Abstract
Given their distance from modern audiences, comedias sometimes demand—to varying degrees—adaptation. This is especially true when the plays are moved not only from page to stage, but from Spanish to English. In recent scholarship, there have been many studies that justify adaptive approaches to both translating and staging the comedia, yet the debate has remained largely centered on issues of language and the individual expression of characters. Meaning-making and the reception of plays on the stage, though, are not limited to characters’ dialogue, because performance is made up of more than just text. Through an exploration of the potential role of the translator in the constructive (rather than interpretive) nature of theater, this article articulates a theoretical justification for not only linguistic but also dramaturgical and structural adaptive strategies when translating comedias. It furthermore explores this theory in practice, documenting the discoveries made when two characters are merged into one in the English-language world premiere of Tirso de Molina’s La celosa de sí misma (Jealous of Herself) in performance at the University of Oxford in November 2016.
