Staging the Spanish Golden Age Translation and Performance Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs Series

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume offers methodologies for translation and communication that can feed the creative processes of actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. It argues that collaboration between academics and theatre practitioners was instrumental in the success of the season and that the work carried out has repercussions for critical debate of Comedia. The volume posits a model for future productions of the Comedia in English, one that recognizes the need for the languages of the scholar and the theatre artist to be made mutually intelligible by the use of collaborative strategies, mediated by a consultant or dramaturg proficient in both tongues. This model applies more generally to theatrical collaborations involving a translator, writer and director, and will be useful for translation and performance processes in any language.

Kathleen Jeffs is Associate Professor at Gonzaga University. Previously, she served as Post-Doctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded project Out of the Wings (www.outofthewings.org) for which she was based at the University of Oxford. The aim of the project is to create a virtual environment geared for theatre practitioners and educators to spark new performances of Spanish drama in English translation. Dr Jeffs's doctoral research took place within the context of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Spanish Golden Age Season in 2004-05, for which she served as rehearsal dramaturg. Prior to her move to Gonzaga, she lectured on Golden Age drama at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and taught an undergraduate drama course at the University of Sussex.