.⁴³ The drama of displacement is foregrounded in these Huguenot representations of the play.

Edith Hall and Fiona Mackintosh argue in their description of Boyer’s ‘Huguenot Iphigenia’ that:

Huguenots were in touch with the ideological requirements of the London stage partly because of their loyalty to the Hanoverian succession […] but the Huguenot refugees in London also had privileged access to the French language and its literature, along with contacts in France, which meant that they constituted a living bridge of a politically safe nature between the works of the French theatre and the English-speaking public.⁴⁴

Yet Boyer was not a straightforward mediator between French and English culture. The translation of Racine’s Iphigénie provided an opportunity to explore the ambiguities of the ‘amphibiousness’ of migrant status through a work which itself explores the complexities of characters displaced by state politics. Katherine Wheatley, focussing on Boyer’s lack of apparent effort to imitate Racine’s style, notes:

Boyer has Englished Racine's tragedy – and with a vengeance. […] But Boyer was a Frenchman. How can we account for his refusal to imitate the essential qualities of Racine’s style? […] Perhaps Boyer quite cynically imitated certain English procédés.⁴⁵

Boyer was not cynically adapting the play to English tastes but attempting to use translation as a means to negotiate his position as a Protestant purveyor of French literary production, while accommodating himself and elements of his French cultural background to his new nation.⁴⁶

In Boyer’s translation, the limit between land and water, one state and another, is repeatedly emphasized to draw attention to the transitional position in which migrants exist. While on the one hand Boyer emphasized and celebrated his ‘amphibious’, Anglo-Frenchness (even as a satirical work attacked him for it), a sense of the difficulties of ‘déracinement’ and the ‘inbetweenness’ of his ­status also emerges in the undercurrents of his Racinian translation.

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Suzanne Jones

Suzanne Jones is currently a Junior Research Fellow in French at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. Her research focusses on seventeenth-century French drama in early modern translation. She is the author of The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux (Legenda, 2020). She has also published various articles and book chapters (written in French and English) on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cross-Channel reception and print publication of Molière and Racine. She is now working on a project called ‘Translating Tragedy: The Politics of Early Modern Cross-Channel Drama’.

Notes

1 Anon., A Comparison Between the Two Stages (London: [s.n.], 1702), pp. 38–9.

2 I am not linking the term ‘amphibious’ with the English (and potentially derogatory) association between Frenchness and frogs. The OED records the first use of ‘frog’ to relate to French nationality in 1657 (‘Your Kitchins are well-lin’d with Beef […] while those in the Continent […] entertain flesh as at a Regalio; and we, your poor French Frogs, are fain to sing to a Salade’, Sir William D’Avenant, The First Days Entertainment at Rutland-House (London: printed by J. M. for H. Hemingman [etc.], 1657), p. 55. Examples of this usage are not frequent in the early modern period.

3 Historian Graham C. Gibbs has produced a series of biographical articles on Boyer: ‘Abel Boyer Gallo-Anglus Glossographus et Historicus 1667–1729: His Early Life 1667–1689,’ Proceedings of the Huguenot Society, 23 (1977–82), 87–98; ‘Abel Boyer Gallo-Anglus Glossographus et Historicus 1667–1729: From Tutor to Author,’ PHS, 24 (1983–88), 46–59; ‘Abel Boyer: The Making of a British Subject,’ PHS, 26 (1994–97), 14–44; ‘Abel Boyer and Jonathan Swift: A “French Dog” Bites Back,’ PHS, 27 (1998–2002), 211–31’; ‘Abel Boyer, 1710–15: A “French Dog” Seeks New Masters,’ PHS, 28 (2003–07), 388–400; ‘Abel Boyer, 1715–22: Boyer in the Dog-House Again,’ PHS, 29 (2008–12), 51–61; ‘Abel Boyer, 1715–22: A ‘French Dog’s Life and Death in Chelsea,’ PHS, 29 (2008–12), 364–84.

4 James Flagg, ‘Abel Boyer: A Huguenot Intermediary,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 242 (1986), 1–73 (p. 4). From 1702 onwards van Bulderen was one of the many publishers who repeatedly printed Boyer’s Royal Dictionary. Boyer used his network of publishing and Huguenot printing contacts to promote his work.

5 See John Gallagher, Learning Languages in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 46–9. Boyer hovered on the fringes of upper-class society. He had dedicated language texts to the Duke of Gloucester, son of Princess (later Queen) Anne in the hope of court preferment, but he remained the tutor of Allen Bathurst, son of the treasurer of the household of the princess, until the success of the Royal Dictionary granted him the financial freedom to stop teaching.

6 It was principally within the pages of this journal that he pursued a well-documented feud with Jonathan Swift. See Gibbs, ‘Abel Boyer and Jonathan Swift’.

7 Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary Abridged (London: printed for R. Clavel, etc., 1708).

