Adaptation Before Cinema Literary and Visual Convergence From Antiquity Through The Nineteenth Century Lissette Lopez Szwydky Full Chapter

Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and
Visual Convergence from Antiquity

through the Nineteenth Century
Lissette Lopez Szwydky
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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
ADAPTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE
Adaptation
Before Cinema
Literary and Visual
Convergence from
Antiquity through the
Nineteenth Century
Edited by
Glenn Jellenik
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
Series Editors
Julie Grossman
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY, USA
R. Barton Palmer
Atlanta, GA, USA
This series addresses how adaptation functions as a principal mode of text
production in visual culture. What makes the series distinctive is its focus
on visual culture as both targets and sources for adaptations, and a vision
to include media forms beyond film and television such as videogames,
mobile applications, interactive fiction and film, print and nonprint media,
and the avant-garde. As such, the series will contribute to an expansive
understanding of adaptation as a central, but only one, form of a larger
phenomenon within visual culture. Adaptations are texts that are not sin-
gular but complexly multiple, connecting them to other pervasive plural
forms: sequels, series, genres, trilogies, authorial oeuvres, appropriations,
remakes, reboots, cycles and franchises. This series especially welcomes
studies that, in some form, treat the connection between adaptation and
these other forms of multiplicity. We also welcome proposals that focus on
aspects of theory that are relevant to the importance of adaptation as con-
nected to various forms of visual culture.
Lissette Lopez Szwydky • Glenn Jellenik
Editors
Adaptation Before
Cinema
Literary and Visual Convergence from Antiquity
through the Nineteenth Century
Editors
Lissette Lopez Szwydky Glenn Jellenik
Department of English Department of English
University of Arkansas University of Central Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR, USA Conway, AR, USA
ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture
ISBN 978-3-031-09595-5 ISBN 978-3-031-09596-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2023
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Cover illustration: Image courtesy of the National Library of France. Scene from Le Monstre
et le Magician (1826), a play based on Frankenstein.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
1 Introduction:
Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s Future 1
Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Part I Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically 19
2 A
Classical Drama of Human Bondage: Recurrent
Replications of Supplication, Appeals, and Social Justice
Activism from Antiquity Through the Present 21
Mary-Antoinette Smith
3 Adaptation
as the Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism
and the Rise of Novelization 49
Glenn Jellenik
4 Poetry
After Descartes: Henry More’s Adaptive Poetics 69
Melissa Caldwell
5 History
and/as Adaptation: MacBeth and the Rhizomatic
Adaptation of History 91
Anja Hartl
6 Shakespeare,
Fakespeare: Authorship by Any Other Name113
Jim Casey
v
vi CONTENTS
Part II Transmedia Culture-Texts 135
7 Shakespeare’s
Adaptations of the Fae and a “Shrewd and
Knavish Sprite” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream137
Valerie Guyant
8 The
Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-
Century Theatre and Visual Culture155
Katie Noble
9 The
Making of Monsters: Thomas Potter Cooke and the
Theatrical Debuts of Frankenstein and The Vampyre183
Eleanor Bryan
10 Dante
Gabriel Rossetti at the Intersection of Painting
and Poetry213
Dominique Gracia
11 Markers
of Class: The Antebellum Children’s Book
Adaptations of The Lamplighter and Uncle Tom’s Cabin235
Maggie E. Morris Davis
12 Alice,
Animals, and Adaptation: John Tenniel’s Influence
on Wonderland and Its Early Adaptation History261
Kristen Layne Figgins
13 CODA:
Transmedia Cultural History, Convergence
Culture, and the Future of Adaptation Studies283
Index305
Notes on Contributors
Eleanor Bryan is an associate lecturer at the University of Lincoln,

UK. She holds a PhD (2022), and her research primarily concerns dra-
matic adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula. Wider research interests
include Romanticism, fin-de-siècle literature, representations of monstros-
ity, and cinematic and theatrical adaptation.
Melissa Caldwell is Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University.
Her research interests include textual adaptations across different time
periods and cultures, seventeenth-century intellectual history, and war lit-
erature. Her recent work has focused on contemporary adaptations of pre-
modern texts, early modern skepticism, trauma and literature, and
Shakespeare and twenty-first-century politics.
Jim Casey is a Fulbright Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities
Grant recipient, editor of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen,
and co-editor of Shakespeare/Not Shakespeare. He has over thirty peer-
reviewed publications, including essays on fantasy, monstrosity, pedagogy,
theory, old age, comics, masculinity, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Ovid, Firefly,
and Battlestar Galactica.
Kristen Layne Figgins holds a PhD in English from the University of
Arkansas. Their specialization is nineteenth-century British literature, crit-
ical animal studies, and adaptation. Their research involves tracing how
developments in natural science and animal rights philosophy are adapted
in transhistorical literature. They are the co-editor of Boom or Bust:
Narrative, Life, and Culture from the West Texas Oil Patch (2021).
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
Dominique Gracia is a Victorianist and writer specializing in the things

that repeat, from popular-fiction tropes to myths and legends. Her recent
publications examine Sherlock Holmes’ influence on twenty-first-century
TV and Victorian women’s ekphrastic writing. She is at University College
London’s Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose.
Valerie Guyant is an associate professor at Montana State University–
Northern in Havre, Montana, where she teaches writing, literary theory,
world literatures, and popular genre courses. She holds a PhD in Literature
from Northern Illinois University (2011). Her primary areas of research
are folklore, popular culture, and speculative fiction.
Anja Hartl is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Konstanz,
Germany, where she is working on a postdoctoral project on shame in the
Victorian novel. Her research interests include contemporary British the-
ater, Victorian fiction, affect theory, William Shakespeare, and adaptation
studies. She is the author of Brecht and Post-1990s British Drama:
Dialectical Theatre Today (2021).
Glenn Jellenik is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Central Arkansas. His research focuses on long-eighteenth-century adap-
tation. His essay, “The Origins of Adaptation, as Such: the Birth of a
Simple Abstraction” (Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017)),
traces the rise of contemporary notions of adaptation to the
Romantic period.
Maggie E. Morris Davis researches representations of children in pov-
erty in American literature and culture and children’s literature. Her work
has been published in Canadian Review of American Studies, Middle West
Review, and Stephen Crane Studies. She works in the Department of
English at Illinois State University.
Katie Noble is a DPhil student in English at Christ Church, University
of Oxford. Their research broadly considers the F. B. Brady Collection of
theatrical ephemera and focuses on the mediation of women’s theatrical
performance in both the eighteenth century and the contemporary
archive.
Mary-Antoinette Smith is Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century British Literature at Seattle University. Her pedagogy and schol-
arship as a women and gender studies specialist promotes praxis-centered
race, class, and gender/sexuality theory, and her publications include
Notes on Contributors ix
Thomas Clarkson and Ottobah Cugoano: Essays on the Slavery and Commerce
of the Human Species (2010).
Lissette Lopez Szwydky is Associate Professor of English at the
University of Arkansas and author of Transmedia Adaptation in the
Nineteenth Century (2020). She specializes in nineteenth-century litera-
ture and culture, adaptation and transmedia storytelling, gothic monsters,
and gender studies.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Lyon, Danny (1963). Student Nonviolent Coordinating

Committee (SNCC) poster with John Lewis (left) et al.
kneeling during protest in Cairo, Illinois 22
Fig. 2.2 Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy (center, back)
kneeling with a group before the March to Selma, Alabama
(1963), and Mark Ulriksen (2018). “In Creative Battle”
depicting football players Colin Kaepernick and Michael
Bennett “taking a knee” with Martin Luther King Jr. in The
New Yorker Magazine, St. Paul, Minnesota; TNS/
ABACAPRESS.com (2016) 25
Fig. 2.3 Classical five-act plot diagram in the Aristotelian tradition.
Diagram by Mary-Antoinette Smith 28
Fig. 2.4 Nicolai Abildgaard (circa 1796). King Priam Pleading with
Achilles for the Corpse of Hector. Oil on Canvas. Image @
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen 30
Fig. 2.5 Thomas Bewick and Thomas Hugo (1784). Slave in Shackles.
Image in Bewick’s Woodcuts: Impressions of Two Thousand
Woodcuts. London, 1870; and William Hackwood and Josiah
Wedgwood (1784). Emblem for Official Medallion of the
British Anti-Slavery Society (1795) 32
Fig. 2.6 George Cruikshank and William Hone (1821). “Peterloo
Medal” sketch. Illustration in the newspaper “A slap at slop,”
27th edition @ British Museum, London 36
Fig. 2.7 Robert Cruikshank (1826). “John Bull Taking a Clear View of
the Negro Slavery Question.” Illustration @ Pictorial Press, Ltd. 38
Fig. 2.8 George Cruikshank and Charles Dickens (1894). “Oliver
escapes being bound to a Sweep.” Engraving in The Writings
xi
xii List of Figures
of Charles Dickens, V. 4, p. 20. Oliver Twist. Houghton Mifflin

and Company 40
Fig. 2.9 Thomas Halliday, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (1834)
“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister” Anti-slavery Coin. Torquay
Museum, Torquay, England 42
Fig. 2.10 Amelia Zeve (2021). Dr. Mary-Antoinette Smith and Seattle
University Sullivan Leadership Community kneel in Black
Lives Matter solidarity 44
Fig. 4.1 More’s use of astronomical “proof” in his Notes upon
Psychathanasia. Image courtesy of Olson Library, Northern
Michigan University 82
Fig. 4.2 One of many of More’s references to Copernicus and Galileo
in his Notes upon Psychathanasia. Image courtesy of Olson
Library, Northern Michigan University 84
Fig. 8.1 Thornthwaite, Mrs. Siddons as Medea in Richard Glover’s
Medea: A Tragedy. Taken from Bell’s British Theatre edition of
the playtext (1792). The 1998 Bell’s catalogue notes that
Siddons never took the role of Medea. Brady MS Kemble
Family, 84 recto. Image © Governing Body of Christ Church,
Oxford156
Fig. 8.2 George Romney, Medea (c. 1773–1775). Image © Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge 165
Fig. 8.3 George Romney, Medea (c. 1773–1775). Image © Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge 166
Fig. 8.4 Eugene Delacroix, Medea About to Kill Her Children (1838).
Image © Alamy Photo 169
Fig. 8.5 George Romney, Lady Hamilton as ‘Medea’ (c. 1786). Image
© Alamy Photo 170
Fig. 8.6 William Dickinson after Robert Edge Pine, Mrs. Yates in the
Character of Medea (1771). Image © Alamy Photo 174
Fig. 8.7 John Goldar after Daniel Dodd, Mrs. Yates in the Character of
Medea (1777). Image © Governing Body of Christ Church,
Oxford175
Fig. 9.1 Thomas Potter Cooke as The Vampyre. MS Thr 942 (76).
Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard
University193
Fig. 9.2 Thomas Potter Cooke in Presumption; or, The Fate of
Frankenstein. TCS 43 (Cooke, T.P.). Harvard Theatre
Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University 194
Fig. 9.3 T. P. Cooke on tour in Paris as Frankenstein’s Creature in Le
Monstre et le Magicien (1826) by Jean-Toussaint Merle and
Antony Béraud. © National Library of France, Paris 195
List of Figures xiii
Fig. 9.4 O. Smith as Frankenstein’s Creature (circa 1826).

17477.37.66. Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library,
Harvard University 196
Fig. 10.1 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, A Vision of Fiammetta (1878). Oil on
canvas. Image © Portland Art Museum, Portland 215
Fig. 10.2 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Day Dream (1880). Oil on
canvas. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum, London 216
Fig. 11.1 “Topsy at the Looking Glass” (Pictures and Stories 23).
Courtesy American Antiquarian Society 244
Fig. 11.2 “Topsy Bringing Flowers to Eva” (Pictures and Stories 25).
Fig. 11.3 “Uncle True giving Gerty the Kitten” (The Lamplighter
Picture Book 9). Courtesy American Antiquarian Society 253
Fig. 11.4 “The Plaster Image” (The Lamplighter Picture Book 15).
Fig. 12.1 John Tenniel’s illustration (top left, 1865) of Alice with her
flamingo is replicated in illustrations by Peter Newell (top
middle, 1901), Arthur Rackham (top right, 1907), and Nick
Willing’s Alice in Wonderland (bottom right, 1999) 262
Fig. 12.2 Though Lovell-Smith’s does not give this particular example,
we can see the similarities between Tenniel’s walrus (left) and
the illustration (right) titled “Walrus” by J.G. Wood from
Animate Creation (1885). Public Domain. Images courtesy of
Victoria and Albert Museum and the New York Public Library 270
Fig. 12.3 Rackham’s naturalistic drawing of “The Caucus Race” (right)
is largely naturalistic, even more so than Tenniel’s (left), with
the exception of the dodo’s human hand, which appears in
both. Public Domain. Images courtesy of Lewis Carroll
Resources and Ozones (high-res scans of original text
by author) 271
Fig. 12.4 Maria Kirk, “The Caucus Race” (1904) (left) and Peter
Newell, “The eldest oyster winked his eye and shook his heavy
head—” (1901) (right). “The Caucus Race” courtesy of Alamy
Stock Photo 272
Fig. 12.5 Playbill for the 1887 tour of Alice in Wonderland: A Dream
Play, as adapted by Ellen Whitehead. Images courtesy of Lewis
Carroll Resources and Wikimedia Commons 276
Fig. 12.6 Photo by Elliott and Fry, “Alice and the Dormouse” (1888).
Public Domain. Image courtesy of Lewis Carroll Resources 277
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 12.7 Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, cinematic recreation, Alice in
Wonderland (1903) (right) and Tenniel’s illustration, “The
Mad Tea Party” (1865), (left). Public Domain. Images
courtesy of Lewis Carroll Resources and the British Film
Institute Archives 280
Fig. 13.1 Transmedia cultural history visualized through Henry Jenkins’s
convergence culture, transmedia storytelling, and participatory
culture and expanded by adding pre-cinematic forms and
media as well as a historical timeline. Image by Lissette Lopez
Szwydky287
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s

