The Nutcrackers: Iberian Variations on a Short Farce

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside original plays, Iberian playwrights produced translations, adaptations, and other forms of textual appropriation. Within this corpus, the sub-genre of short farces (‘entremezes’) is still largely unknown, but it presents a fruitful field for the intersection of Iberian studies and theatre translation studies. By demonstrating the complex nature of the (inter)relations between the Spanish Entremés del valiente (1691) and the Portuguese Entremez do soldado valentão (1773)/‘Entremez do Pinalvo’ (undated manuscript), this chapter revisits an understudied area of the history of Iberian theatre translation. It contributes to the understanding that the Iberian interliterary system is ‘more than the sum of its parts’ (Resina 2013), and that (historical) Portuguese–Spanish rivalry ultimately promoted the creation, domestication, appropriation, and manipulation of theatrical products in order to affirm different cultural identities.