This book takes the reader through the translation and performance processes of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to establish a model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama.

Spanish Golden Age drama has resurfaced in recent years, however scholarly analysis has not kept pace with its popularity. This book problematizes and analyzes the approaches to staging reconstruction taken over the past few decades, including historical, semiotic, anthropological, cultural, structural, cognitive and phenomenological methods.

In 2004 the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a ground-breaking season of Spanish Golden Age plays in English which pioneered a new approach to translating these works for the modern stage. As well as a director and translator, each play was assigned an academic advisor in the belief that the quality and success of the productions would rely in part on balancing the vitality of contemporary theatre practice with respect for the original plays. The eight essays and three interviews in this book, contributed by a mixture of leading academics and renowned practitioners, explore some of the many issues that emerged from this experience - unique in British theatre history. They provide a new perspective on what it means to perform Spanish Golden Age theatre on today's English-speaking stage.

This is the first monograph on the performance and reception of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century national drama in contemporary Spain, which attempts to remedy the traditional absence of performance-based approaches in Golden Age studies. The book contextualises the socio-historical background to the modern-day performance of the country’s three major Spanish baroque playwrights (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.

Spanish Golden-Age plays take their place at the forefront of world theatre. Oscar Wilde once observed that `it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors'. This thought is borne out in this volume, which brings together two different and often mutually exclusive constituencies: the academic critic and the theatre practitioner. In looking at the ways in which theatre is a barometer of society, the essays in this book form part of a larger theoretical inquiry into performance as interpretation, contingent upon the cultural context. Engaging with theoretical approaches to culture, and theoreticians from Elam to Brook, and from Derrida to Bakhtin, the author analyzes in detail productions of plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón dela Barca, as well as an adaptation of Rojas' Celestina, on the Spanish, or French, or Anglo-American stage. Two chapters deal with appropriations of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in translation on the Spanish andFrench boards. As they read performance in [trans]national productions, these essays are not only at the cutting-edge of theatre studies on the `foreign' stage, but they also bring Spanish Golden-Age plays, long neglected byprofessional directors of the classics because of the lack of a continuous performance tradition, closer to assuming their rightful place amongst `the great theatre of the world'. SUSAN L. FISCHER is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Bucknell University.

This collection of original new essays focuses on the many ways in which early modern Spanish plays engaged their audiences in a dialogue about abuse, injustice, and inequality. Far from the traditional monolithic view of theatrical works as tools for expanding ideology, these essays each recognize the power of theatre in reflecting on issues related to social justice. The first section of the book focuses on textual analysis, taking into account legal, feminist, and collective bargaining theory. The second section explores issues surrounding theatricality, performativity, and intellectual property laws through an analysis of contemporary adaptations. The final section reflects on social justice from the practitioners’ point of view, including actors and directors. Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre reveals how adaptations of classical theatre portray social justice and how throughout history the writing and staging of comedias has been at the service of a wide range of political agendas.