Rehearsal and Translation

This chapter discusses the degree to which the texts in the RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season accomplished Boswell’s goal for these to be ‘accurate translations’ and ‘not adaptations’. Despite both theoretical and practical problems presented by using a ‘literal’ translation as part of the translation process of the comedia, it is a valuable step in translating plays of the Golden Age for English audiences. The wider purpose of this chapter is to develop a vocabulary and a vision of how the literal-to-performance-text transmission process might be improved. This allows for a more symbiotic relationship between the work of scholars, critics, and translators on the one hand, and that of theatre professionals on the other, in order to create a more robust comedia performance tradition and a model which will be useful for other foreign translations.