Future
Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky
Adaptation Before Cinema is both a historical intervention into contem-

porary adaptation studies and an introductory primer for literary and cul-
tural historians who may not be well-versed in contemporary adaptation
studies. This collection demonstrates how much is gained by rethinking
the function of adaptation as a transhistorical, global phenomenon that
also crosses forms, media, and genres. The book is written to help scholars
of literature and culture working in historical fields that predate the twen-
tieth century identify common points of interest with adaptation studies
and its standard theoretical and critical approaches, which, to this point,
have tended to draw primarily from contemporary media studies. At the
same time, the essays in this collection demonstrate to contemporary
media theorists how much twentieth- and twenty-first-century media
forms and industry practices continue to be influenced not only by
G. Jellenik (*)
Department of English, University of Central Arkansas, Conway, AR, USA
e-mail: gjellenik@uca.edu
L. L. Szwydky (*)
Department of English, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA
e-mail: lissette@uark.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2023
L. L. Szwydky, G. Jellenik (eds.), Adaptation Before Cinema,
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2_1
2 G. JELLENIK AND L. L. SZWYDKY
historical literary sources but also by early adaptation practices that pre-
date film and other contemporary media. Beyond that, attention to those
older adaptations and adaptation practices can yield creative and produc-
tive critical approaches that can be applied across contemporary media
adaptation studies. As the essays in this collection demonstrate, adapta-
tions have always driven literature, theater, art, and popular culture.
Adaptations and other forms of extension and transmediation shaped the
construction and reception histories of specific texts while also driving the
evolution of storytelling across forms that include prose, poetry, theater,
painting, illustration, and other forms of visual culture. These connections
and broader stakes for the study of literature and culture crystallize when
we excavate and analyze forms of adaptation and transmedia that drove
storytelling before the twentieth century.
As the editors of this collection of essays, our hope is that by building
bridges between previously distinct discourses, the already-existing links
and connections between them will become more evident and productive.
As Romanticists and adaptation scholars, the transhistorical and transdisci-
plinary approach that informs our research and teaching is reflected in the
range of essays collected here that speak directly to major critical issues in
adaptation studies and comparative media studies. To that end, this collec-
tion brings together the study of literature, theater and performing arts,
film and television, and visual arts, synthesized through historically situ-
ated, theoretical approaches to adaptation and transmedia storytelling
across forms and media. This approach brings vital historical diversity to a
field that tends to be dominated by the film/novel binary, as Kamilla Elliot
has documented extensively in Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (2003)
and Theorizing Adaptation (2020). Her own training and scholarship in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, exemplified in
Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification,
1764–1835 (2012), mirrors our own areas of scholarly expertise and illus-
trates exactly how adaptation studies need a broader and longer historical
view in order to demonstrate how new media is always already shaped by
older forms and to thus map out future directions and possibilities for the
study of adaptation and transmedia storytelling practices.
Adaptation scholars regularly acknowledge that the practice of adapting
and retelling stories is roughly as old as storytelling itself. Linda Hutcheon
begins her foundational A Theory of Adaptation (2006) with a warning
against a critical over-reliance on contemporary forms and methods: “If
you think adaptation can be understood using novels and film alone,
1 INTRODUCTION: ADAPTATION’S PAST, ADAPTATION’S FUTURE 3
you’re wrong” (xiii). You would think, given the position of this assertion
(in the first sentence of Hutcheon’s Preface) and the sheer impact and
diverse scope of her study, the field would have become less film-centric.
Yet twenty-first-century adaptation studies has been driven largely by
scholars considering contemporary media forms, with many of the promi-
nent voices skewing heavily toward film (Robert Stam, James Naremore,
Linda Hutcheon, Thomas Leitch, Deborah Cartmell, Christine Geraghty,
Tim Corrigan, Bryan McFarlane, Simone Murray, Imelda Whelehan) and,
more recently, television and streaming media (Kyle Meikle, Betty
Kaklamanidou). As Peter Lev puts it, “There are hundreds of books and
thousands of articles about film adaptations of novels and plays, but only
a tiny percentage consider adaptation from a historical perspective” (“How
to Write Adaptation History,” 661). Even a good portion of the scholar-
ship that does call for a historical perspective still approaches that history
within the historical development of specific mediums, like film, or along-
side and within the rise of film as the dominant storytelling form of the
twentieth century (Raw and Tutan, Matthew Freeman, Anne-Marie
Scholz). How does decentering film and other screen-based media from
the conversation recalibrate the questions we ask as adaptation scholars?
Moreover, As Greg Semenza asks, “What would be the benefits of more
long-term histories of adaptation?” (59). Semenza argues that such a
move would lead to a much more ambitious and broad field. He observes
that the field has lacked what he calls “a more telescopic view of adapta-
tion” (64). Semenza’s essay provides this telescopic historical view through
the lens of film adaptation. However, over-reliance on film adaptation has
left the field somewhat historically myopic. Decentering film opens up
countless directions for adaptation studies past, present, and future.
Interestingly, if Hutcheon’s opening sentence asks readers to break
scholars’ overemphasis on film, her second sentence zooms right in on the
historical possibilities of exploring pre-cinematic adaptation: “The
Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything–and in just about
every possible direction” (xiii). Despite acknowledging that adaptation
has, “a history as old as narration,” Colin MacCabe claims that the advent
of cinema “produces a completely new kind of adaptation,” though he
does allow that this new cinematic adaptation “has a prehistory in the
nineteenth century theater” (5). We argue that MacCabe mistakenly
applies “completely new” to film adaptation, which—rather than invent-
ing a new form of adaptation—actually continues a rather long history of
similar adaptation strategies in forms and media that predate the invention
of film. As such he also drastically mislabels the adaptation that took place
before the advent of cinema. It is not prehistory at all—it is simply history.
Though it is not simple history, one that has yet to be fully explored and
unpacked.
Indeed, research in this history of adaptation shows that pre-cinematic
forms and practices of adaptation offer the field of adaptation studies pro-
ductive insights about the act, product, production, and reception of
adaptation as a transhistorical cultural phenomenon. Often when scholars
engage with these texts and textual practices, it is in disciplines and dis-
courses far afield of adaptation studies. The fact that those explorations
take place outside the boundaries of adaptation studies presents both an
obstacle and an opportunity. The obstacle is that the scholarly realities of
siloing means that these conversations rarely intersect in any productive
way, that these parallel discourses share ideas but not conversations. The
opportunity, obviously, is that if we can bring these discourses together,
we might see that many of us are pushing in similar directions. These con-
versations are not merely scholarly adjacent, such literary and cultural
studies commonly run parallel to the core theoretical and material con-
cerns of adaptation studies, presenting an amazing opportunity for schol-
ars in multiple areas. The challenge is to construct an intersectional
discourse that allows scholars to emerge from their discrete disciplinary
silos into a common space. In coming together, these diverse approaches
can cross-pollinate and provide avenues of exploration for multiple fields.
As both adaptation scholars and literary historians, the co-editors of
this collection maintain that adaptation-mania is nothing new. While adap-
tation scholarship such as Elliott and Hutcheon have fleshed out more
complex understandings of the relationships between film, literature, and
other art forms, the field has yet to work toward systematic accountings
and explorations of adaptation’s long history. A few exceptions to this
otherwise absent scholarship help us start to chart that history, showing us
what such explorations of historical ties between the practice of adaptation
in the nineteenth century, and the present might look like beyond the
many books published as cultural histories of individual texts or authors
without explicit engagement with contemporary theories of adaptation
and transmediation. Karen Laird’s The Art of Adapting Victorian
Literature, 1848–1920 (2015) has shown the prevalence of literary adapta-
tion in the silent film era and how those first films were almost entirely
based on popular plays of the Victorian novels staged during the nine-
teenth century, in other words, adaptations based on other adaptations.
Similarly, Lissette Lopez Szwydky’s Transmedia Adaptation in the

Nineteenth Century (2020) argues that the commercialization of literary
adaptation across forms, genres, and mediums predates the film industry
and, more importantly, provided blueprints from which adaptation drove
the developments of film, radio, and television in the twentieth century
and beyond. But the Victorians didn’t invent the habit of serially adapting;
they inherited (and adapted) it from Romantic-period adapters, who
inherited (and adapted) it from Neoclassical adapters, and so on back and
back. The more we explore the history of adaptation, the more we dis-
cover productive connections with both the past and the present. The
essays in Adaptation Before Cinema form a longer historical bridge that
spans these period-specific studies and existing discourses in adaptation
studies.
The goal of Adaptation Before Cinema is to expand that bridge and to
connect the primary scholarly audience of adaptation studies from film
and media scholars to literary scholars and cultural critics working across a
range of historical periods, genres, forms, and media—and vice versa.
Collectively, the essays in Adaptation Before Cinema construct critical
links between literary and cultural history and contemporary media and
culture studies by foregrounding diverse practices of adaptation and pro-
viding a platform for innovative critical approaches to aspects of adapta-
tion, appropriation, or transmedia storytelling that were popular from the
middle ages through the invention of cinema in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. In keeping with current trends in adaptation studies that seek to
move beyond the traditional 1:1 source/adaptation format, the essays in
this collection foreground thematic trends, commercial practices, theo-
retical models, political and industrial contexts, and comparative
approaches. The essays highlight a range of pre-cinematic media forms,
including various theatrical genres, novelization, painting, illustration, and
other forms of literary production and visual culture, all of which continue
to influence art, culture, and media today. They also address major theo-
retical questions that drive the study of adaptation while resisting the urge
to situate those questions within any single specific form, medium, text, or
person. Thus, Adaptation Before Cinema underscores the creative diver-
sity of cultural adaptation practiced before cinema came to dominate the
critical conversation. At the same time, it illustrates how these many forms
of adaptation not only informed the cinematic adaptation industry of the
twentieth century but also continue to inform adaptation practices in the
twenty-first-century transmedia landscape, where all of these artistic forms
continue to proliferate, thrive, and evolve through artistic, commercial,

and cultural practices of adaptation and remixing.
Notably, all of the forms and media covered in this collection—perfor-
mance, print, art, and illustration—are all forms of adaptation, extension,
and transmediation that continue to flourish today. Film is an add-on to
these forms, not the center, and certainly is not a replacement specifically
as we are currently witnessing its decentering by popular, critical, and
scholarly interest in serialized television and streaming media. All of these
screen-based forms function alongside other forms and media, including
those that predate the invention of screen-based mediums and their
respective artistic forms of storytelling. Collectively, the essays in this col-
lection demonstrate that one of the most enabling and dynamic futures for
the field is through the past. In fact, the study of adaptation and visual
culture today is incomplete without a stronger understanding of the con-
vergence of literary and visual culture throughout history. By developing
and engaging with an ongoing history of adaptation, appropriation, and
transmedia storytelling, new connections emerge, and new avenues of
inquiry open.
The essays are written by scholars with expertise in historical literary
and cultural scholarship from various historical subfields, using the dis-
courses developed in contemporary adaptation studies to shed new light
on their respective historical fields, authors, and art forms. The essays are
organized into two sections to highlight the ideological stakes that histori-
cal approaches to adaptation and transmedia storytelling help us excavate
and explore. Although they don’t follow a strict chronology, the ordering
of the essays in this collection reflects chronological developments in the
history of adaptation while focusing on the different practices, forms, and
media that comprise diverse and representative acts of adaptation before
the invention of cinema. Further, the collection represents various critical
approaches to recontextualizing adaptation from a historical perspective
while remaining grounded in contemporary adaptation studies discourse
and theory.
Overview of Chapters
The five essays in Part I “Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically”
illustrate the ideological functions and political possibilities of adaptation
and storytelling. The essays cover a wide range of big picture questions for
adaptation scholars that illustrate how adaptations can either enhance or
even drive political change from including emancipatory movements to

the democratization of literature, art, and culture.
In Chap. 2, “A Classical Drama of Human Bondage: Recurrent
Replications of Supplication, Appeals, and Social Justice Activism from
Antiquity Through the Present,” Mary-Antoinette Smith illustrates how
today’s practices of kneeling in support of racial social justice draw on a
long history of identical supplicatory poses in visual culture. Discussed
through the work of adaptation theorists Kamilla Elliott (2003), Linda
Hutcheon (2006), and Kate Newell (2017), Smith traces a history of
social justice images that—through various forms of repetition, adapta-
tion, and remediation—created a global iconography present from antiq-
uity to our present historical moment. In their transhistorical journey,
Smith shows how kneeling images support several social justice causes
including the abolition of slavery, empathy for the working classes, wom-
en’s appeals against oppression, and systemic racism. For example, adapt-
ing classical tableaus of supplication features in sculpture, coins, and bas
reliefs, Josiah Wedgwood created his influential pleading slave medallion
(“Am I not a man and a brother?”) for the Society for the Abolition of the
Slave Trade in 1787. Appearing on varied artifacts such as cameos, print
matter, fabrics, paintings, and more, this “appealing” image was appropri-
ated and adapted widely to visualize stories of African enslavement (male
and female), child labor exploitation, and patriarchal oppression. Drawing
from a wide range of examples many selected from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, images discussed in the chapter include the follow-
ing: George Cruikshank’s illustration of Oliver Twist’s kneeling supplica-
tory appeals not to be sold as a chimney sweep, George Bourne’s adaptation
of Wedgwood’s male slave transformed into a woman asking “Am I not a
woman and sister?,” Nathaniel Orr’s illustrations for Solomon Northup’s
Twelve Years a Slave, and Cruikshank’s visuals for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Following Newell’s work on adaptation and visual
culture, this chapter traces a genealogy and legacy of visual storytelling
through supplicatory image adaptations across time and affirms their
important socio-historic role in provoking public sentiment and inspiring
social justice advocacy on behalf of victims of human bondage and sys-
temic oppression from antiquity through the nineteenth century (and
beyond), which continue to the visual culture and iconography of social
justice and civil rights movements in the present.
Adaptation’s potential to influence political and social movements
through print-based forms is the focus of Chap. 3. In “Adaptation as the
Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism and the Rise of Novelization,”

