Is gender learned or innate? This controversial play asks the question: what happens if you raise a boy to sew and behave as a girl, and raise his sister to fight as a soldier? For the first time, Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre (‘The Force of Habit’) is available to English and Spanish audiences with a performance-tested translation on facing pages.

The theatrum mundi metaphor was well-known in the Golden Age, and was often employed, notably by Calderón in his religious theatre. However, little account has been given of the everyday exploitation of the idea of the world as stage in the mainstream drama of the Golden Age. This study examines how and why playwrights of the period time and again created characters who dramatize themselves, who re-invent themselves by performing new roles and inventing new plots within the larger frame of the play. The prevalence of metatheatrical techniques among Golden Age dramatists, including Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca and Guillén de Castro, reveals a fascination with role-playing and its implications. Thacker argues that in comedy, these playwrights saw role-playing as a means by which they could comment on and criticize the society in which they lived, and he reveals a drama far less supportive of the social status quo in Golden Age Spain than has been traditionally thought to be the case.

The sixteenth century was an exciting period in the history of European theatre. In the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, France, Germany and England, writers and actors experimented with new dramatic techniques and found new publics. They prepared the way for the better-known dramatists of the next century but produced much work which is valuable in its own right, in Latin and in their own vernaculars. The popular theatre of the Middle Ages gave endless material for reinvention by playwrights, and the legacy of the ancient world became a spur to creativity, in tragedy and comedy. As soon as readers and audiences had taken in the new plays, they were changed again, taking new forms as the first experiments were themselves modified and reinvented. Writers constantly adapted the texts of plays to meet new requirements. These and other issues are explored by a group of international experts from a comparative perspective, giving particular emphasis to one of the great European comic dramatists, the Portuguese Gil Vicente. Tom Earle is King John II Professor of Portuguese at Oxford. Catarina Fouto is a Lecturer in Portuguese at King's College London.

With the rise of nationalism, and with it the nation-state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, so arose new polemical issues. As the Spanish Empire expanded in the sixteenth century, theologians, jurists, artists and politicians commented on the morality and legitimacy of the imperial enterprise. With the increase in power of successive Spanish sovereigns from the Catholic Monarchs to Philip II (1556–98), followed by the decadence of the state through the reign of Charles II (1665–1700), political participants and observers alike put their thoughts on paper for mass dissemination. The study of epic poetry, poetry, drama, novels, rhetoric, imperial administrative documents and religion, reveals a plethora of means by which these people conveyed thoughts and opinions, often negatively critical, concerning Spain’s monarchs, their imperial policies, the Catholic Church, the role of the nobility in government, and societal limitations. Providing innovative literary interpretations and revealing newly-discovered archival material, experts from US and UK universities have contributed original scholarly studies to this volume which delve deeper than academia has thus far into the operations of imperial Spain and the reactions of the people of the time. Studying works by the likes of Alonso de Ercilla, Juan de la Cueva, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Calderón de la Barca, among others, On Wolves and Sheep explores the various methods used in the Spanish Golden Age to voice political opinions and ideas.

A must reference for students of Spanish and travelers anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world -- over 18,000 commonly used words, phrases, and expressions, plus valuable supplements on pronunciation, grammar, currency, road signs, geography, and foods.

"The contributors to this volume now offer a comprehensive and innovative picture of this reception history, discussing the English translations of Cervantes's works, the literary genres which developed in his shadow, and the best-known authors who consciously emulated him. Cervantes emerges as perhaps the greatest outside influence on English literature since the Renaissance." --Book Jacket.

In this volume, we are particularly interested in approaching theatre and performance as a dynamic and evolving practice of continuous change, regeneration and cultural mobility. Neither the dramatic texts nor their stage versions should be viewed as finished products but as creative processes in the making. Their richness lies in their unfinished and never-ending potential energy and their openness to constant revision, rehearsal, revival, and collective enterprise. This edited collection aims to create a dialogue on the artistic processes implicated in the various ways of working with the play text, the staging practices, the way audiences and critical reception can impact a production, and the many lives of Iberian theatre beyond the page or the stage. That is, its cultural and social legacies.