In March 2010, I had one of my most unforgettable experiences with Tirso de Molina. We had brought our University of Massachusetts’ production of Marta la piadosa [Marta the Divine] to the Siglo Festival at El Paso’s Chamizal National Memorial. I was the show’s translator and adapter, and my perspective on the play had always been from the audience’s side of the proscenium, whether during rehearsals and performances from the previous November’s run at UMass or brush-ups for our Chamizal remount. We were able to bring only a skeleton crew to El Paso; all hands were needed literally “on deck” to crew the performance. Where was the need greatest? Costumes, of course! Along with costume designer Felicia Malachite and dramaturg Sarah Grunnah, I got swept up in the frenzy of the backstage costume-change pattern. In the dimly lit wing space off-left, we helped harried actors get in and out of breastplates, shawls, head-dresses, hoop skirts, belts, booties, stockings, and accessories—all in near darkness and sometimes with just a few seconds to spare before an actor was called upon to exit our murky world and enter the audience’s brilliantly illuminated one. It was one of the most exhilarating and also one of the most exhausting nights I have ever spent in a theater, and it gave me new appreciation for Tirso: for the technical complexity involved in engineering the spectacle taking place on stage, and for the virtuosity required of his performers—especially actresses—who are called on to juggle multiple intricate tasks for the entire run time of a show, on stage and off.

From my perspective as a theater practitioner, Tirso’s dramaturgy, at least in his comedies, is rooted in the potentialities of costume, in ways that distinguish him from his early modern Spanish playwriting peers. My observations come from a close knowledge of his texts from a series of productions that I have been associated with over the last thirty years.

All dramatic texts hold a tension between what is explicitly inscribed on the page and what, while absent, is nevertheless implied. While this tension derives from many factors, it is ultimately rooted in the dueling audiences to which theater scripts make their appeal. On the one hand, plays have in some fashion a literary function. They communicate to an imagined posterity (including directors, actors, etc.) the intentions and the authority of their creators at a time when the author is absent. On the other hand, scripts also document the circumstances of their original performances: what lines the actors said and what major stage directions they undertook. But playtexts are highly imperfect instruments; they are inevitably shot through with fissures, gaps, inconsistencies, since capturing a live performance is an impossible dream. A script, then, is the residue of a live moment masquerading as something permanent, inviting repetition. This haunted quality of the text speaks to why theater powerfully fosters, to cite Marvin Carlson, “a simultaneous awareness of something previously experienced and of something being offered in the present … which can only be fully appreciated by a kind of doubleness of perception” (51). An adapter of classical theater, I believe, must be attendant to these gaps, these ghosts of the original performance haunting the interstices of the written text.

At first glance, Spanish Golden Age comedias may not appear to be so shot through with these fissures. Unlike Shakespeare's plays, they generally do not present major variants; there are no questions akin to Folio vs. Quarto, and hence textual questions tend toward matters of editorial minutiae. Comedias also follow a highly regular, transparent dramaturgical formula. Virtually all are divided into three acts; there is no ambiguity about where these act breaks fall; and each act has its own clear internal structure with a beginning, middle, and end, situated within an overall linear plot that is roughly Aristotelian, as filtered through Lope. Perhaps most importantly, comedias feature rigid versification schemes.

The 400-year stage history of the Comedia has often been a history of these plays in freewheeling adaptation—or, as the Spanish put it, refundición. Literally, this word means “recasting” (as in metal) or “comprehension” (as in the inclusion of previous elements into something). In the context of the Spanish Comedia, however, the word, in use since the eighteenth century, has the specific meaning of a theatrical reworking of a playwright's script, usually in which the original has been reshaped, altered, re-imagined, or transformed in some way so as to become something new for a contemporary audience. In today's parlance, we might call these “remakes.” This book examines the variety of ways in which Spanish classical theater has been remade over the years—and is still being remade around the world today. We contend that the stage history of the Comedia is very much a history of the plays-as-remakes, and that the rubric of adaptation is a particularly useful one for consideration of the plays in performance.

Our contention is not new. Certain Spanish critics maintain that the Comedia is a theatrical system in perpetual renewal, always being remade, even from its inception. Golden Age playwrights such as Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca might be called first-generation remakers, imitating and reworking their models. Eighteenth-century writers such as Zamora and Cañizares constitute the second generation, their transitional period intimating new ideology and structures in the comedias they produced. The regular use of scenic décor as well as the influence of neoclassicism gave birth to a third period of adaptations beginning near the end of the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth. Though the word refundición has not frequently been applied to more contemporary Comedia adaptations, theater practitioners frequently act as adapters in the ways they substantially revise, modify, or adjust these works for the stage, or indeed transform them into other media.

Mainstream Comedia criticism has looked disparagingly upon these adaptations, and the term refundición has therefore taken on a negative connotation.