Glenn Jellenik situates adaptation as the art form of democracy, quite liter-
ally. Drawing on Deborah Cartmell’s essay “100+ Years of Adaptations, or
Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy,” which considers adaptation’s
capacity as a popularization of ideas that can reach a larger audience,
Jellenik carries Cartmell’s claim back to the Enlightenment flowering of
modern democracy in the late eighteenth century, particularly as it was
used by Romantic-period writers interested in bringing political philoso-
phy to the masses. In the midst of the French Revolution, radical writers
such as Thomas Paine, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft argued
in favor of myriad democratic reforms including class and gender. In that
moment of exponential growth in literacy, these revolutionaries also
experimented with adaptation and its capacity to deliver democratic ideas
to reading audiences from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Godwin
and Wollstonecraft each utilized the gothic novel as a delivery system for
their philosophical ideas. Godwin adapted his political work Enquiry
Concerning Political Justice (1793) into Things as They Are; or, The
Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), and Wollstonecraft adapted The
Rights of Woman (1792) into Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). In
each case, the author novelizes a previously published philosophical tract,
attempting to leverage an enormously popular mainstream literary genre
to deliver revolutionary concepts to a vital audience that would otherwise
not receive them. These fictional works had a much wider reach than their
more academically minded originals, a phenomenon familiar today where
more people will typically watch a screen-based adaptation rather than
read the book or even a novelization of a popular film. However, with few
exceptions like Linda Hutcheon, Kate Newell, and Jan Baetens, print-to-
print-based adaptations are not well-represented in adaptation studies
generally, even though they have been a major part of the cultural land-
scape since the late eighteenth century. Jellenik locates the birth of novel-
ization within a longer tradition of adaptations that cross art forms (genres)
even as they stay within the same medium (print) and situates them within
a broader democratization of politics, philosophy, art, and popular culture.
Chapter 4 continues this focus on print-based forms and text-based
genres but traces the practice back more than 100 years before the focus
of Jellenik’s timeframe. In “Poetry After Descartes: Henry More’s
Adaptive Poetics,” Melissa Caldwell focuses on an unlikely figure in the
history of adaptation: the seventeenth-century poet and philosopher
Henry More. Caldwell reads More’s epic philosophical poem The Platonick
Song of the Soul (1642, 1647) as an adaptation of Lucretian and Spenserian

poetics in response to Descartes’s call for the certain demonstration of
metaphysical truth, arguing that the generic strangeness of More’s adap-
tive poetry is an index of cultural and intellectual rupture. As a site of
convergence between philosophy and poetry on the page, the form of the
poem reflects the much embattled nature of philosophical dualism and
metaphysical discourse during the 1640s. Through the use of paratextual
apparatus, More validates a poetics of metaphysical representation against
the Cartesian call for demonstration, by radically adapting and transform-
ing the metaphysical discourse of the poem from Neoplatonism to skepti-
cism. This essay argues that the generic hybridity that is a product of
More’s adaptive practices reveals More’s attempt to evolve and accommo-
date poetry itself to meet the new requirements of Cartesian philosophy
for certain metaphysical truth. With his use of Spenserian stanzas, glossary
of philosophical and allegorical terminology, and appendices that include
mathematical and astronomical diagrams taken directly from the texts of
Descartes and Galileo, More’s adaptive practices demonstrate and call into
question the function of poetry as a form of metaphysical discourse both
in mid-seventeenth-century England and in poetry itself as a form.
Caldwell asks us to rethink the relationship between philosophy and
poetry through the lens of adaptation, highlighting how much the page
can mediate both textual and visual forms and literary genres.
Chapter 5 broadens the scope of genre-based analysis in adaptation
studies by exploring adaptation’s role in turning historical figures into lit-
erary myths, a practice that applies to nearly any cultural legend or figure
as their stories are retold over long periods of time. Anja Hartl’s essay
“History and/as Adaptation: MacBeth and the Rhizomatic Adaptation of
History” shows how early modern historical narratives were not only
highly fictionalized but also often self-consciously ambivalent and pluralist
in outlook and can therefore be brought into fruitful dialogue with (post-)
postmodernist understandings of history as adaptation. Building on cur-
rent trends in adaptation studies that foreground the essentially adaptive
nature of history and historiography (Tutan and Raw; Leitch), Hartl’s
essay examines these productive intersections with regard to the early
modern history play and contributes to the lively discussions mostly car-
ried out in film studies by turning to the case of William Shakespeare’s
history plays as an example of “pre-cinematic” adaptation. Offering an
unconventional reading of Macbeth as a history play, this essay illustrates
the potential of adaptation as a myth-making practice. Exposing the fault
lines of history and mythology at the heart of the play, Hartl argues that
this indeterminacy makes it possible to exploit the myth of the historical
MacBeth for specific ideological purposes—both by Shakespeare himself
and by later generations. This ambivalence, which continues to provoke
new adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, reflects the myth’s ongoing
appeal for contemporary audiences in an unsettling time of shifting notions
of history, identity, and nationhood.
In Chap. 6, Jim Casey’s essay “Shakespeare, Fakespeare; or, Authorship
by Any Other Name” continues the conversation about Shakespeare’s
omnipresence in adaptation but shifts the spotlight from questions of his-
tory and myth to questions of authorship and reception through adapta-
tion. As Casey argues, the idea of “Shakespeare” is always already clearly
delineated in the public consciousness, even if this imagined Shakespeare
is disconnected from any actual reality. Perhaps the most useful recent
theory of Shakespearean adaptation is Douglas Lanier’s essay,
“Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value” (2014), which
adopts and adapts Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of the rhi-
zome—a structure with multiple, non-hierarchical nodes (like Bermuda
grass or ginger) rather than one centralized, hierarchical system of base
and branches (like a tree). In such a model, Shakespeare is simply one
more node on the rhizome, rather than being the central trunk of the lit-
erary tree. More importantly, such a paradigm liberates the scholar from
questions of textual fidelity or authenticity and instead focuses the critical
impulse on the ever-changing cultural processes that make up
“Shakespeare.” Within this critical frame, Casey’s essay explores the pro-
cess of Shakespearean adaptation in the seventeenth century, problematiz-
ing Lanier’s rhizomatic Shakespeare, however, by tracing the nearly
invisible influence of the Shakespearean hypotext on the various hyper-
texts. Ultimately, this essay demonstrates the way even the earliest adapta-
tions of the Bard are haunted by the ghosts of Shakespeares-Past. Like
Umberto Eco’s “Absolute Fake,” this Fakespeare has supplanted the
“real” Shakespeare and become more real than the actual real, and this has
arguably been the case since the early modern period. Together Chaps. 5
and 6 use Shakespeare as a springboard for rethinking the theoretical
stakes of history, fiction, authorship, and literary genealogies.
The six essays in Part II “Transmedia Culture-Texts” help us see how
centering adaptation as a primary entry point into the study of major liter-
ary works with long cultural histories provides us with a better under-
standing of how those well-known stories become iconic and canonical
through repeated adaptation and transmediation at different historical

moments. Culture-texts, as defined through Paul Davis, and later Brian
Rose, are works that exist outside of and beyond the scope of the original
works to which they refer. Davis works through this concept through the
figure of Ebenezer Scrooge and “the Carol” which he uses to describe the
culture-text based on Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), while
Rose focuses his analysis on the culture-text produced from Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Adaptation
Before Cinema works through numerous ways to see, understand, and
revisit a new series of culture-texts: fairy tales, as told by Shakespeare as
adapter; the story of Medea; the nineteenth-century theatrical roots of
Frankenstein and The Vampyre; Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s self-adaptations
and transmediations in poetry and painting; and the relationship between
print, illustration, and performance exemplified by adaptations in
nineteenth-century children’s media and culture, as exemplified by the
early illustration histories of The Lamplighter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and
Alice in Wonderland.
In Chap. 7, “Shakespeare’s Adaptations of the Fae and a ‘Shrewd and
Knavish Sprite’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Valerie Guyant analyzes
an often-overlooked aspect of Shakespeare’s own acts of adaptation—spe-
cifically the ways in which he utilized fairy stories and folk tales from
Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Britain to imbue A Midsummer Night’s
Dream with a sense of the fantastic. The chapter will illustrate how
Shakespeare adapted fae demeanor and behavior from folklore for theatri-
cal production, thus preserving fairy lore that might have otherwise been
historically lost without adaptation. Of special interest is “that shrewd and
knavish sprite/Call’d Robin Goodfellow” (2.1.33–34) or, more often,
Puck. Phouka stories are many and varied in their content but most include
a certain level of playfulness and a desire to either help or torment humans.
Early puka stories present a creature that was a shape changer, often taking
on the appearance of a horse and referred to as a pwca in Welsh mythol-
ogy, the Bucca in Cornish legends, and a pook or puki in Old Norse.
Although Robin Goodfellows, a type of Hobgoblins, may be traced to the
1530s, Hobgoblins are a part of English folklore much further back.
Shakespeare’s Puck is an amalgamation of Celtic tales of the Puca or
phouka and of Robin Goodfellow. Guyant traces the origins of the fairy
stories in the cultures and references likely available as sources to
Shakespeare and discusses the ways in which Shakespeare’s adaptation
would have been familiar enough to his audience yet also new and enticing.
In Chap. 8, “The Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-

Century Theatre and Visual Culture,” Katie Noble analyzes adaptations of
Medea in the 1700s, which have been primarily viewed within the frame-
work of fidelity and solely in relation to drama. Deemed unsuitable for
contemporary audiences, the infamous infanticidal act that largely defines
the story of Medea was changed and even removed from the eighteenth-
century stage. Noble sees this approach as counterproductive when con-
sidering not only the inherent nature of myth as untraceable to a single
source but also the concurrent visual responses that take the story beyond
the realm of neoclassical drama. Encompassing drawings, theatrical prints,
and other visual media, alongside the performances on which they are
based, Noble highlights historical and dramatic oversights by adopting an
interdisciplinary approach for the interrogation of adaptations of Medea in
eighteenth-century visual culture. In eighteenth-century theater, the pro-
scenium arch mediated the space between the actors and spectators, serv-
ing as a picture frame for theatrical action. As such, eighteenth-century
theatergoing experience explicitly drew on the connections between these
two artistic mediums. Moreover these inter-art connections between the-
atrical and visual cultures continued in drawings and paintings, including
those of famous society painter George Romney, many borrowing the
likeness of fellow adapter, the actress Emma Hamilton, who performed as
Medea on the eighteenth-century stage. Endorsing Linda Hutcheon’s
definition of adaptation as “process and product,” this chapter considers
transmediated responses to the ongoing cultural myth of Medea as various
adaptations engaged with contemporary discourses about women, mater-
nity, creativity, and power.
Chapter 9 “The Making of Monsters: Thomas Potter Cooke and the
Theatrical Debuts of Frankenstein and The Vampyre in the 1820s” shifts
the discussion from monstrous mother figures to the two most recogniz-
able cinematic monsters in modern history. In this essay, Eleanor Bryan
traces the early performance history of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
(1818), John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1897), two texts that have been repeatedly brought together in adapta-
tions since their cinematic debuts within the Universal Studios Monsters
franchises that started in the 1930s. But these monster mash-ups texts go
way back. The pairing together of Frankenstein’s monster and the figure
of the vampire is a trope that predates the emergence of cinema and traces
its roots back to early nineteenth-century theater, as both Frankenstein’s
monster and the vampire were first brought to life on-stage by the actor
Thomas Potter Cooke in the 1820s. This essay examines the implications
of Cooke’s performance of these two roles, along with the ways in which
his previous characters and his celebrity image “ghosted” his portrayals of
these two now-classic monsters and cultural icons. Through a Bakhtinian
approach, which proposes that adaptive works do not silence or correct
previous work but establish a dialogue between the original work and
antecedent adaptations, Bryan argues that this dialogue is not only textual
but also performative and that in the case of the early adaptation histories
of The Vampyre and Frankenstein it was additionally informed by a celeb-
rity actor who was famous for playing the lead monsters in these two sto-
ries in the nineteenth century, much as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff
became the iconic faces of these characters in the twentieth century.
In Chap. 10, “Dante Gabriel Rossetti at the Intersection of Painting
and Poetry,” Dominique Gracia draws on Alex Symons (2012) study of
adaptation in the cultural industries to show how adaptations allow cre-
ators to “capitalise on ‘presold’ content” and to survive in unstable and
competitive marketplaces. However, in contrast to Symons’s focus on the
contemporary entertainment industries, Gracia locates this practice in
Victorian fine arts industry. Gracia underscores the balancing act between
adaptation as a canny economic strategy and adaptation’s ability to serve
individualistic aesthetic purposes through Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s work
between the “sister arts” of painting and poetry. Rossetti is well known for
his “‘presold’ content”—his aesthetic fixations on the visual “stunner,”
the story of Dante and Beatrice, and a broader medievalism—and the
chapter works through two detailed double-work case studies from
Rossetti’s well-known works and themes: A Vision of Fiammetta and
“Fiammetta (For a Picture),” and The Day-Dream and “The Day-Dream
(For a Picture).” While Rossetti’s luscious artworks dominate his recep-
tion, and now we enjoy convenient access to Rossetti’s visual work online,
Rossetti himself wished to be thought of primarily as a poet, and the rou-
tine unavailability of his visual work in the nineteenth century created a
fertile ground for his self-adaptation between these two mediums.
Through these two double works, this chapter explores the method of
Rossetti’s self-adaptation, his (compulsive) elaboration of highly personal
themes, to produce “innovation rather than repetition without variation”
(as Elliott has discussed) by creating and working in the “gaps” between
the old meanings of tropes, themes, and images and potential new ones.
Gracia argues that these form the essential stuff of adaptation.
In Chap. 11 “Markers of Class: Antebellum Children’s Book

