Dr Suzanne Jones

Research interests: 

Seventeenth-century French drama, translation studies, early modern cross-Channel migration and multilingualism, print culture and intermedial translation, French-language texts and performances in early modern Europe.

Recent research projects: 

Suzanne’s first book, The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux, 1663–1732, explores the ways in which the first translators of the French playwright engaged with the dramatic impact and satirical drive of the source texts and challenges the idea that the plays were straightforwardly plagiarized. It assesses how translated terms relating to the key social themes of cuckoldry, zealotry, medicine and bourgeoisie were chosen to resonate within the new semantic fields in English, a target language which was coming into renewed close contact with French.

Suzanne has shared her research on Molière’s comedies through radio (BBC Radio 3, Free Thinking, 2022), interview and in conversation and consultation with directors of theatre companies.

She is now working on a project called ‘Translating Tragedy: The Politics of Early Modern Cross-Channel Drama’. This research examines the ways in which tragedies by writers such as Corneille and Racine traversed not only geographical, but also generic and social, boundaries. She is interested in how French tragedy crossed borders through a range of intermediaries including Huguenot exiles, editors, actors and actresses, prologue- and epilogue-writers, and female translators, all of whom saw the source tragedies as flexible texts which could be shaped by political interests, not merely as a fixed corpus of French national theatre.

Published works: 

Books:

• The First English Translations of Molière: Drama in Flux 1663–1732 (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020)

Articles and Book Chapters:

• ‘«Finissons tout cela, Monsieur, c’en est assez » : Des fins et des interventions dans les Tartuffe de Molière et de Matthew Medbourne’, in Le théâtre classique français en Europe : transferts, traductions, adaptations (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), ed. by Tristan Alonge, Christian Belin, Luc Borot et Florence March (Paris: Éditions Hermann) [forthcoming 2025]
• ‘Diana in the Shadows?: Racine’s Iphigénie and Phèdre in Early Modern Interpretations’, in Racine’s ‘Iphigénie’ and ‘Phèdre’, ed. by Joseph Harris, Nicholas Hammond, Paul Hammond (Leiden: Brill, 2025) [forthcoming]
• ‘Amphibious Author: Abel Boyer, Iphigénie, and Huguenot Migration’, Early Modern French Studies (2024). Open access: https://doi.org/10.1080/20563035.2024.2302973
• ‘If Neither Faith nor Tears nor Means Can Move’: Translating Emotion from Racine's Bérénice (1670) to Otway's Titus and Berenice (1676)’, in Racine’s Roman Tragedies, ed. by Nicholas Hammond and Paul Hammond (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 329–47.
• ‘Early Modern English Translations of Molière’, in Molière in Context, ed. by Jan Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 265–72.
• ‘Premières « impressions » : publier Molière dans l’Angleterre du premier XVIIIe siècle’, Littératures classiques, 106 (2021), 19–30
• ‘Printing Stage: Relationships between performance, print and translation in early English editions of Molière’, Early Modern French Studies 40.2 (2018), 146-65

Edited scholarly texts:

• Poisson, Raymond, Théâtre complet, ed. by Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Suzanne Jones, and Naomi Matsumoto (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022)