How should a seventeenth-centry Spanish verse play be presented to a contemporary English-speaking audience? For many reasons, but most usually the lack of playable modern translations, the plays of the seventeenth-century Spanish Comedia have appeared infrequently on the stages of the English-speaking world. Once such translations began to appear in the final decades of the twentieth century, productions followed and audiences were once again given the opportunity of discovering the enormous riches of this theatre. The bringing of Spanish seventeenth-century verse plays to the contemporary English-speaking stage involves a number of fundamental questions. Are verse translations preferable to prose, and if so, what kind of verse? To what degree should translations aim to be "faithful"? Which kinds of plays "work", and which do not? Which values and customs of the past present no difficulties for contemporary audiences, and which need to be decoded in performance? Which kinds of staging are suitable, and which are not? To what degree, if any, should one aim for "authenticity" in staging? And so on. In this volume, a distinguished group of translators, directors, and scholars explores these and related questions in illuminating and thought-provoking essays. EDITORS: Susan Paun de Garcia and Donald Larson are Associate Professors of Spanish at the Universities of Denison and Ohio State respectively. OTHER CONTRIBUTORS: Isaac Benabu, Catherine Boyle, Victor Dixon, Susan Fischer, Michael Halberstam, David Johnston, Catherine Larson, A. Robert Lauer, Dakin Matthews, Anne McNaughton, Barbara Mujica, James Parr, Dawn Smith, Jonathan Thacker, Sharon Voros

New essays on the performance of Spanish Golden Age drama. Diverse aspects of the performance of Golden Age plays are explored in this volume, ranging in approach from the theoretical to the concrete and from the historical to the contemporary. Several essays focus on staging and performance in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain,examining areas such as audience reception, adaptations of Golden Age plays to the Italian stage, ways of representing the supernatural in hagiographic plays, and the participation ofwomen in the theatre. Other articles concentrate specifically on the text, highlighting such issues as the representation of violence; while a third group deals with modern productions, looking at issues involving casting and staging for contemporary audiences, and including semiological anaylses of actual performances. Overall, the book reflects the very latest research in comediastudies.Spanish language.