Adaptations of The Lamplighter and Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Maggie Morris
Davis explores the children’s book adaptations of best-selling sentimental
antebellum texts, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Lamplighter, specifically the
physical changes the bodies of poor and enslaved children undergo in the
books’ illustrations. Here marginalized bodies become smaller as the visi-
ble markers of their class position disintegrate under the loving care of a
surrogate parent. Building on the work of Kamilla Elliott (2003) and Kate
Newell (2017), the chapter examines “points of interchange between
word and image” in the illustrations and prose to examine the ways these
children’s books marked certain bodies as abhorrent and other, how illus-
trations can offer different understandings than “that offered by the
prose,” as well as the antebellum cultural iconography these illustrations
rely on to reinforce a hegemonic middle-class whiteness as the ideal stan-
dard of childhood (Elliott 16; Newell 17, 64). The antebellum period’s
changing definition of childhood was based in large part on a middle-class
desire to differentiate their children from those suffering. Within these
layered adaptation networks (the prose and illustrations of the children’s
books are both layers of adaptation of the original novels and, in the case
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, adaptations of the original illustrations, too), this
essay explores how the anxieties of the nation, especially its middle class,
can be read in the illustrated and prose spaces that marginalized children
occupy within these texts. What was expected of their bodies simultane-
ously made them an object of sympathy and removed them from the same
category within which middle-class children leisurely read of their plight.
This convergence of text, image, and reader interpretation illustrates a
pre-cinematic form of adaptation as an ideological tool in the shaping of
class relations in the nineteenth century and this practice’s continued rel-
evance in contemporary children’s literature, media, and culture.
Building on the intricate relationships between textual and visual cul-
tures in children’s media, Chap. 12 closes this collection’s culture-text
case studies with a journey through “Alice, Animals, and Adaptation: John
Tenniel’s Influence on Wonderland and Its Early Adaptation History”
while demonstrating how Alice adaptations always draw on the story’s
earliest visualizations even as the whimsical characters of Wonderland jour-
ney through increasingly diverse forms and media. Kristen Figgins docu-
ments how John Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland (1865)
have grounded the image of Wonderland in a nineteenth-century natural-
ist aesthetic. Building on Gary Bortolotti’s and Linda Hutcheon’s
evolutionary theory of adaptation, Figgins shows how each incarnation of

Alice exists in relationship to each subsequent Alice, building an evolu-
tionary palimpsest that has ensured the survival of Wonderland for nearly
two centuries among varying media ecologies. Alice’s changeable nature
has inspired many adapters to interpret her in new ways. Yet throughout
all her transformations, Alice and her world remain visually recognizable,
retaining certain paradigmatic characteristics even as she is represented in
new and exciting ways. No matter what mutations occur, she is still funda-
mentally Alice, in every media environment—print, illustration, theater,
film, comic books, and video games. Through her explorations of the
Alice culture-text, and specifically by attaching her evolutionary approach
to the presence of animals in Wonderland, Figgins illustrates how adapta-
tions do not merely resemble one another through a desire to recreate the
source text, but instead because they are all descended from one another.
John Tenniel’s 1865 illustrations remain the primary lens through which
we visualize Alice in Wonderland specifically because of Tenniel’s influence
on pre-cinematic illustrative and theatrical adaptations, which have served
as the visual blueprint for all Alices since the mid-Victorian period through
the present. By grounding her analysis in an evolutionary model for adap-
tation that is well-documented but has not been substantially developed
theoretically since Bortolotti’s and Hutcheon’s 2007 essay, Figgins uncov-
ers the greater stakes of long-term historical approaches, which help us
establish textual, visual, dramatic, and immersive genealogies and recep-
tion histories that depend on adaptation for their existence.
Finally, Lissette Lopez Szwydky’s “Transmedia Cultural History,
Convergence Culture, and the Future of Adaptation Studies” closes this
collection by proposing and visualizing a new theoretical model for long-
term adaptation histories, which she refers to as transmedia cultural his-
tory. Adapting media theorist Henry Jenkins’s conceptual frameworks for
transmedia storytelling and convergence culture, in Szwydky’s model,
transmedia cultural history incorporates practices of artistic production,
industrial convergence, and ongoing audience (and scholarly) reception.
This term explores how technology, spectacle, the proliferation and com-
mercialization of art forms, world-building, tie-ins, and merchandizing
function at different historical moments. Moreover, it provides opportuni-
ties to identify and examine how cultural production in early periods has
influenced complementary practices in later periods, including the pres-
ent. Transmedia cultural history allows us to see how writers and artists
from the Romantic and Victorian periods (as well as everyone before and
everyone after) have always already been creators and consumers of adap-
tations and serialized storytelling.
Together all of the essays provide a transhistorical view of adaptation
informed by the convergence of literature, visual culture, and performance
history revealing how much today’s massive, corporate transmedia fran-
chises are inheritances and intensifications of the past. To better under-
stand adaptation in the present and its many possible futures, we must
have a stronger and more diverse understanding of adaptation’s pre-
cinematic history.
Works Cited
Andrew, Dudley. “Adaptation,” in Concepts in Film Theory. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1984. 96–106.
Bortolotti, Gary, and Linda Hutcheon, “On the Origins of Adaptation: Rethinking
‘Success’—Biologically.” New Literary History (2007): 443–58.
Elliott, Kamilla. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford University Press, 2020.
— Portraiture and British Gothic Fiction: The Rise of Picture Identification,
1764–1835.
— Rethinking the Film/Novel Debate
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Translated by
Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1997. Originally published in French by Editions du
Seuil, 1982.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge: New York, 2006.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
New York University Press, 2006.
Laird, Karen E. The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848–1920: Jane Eyre,
David Copperfield, and The Woman in White. Ashgate, 2015.
Lanier, Douglas M. “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value.”
Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, edited by Alexa Huang and
Elizabeth Rivlin, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 21–40.
Lev, Peter, “How to Write Adaptation History,” book chapter in The Oxford
Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Leitch, Oxford University Press, 2017:
(661–678).
MacCabe, Colin, “Bazinian Adaptation: The Butcher Boy as Example,” Introduction
to True to the Spirit, Oxford University Press, 2011: (3–25).
Meikle, Kyle. Adaptations in the Franchise Era, 2001–2016. Bloomsbury, 2019.
Semenza, Gregory. “Towards a Historical Turn? Adaptation Studies and the
Challenges of History.” The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, edited by
Dennis Cutchins, Katja Krebs, and Eckart Voigts, Routledge, 2018, 58–66.
Semenza, Gregory, and Bob Hasenfratz. The History of British Literature on Film:
1895–2015. Co-authored with New York and London: Bloomsbury Press, 2015.
Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. Transmedia Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century, Ohio
State University Press, 2020.
PART I
Reframing Adaptation’s Potential,

Historically
CHAPTER 2
A Classical Drama of Human Bondage:

Recurrent Replications of Supplication,
Appeals, and Social Justice Activism from
Antiquity Through the Present
What could have been more apropos than launching this “kneeling” anal-
ysis amidst the dual pandemics of the coronavirus and the racism that
spawned the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which convergently
brought so many of us to our knees across the globe? Unlike any moment
in the history of humankind, this unprecedented phenomenon compelled
multitudes to our knees to plead, petition, and appeal in medias res [in the
middle of things] for a flattening of the curve, for rapid development of
virus vaccines, and for promoting BLM solidarity at one and the same
time. Drawing from the “profoundly remote ancient practice of supplica-
tion” (Whittingdon 115), our worldwide kneeling holds adaptational pri-
macy for both pandemics, especially for those whose lives have been
M.-A. Smith (*)

Seattle University, Seattle, WA, USA
e-mail: masmith@seattleu.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

Switzerland AG 2023
L. L. Szwydky, G. Jellenik (eds.), Adaptation Before Cinema,
Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09596-2_2
22 M.-A. SMITH
perpetually plagued by demoralizing racism, oppression, and abuse across

the ages. While rooted in antiquity, our socially conscious BLM kneeling
aligns with the legacy of civil rights activism and, as observed by lifelong
social justice warrior, John Lewis, in a contemporary Twitter tweet: “The
young people kneeling today are following a long tradition” (@repjohn-
lewis, September 25, 2017). Posted three years prior to our BLM marches,
the tweet includes the hashtags #TakeAKnee and #goodtrouble along
with a photo of Lewis and several Black youths kneeling in protest of racial
segregation in Cairo, Illinois (1963). This photograph captured by Danny
Lyon was soon adapted for use on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) poster proclaiming the beckoning credo “Come let
us build a new world together” (Fig. 2.1).
This powerful petitionary credo serves throughout this analysis as an
anachronistically adapted expression reflecting the invitational vision of
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anti-human bondage activisms while
Fig. 2.1 Lyon, Danny (1963). Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

(SNCC) poster with John Lewis (left) et al. kneeling during protest in Cairo,
Illinois
2 A CLASSICAL DRAMA OF HUMAN BONDAGE: RECURRENT REPLICATIONS… 23
adaptively defining the collaborative intentionality of our present-day

kneeling advocacies on behalf of Black Lives Matter and other intersec-
tional social justice issues.
Born of ancient supplicatory practices, kneeling postures have been
recurrently replicated across transhistorical time on a wide range of arti-
facts, including sculptures, bas reliefs, coins, medallions, tokens, wood-
cuts, etchings, abolitionist tracts, political treatises, broadsides, paintings,
satirical cartoons, book frontispieces and illustrations, monuments, and
more. While kneeling iconographies have always been recurrently repro-
duced, a significant paradigmatic shift occurred during the eighteenth
century when ancient supplication artifacts were purposefully adapted by
social justice advocates to seek the end of transatlantic slavery. Abolitionist
momentum of the era was “driven forward by massive public agitation, in
print, in crowded local meetings and through a visual and material culture
of anti-slavery; in pictures, prints, plaques, medallions and pottery”
(Walvin 109). After the visually persuasive supplicatory African slave
medallion was created by prominent pottery expert Josiah Wedgwood as
the seal for the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade
(1787), resourceful “manufacturers began to realise that there really was a
market in products that promoted social causes. It is from these begin-
nings that modern advocacy marketing might be said to have begun”
(Katz-Hyman 226). And, from the eighteenth century to the present,
[s]trategies like widespread petitioning, the distribution of leaflets, pam-

phlets, and
printed images, and the production of artifacts like [the kneeling slave]
medallion,
established the tactics for subsequent political and social pressure groups
on local,
national, and now on a global scale. The printed T-shirt, badges,
and mugs
distributed or sold today are the descendants of the Wedgwood medal-
lion. (Hawes 1)
While these recurrent replications of supplicatory iconographies can be

viewed as mere “single frozen moments for visual and spatial interpreta-
tion” (Elliott 18–19), when considered through the lens of adaptation
theory and tethered together at specific historical hinge-points, they illus-
trate a “broader genealogy and legacy” (Newell 7). When viewed chrono-
logically across transhistorical time, these inter-visual hinge-points unveil
24 M.-A. SMITH
an ever-adapting “kneeling narrative” spanning antiquity to the present.

