The Commotion of the Chambord Chateau Brought to the Ottoman Stage: Yi̇rmi̇ Çocuklu Bi̇r Adam yahut Fettan Zaman İnsana Neler Yapmaz

Abstract

<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">The “Age of Translations” (1869-1882) was a period in which the men of Ottoman theater provided theater companies with plays to be performed in Turkish, especially at Güllü Agop’s “Osmanlı Tiyatrosu” (“Ottoman Theater”), and these new plays were written using different techniques of text production. By translating and adapting new French plays that were either considered classics or were popular at the time into Turkish, or by rewriting them in Turkish, they created an entirely new repertoire for the theater. Mehmet Hilmi’s Yirmi Çocuklu Bir Adam yahut Fettan Zaman İnsana Neler Yapmaz (The Man with 20 Children or What can't Cunning Time do to People), an adaptation of Molière’s Monsieur de Pourceaugnac, is one of the more successful examples of this. This article will examine exactly how Mehmet Hilmi transformed the source text to make it compatible, both in terms of culture and aesthetics, to the Ottoman audiences for which these plays would be performed.</span>