8 Abel Boyer, The Royal Dictionary, in Two Parts (London: R. Clavel, etc., 1699), arts ‘amphibious’, ‘amphibie’.

9 Antoine Furetière, Dictionnaire universel, 3 vols (The Hague and Rotterdam: Arnout and Reinier Leers, 1690), i, art. ‘amphibie’.

10 Michel de Pure, La précieuse, ou, le mystère de la ruelle, ed. by Myriam Dufour-Maître (Paris: Champion, 2010), p. 134.

11 Antoine Furetière, Le Roman bourgeois (Paris: Chez Denis Thiery, 166), p. 16. For discussion of Nicomède’s amphibiousness and the hybridity of the text, see Nicholas Hammond, ‘Furetière’s Le Roman bourgeois and “La Rage de Causer”,’ Early Modern French Studies, 37.2 (2015), 126–34 (p. 127). It is possible that the character’s name recalls Nicodemites, a term used from the sixteenth century to refer to Protestants living in a Catholic country who concealed their true faith to avoid persecution, though Furetière avoids using the directly associated name, Nicodème.

12 [Antoine Furetière], Scarron’s City Romance, Made English (London: printed by T. N. for H. Herringman, 1671), p. 7. This text was wrongly attributed to Paul Scarron, possibly owing to confusion with Le Roman comique.

13 See, for example, the woodcut image of the web-footed unicorn-like ‘camphur animal amphibie’ in Ambroise Paré, Les Œuvres d’Ambroise Paré (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1585), p. viii.cix. I am grateful to Raphaële Garrod for drawing my attention to it.

14 Further senses of ‘amphibie’ were explored by eighteenth-century writers. See Elsa Jaubert, ‘Voltaire dramaturge comique: un “auteur amphibie”?’ Revue Voltaire, 6 (2006), 155–68; Sarah Banharrech, ‘L’ambivalence de l’amphibie,’ Diderot Studies, 32 (2012), 345–67; Patrick Coleman, ‘Character in the Encyclopédie,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 13.1 (1979), 21–47 (p. 37).

15 Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec Les Caractères ou les Mœurs de ce siècle (Lyon: Thomas Amaulry, 1688), p. 209. In modern editions this section is labelled De la cour, 46 (IV). The idea of ‘amphibie’ relating to duplicitousness or ambition at court reappeared in François Couperin’s 1730 harpsichord piece titled L’Amphibie. The piece begins ‘noblement’, but creeping bowing and scraping are later reflected in the music.

16 The Characters, or the Manners of the Age by Monsieur de la Bruyère, of the French Academy. Made English by several hands (London: printed for John Bullord, 1699). Abel Boyer himself wrote an imitation of Caractères, titled Characters of the Virtues and Vices of the Age; […] Translated from the most refined French wits […] and extracted from the most celebrated English writers (London: printed for Abel Roper, E. Wilkinson, and Roger Clavell, 1695). An expanded edition called The English Theophrastus was published in 1702 and is attributed to Boyer.

17 A parallel with the Huguenot ‘amphibie’ is the politique. During the French Wars of Religion (1562–98), the politiques, those who were willing to compromise on national religious uniformity for the sake of peace, were often described in terms of their uncertain position and perceived hybridity with animals, especially fish. See Emma Claussen, Politics and ‘Politiques’ in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), p. 200.

18 François Garasse, Les Recherches des Recherches (Paris: Sébastien Chappelet, 1622), pp. 700–01.

19 Nicolas Pasquier, ‘Responce au libelle diffamatoire intitulé les recherches des recherches,’ in Les Lettres de Nicolas Pasquier (Paris, 1623), pp. 866–948 (pp. 920–21).

20 Letter from Samuel Poulion to Daniel Finch, 2nd Earl of Nottingham, ‘Nouvelles de Paris, tant de la cour que de la ville,’ 27 March/6 April 1693, in Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Allan George Finch: Volume 5, ed. by Sonia P. Anderson (London: HMSO), p. 532.

21 Ibid.

22 Abel Boyer’s cousin, Guillaume Boyer, with whom he moved to the Netherlands, migrated to Maryland in 1688.

23 Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr (London, 1701), p. 4.

24 William Pittis, The True-Born Englishman: A Satyr, Answered Paragraph by Paragraph (London, 1701).

25 A Comparison Between the Two Stages has sometimes been attributed to the hack writer Charles Gildon. Boyer, not one to mince his words, wrote a tepid obituary of Gildon, describing him as a ‘person of great literature, but of mean genius’ (Abel Boyer, The Political State of Great Britain, 60 vols (London: 1711–40), p. xxvii, p. 102). Gildon was born into a Catholic royalist family and was educated at the Jesuit College at Douai, northern France. He returned to England in the 1680s and apparently shook off these early associations, but perhaps he drew on this background in the characterization of Critick in A Comparison. Staring B. Wells, however, argues against the attribution to Gildon in ‘An Eighteenth-Century Attribution,’ The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 38.2 (1939), 233–46.

26 Jean-Armand Dubordieu, An Appeal to the English Nation (London: printed for J. Roberts, 1718), p. 73. Paraphrase of remarks in Michel Malard, The Case and the Humble Petition of Michael Malard (London: printed by William Heathcote, 1717), p. 20.