And, as this analysis visualizes, a diverse range of adapter-activists from the
eighteenth century to the present recurrently replicated ancient supplica-
tory iconographies to resist societal wrongs and promote transformative
social change for the common good.
Although ancient supplicatory kneeling was originally enacted to plead,
petition, and appeal, the critical paradigmatic shift in what “taking the
knee” came to signify in the eighteenth century can be considered a pre-
scient Black Lives Matter movement wherein British abolitionists adapta-
tionally aligned ancient supplicatory images with the plight of African
slaves whose lives mattered. The profound persuasiveness of Wedgwood’s
socially conscious and precedent setting supplicatory antislavery medallion
(1787) was a powerful motivator for gradual legislative action wherein the
British Parliament initially passed the Slave Trade Act of 1788 (also known
as the regulatory Dolben Act) which limited the number of slaves any one
ship could transport via the triangular trade. The Slave Trade Act of 1807
which prohibited slavery across the British Empire was passed next, and
finally the Slavery Abolition Act which abolished slavery in most British
colonies across the empire was passed in 1833.
As adaptations of this influential eighteenth-century supplicatory slave
image emerged, it has subsequently been replicated at distinctive historical
hinge-points of the kneeling narrative promoting a range of social justice
issues. This includes visualizing and protesting deplorable child and adult
labor exploitation, appealing for gender equity, fighting for the enfran-
chisement of women on both sides of the Atlantic, and more through the
nineteenth century. And now, the most pronounced paradigmatic hinge-
point shift has occurred during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
with the kneeling narrative dramatizing our proactive socially conscious
adaptations of “taking the knee” postures from supplicatory to emancipa-
tory. Contemporary tableaux vivant (i.e. living pictures) from the
mid-1950s to the present demonstrate the profound adaptational power
of our non-supplicatory civil rights activism. Our exemplars of these pro-
active kneeling stances include Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others
kneeling in reverential power at the launch of the March on Selma,
Alabama (1965), and sports superstars Colin Kaepernick and Michael
Bennett, among others, “taking the knee” rather than standing in tradi-
tional salute during the National Anthem at professional football games.
Adapted from ancient supplication, these social justice-oriented kneeling
stances have powerfully promoted the dignity of Black bodies while
Fig. 2.2 Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy (center, back) kneeling
with a group before the March to Selma, Alabama (1963), and Mark Ulriksen
(2018). “In Creative Battle” depicting football players Colin Kaepernick and
Michael Bennett “taking a knee” with Martin Luther King Jr. in The New Yorker
Magazine, St. Paul, Minnesota; TNS/ABACAPRESS.com (2016)
protesting racial inequities and police brutality against African-Americans

from the civil rights era to the present (Fig. 2.2).
Our most socially conscious adaptation of civil rights-influenced
“bended knee” postures to date made its most profound contribution to
the visualized drama of human bondage in the wake of our worldwide
witnessing of the death of George Floyd (2020). Recurrent images of his
unconscionable murder cast the drama of human bondage in a vividly
disturbing contemporary context (with an ironic kneeling plot twist) as
more than nine minutes of video footage visually documented his pros-
trate pleading appeal—“I can’t breathe!”—as a homicidal law enforce-
ment officer heinously knelt on Floyd’s neck until he could breathe no
more. Evoking Aristotle’s requisite emotions of pity and fear, this malevo-
lent act of kneeling-to-kill mobilized global sensibilities, leading multi-
tudes to demonstrate benevolent acts of kneeling-to-affirm that Black
Lives Matter. The profound impact of Floyd’s death-by-kneeling launched
26 M.-A. SMITH
a moment of global catharsis which confirmed adaptation specialist Kate

Newell’s observation that “[s]ometimes a single source can inspire so
many subsequent adaptations across media that it becomes a cultural phe-
nomenon with wide-ranging impact” (2). The momentous import of this
paradoxically bittersweet image has been best commemorated by the viral
video of Floyd’s six-year-old daughter, Gianna, proclaiming with arms
outstretched in posthumous homage, “Daddy changed the world!”
(Hohman 1).
The widespread impact of our present-day proactive kneeling postures
represents the final act of what this analysis casts as a five-act drama of
human bondage inspired by ancient theatre traditions. Aligned with ele-
ments of the Aristotelian plot structure (exposition, rising action, climax,
falling action, denouement/resolution), the plot of this kneeling drama
unfolds across a narrative arc replete with appropriative adaptations and
sociopolitical plot twists rivaling oral, written, and visual works from antiq-
uity to the present. Defining drama as “an imitation of an action that is
serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude” (Butcher 23), Aristotle
insisted in Poetics (c. 335 BC) that it should arouse “pity and fear [and]
effect … the proper purgation of these emotions” (Butcher 23). The sup-
plicatory images comprising the kneeling narrative invoke feelings of pity
and fear for victims of human bondage which across time have increas-
ingly inspired a caliber of catharsis (purgation) that promotes social justice
activism. This adaptational, visual trend has richly impacted our current
critical time of global catharsis, and it is a kaírós (καιρός) time (i.e. an
opportune time) foreshadowing a promising purgation the world over
that was unforeseen at the ancient dawn of the drama of human bondage.
How we have arrived at this portentous moment becomes clearer as the
plot of the kneeling narrative unfolds from the first images depicting the
ancient tradition of Greek supplication (ικεσία). By adaptationally tether-
ing together sequential supplicatory iconographies with what Roland
Barthes and Lionel Duisit identify as narrative “hinge-type functions”
(248), this analysis demonstrates the intertextual continuity of the drama
of human bondage by plotting it as a visualized narrative from antiquity to
the present. Just as the physical action of kneeling literally enacts the repo-
sitioning of the anatomical “hinges” of the human body, recurrent replica-
tions of supplicatory iconographies demonstrate how from “medium to
medium adapters reproduce so called ‘hinge’ points and, through repeti-
tion, such points coalesce as the work” (Newell 9). Within this analysis,
the “coalesced work” is defined as the kneeling narrative whose plot is
viewable from two distinct perspectives. On the one hand, the “coalesced
work” comprises a visualized narrative that emerges from chronologically
tethered “hinge-points” of supplicatory images and artifacts across time
which form the plot of the drama of human bondage; and, on the other
hand, the “coalesced work” represents the labor-intensive activism of art-
ists invested in adapting supplicatory postures to inspire transformative
social change.
The recurrent supplicatory replications produced by proactive social
justice artists across time demonstrate that stories are “retold in different
ways in new material and cultural environments; [and] like genes, they
adapt to those new environments by virtue of mutation in their ‘offspring’
or their adaptations” (Hutcheon 32). Images of this transhistorical drama
of human bondage reveal how artists have harnessed the adaptational
power of supplicatory images in visual culture to provoke heightened
sociopolitical awareness (catharsis) from antiquity forward. As Ralph
E. Shikes observes, “certain artists have become spiritually and artistically
involved in man’s seemingly endless quest for social justice. They have
used the most effective weapon at their command—their art—to … duel
with oppressive governments, satirize corrupt or indifferent churches, …
attack exploitation, uncover the bleak existence of the poor, and in general
to make visual comment on human folly in its infinite variations”
(Introduction xxiii). This reality serves as the social justice subtext pervad-
ing the kneeling narrative while illustrating the periodic historical hinge-
points which have shifted the signification of what “taking the knee” has
represented since the eighteenth century. Thereafter, the tethered together
drama of human bondage is composed of a sequence of recurrent kneeling
iconographies adapted at distinctive historical hinge-points to abolish
transatlantic slavery, end British adult and child labor exploitation, advo-
cate for gender equity and women’s enfranchisement on both sides of the
Atlantic, promote contemporary civil rights, prove that Black Lives Matter,
and more.
The Transhistorical, Visualized Drama of Human

Bondage in Five Acts
Envisioning the narrational schemata of the visualized drama of human
bondage alongside Aristotle’s classical five-act plot structure demonstrates
its alignment with his elements of exposition, rising action, climax, falling
28 M.-A. SMITH
Fig. 2.3 Classical five-act plot diagram in the Aristotelian tradition. Diagram by
action, and denouement/resolution converging to arouse pity and fear that

results in catharsis (Fig. 2.3).
Originating with the “classical” foundations of drama, this analysis
demonstrates the varied ways ancient supplicatory practices have been
adapted over time. Although it is not intended as a comprehensive visual-
ization of the kneeling narrative, it offers a plot-driven storyline composed
of select tableaux of supplication from antiquity forward, which demon-
strates through the following five acts how kneeling iconographies have
been adapted for purposes of social justice advocacy across the ages:
Act I: Human Bondage in Antiquity

Act II: Human Bondage and Transatlantic Slavery
Act III: Human Bondage and the Laboring Poor
Act IV: Human Bondage and the Oppression of Women
Act V: Of Human Bondage No More!
Spawned from the foundations of ancient supplication, this visualized

drama launches with Human Bondage in Antiquity (Act I), the historical
period wherein supplication was known as deprecatus sum in Latin and
hiketeia in Greek. The “Greek verb hikō, from which the words for suppli-
ant (hikete ̄s), suppliant prayer (hikesia), and supplication (hiketeia) all
derive, means ‘to approach’ or ‘to come to,’ and this root captures the
dynamism and movement at the heart of the suppliant situation”
(Whittingdon 117). The stylized practice of hiketeia was an important
“ritual act [with a] place and significance in the fabric of Greek social insti-
tutions” (Gould 75). Alongside visualized supplicatory iconographies rep-
resenting piety, petition, and prayer, there are written accounts of ancient
kneeling practices demonstrating that the “social and religious institution
of ικεσία [supplication] figures prominently in the traditional, mythologi-
cal themes of Greek literature, and in the contemporary historical record”
(Gould 74).
Examples of the appearance of supplication in classical literature include
Homer’s incorporation of “some 35 occurrences of supplication in [his]
poems” (Gould 80) written between 800 and 750 BCE and two dramas
titled the same, The Suppliants (Ἱκέτιδες), authored by tragedians Aeschylus
(ca. 463 BCE) and Euripides (ca. 423 BC), respectively. The Homeric
writings are particularly useful in visualizing the plot of the kneeling nar-
rative because they offer detailed descriptions of the ritualized sequential
conventions that defined ancient supplicatory postures. These consisted of
“lowering the body and crouching (sitting or kneeling), of physical con-
tact with knees and chin, and of kissing. Of these gestures, only touching
the knee is found exclusively in the act of supplication … [but] together
they constitute the ritual act in its ‘complete’ or strongest form” (Gould
76). Homer’s written rendering of this prescriptive process in The Iliad
(850–750 BCE) wherein Priam appeals to Achilles for the release of his
son Hector’s body for burial (24.457–676) has been frequently adapted,
visually appearing as sculptures, bas reliefs, and paintings (Fig. 2.4).
Serving as the inciting forces that launched the visualized drama of
Human Bondage in Antiquity, the reciprocally enacted ritual rules of
ancient supplication represent a high-stakes transactional process “between
high and low, inside and outside, powerful and powerless” (Whittingdon
117). These stylized exchanges between possessor and possessed, master
and slave, and suppliant and supplicandus consisted of
30 M.-A. SMITH
Fig. 2.4 Nicolai Abildgaard (circa 1796). King Priam Pleading with Achilles for
the Corpse of Hector. Oil on Canvas. Image @ Statens Museum for Kunst,
Copenhagen
an approach to an individual or a place … the use of a distinctive gesture …

the request for a boon, [which] is wholly verbal … [and] the response of the
supplicandus … [who] evaluates the suppliant, decides whether to accept or
reject … and carries out the decision he has made … All the steps matter.
Without the first, the approach, the supplication cannot get underway, and
without the second, the gesture, the suppliant cannot make his purpose
known. Without the third step, the request, there is nothing to which to
respond. Without the arguments that are part of this step, there is no way
for the successful … to distinguish themselves from the unsuccessful … But
the fourth and last step matters most. (Naiden 4)
This final step played a very important role in the ancient supplicatory
process because the “gesture and the plea are designed to elicit a response.
The action of the suppliant is not unilateral but, rather, depends for its
completion on a corresponding action performed by the person to whom
it is addressed … [and it] coexists with a radical inequality between the
participants” (Whittingdon 118).
It is important to recognize, however, that while inequalities between a
supplicant and supplicandus were absolute, they should not be anachro-
nistically viewed as representing the brutalities which characterized later
adaptations of the master/slave dynamic. Those came into being during

the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, characterizing the
horrors of transatlantic slavery. While depicting the pity-fear-catharsis con-
tinuum, ancient supplicatory iconographies represent prayerful reverence,
political appeals, and pleading on behalf of slaves of the era, and the pre-
scriptive performativity of the practice presupposed the request would be
granted. Such reciprocally congenial exchanges which reflected such opti-
mism on the part of ancient supplicants underwent an irrevocable plot
shift, however, as the drama of human bondage developed within the con-
text of British slavery and abolitionism.
As previously noted, during the late eighteenth century, the first of
several paradigmatic shifts wherein classical supplicatory iconographies
were adapted for purposeful social justice advocacy occurred as the narra-
tive arc [climax] of the drama of human bondage crested during what this
analysis titles the era of Human Bondage and Transatlantic Slavery (Act
II). It soon became clear that, unlike their ancient predecessors, the abject
condition of African slaves prohibited them from direct reciprocal suppli-
catory engagement with their supplicandi (i.e. white overseers, owners,
and masters). Slaves in antiquity were not subjected to the dehumaniza-
tion characteristic of the brutal brand of human bondage endured by
abject African slaves for whom none of the ritual supplicatory conventions
were actionable. No approach was permissible, no use of a distinctive ges-
ture was allowable, no verbal request for liberty was conceivable, and no
response, much less a yay or nay, from a supplicandus was forthcoming.
Since African slaves could not plead their own plight, adapter-advocates
served as abolitionist intermediaries who replicated ancient supplicatory
artifacts to fight the cause on their behalf. Given their “[c]onviction as to
the importance and superiority of classic models was widespread”
(Hamilton 638), Neoclassical artists were frequent adapters of ancient ico-
nographies. Deliberatively designed to evoke pity and fear over the traves-
ties of transatlantic slavery, their adaptations were deliberatively designed
to provoke catharsis that would inspire transformative social change and
eradicate the trade in slaves on both sides of the Atlantic.
During the 1780s two British artists—an illustrator, Thomas Bewick,
and a pottery expert, William Hackwood (principle modeler for Josiah
Wedgwood)—produced virtually identical supplicatory images drawn
from antiquity which illustrate kneeling African male slaves (Fig. 2.5).
Although which of two juxtaposed images was produced first is not known,
independent historian Sean Creighton argues that “there may be a strong
32 M.-A. SMITH
Fig. 2.5 Thomas Bewick and Thomas Hugo (1784). Slave in Shackles. Image in
Bewick’s Woodcuts: Impressions of Two Thousand Woodcuts. London, 1870;
and William Hackwood and Josiah Wedgwood (1784). Emblem for Official
Medallion of the British Anti-Slavery Society (1795)
case for Bewick being the designer of the image for the London Society’s
seal in 1787, which was then quickly interpreted by Wedgwood’s design-
ers into the jasperware medallion in the same year” (Creighton 2014).
In The Bewick Collector (1866) catalogue, Thomas Hugo attributes the
supplicatory British West Indies plantation scene to being a “beautiful
wood engraving … of a Negro kneeling, by Thomas Bewick” (18). Close
analysis reveals that the woodcut adaptationally depicts not one, but two,
pleading slaves. The primary image centers the slave prominently in the
forefront in a singular supplicatory pose, while the secondary image is
recessed to the left within the backdrop of the scene as the slave poses in
appeal before an actively abusive white overseer/master. Referencing its
recurrent replication, an appended catalogue note by Mr. John Bell
observes that the illustrator “took a deal of pains with this cut … [which]
has since been much hacked [my emphasis], by being used for everything
which had any allusion to Negroes or the Slave Trade” (Hugo 18).
Regarding his adaptive use of “much hacked” supplicatory iconogra-
phies, Wedgwood established from the onset that his kneeling slave image
drew upon ancient models. In a letter to Dr. Erasmus Darwin, for exam-
ple, he noted his fidelity to copying “the fine antique forms, but not with
absolute servility. I have endeavoured to preserve the style & spirit or if
you please the elegant simplicity of antique forms, & in so doing to intro-
duce all the variety I was able … [This] is the true way of copying the
antique, [to] improve rather than copy” (Finer and Savage 317). Rather
than perceiving his image as a “much hacked” replication, Wedgwood
purports to have “improved” upon classical supplicatory models, but
whether he deemed these “improvements” to be aesthetic or interpretive
is unclear. Given the convergent Neoclassical and Enlightenment influ-
ences of the era, however, it is probable that Wedgwood perceived them
as reflecting Neoclassical artistic aestheticism and cultural ideals were con-
vergent with Enlightenment political and philosophical concerns regard-
ing the human condition. Whatever his motives, Wedgwood’s “improved
upon” supplicatory adaptation was done to good effect and affect in terms
of the pity-fear-catharsis continuum when the Society for Effecting the
Abolition of the Slave Trade adopted it as its seal in 1787.
In describing the genesis of this now iconic supplicatory seal, pioneer-
ing abolitionist and founding member of the Society, Thomas Clarkson,
notes in his The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the
Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808):
An African was seen … in chains, in a supplicating posture, kneeling with one

