Staging the Spanish Golden Age: Translation and Performance by Kathleen Jeffs (review)

this interdisciplinary monograph combines the author's firsthand experience in comedia performance with the literary analysis of a theater scholar, and the resulting study enriches the ongoing conversation about comedia performance for English-speaking audiences. Kathleen Jeffs nods to recent scholarship by Catherine Boyle and David Johnston, Susan L. Fischer, Susan Paun de García and Donald R. Larson, and Duncan Wheeler, among others, while providing her own insightful contribution to this growing field. Jeffs leverages her work as translator and script consultant during the Royal Shakespeare Company's (hereafter, RSC) 2004–05 Spanish season to offer a behind-the-scenes view of the productions and, compellingly, to propose "a model for the successful collaboration between scholars and practitioners engaged in the ever-evolving process of bringing translated drama to the stage" (10).

To frame her discussion of the RSC's season as a specific case study, Jeffs draws from translation and performance studies while working through the lens of participant observation and focusing on the "roles and responsibilities of the consultants and collaborators" (6). Her analysis of the processes that contribute to the final productions builds on studies of versification, characterization, and metatheater in the comedia. As she notes, her project seeks to elucidate and propose viable solutions to the complications that arise when traditional scholarship, understood as textual analysis, is cast into a supporting role in comedia performance. Jeffs divides her study into an introduction and six chapters supported by five appendices, a well-researched bibliography, and an index that is helpful for those interested in a specific work. The plays that receive the most attention, notably because of Jeffs's close participation in their preparatory phases, are Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano, translated by David Johnston as The Dog in the Manger and directed by Laurence Boswell, and Cervantes's Pedro de Urdemalas, translated by Philip Osment as Pedro, the Great Pretender and directed by Mike Alfreds. Jeffs also considers James Fenton's translation of Tirso de Molina's La venganza de Tamar (Tamar's Revenge, directed by Simon Usher), Catherine Boyle's translation of Sor Juana's Los empeños de una casa (House of Desires, directed by Nancy Meckler), and Sarah Woods's translation of Calderón's La hija del aire (Daughter of the Air, radio play).

In chapter 1, Jeffs contextualizes the comedia within its historical time and space as well as in academic discussions today. Special attention is paid to the plays that were performed during the RSC season and their authors. Jeffs addresses contemporary scholarship's move from purely textual exegesis to considerations of performance, which leads into a discussion of the cooperation between academic consultants and theater practitioners in the play-selection process. This section provides a fascinating view into how such interaction developed during the RSC season with lengthy citations from email correspondence between the academic consultants and Laurence Boswell, the Spanish season's artistic director charged with selecting the plays. Jeffs describes and reflects on the steps involved in this process, namely, establishing a set of criteria, proposing different works, and selecting the final five plays. As Jeffs indicates, this model can serve future collaborations working to bring the comedia to the stage.

Chapter 2 describes the ways in which the Spanish play text moves onto the English-speaking stage. Anchoring her discussion in translation theory, Jeffs describes the RSC's process of using literal translations to form and inform the final performance script, following the RSC's artistic director Michael Boyd's charge "to give the audiences translations, not adaptations" (1). In the case of The Dog in the Manger, Jeffs emphasizes her role as a script consultant who aided Boswell in working Johnson's literal translation into the final performance text. Jeffs provides useful charts of this process in the form of side by side comparisons of the original, the literal translation, and the rehearsal draft within the text of the chapter and in the first two appendices. Jeffs...