Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre


Book Description

Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre offers an account of Shakespeare's presence on the Spanish stage, from a production of the first Spanish rendering of Jean-François Ducis's Hamlet in 1772 to the creative and controversial work of directors like Calixto Bieito and Alex Rigola in the early 21st century. Despite a largely indirect entrance into the culture, Shakespeare has gone on to become the best and known and most widely performed of all foreign playwrights. What is more, by the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century there have been more productions of Shakespeare than of all of Spain's major Golden Age dramatists put together. This book explores and explains this spectacular rise to prominence and offers a timely overview of Shakespeare's place in Spain's complex and vibrant culture.




Reading Performance


Book Description

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.




Shakespeare and Latinidad


Book Description

Shakespeare and Latinidad is a collection of scholarly and practitioner essays in the field of Latinx theatre that specifically focuses on Latinx productions and appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays.




Three Spanish Golden Age Plays


Book Description

Three classic Spanish plays, made famous by Shakespeare and Webster Two of the most famous and successful playwrights of Spain's Golden Age of playwriting were Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Rojas Zorrilla (1607-48). From their prodigious output, the three plays in this volume, based on similar sources to Shakespeare's and Webster's versions, provide a fascinating comparison with their Jacobean counterparts. Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, in contrast to Webster's play, focuses on the nobility of love, with characters who are complex and appealing. His Romeo-and-Juliet story, The Capulets and Montagues, is a fast-moving mixture of serious and comic, with an ending that will surprise and entertain. Rojas' treatment of Cleopatra, with its rich imagery, emphasises the love theme, held within a knot of jealous relationships. A full introduction by Gwynne Edwards sets the plays in context and provides a thorough study of the individual works.




Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires


Book Description

This volume presents the proceedings of the international conference “Theatre Cultures within Globalising Empires: Looking at Early Modern England and Spain”, held in 2012 as part of the ERC Advanced Grant Project Early Modern European Drama and the Cultural Net (DramaNet). Implementing the concept of culture as a virtual network, it investigates Early modern European drama and its global dissemination. The 12 articles of the volume – all written by experts in the field teaching in the United Kingdom, the USA, Russia, Switzerland, India and Germany – focus on a selection of English and Spanish dramas from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Analysing and comparing motifs, formal parameters as well as plot structures, they discuss the commonalities and differences of Early modern drama in England and Spain.




The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus


Book Description

"The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus" by William Shakespeare is a gripping and intense drama that explores themes of revenge, betrayal, and the destructive consequences of violence. Set in ancient Rome, the play follows the tragic downfall of the noble general Titus Andronicus and his family as they become embroiled in a cycle of vengeance and bloodshed. At the heart of the story is the brutal conflict between Titus Andronicus and Tamora, Queen of the Goths, whose sons are executed by Titus as retribution for their crimes. In retaliation, Tamora and her lover, Aaron the Moor, orchestrate a series of heinous acts of revenge against Titus and his family, plunging them into a spiral of madness and despair. As the body count rises and the atrocities escalate, Titus is consumed by grief and rage, leading to a climactic showdown that culminates in a shocking and tragic conclusion. Along the way, Shakespeare explores themes of honor, justice, and the nature of humanity, offering a searing indictment of the cycle of violence and the capacity for cruelty that lies within us all.




Remaking the Comedia


Book Description

Leading Golden Age theatre experts examine the ways that comedias have been adapted and reinvented, offering a broad performance history of the genre for scholars and practicioners alike. This volume brings together twenty-six essays from the world's leading scholars and practitioners of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Examining the startlingly wide variety of ways that Spanish comedias have been adapted, re-envisioned, and reinvented, the book makes the case that adaptation is a crucial lens for understanding the performance history of the genre. The essays cover a wide range of topics, from the early stage history of the comedia through numerous modern and contemporary case studies, as well as the transformation of the comedia into other dramatic genres, such as films, musicals, puppetry, and opera. The essays themselves are brief and accessible to non-specialists. This book will appeal not only to Golden Age scholars and students but also to theater practitioners, as well as to anyone interested in the theory and practice of adaptation. Harley Erdman is Professor of Theaterat the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Susan Paun de García is Professor of Spanish at Denison University. Contributors: Sergio Adillo Rufo, Karen Berman, Robert E. Bayliss, Laurence Boswell, Bruce R.Burningham, Amaya Curieses Irarte, Rick Davis, Harley Erdman, Susan L. Fischer, Charles Victor Ganelin, Francisco García Vicente, Alejandro González Puche, Valerie Hegstrom, Kathleen Jeffs, David Johnston, Gina Kaufmann, Catherine Larson, Donald R. Larson, Barbara Mujica, Susan Paun de García, Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez, Veronika Ryjik, Jonathan Thacker, Laura L. Vidler, Duncan Wheeler, Amy Williamsen, Jason Yancey




Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men


Book Description

Created when James I granted royal patronage to the former Chamberlain's Men in 1603, the King's Men were the first playing company to exercise a transformative influence on Shakespeare's plays. Not only did Shakespeare write his plays with them in mind, but they were also the first group to revive his plays, and the first to have them revised, either by Shakespeare himself or by other dramatists after his retirement. Drawing on theatre history, performance studies, cultural history and book history, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men reappraises the company as theatre artists, analysing in detail the performance practices, cultural contexts and political pressures that helped to shape and reshape Shakespeare's plays between 1603 and 1642. Reconsidering casting and acting styles, staging and playing venues, audience response, influence and popularity, and local, national and international politics, the book presents case-studies of performances of Macbeth, The Tempest, The Winter's Tale, Richard II, Henry VIII, Othello and Pericles alongside a broader reappraisal of the repertory of the company and the place of Shakespeare's plays within it.




Ophelia


Book Description

It is astonishing how deeply the figure of Ophelia has been woven into the fabric of Spanish literature and the visual arts – from her first appearance in eighteenth-century translations of Hamlet, through depictions by seminal authors such as Espronceda, Bécquer and Lorca, to turn-of-the millennium figurations. This provocative, gendered figure has become what both male and female artists need her to be – is she invisible, a victim, mad, controlled by the masculine gaze, or is she an agent of her own identity? This well-documented study addresses these questions in the context of Iberia, whose poets, novelists and dramatists writing in Spanish, Catalan and Galician, as well as painters and photographers, have brought Shakespeare’s heroine to life in new guises. Ophelia performs as an authoritative female author, as new perspectives reflect and authorise the gender diversity that has gained legitimacy in Spanish society since the political Transition.




Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia


Book Description

Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia is a nearly unique transnational study of the theater / performance traditions of early modern Spain and England. Divided into three parts, the book focuses first on translating for the stage, examining diverse approaches to the topic. It asks, for example, whether plays should be translated to sound as if they were originally written in the target language or if their “foreignness” should be maintained and even highlighted. Section II deals with interpretation and considers such issues as uses of polyphony, the relationship between painting and theater, and representations of women. Section III highlights performance issues such as music in modern performances of classical theater and the construction of stage character. Written by a highly respected group of British and American scholars and theater practitioners, this book challenges the traditional divide between the academy and the stage and between one theatrical culture and another.