knee upon the ground, and with both his hands lifted up to heaven,
and round
the seal was observed the following motto, as if he was uttering the words
himself,—“Am I not a Man and a Brother?” The design having been
approved of, a seal was ordered to be engraved from it. I may men-
tion here
that this seal, simple as the design was, was made to contribute
largely, as will
be shown in its proper place, towards turning the attention of our coun-
trymen to
the case of the injured Africans, and of procuring a warm interest in
their favour.
(450–51)
Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic “seized on this simple but effec-
tive graphic device as a means of driving home the horrors that had to be
endured by [enslaved] Africans” (Chambers 169) while proving that “[i]n
the fight against slavery … no weapon was more potent than the idea that
all men are brothers. If we are brothers, how can we justify the ownership
of some by others? Nothing captured this idea more powerfully than th[is]
image [of] a manacled African ask[ing] the question: “Am I not a man and
a brother?” (Levy and Peart 2002).
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and their Indian allies. On the resignation of his professorship, Mr. Jackson was
succeeded by Mr. Beveridge.
261. Dr. William Shippen, the younger, who first filled the
anatomical chair in the College of Philadelphia, (afterwards, the
University of Pennsylvania,) and which he continued to occupy for
almost forty-three years with great respectability, may be justly
considered as the founder of the medical department of that
institution. The establishment of a medical school in his native city,
had long been contemplated by this distinguished lecturer, as a most
desirable object: but, in the execution of such a plan, serious
difficulties were to be encountered at the commencement. In the
language of-his anonymous eulogist,[261a] “the enterprize, arduous in
itself, was rendered abundantly more so, in consideration of its
novelty: for, as yet, the voice of a public lecturer in medicine had
never been heard in the western world. In order, therefore, to test the
practicability of the measure, and to pave the way for a more regular
and extensive establishment, he determined to embark in the
undertaking himself, by delivering, in a private capacity, a course of
lectures on anatomy and surgery: this he did in the winter of 1762-3,
being the first winter after his return from his studies and travels in
Europe.”
Dr. Shippen’s success, as a private lecturer, demonstrated the

expediency of engrafting a medical school on the College; and, in
consequence, he was unanimously elected the professor of anatomy
and surgery, on the 17th of September, 1765. This able teacher held
that chair until his death,[261b] which occurred the 11th of July, 1808,
in the seventy-fifth year of his age.
261a. Said to be Dr. Caldwell, of Philadelphia. See the Port Folio.
261b. Casper Wister, M. D. Professor of Anatomy and Surgery in the

University of Pennsylvania, was, for some years before the death of Dr. Shippen,
his adjunct professor in the same chair; to which station, this eminent teacher in
those branches of medicine was appointed by the trustees of the university, at the
request of his late colleague.
262. William Shippen, jun. M. D. just mentioned, was the professor
of anatomy; Adam Kuhn, M. D. a distinguished pupil of the
celebrated Linnæus, was professor of botany, united with the materia
medica; Benjamin Rush, M. D. a learned and able professor of the
theory and practice of physick, then held the chemical chair; and Dr.
Thomas Bond, an ingenious and eminent physician, gave clynical
lectures in the Pennsylvania Hospital. In the year 1789, the trustees
of the College of Philadelphia instituted a professorship of natural
history and botany; which was then conferred on Benjamin Smith
Barton, M. D. Dr. Kuhn had formerly delivered several courses of
lectures on botany, in the College of Philadelphia; but natural history
had never before been taught there. On the union of the College with
the University, in the year 1791, Dr. Barton’s former appointment was
confirmed by the trustees of the united institution; and in the year
1796, he was further appointed by them to the professorship of
materia medica; that chair having been then vacated by the
resignation of the late professor of that branch of medical science.
The other chairs, in the Medical Department of the University, are

filled as follows; viz. that of Anatomy, by Casper Wister, M. D.—of
the Theory and Practice of Physick, by Benjamin Rush, M. D.[262a]—
of Chemistry, by John Redman Coxe, M. D.—of Materia Medica,
Botany and Natural History, by Benjamin Smith Barton, M. D.—of
Surgery, by Philip Syng Physick, M. D. and John S. Dorsey, M. D.—
and of Midwifery, by Thomas Chalkley James, M. D.
Among these collegiate-chairs in medicine, appertaining to the

University of Pennsylvania, the only one which appears to be
deficient in a suitable appendage to its institution—and this, too,
such an appendage as may be considered almost indispensably
necessary to it—is the Professorship of Botany. To this chair, a
Botanical Garden ought to be appurtenant: and accordingly we find,
that this requisite for rendering a Botanical Professorship complete,
in most Universities, is the establishment of such a Garden, for the
use of the Teacher and his Pupils.
The importance that is attached to institutions of this kind, in
foreign seminaries of learning, will be perceived from the following
sketches of those in three of the most celebrated universities of
Europe.
The Botanical Garden (called the “Physick Garden”) of the

university of Oxford, contains five acres of ground. It is surrounded
by a noble wall, with portals in the rustic style, at proper distances.
The passage to the grand entrance is through a small court: this
principal portal is of the Doric order, ornamented with rustic work,
and adorned with a bust of Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby, the
founder; besides statues of the kings Charles I. and II.
The ground is divided into four quarters. On each side of the

entrance, is a neat and convenient green-house, stocked with a
great variety of exotics. The quarters are filled with indigenous
plants, properly classed; and without the walls is an admirable hot-
house, filled with various plants, the production of warm climates.
These fine and spacious gardens were instituted by Lord Danby,

so early as the year 1632; and this nobleman having supplied them
with the necessary plants, for the use of the students of Botany in
the university, endowed the establishment with an annual revenue,
for its support. The Gardens were afterwards much improved by Dr.
Sherrard, who assigned a fund of 3000l. sterling, for the
maintenance of a professor of Botany. Over the grand entrance into
the Gardens is this inscription: “Gloriæ Dei Optimi, maximi honori
Caroli I. Regis, in usum Academieœ et Reipublicæ, Henricus Comes
Danby, anno 1632.”
The Botanic Garden, at Cambridge, consists of nearly five acres,

well watered. The ground, with a large house for the use of the
governors and officers of the Garden, was purchased at the expense
of about 1600l. sterling, by Dr. Richard Walker.
An handsome green-house, one hundred feet in length, and

having an hot-house (or, what is called a stove,) appurtenant to it,
were erected by subscription. These are furnished with an extensive
variety of curious exotics: the plants are all arranged according to the
Linnæan system, and a catalogue of them is printed.
These Gardens are under the government of the chancellor or

vice-chancellor of the university, the heads of three of the colleges,
and the regius professor of physick; and they are superintended by a
lecturer or reader, and a curator.
There is, besides, a Professorship of Botany, in this university; as

there is also at Oxford.
The Botanical Garden belonging to the university of Edinburgh, is

about a mile from the city, It consists of a great variety of plants,
exotic and indigenous. The Professor is botanist to the king, and
receives an annual salary of 120l. sterling, for the support of the
Garden. A monument to the memory of Linnæus was erected here,
by the late Dr. Hope, who first planted the Garden and brought it to
perfection.
The Garden of Plants, at Paris, now termed the Museum of

Natural History, comprises a space of many acres. It dates its origin
as far back as the year 1640, during the reign of Louis XIII. In 1665,
it bore the name of Hortus Regius, and exhibited a catalogue of four
thousand plants. From that period, it made but slow progress, until
Louis XV. placed it under the direction of the Count de Buffon, the
celebrated naturalist; to whose anxious care and indefatigable
exertions, it owes its present extent and magnificence: it is now
under the patronage of the government.
But this institution comprehends, in addition to the Botanical

Garden, an extensive chemical laboratory, a cabinet of comparative
anatomy, a cabinet of preparations in anatomy and natural history, a
large library, a museum of natural history, and a menagérie well
stocked. Besides the lectures delivered in the Amphitheatre, erected
in these Gardens, the Professors of Botany give their peripatetic
lessons, in good weather, to a numerous train of disciples.
“When I have been seated at noon, on a fine day, in the month of
August, or in the commencement of May, under one of the majestic
ash of the Garden of Plants, with this Elysian scene before me, in
the midst of a most profound silence, and of a solitude interrupted
only by the occasional appearance of the Professor of Botany and
his pupils, I have almost fancied myself,” says the writer of Letters on
France and England—(see Am. Rev. No. ii.) “among the groves of
the Athenian Academy, and could imagine that I heard the lessons of
the “divine” Plato. Here, as well as in the spacious and noble works
and gardens of Oxford, which are so admirably calculated for the
exercises both of the mind and body, the fancy takes wing, and
readily transports the student of antiquity to those venerable seats of
knowledge, where the sublime Philosophy of the Greeks was taught,
and the masters of human reason displayed their incomparable
eloquence:”—
——“the green retreats

[262b]
Of Academus, and the thymy vale,
Where, oft enchanted with Socratic sounds,
Ilyssus,[262c] pure, devolv’d his tuneful stream
In gentle murmur.”
Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination.
The importance of establishing a Botanical Garden at Philadelphia

is obvious: it has, in fact, become a necessary institution, towards
completing a medical education; according to the system of teaching
medicine, pursued in the medical department of the University of
Pennsylvania. In this respect, New-York has taken the lead of
Philadelphia. Dr. David Hosack, professor of botany in the Medical
School of New-York, established a Botanic Garden of about twenty
acres, called the Elgin Botanic Garden, in the vicinity of that city, in
the year 1801. This Garden is skirted around by forest-trees and
shrubs, within the substantial enclosure of a stone wall; and on these
grounds are erected extensive, commodious, and well constructed
conservatories and hot-houses, which are furnished with a variety of
plants, exotic and indigenous. The whole of this establishment was
purchased from Dr. Hosack, by the state, in the year 1810: It is now
under the direction of the regents of the University of that state.
Six years ago, the general assembly of Pennsylvania made some

provision for such an institution: By a law passed the 19th of March,
1807, towards the close of Governor M‘Kean’s administration, three
thousand dollars were granted to the trustees of the University of
Pennsylvania, “out of the monies they owe the state; for the purpose
of enabling them to establish a Garden for the improvement of the
science of Botany, and for instituting a series of experiments to
ascertain the cheapest and best food for plants, and their medical
properties and virtues.” But no application of this fund has yet been
made, to the purposes contemplated by the legislature in their
appropriation of it.
Mr. John Bartram, F. R. S. a distinguished botanist, though self-

