Shakespeare and the Spanish “Comedia”: Translation, Interpretation, Performance. Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer ed. by Bárbara Mujica (review)

If readers of Shakespare and the Spanish “Comedia” expect a comparative study of the two traditions, a preliminary glance at its table of contents may raise a few eyebrows. But if they notice the phrase “Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer,” they may find the title of this Festschrift justified. Fischer, professor emerita of Spanish and comparative studies at Bucknell University, is one of the few scholars who has a consistent record of research on Spanish Golden Age theater and on Shakespeare, often relating both. Shakespeare scholars may recall her book Reading Performance: Spanish Golden Age Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage¹ and her articles in Shakespeare Bulletin or Cahiers Élisabéthains. Bárbara Mujica has intelligently arranged the contributions of fifteen scholars and theater practitioners in three sections reflecting the main areas of Fischer’s scholarly production: translation, interpretation, performance (terms that appear in the volume’s title).

In her introduction, Mujica briefly explains the key points in Fischer’s understanding of the translation of Shakespeare as theater, of performance as “interpretation of a particular sociopolitical reality” (2), and of criticism applied from Jungian, metatheatrical, intertextual, and reader-response perspectives, and points to her pioneering work in particular areas. Mujica then focuses on Fischer’s research on the performance of plays by the great early modern Spanish playwrights and by Shakespeare—research that transcends national and cultural borders in her analysis of productions of Shakespeare plays not only in England but also in Spain and France, and of Spanish Golden Age productions not only in Spain but also in France and England. As Mujica states, Fischer is one of the few to consider the Spanish comedia “transnationally and intertextually against plays of its predominant English counterpart” and to consider it “in performance” (6).

The compiled essays, however (and this is where eyebrows rise), do not treat Shakespeare or the comedia intertextually but focus exclusively on one of the two traditions, and only four of the fifteen contributions, systematically printed at the end of each section, are devoted to Shakespeare.² While this imbalance contradicts the order in the book’s title, the essays’ content, remaining within the boundaries of each tradition, belies the immediate interpretation of the book’s claim that this is “a nearly unique transnational study” (back cover). The disparity of contributors—American and European, Hispanists and Shakespeareans—may be defined as transnational. But the contributions are not, at least not in the manner of the comparative essays in compilations such as Fischer’s Comedias del siglo de oro and Shakespeare, Louise and Peter Fothergill-Payne’s Parallel Lives, Anita K. Stoll’s Vidas paralelas,³ and in the research carried out by the collaborative Theatre Without Borders, as seen in a number of essays in Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson’s Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater.⁴ What one acquires from an overall reading of the fifteen essays is a refreshing multiperspective approach to early modern theater (Spanish and English) in which the academic and the theatrical-as-stage-practice and the linguistic are instructively blurred.

If readers of Shakespeare Quarterly are more interested in Shakespeare-related essays, the contributions by Denis Rafter, Michael Payne, David Bevington, and James Bulman may appeal to them. In the first of these, placed at the end of the Translation section, Dublin-born actor and director Denis Rafter (a Spanish resident for many years) puts forth his view of what a translation of Hamlet for Spanish actors should be, and declares his negative appraisal of selected Spanish translations according to his criteria, expressed in terms of rationality, tonality, sentiment, and coherence (72-74). Rafter published a book (in Spanish) with a similar title in 2011. His essay appears to be a not quite successfully compressed...