Originally written by seventeenth century nun Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz and adapted here by Catherine Boyle, House of Desires is a romantic farce involving a brother and sister entangled in a web of love with four others. Critically acclaimed, this play was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Spanish Golden Age 2004 season.

The Spanish Golden Age was a period of flourishing in arts and literature, and in particular of drama, in Spain, coinciding with the political decline and fall of the Habsburgs. This term does not generally imply any great precision about dates, but it begins no earlier than 1492, ending with the death of he last great writer of the period, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, died in 1681.In 2003, the RSC produced a season of Spanish Golden Age plays, including classics such as "The Dog in the Manger", "House of Desires and Pedro", and "The Great Pretender" establishing an innovative working process that laid emphasis on the plays as pieces of theatre, dynamic and alive, and on the principle of respect for the plays' historical contexts. The essays in this book, written by some of the world's foremost scholars of the Spanish Golden Age, explore some of the many issues that arose from this season and the complex nature of translating and staging plays from the Spanish Golden Age on the English-speaking stage.

From Ushuaia, the southernmost town in the world to the edges of the great Parana river, and from the city of Buenos Aires to its fertile plains and the estuaries of northern Argentina, The Oberon Anthology of Contemporary Argentinian Plays provides a unique insight into the preoccupations and the creative responses of one of the major theatre-producing countries in Latin America. _x000D_ Includes the plays: _x000D_ La vida extraordinaria (Extraordinary Life) by Mariano Tenconi Blanco, translated by Catherine Boyle _x000D_ Pato verde (Green Duck) by Fabian Miguel Diaz, translated by Gwen MacKeith _x000D_ Fonavi by Leonel Giacometto, translated by Rosalind Harvey _x000D_ Nou Fiuter (No Future) by Franco Calluso, translated by William Gregory _x000D_ Poema ordinario (Poor Men's Poetry) by Juan Ignacio Fernandez, translated by William Gregory _x000D_ Fuego de dragon sobre dragon de madera (Dragon Fire over Wood Dragon) by Candelaria Sabagh, translated by Kate Eaton