taught, is understood to have been the first anglo-American who
executed the design of a Botanic Garden in this country. He laid out,
and planted with his own hands, on his farm, pleasantly situated on
the west bank of the Schuylkill and about four miles below
Philadelphia, a garden of five or six acres; which he furnished with a
great variety of curious, useful and beautiful vegetables, exotic as
well as American. He acquired the greater part of the latter, in
travelling through many parts of the continent, from Canada to the
Floridas. His proficiency in his favourite science was, at a pretty early
period, so great, that Linnæus pronounced him, in one of his letters,
to be the greatest natural botanist in the world. This Garden is now in
the tenure and under the management of his son, the ingenious Mr.
William Bartram, a well known cultivator of Natural History and
Botany. Although this respectable man is above seventy years of
age, he continues the most sedulous attention to his favourite
pursuits. For a further account of Mr. John Bartram, see Dr. Barton’s
Medical Journal.
Mr. Bartram was born near Darby, in the (then) county of Chester,
Pennsylvania, in the year 1701. He held the appointment of Botanist,
for America, to King George III. until his death, which occurred in
September, 1777, in the seventy-sixth year of his age.
262a. Since deceased.
262b. Academus was an Athenian hero, from whom the original Academists,
or that sect of philosophers who followed the opinion of Socrates, as illustrated
and enforced by Plato, derived their name; Plato having taught his disciples in a
grove, near Athens, consecrated to the memory of that hero.
262c. The Ilyssus is a rapid, but, when not swollen by rains, a small stream, of
pure and limpid water, in the vicinity of Athens; and near the margin of which, in a
vale at the foot of Mount Hymettus, is supposed to have stood the Grove,
dedicated to Academus, in which the Socratic Philosophy was taught in its
greatest purity.
263. This highly important and well conducted institution owes its
rise to the liberal contributions of several humane, charitable and
public-spirited persons, aided by a legislative grant of two thousand
pounds, Pennsylvania currency, (equivalent to $5333⅓ in the
beginning of the year 1751: the first design, it is believed, was
suggested by the late Dr. Thomas Bond, long an eminent physician
in Philadelphia; and heretofore an active and useful member of the
Philosophical Society, as well as sometime one of the vice-
presidents of that body. By a law passed the 11th of April, 1793, the
general assembly liberally granted ten thousand pounds ($26,666,)
out of the funds accruing to the loan office of February 26, 1773; to
enable the managers of the Hospital to make additions to their
buildings, conformably to the original plan; and so to extend it as to
comprehend a Lying-in and a Foundling Hospital,[263a] so soon as
specific funds for those purposes should be obtained.
The first twelve managers (whose names deserve to be held in

remembrance, as prominent benefactors to their country,) were
Joshua Crosby, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Thomas Bond, Samuel
Hazard, Richard Peters, Israel Pemberton, (then styled junior,)
Samuel Rhoads, Hugh Roberts, Joseph Morris, John Smith, Evan
Morgan and Charles Norris; and John Reynell officiated as treasurer:
all of these were gentlemen of most respectable characters.
In order to obviate some objections, that were at first made, to the
contemplated expense of the medical department of the institution,
and which it was apprehended might obstruct the passage of the bill
then depending in the legislature, by which the grant of the two
thousand pounds, before mentioned, was obtained from the public,
Dr. Thomas Bond, together with his brother Dr. Phineas Bond, and
Dr. Lloyd Zachary, generously offered to attend the Hospital,
gratuitously, for the term of three years.
The Hospital establishment is now very complete, according to the

original plan of this valuable institution; and, indeed, much beyond
what was at first contemplated, in some respects: yet its utility might
be much increased, by a further extension of the design. In its
present condition, however, it reflects great honour on Pennsylvania,
justly celebrated, as she is, for her charitable, literary, scientific, and
other useful institutions; and the conduct of the managers has been
uniformly such, as to entitle them to the gratitude of the community.
The Students in the Medical School of the University pay ten

dollars per annum, for the privilege of attending the Hospital-
practice, which is of very important advantage to them: and the
physicians, with the managers, have generously appropriated a fund
out of the monies, thus obtained, for the purpose of founding a
Medical Library, and of purchasing the late Dr. Abraham Chovet’s
most curious anatomical preparations.[263b] By these means, in
addition to Dr. John Fothergill’s valuable present, and other
donations, this Hospital, with little expense of its more immediate
funds, already possesses the most useful as well as ornamental
collection, of the kind, that is to be found any where in America: and
when the superbly magnificent painting, representing Christ healing
the sick, (now in a train of execution by Mr. West, in London, and
intended to be a donation from him to this Hospital,) shall have been
received, this chef-d’œuvre of the sublime artist will constitute there,
not only a noble monument of his liberality, benevolence, and
attachment to his native country, but a splendid and admirably well-
suited ornament to the institution possessing it. It is scarcely sixteen
years since the hospital-tickets of the medical pupils amounted to
only about three hundred dollars per annum. This fund has been
since increasing; the annual income to it being at present estimated
at fifteen hundred dollars: it is now amply sufficient to supply the
library belonging to the Hospital with new books, and to keep in good
preservation the anatomical casts, &c.
As Dr. Franklin was eminently instrumental in promoting the

establishment of the Pennsylvania Hospital, so he likewise bore a
conspicuous part in the formation of the Library-Company of
Philadelphia; an institution which holds a distinguished rank, for its
usefulness, among the many that do honour to the capital of
Pennsylvania. A public Library was first set on foot in Philadelphia by
Franklin, about the year 1731; at which time he was scarcely twenty-
six years of age. Fifty persons then subscribed forty shillings each,
and agreed to contribute ten shillings annually, for that purpose.
Some other companies for similar purposes had been formed in that
city, after the one here mentioned; but these were soon after united
with “The Library Company of Philadelphia.” This Company now
possess many thousand valuable books; and their stock is
continually deriving accessions from donations, as well as from
purchases. Besides the marble statue of Dr. Franklin, presented to
the company by the late William Bingham, Esq. of Philadelphia,
(which decorates the front of the Library-edifice,) and many other
considerable benefactions to the institution, from time to time, “the
Penn family” (as the late ingenious Dr. Henry Stuber, the continuator
of the Life of Franklin, has remarked,) “distinguished themselves by
their donations” to it. The Loganian Library was, a few years since,
placed under the same roof with that of the Philadelphia Company;
though in a distinct apartment. It consists of an extensive collection
of curious, rare and valuable books, in various branches of ancient
and modern learning: and for this noble benefaction to his native
country, the public are indebted to James Logan, Esq. many years
an eminent citizen of Philadelphia, and well known, not only
throughout America, but in the old world, for his erudition and talents.
Dr. Rittenhouse’s intimate connexion with the College, and

afterwards with the University of Pennsylvania, rendered it improper,
in the opinion of the Memorialist, not to notice those institutions in
the manner he has done: and in doing this, he could not without
injustice omit a similar mention of the Hospital, so nearly allied to
them through the Medical School of the former; nor of the
Philadelphia Library Company, which bears a close affinity to them
all.
The name of Mr. West having been introduced on this occasion,

the writer conceives it will not be thought foreign to the design of
these Memoirs (though only incidentally connected with the present
article), to make some further mention of a native American, whose
name must ever hold a most conspicuous place in the history of the
fine arts, in relation to this country.
This celebrated Artist is the youngest of ten children of John West,

a person descended from very respectable ancestors, and a native
of England. John early embraced the tenets of the people called
Quakers. Migrating, in the year 1714, to Pennsylvania, where some
members of the same family had arrived with William Penn about
fifteen years before, he married and settled in the vicinity of
Philadelphia; and there his son Benjamin was born.
This gentleman’s residence has been in England, during the last

forty-five years: but he left his native country some considerable time
prior to that period; having first visited Italy, and some other schools
of painting on the continent. When a Society of Artists was instituted
in London, a few years after the accession of the present king to the
throne, Mr. West (who had then recently arrived in England, on his
return from Italy,) became a member of that body. Their exhibitions of
painting, sculpture and architectural designs, became objects of
attention to men of taste in the fine arts;—“the young Sovereign,”
says Mr. West (in a letter to Mr. C. W. Peale, written in 1809,[263c])
“was interested in their prosperity.” After the dissolution of that
society, the king desired Mr. West and three other artists to form a
plan for a Royal Academy; which having been approved by his
majesty, he directed that it should be carried into execution. “Thus,”
continues Mr. West, “commenced the institution of the Royal
Academy of London[263d]:” And again, speaking of this patronage, he
says;—“his majesty, by his regard for the arts, gave a dignity to
them, unknown before in the country.” Referring to this meritorious
patronage of the fine arts by the present king of England, Mr. Latrobe
(in his Anniversary Oration before the Society of Artists in
Philadelphia, in May, 1811,) makes this just remark: “Nor ought we to
omit mention of the name of George III. by whose patronage, our
illustrious countryman, West, has become the first historical painter
of the age.”
263a. Towards the incorporation of either one or the other of these institutions
with the present establishment of the Pennsylvania Hospital, the managers
possess, also, sixteen shares of stock in the Bank of Pennsylvania, bestowed by
the First Troop of Cavalry in Philadelphia. The product of this noble and very
valuable donation, and which is considered as being equivalent to a capital stock
of $8503.33, will, most probably, be wholly applied to the support of a Lying-in
Hospital, as part of the great institution.
263b. Thirty pounds a year were payable to Mrs. Abington, a daughter of Dr.
Chovet, during her life, on account of this purchase. That annuity has very recently
been extinguished, by the death of the annuitant.
263c. See the Port Folio, for January, 1810.
263d. When this Academy was first established, the celebrated Dr. Samuel
Johnson was appointed ‘Professor of Ancient Literature’ in the institution; an office
merely honorary.
264. Of these, Francis Alison, D. D. a learned and worthy

presbyterian clergyman, was vice-provost, and professor of moral
philosophy; the Rev. Ebenezer Kinnersley, M. A. an eminent
electrician and an amiable man, was professor of English and
oratory; John Beveridge, M. A. an excellent scholar in the learned
languages (some of whose Latin epistolary writings, in metrical
language, after the manner of Horace, possess a considerable
portion of merit and discover much classical purity of style,) was
professor of languages; and Hugh Williamson, M. A. (now M. D.) a
gentleman of distinguished talents, was professor of mathematics.
The last mentioned of these eminently meritorious characters is
yet living. He enjoys the respect and esteem due to a man who, in
the course of a long life, devoted much of his time and talents to the
promotion of learning, useful knowledge, and the welfare of his
country. Of the other three, who have, long since, passed on to “that
bourn from which no traveller returns,” the following circumstances
are worthy of being preserved in remembrance, by those who shall
hereafter record the history of literature and science, in this country.
Dr. Alison was one of the first persons in the middle colonies, who,
foreseeing the ignorance into which this part of the country seemed
inclined to fall, set up a regular school of education here. He was
long employed in the education of youth at New-London Cross-
roads, in Pennsylvania, before his appointment to the vice-
provostship of the college of Philadelphia; and many persons, who
afterwards made a distinguished figure in this country, were bred
under his tuition. The University of Glasgow, being well informed of
the pious and faithful labours of this valuable man, in propagating
useful knowledge in these then untutored parts of the world, created
him a Doctor of Divinity: He was honoured with this degree, without
any solicitation whatever on his part.
Mr. Kinnersley possessed great merit, in the estimation of the

learned world, “in being the chief inventor of the Electrical Apparatus,
as well as author of a considerable part of those discoveries in
Electricity, published by Mr. Franklin, to whom he communicated
them. Indeed Mr. Franklin himself mentions his name with honour;
though he has not been careful enough to distinguish between their
particular discoveries. This, perhaps, he may have thought needless,
as they were known to act in concert. But, though that circumstance
was known here, it was not so in remote parts of the world, to which
the fame of these discoveries has extended.” The passage here
quoted, is copied from an account of the college and academy of
Philadelphia, published in October, 1758.
Dr. Franklin’s experiment with the electrical kite—which

established the theory on which the metallic conductors of lightning
were introduced, for the security of buildings, and those within them,
from injury by that element—was made in June, 1752; and his letter,
giving an account of it, is dated the 19th of October following. But Mr.
de Romas, a Frenchman, to whom his countryman the Abbé
Bertholon ascribes the honour of the experiment with the kite, made
his first attempt on the 14th of May, 1753: he did not succeed, until
the 7th of the next month; a year after Dr. Franklin had completed his
experiments, and then generally known in Europe. It is noticed by
the late ingenious Dr. Stuber, of Philadelphia, in his continuation of
the Life of Franklin, that “his (Dr. Franklin’s) friend, Mr. Kinnersley,
communicated to him a discovery of” (what Dr. Stuber terms) “the
different kinds of electricity, excited by rubbing glass and sulphur.”
This, it is said, was first observed by Mr. Du Faye; though afterwards
not attended to, for many years. It seems, however, that the
electricians of Europe, with Du Faye himself, had conceived a
mistaken notion on this subject; and that Franklin had, at first,
adopted their doctrine. “But,” says the continuator of his Life, “upon
repeating the experiments, he perceived that Mr. Kinnersley was
right; and the vitreous and the resinous electricity of Du Faye were
nothing more than the positive and negative states which he had
before observed; that the glass globe charged positively, or
encreased the quantity of electricity on the prime conductor,—whilst
the globe of sulphur diminished its natural quantity, or charged
negatively.”
Mr. Beveridge, who was appointed by the trustees of the college

and academy of Philadelphia, in June, 1758, professor of languages
in that institution, was one of the ablest masters of the Latin tongue;
and wrote many poetical pieces in that language, in a style of
superior purity and elegance. This excellent Latin scholar originally
taught a grammar-school in Edinburgh, under the patronage of the
celebrated Mr. Ruddiman. While in that station, he taught the Latin to
Mr. Thomas Blacklock, the well-known blind poet; and it was during
this time, that Blacklock wrote his fine paraphrase of Psalm CIV.
which his friend Beveridge afterwards rendered into Latin verse. A
collection of Mr. Beveridge’s poetical pieces, under the title of
Epistolæ Familiares et alia quædam miscellanea, was published at
Philadelphia, in the year 1765.
265. A Law Professorship was instituted in the College of

