The American Reception of Tourneur's Volpone in the 1940s

The fact that the source text is an early seventeenth-century English comedy, transposed into the film medium by a twentieth-century French screenwriter and film director, and shown in a subtitled version all over the United States during the late 1940s, speaks of the key role played by adaptations as a means of ensuring the afterlife of classical texts. Well aware that texts are heavily dependent on their contexts of production and reception, I have paid special attention to the circumstances that surrounded the production and reception of Ben Jonson's initial hypotext in 1606. For the same reason, I have looked into the different contexts that may have affected the play's successive hypertextual transformations over a period of three hundred and fifty years. In order to offer an informed assessment of Tourneur's film version, I have identified the most outstanding features of its previous hypotexts, especially Stefan Zweig's 1926 German stage adaptation of the play and Jules Romains' 1928 French adaptation of Zweig's version. Taking into account that Romains was also the screenwriter of Tourneur's film version of the play, special attention has been paid to the specificities of the film medium in terms of length, plot and character portrayal to account for the differences between both adaptations. [...] as Tourneur's French film was shown with English subtitles in the United States, the most relevant changes it underwent before its American release have been pointed out. The research I have undertaken shows that the timing was perfect for the adaptation to succeed, as the commercial situation had directly affected the degree of tolerance on the part of censors, which, in turn, had increased the demand for complex and demanding quality products on the part of audiences.