“Everyone Breeds in His Own Image”: Staging the Aethiopica across the Channel

Abstract

for a long time, the third-century romance Aethiopica by Heliodorus of Emesa fell exclusively within the critical purview of novel specialists. Over the last fifteen year, a rich body of scholarship has emerged and shifted attention from the important formal innovations that the discovery of Heliodorus’s romance facilitated to the significance of the Aethiopica’s racial themes for the early modern cultural moment. This recent scholarship has focused, on one hand, on the reception of the Aethiopica in early modern English literature and theater and, on the other hand, on the reception of Heliodoric materials in continental visual culture starting in 1610. The present article means to connect those two discrete lines of critical inquiry by foregrounding a topic that has, to this day, received virtually no attention: stage adaptations of the Aethiopica in early modern France and their transnational influence on English seventeenthcentury theater.