27 Abel Boyer, Achilles: or, Iphigenia in Aulis (London: printed for Thomas Bennett, 1700). Further references are given after quotations in the text.

28 Horace, Satires. Epistles. The Art of Poetry, trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library 94 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), p. 461. Rectius Iliacum Carmen deducis in Actus, / Quam si proferres ignota indictaque primus.

29 <https://www.iphigeniapointblank.com/> [accessed 12 November 2023].

30 Ifigenia in Aulide, dir. by Tonino de Bernardi (Lontane Province Film, 2018).

31 Katherine Ibbett has looked at the hospitality metaphor in John Crowne’s 1675 translation of Racine’s Andromaque and read the text against the pamphlet literature which described the plight of the Huguenots. See Katherine Ibbett, ‘Andromaque Translated: John Crowne’s Racine and the Refugee,’ in Racine’s Andromaque: Absences and Displacements, ed. by Nicholas Hammond and Joseph Harris (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 133–46.

32 It is worth noting, though, that Abel Boyer became a frequent critic of Defoe. Amongst other grievances, he objected to Defoe’s lack of support for George I’s ennoblement of foreigners, which seemed to contradict the tenor of The True-Born Englishman. See Maximilian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions (Oxford: OUP, 2001), p. 513.

33 Pierre Coste, a fellow Huguenot migrant in London, was to write with less reservation in the preface to a London-produced French-language Œuvres de Jean Racine that ‘cette impression de tous ses Ouvrages marque l’estime générale où ils sont chez une Nation éclairée et judicieuse, qu’on n’a jamais soupçonné de trop de prévention pour ce qui lui vient d’au-delà des Mers’. Œuvres de Jean Racine, 2 vols (London: printed for Jacob Tonson and John Watts, 1723), i, sig. a^r.

34 Pierre Pasquier, ed., Le Mémoire de Mahelot (Paris: Champion, 2005), p. 328.

35 Jean Racine, Théâtre-Poésie, ed. by Georges Forestier (Paris: Gallimard, 1999). Further references to the play text and Forestier's scholarly analysis are given after quotations.

36 Jean-Marie Apostolidès, ‘La belle aux eaux dormantes,’ Poétique, 58 (1984), 139–53, p. 145.

37 The score of Morpheus thou gentle God of soft Repose has survived, and the piece has been performed and recorded: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r15pgSFrzv4> [accessed 12 November 2023].

38 Apostolidès, p. 148.

39 My thanks to Erec Koch for drawing my attention to his and Apostolidès’ work on the Iphigénie-Ériphile figure and its relevance to my theme. Erec R. Koch, ‘Tragic Disclosures of Racine’s Iphigénie,’ Romanic Review, 81.2 (1990), 161–72 (pp. 169–70).

40 Abel Boyer, The Victim, or, Achilles and Iphigenia in Aulis (London: printed for James Knapton, 1714), p. 52. The reason for the title change and printing of the second edition is that Boyer claimed Charles Johnson had plagiarized his translation in The Victim. In fact the texts are different, but Boyer was outraged and capitalized on the appearance of Johnson’s version to republish his text with additional notes and justifications.

41 Ibid., sig. A2^r–v.

42 Though Boyer’s translation had a short run in his lifetime, it was revived at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden for an actress’s benefit performance in 1778, and was advertised widely in newspapers as having been translated from Racine by Boyer. According to the General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer, it was ‘received with universal approbation by a numerous and brilliant audience. The sacrifice, the composition of the music, and the catastrophe of the piece, seemed to have a very striking and satisfactory effect’, ‘The Theatre Covent Garden’, issue 434, 24 March 1778, p. 4.

43 See n. 32.

44 Edith Hall and Fiona Mackintosh, Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre, 1660–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 35, emphasis in original.

45 Katherine E. Wheatley, Racine and English Classicism (New York: University of Texas Press, 1956), p. 91.

46 Edith Hall suggests that Boyer’s endeavour was challenged by the absence of certain resonances between the content of Iphigénie and cultural aspects of the Catholic nation in which it was first produced: ‘The marriageable maiden’s graceful obedience to her father, the wielding of his absolute patriarchal authority, the motif of human sacrifice – all these were more than congenial to the Christian, indeed dominantly Catholic, culture […] of pre-revolutionary Europe; it is revealing to note how starkly the popularity of the story in Catholic Italy and France contrasts with the absence of revivals or new dramatic versions to emerge from Whiggish, Anglican, anti-Catholic mainland Britain, at least after the French Huguenot exile Abel Boyer’s Achilles (1699)’. Edith Hall, ‘Iphigenia and her Mother at Aulis,’ in Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today, ed. by Stephen Wilmer and John Dillon (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 1–41 (pp. 4–5). My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for pointing out that Boyer’s exploration of the play as a Huguenot migrant prompts further reflection on the relationship between the source text and the Catholic national context in which it was produced.