Professor John Stone documents the first arrival of Shakespeare’s plays in Portugal

Details from John Preston's letter requesting two copies of Shakespeare's Othello to be sent, found by Professor John Stone in the English College archive at Ushaw House.
Details from John Preston's letter requesting two copies of Shakespeare's Othello to be sent, found by Professor John Stone in the English College archive at Ushaw House.
News | Culture | Research | Divulgation
(11/04/2024)
John Stone, a professor at the University of Barcelona, has found the request for two copies of Shakespeare’s Othello to be sent to Lisbon in 1765, in the correspondence of the English scholar John Preston, a professor at the English College in Lisbon, addressed to the college’s London agent, John Sheppard.
Details from John Preston's letter requesting two copies of Shakespeare's Othello to be sent, found by Professor John Stone in the English College archive at Ushaw House.
Details from John Preston's letter requesting two copies of Shakespeare's Othello to be sent, found by Professor John Stone in the English College archive at Ushaw House.
News | Culture | Research | Divulgation
11/04/2024
John Stone, a professor at the University of Barcelona, has found the request for two copies of Shakespeare’s Othello to be sent to Lisbon in 1765, in the correspondence of the English scholar John Preston, a professor at the English College in Lisbon, addressed to the college’s London agent, John Sheppard.
Stone found this reference in the Ushaw College, in Durham (United Kingdom), where all the documents from the English College in Lisbon are now kept, after it closed its doors in 1973, after more than three hundred years of activity.
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Although partial translations — sometimes from French editions — of Shakespeare’s plays had been known to exist in Portugal since the late eighteenth century, this is the first time that the arrival of Shakespeare’s plays in their original language in Lisbon and, by extension, in the Lusophone world can be documented. This finding confirms that Shakespeare’s plays circulated among binational and bilingual or multilingual family and commercial networks, as well as among readers for whom English was neither their language nor the language of origin.

The copies were sent by sea, along with many other volumes in a larger order. Preston and the College regularly requested and received books and goods from England. These shipments provide the immediate context in which Othello’s presence in Portugal in the sixties of the 18th century is understood. Moreover, this fact points to a wider phenomenon, both of British and Irish expatriates and of a local community that read widely in English throughout the eighteenth century.
He has shown that two copies of Othello arrived in Lisbon in the mid-18th century.
John Preston (1712-1780) was a priest and professor of theology, tutor to the crown prince of the Portuguese throne, and was in charge of the developing policy to fit the English College into Portuguese civil life. This college was a modest establishment for about twenty-five students, and it was part of an informal but extensive network of diasporic institutions serving English, Scottish and Irish Catholics.

​​​​​​​Stone wonders why Preston ordered precisely two copies of Othello, rather than works such as King Lear, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra. He notes that perhaps this “should be associated with a long Portuguese theatrical tradition featuring African characters — linguistically marked comics — or, more generally, with the fact that the play is itself an expatriate drama in a maritime culture”.
 

John Stone is a professor of English Literature at the UB’s Faculty of Philology and Communication, where he teaches 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century British literature. He has published a scholarly edition of Samuel Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare (2004) in Catalan. He is also co-principal investigator, together with Professor Deanne Williams (University of York), of the research project “Shakespeare and Diasporic Book History in Iberia, 1592-1810 (Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada)”, which focuses on the circulation of printed works through diasporic networks. His new research focuses on English as a language of culture in eighteenth-century Spain, with a particular emphasis on the formation of personal and institutional libraries, book smuggling, and cases of direct translation from English into Spanish. In 2020, Stone discovered the first play by Shakespeare to arrive in Spain, and in 2021 he found the identity of the first translator of Dickens into Spanish

References

Stone, John, «Othello Goes to Lisbon, 1765», Notes and Queries, March,  14 2024.
Doi: doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjae022.