Location: International Congress on the Enlightenment, Edinburgh

Aaron Hill’s translation of Voltaire’s Zaïre (1732) was first performed in 1735. Writing a preface to the English play in 1817, Richard Cumberland enumerated the work’s numerous faults: the verse was ‘not sufficiently diversified’, the plot ‘cannot boast of that intricacy which perplexes, and that denouement which surprises’, and, worst of all, the two lead parts of Osman and Zara ‘are by no means preserved with the consistency required by tragedy’. This paper answers these criticisms. The key to this play’s success in the 1700s was neither its plot nor its consistency of character, but its enthusiastic passions. John Dennis, at the turn of the eighteenth century, had defined such passions as central to the revitalisation of English poetry (including drama), and, in Voltaire’s Zaïre, Hill found an abundance of them for him to import. Voltaire’s playtells the story of a Christian captive who must choose between her religion and her love, and, as Hill himself wrote in a paraphrase of Dennis, the ‘most spirited Enthusiasm, is imprinted by Religious Sentiments’. To study the ebb and flow of this play’s passions is to follow the advice that Hill gave to aspiring actors (including his own nephew, the first English Osman), and it is with reference to Hill’s own theories of acting that this chapter will offer a close reading of Hill’s translation, revealing both Hill’s debts to Dennis and Voltaire and his own ability to create a distinctively eighteenth-century spectacle of stage emotion.