"The bringing of Spanish seventeenth-century verse plays to the contemporary English-speaking stage involves a number of fundamental questions. Are verse translations preferable to prose, and if so, what kind of verse? To what degree should translations aim to be 'faithful'? Which kinds of plays 'work', and which do not? Which values and customs of the past present no difficulties for contemporary audiences, and which need to be decoded in performance?Which kinds of staging are suitable, and which are not? To what degree, if any, should one aim for 'authenticity' in staging? In this volume, a group of translators, directors, and scholars explores these and related questions."--Jacket

As well as dealing with the lives and major works of the most significant playwrights of the period, this text focuses on other aspects of the growth and maturing of Golden Age theatre, reflecting the interests and priorities of modern scholarship.

An assessment of the life, work and reputation of Spain's leading Golden Age dramatist

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.

The heart of Europe. 1942. Children playing, lovers' tiffs, a deserted train station and a ramp rising towards a hangar. This is what you can see, but what should the Red Cross representative report say? Way to Heaven has previously been produced at the Teatro Mara Guerrero, Madrid by the Centro Dramatico Nacional. A production of this English translation opened at the Royal Court Theatre, London in June 2005.

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume offers methodologies for translation and communication that can feed the creative processes of actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. It argues that collaboration between academics and theatre practitioners was instrumental in the success of the season and that the work carried out has repercussions for critical debate of Comedia. The volume posits a model for future productions of the Comedia in English, one that recognizes the need for the languages of the scholar and the theatre artist to be made mutually intelligible by the use of collaborative strategies, mediated by a consultant or dramaturg proficient in both tongues. This model applies more generally to theatrical collaborations involving a translator, writer and director, and will be useful for translation and performance processes in any language.

Fresh explorations of the tragicomic drama, setting the familiar plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries alongside Irish and European drama. Tragicomedy is one of the most important dramatic genres in Renaissance literature, and the essays collected here offer stimulating new perspectives and insights, as well as providing broad introductions to arguably lesser-known European texts. Alongside the chapters on Classical, Italian, Spanish, and French material, there are striking and fresh approaches to Shakespeare and his contemporaries -- to the origins of mixed genre in English, to the development of Shakespearean and Fletcherian drama, to periodization in Shakespeare's career, to the language of tragicomedy, and to the theological structure of genre. The collection concludes with two essays on Irish theatre and its interactions with the London stage, further evidence of the persistent and changing energy of tragicomedy in the period. Contributors: SARAH DEWAR-WATSON, MATTHEW TREHERNE, ROBERT HENKE, GERAINT EVANS, NICHOLAS HAMMOND, ROSKING, SUZANNE GOSSETT, GORDAN MCMULLAN, MICHAEL WINMORE, JONATHAN HOPE, MICHAEL NEILL, LUCY MUNRO, DEANA RANKIN