Philadelphia, in the year 1790, and the Hon. James Wilson, LL.D.
(late one of the associate judges of the supreme court of the United
States,) was appointed the first professor: the first course of lectures,
under this appointment, was delivered in the winter of 1790-1. In
April, 1792, when the College and University became united into one
seminary, under the latter title, a Professorship of Law was erected
in the new seminary; when Judge Wilson was again appointed to fill
that chair: but no Law-lectures were afterwards delivered.
The lectures composed by the able and very learned Judge, for
this department of the institution, are given entire in his works,
published in three volumes octavo, in the year 1804, by his son Bird
Wilson, Esq. president of the seventh judicial district of
Pennsylvania.
It is much to be regretted, that this important chair in the University

has remained unoccupied, since the death of its late eminent
incumbent: For, as he has justly observed, in his Introductory
Lecture, “The science of Law should, in some measure and in some
degree, be the study of every free citizen, and of every free man.
Every free citizen and every free man has duties to perform, and
rights to claim. Unless, in some measure, and in some degree, he
knows those duties and those rights, he can never act a just and an
independent part.”
266. In an Account of Dr. Smith, prefixed to his posthumous works,

the respectable Editor observes—that “Dr. Smith was actuated by a
“zeal bordering on enthusiasm” (as he himself expressed it), in his
devotion to the dissemination of literature and science.”
267. This University was founded in the year 1480; it consists of

two colleges, called the Marischal and the King’s College, under the
name of the University of King Charles. The library belonging to this
ancient university is large; and in both the colleges, the languages,
mathematics, natural philosophy, divinity, &c. are taught by able
professors.
268. These prelates were, respectively, the Doctors—Secker,

Trevor, Thomas, Hume, and Egerton.
269. See his Eulogium on Rittenhouse.
270. His salary was two thousand dollars per annum.
271. A particular instance, of a similar kind, occurred within the

knowledge of the Memorialist. Mr. Peter Getz was, lately, a self-
taught mechanic of singular ingenuity, in the borough of Lancaster;
where he many years exercised the trade of a silver-smith and
jeweller, and was remarkable for the extraordinary accuracy,
elegance, and beauty of the workmanship he executed. This person
was a candidate for the place of chief coiner or engraver in the mint;
and, on that occasion, he offered to present to Dr. Rittenhouse, in
the summer of 1792, a small pair of scales—such as are commonly
called gold-scales—of exquisite workmanship as well as great
exactness, as a specimen of his skill as an artist. The Director
conceived, that an instrument equally well suited to the use for which
this was designed, though less ornamental, could be procured for
the mint, if desirable, for less money than this was worth as a matter
of curiosity; he would not, therefore, purchase it for the mint: but
being determined not to accept it as a present, and desirous at the
same time to make compensation to the artist for his work, he
insisted on his receiving twenty dollars for the instrument; on
payment of which, he retained it himself.
272. “Coinage is peculiarly an attribute of sovereignty: to transfer

its exercise into another country, is to submit it to another sovereign.”
See a Report made to congress, in the year 1790, by Thomas
Jefferson, Esq. then secretary of state, on certain Proposals for
supplying the United States with Copper Coinage, offered by Mr.
John H. Mitchell, a foreign artist.
273. The plan of the Bank of North-America, which was submitted
to congress by their order, was approved by them on the 26th of
May, 1781.
274. When the question, respecting the incorporation of the Bank

of North-America was taken in congress, twenty members voted in
the affirmative and only four in the negative. But the votes were then
taken by states; and of these, the delegates from New-York and
Delaware were absent, Pennsylvania (having only two members of
her delegation present) was divided, Massachusetts (having also but
two members present) voted in the negative: all the southern states
were in the affirmative, with the single exception of Mr. Madison’s
vote, his three colleagues (from Virginia) being on the affirmative
side of the question.
275. Whatever failings (and these were of a venial nature) may

have appeared in the transactions of Mr. Morris, as a private citizen,
in the latter part of a life long devoted to honourable and useful
pursuits, yet the eminent services which he rendered to his country,
in times of her greatest peril, entitled him to the gratitude of his
compatriots; for, in his numerous and important official and other
public negotiations, his honour and integrity were alike
irreproachable. His merits ought not only to rescue his name from
oblivion, but they give him a just claim to be placed in the list of
American worthies; while his subsequent misfortunes —— —— ——
—— —— but,
“No further seek his merits to disclose,

Or draw his frailties from his dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose,)
The bosom of his Father and his God.”
Gray.
Mr. Morris, who was long distinguished for his talents and his
services in this country, was a native of Lancashire, in England. He
died in Philadelphia on the 8th of May, 1806.
276. “The task of re-creating public credit,” (says Chief Justice
Marshal, in his Life of Washington,) “of drawing order and
arrangement from the chaotic confusion in which the finances of
America were involved, and of devising means which should render
the revenue productive, and commensurate with the demand, was
justly classed among the most arduous of the duties which devolved
on the new government[276a]. In discharging it, much aid was
expected from the head of the treasury. To Colonel Hamilton[276b] was
assigned this important, and at that time intricate department.
“This gentleman was a native of the island of St. Croix, and, at a

very early period of life, had been placed by his friends in New-York.
Possessing an ardent temper, he caught fire from the concussions of
the moment, and with all the enthusiasm of youth, engaged first his
pen, and afterwards his sword, in the stern contest between the
American colenies and their parent state. Among the first troops
raised by New-York was a corps of artillery, in which he was
appointed a captain. Soon after the war was transferred to the
Hudson, his superior endowments recommended him to the
attention of the commander in chief, into whose family, before
completing his twenty-first year, he was invited to enter. Equally
brave and intelligent, he continued in this situation to display a
degree of firmness and capacity which commanded the confidence
and esteem of his general, and of the principal officers in the army.
“After the capitulation at York-Town, the war languished throughout

the American continent, and the probability that its termination was
approaching daily increased.
“The critical circumstances of the existing government rendered

the events of the civil, more interesting than those of the military
department, and Colonel Hamilton accepted a seat in the congress
of the United States. In all the important acts of the day, he
performed a conspicuous part, and was greatly distinguished among
those distinguished characters whom the crisis had attracted to the
councils of their country. He had afterwards been active in promoting
those measures which led to the convention at Philadelphia, of which
he was a member, and had greatly contributed to the adoption of the
constitution by the state of New-York. In the distinguished part he
had performed, both in the military and civil transactions of his
country, he had acquired a great degree of well merited fame; and
the frankness of his manners, the openness of his temper, the
warmth of his feelings, and the sincerity of his heart, had secured
him many valuable friends.
“To talents of the highest grade, he united a patient industry, not

always the companion of genius, which fitted him in a peculiar
manner for the difficulties to be encountered by the man who should
be placed at the head of the American finances.”
The disastrous death of this celebrated man happened on the 12th

day of July, 1804, at the age of about forty-seven years.
276a. This was in the year 1789.
276b. Afterwards promoted to the rank of Major-General.
277. The deleterious, though—as it might almost be called—

fascinating influence, of the revolution undertaken by the people of
France, extended itself far and wide, prior to the murder of their king,
even in countries under the milder forms of government: many
characters of great worth were every where misled by the plausibility
of the avowed designs of its authors and supporters; and in no
country was the infatuation more general, than in the United States.
In England itself, it begat a kind of political frenzy; and, had not the
wise and salutary writings of the celebrated Burke arrested its
progress, in good time, the most fatal consequences must have
ensued. Among the literary and scientific men in Britain, who
became deeply infected by the revolution-mania of that day, was Dr.
Erasmus Darwin, Miss Anna Seward (one of his biographers)
remarks, that the Doctor has introduced into his Botanic Garden an
allegory, representing Liberty “as a great form, slumbering within the
iron cage and marble walls of the French Bastile, unconscious of his
chains; till, touched by the patriot flame, he rends his flimsy bonds,
lifts his colossal form, and rears his hundred arms over his foes; calls
to the good and brave of every country, with a voice that echoes like
the thunder of heaven to the polar extremities;
“Gives to the winds his banner broad, unfurl’d,

“And gathers in its shade the living world!”
In consequence of Darwin’s use of this grossly misapplied figure;

—as the issue of the French revolution too fatally proves it to have
been,—Miss Seward offers the following apology for the subject of
her friendly pen:
“This sublime sally of a too-confiding imagination, has made the

poet and his work countless foes. They triumphed over him,” says
his fair biographer, “on a result so contrary,—on the mortal wounds
given by French crimes to real Liberty. They forget, or choose to
forget, that this part of the poem (though published after the other)
appeared in 1791, antecedent to the dire regicide, and to all those
unprecedented scenes of sanguinary cruelty inflicted on France, by
three of her republican tyrants; compared to whom, the most
remorseless of her monarchs was mild and merciful.”
278. Mr. Genet arrived in Philadelphia the 16th of May, 1793; and
in the evening of the same day a meeting of the citizens was held at
the state-house, when a committee was appointed to draw up an
address to this minister from the republic of France: Mr. Rittenhouse
was the first named on that committee. At a meeting of the citizens
held the next day, he, as chairman of that committee, reported an
address accordingly; which, being adopted by the persons then
assembled, was presented to the new minister, the ensuing morning.
The president’s proclamation of neutrality had then been issued

between three and four weeks:[278a] the addressers therefore say,
keeping this in their view; “Earnestly giving to the national exertions
(of France) our wishes and our prayers, we cannot resist the
pleasing hope, that although America is not a party in the existing
war, she may still be able, in a state of peace, to demonstrate the
sincerity of her friendship, by affording very useful assistance to her
sister republic.”—The “useful assistance,” here alluded to, and which
it was supposed France might derive from this country, “in a state of
peace,” did not contemplate any infringement of the neutrality of the
United States: Nor could Mr. Genet, himself, consider the language
of the address in any other than its true sense; for, in his extempore
answer, (a written one was also returned,) he says, “From the
remote situation of America, and other circumstances, France does
not expect that America should become a party in the war; but
remembering that she has already combated for your liberties, (and
if it was necessary, and she had the power, would cheerfully again
enlist in your cause,) we hope, (and every thing I hear and see
assures me our hope will be realized,) that her citizens will be
treated as brothers, in danger and distress.” This declaration of the
French minister, made immediately after his arrival at the seat of the
American government, forbad the addressers to believe, that either
he or any other agent of the French government would afterwards
undertake to violate the neutrality of the United States.
278a. It is dated the 22d of April, 1793.

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Adaptation Before Cinema: Literary and

Visual Convergence from Antiquity

ISSN 2634-629X ISSN 2634-6303 (electronic)

Part I Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically 19

Part II Transmedia Culture-Texts 135

Eleanor Bryan is an associate lecturer at the University of Lincoln,

Dominique Gracia is a Victorianist and writer specializing in the things

Fig. 2.1 Lyon, Danny (1963). Student Nonviolent Coordinating

of Charles Dickens, V. 4, p. 20. Oliver Twist. Houghton Mifflin

Fig. 9.4 O. Smith as Frankenstein’s Creature (circa 1826).

Introduction: Adaptation’s Past, Adaptation’s

Glenn Jellenik and Lissette Lopez Szwydky

Adaptation Before Cinema is both a historical intervention into contem-

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Similarly, Lissette Lopez Szwydky’s Transmedia Adaptation in the

continue to proliferate, thrive, and evolve through artistic, commercial,

even drive political change from including emancipatory movements to

Art Form of Democracy: Romanticism and the Rise of Novelization,”

Song of the Soul (1642, 1647) as an adaptation of Lucretian and Spenserian

through repeated adaptation and transmediation at different historical

In Chap. 8, “The Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-­

In Chap. 11 “Markers of Class: Antebellum Children’s Book

evolutionary theory of adaptation, Figgins shows how each incarnation of

Reframing Adaptation’s Potential,

A Classical Drama of Human Bondage:

M.-A. Smith (*)

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 21

perpetually plagued by demoralizing racism, oppression, and abuse across

Fig. 2.1 Lyon, Danny (1963). Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

adaptively defining the collaborative intentionality of our present-day

[s]trategies like widespread petitioning, the distribution of leaflets, pam-

While these recurrent replications of supplicatory iconographies can be

an ever-adapting “kneeling narrative” spanning antiquity to the present.

protesting racial inequities and police brutality against African-Americans

a moment of global catharsis which confirmed adaptation specialist Kate

The Transhistorical, Visualized Drama of Human

action, and denouement/resolution converging to arouse pity and fear that

Act I: Human Bondage in Antiquity

Spawned from the foundations of ancient supplication, this visualized

an approach to an individual or a place … the use of a distinctive gesture …

adaptations of the master/slave dynamic. Those came into being during

An African was seen … in chains, in a supplicating posture, kneeling with one

Dr. Shippen’s success, as a private lecturer, demonstrated the

261a. Said to be Dr. Caldwell, of Philadelphia. See the Port Folio.

261b. Casper Wister, M. D. Professor of Anatomy and Surgery in the

The other chairs, in the Medical Department of the University, are

Among these collegiate-chairs in medicine, appertaining to the

The Botanical Garden (called the “Physick Garden”) of the

The ground is divided into four quarters. On each side of the

These fine and spacious gardens were instituted by Lord Danby,

The Botanic Garden, at Cambridge, consists of nearly five acres,

An handsome green-house, one hundred feet in length, and

These Gardens are under the government of the chancellor or

There is, besides, a Professorship of Botany, in this university; as

The Botanical Garden belonging to the university of Edinburgh, is

The Garden of Plants, at Paris, now termed the Museum of

But this institution comprehends, in addition to the Botanical

——“the green retreats

The importance of establishing a Botanical Garden at Philadelphia

Six years ago, the general assembly of Pennsylvania made some

Mr. John Bartram, F. R. S. a distinguished botanist, though self-

The first twelve managers (whose names deserve to be held in

The Hospital establishment is now very complete, according to the

Part I Reframing Adaptation’s Potential, Historically 19

Part II Transmedia Culture-Texts 135

In Chap. 8, “The Medea Network: Adapting Medea in Eighteenth-