The Spanish Golden Age in English: Perspectives on Performance (review)

In its ground-breaking 2004 season, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced four Spanish comedias in English: Lope's The Dog in the Manger (El perro del hortelano), Tirso's Tamar's Vengeance (La venganza de Tamar), Sor Juana's House of Desires (Los empeños de una casa), and Cervantes's Pedro, the Great Pretender (Pedro de Urdemalas). The Company, under the artistic direction of Laurence Boswell, initiated a new approach to translating Golden Age comedias for the modern stage. From a selection of "literal" translations, the four plays were chosen by the directors, who then gave them to writers "to produce the stage version, and an academic was assigned to each production as adviser. The model was in principle that the team would be: director, translator, academic adviser" (11). This slim volume, comprised of eight essays from leading academics (mostly from the U.K.) and three interviews with renowned translators and directors, offers insights into some of the many issues that emerged from the complex enterprise of translating and staging plays from this period on the English-speaking stage, with special reference to the RSC's 2004 season of Spanish Golden Age plays in English translation.

A number of essays deal with general issues of the genre. Jonathan Thacker provides a thorough but succinct history of the performance of the comedia in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century, focusing on the difficulties this rich but unfamiliar genre presents to stage critics "trained" in Shakespeare. Related to this is Susan Fischer's essay, "Aspectuality, Performativity and 'Foreign' Comedia," in which (following Jonathan Bate) she discusses aspectuality, a type of dialogism, as a key concept for interpreting, translating, performing, and reviewing Lope in general and El castigo sin venganza in particular. David Johnston follows this line of thought in "Historicizing the Spanish Golden Age," reflecting on translation as a form of "theatre practice" and how "the meanings encased in any text, in any place, in any time, shift according to the viewing frame, the context" (51). Catherine Boyle's "Perspectives on Loss and Discovery" refers to García Lorca's La Barraca as an exemplar of effective adapting, cutting, and connecting classical texts in order to bring "Living Theatre" as opposed to "Deadly Theatre" to modern audiences. Particularly interesting is her review of the reception of the RSC season in Madrid (where plays were presented in English with Spanish surtitles based on the translated text, not the original). In "Beyond the Canon," Victor Dixon suggests possibilities for future translation and performance from among full-length works of Lope, Tirso, Calderón, Ruiz de Alarcón, Rojas Zorrilla, and Moreto, also adding suggestions from the autos of Gil Vicente. Would-be translators in search of performable plays would be advised to consult Dixon's proposals.

Of particular interest are the essays and discussions of Pedro de Urdemalas, one of a strikingly small number of Cervantes's plays to have been translated and performed in English. While the Entremeses have been translated frequently, full-length plays by Cervantes have not. In the nineteenth century, Gordon Willoughby James Gyll published Numantia, A Tragedy and The Commerce of Algiers (1870). Fifteen years later, James Y. Gibson translated Numantia. A Tragedy (1885). In the twentieth century, Pedro, the Artful Dodger appeared in an anthology of eight works translated by Walter Starkie, but Adrian Mitchell's promised version of El cerco de Numancia never appeared. In any case, these works were by and large intended to be read, and were never performed professionally. It was not until 2004 that a full-length play by Cervantes was brought to the boards by a major English-speaking professional company. And, as it turned out, Philip Osment's version of Pedro de Urdemalas was the most controversial translation of the RSC season, essentially for its "rhyme schemes and metre that follow Cervantes's original, prompting in English the question of the role of verse in theatre" (63). Lyn Gardner...