Translocating Humour to Seventeenth-Century England: The Comic Afterlife of Spanish Drama

Abstract

Abstract The term ‘Golden Age’ broadly describes a period (the mid-sixteenth to late-seventeenth centuries) of great literary flowering in Spain, above all in theatre, where honour, love and humour emerged as recurring motifs. Unsurprisingly, Caroline and even more so Restoration England took an interest in the genre and imported several Spanish comedias, which made a modest but essential qualitative contribution to the London stage during this age. This essay centres on the purposes and limitations of humour in Spanish Golden Age drama, and on the extent to which the linguistic and semiotic aspects linked to comic performance were successfully carried over into the seventeenth-century English versions. By examining a corpus of performance-oriented plays in translation, I seek to illustrate the way in which contemporary British translators rendered comicality, studying how it was maintained, modified or distorted in the process, and taking into account the particular landscape proper to drama-translation practice and its degree of acceptance in the recipient culture. The dramatic areas in which comic devices function – plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle – are given special attention. The results reveal how practitioners may have obliterated the so-called Spanish flavour of the original comedy in an attempt to seek deliberately audience-friendly solutions, so as to fall in line with the expectations of the target theatrical context.