This chapter demonstrates how adaptation theory can be used in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies courses. It both distills information about adaptation theory and provides a primer for teachers who are new to using adaptation in the classroom. I provide scaffolding for instructors who wish to address contemporaneous adaptations of eighteenth-century texts. My chap- ter outlines a way to teach both eighteenth-century studies and adaptation studies by grounding them in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and culture. Eighteenth-century adaptations emphasized inventiveness, so studying adaptation in the classroom provides both cultural translation and a path to innovative teaching. First, I offer examples of twenty-first-century theorists whose work is accessible to students, such as Robert Mayer's work on adaptation as “critical cultural gloss,” Imelda Whelehan's concept of the “adaptive event,” and Linda Hutcheon's concept of the “palimpsest” of adap- tation. I then explain my selection of Restoration and early eighteenth-cen- tury adaptation/translation theory as argued by authors such as John Dryden and Aphra Behn. I conclude by offering some hooks and lesson plans that I have used when teaching eighteenth-century adaptations.

College students in literature courses rarely realize that Restoration and eighteenth-century readers expected adaptations to be unique, imaginative texts that were deeply innovative when compared to the source text. Readers and writers of the long eighteenth century took for granted that creativity and alteration in adaptations and translations were required for the clear communication of ideas, and that the text itself, because of cultural as well as linguistic differences, necessitated a form of re-creation. Theories of adapta- tion by writers such as John Dryden and Aphra Behn were rife, and many stories throughout the long eighteenth century have a rich adaptive life. For example, Aphra Behn's The History of the Nun (1689) has six traceable adap- tations, as dramas and prose morality tales, between 1689 and 1757. Behn's Oroonoko was most popular in the age of the Stuarts for Thomas Southerne's stage adaptation (1696). The Letters of Abelard to Heloise were avidly adapted in poetry (“Eloisa to Abelard,” by Alexander Pope, 1717) and for the stage (The Perceptor, or the Love of Abelard, by William Hammond, 1740).