Going by the strength of the first two publications of the new Peter Lang series, Spanish Golden Age Studies, this initiative is very much to be welcomed. Both constitute important contributions to the discipline. The first, a volume of essays edited by Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, arising from a symposium held at Manchester Metropolitan University in April 2018, is a timely reflection on the state of the field of Golden Age Studies, predominantly in the United Kingdom, although it does include important reflections on its place in modern Spain and the United States. A sense of crisis in the discipline has been with us for some time. UCL ran a symposium on the state and future of the field just under 20 years ago but perhaps this has been magnified recently as part of a more generalized siege mentality in arts and humanities as a whole and an even greater one in languages. The notion of “teaching the old through the new” seeks to address two related problems. Firstly, the challenge of making strange, intellectually challenging linguistic artifacts attractive, accessible, and manageable for students who are increasingly audiovisual learners. Secondly how to make these strange materials feel relevant in a higher education sector increasingly dominated by instrumentalist conceptions of learning. A central presupposition of their critique is a declining capacity for reading. One of the most significant proposals in the volume, registered in several chapters, is to take analogous cultural forms to build “cognitive bridges” allowing learners to relate the unfamiliar to contemporary contexts.To some extent in tension with this approach is the delightfully pugnacious and brilliant opening riposte from Jeremy Lawrance, who underlines the indispensable role played by difference in both generating interest and learning. Defending the intrinsic value and pleasure of the Golden Age text, he makes the case that their unique unrepeatability arises from an otherness that cannot simply be appropriated by our concerns but requires us to be appropriated by them. The literary text is not information. The notion of the afterlife of the work, downstream contexts, proposes that as its material form becomes increasingly unfamiliar its truth value becomes increasingly palpable in a growing foreignness and alterity in which it is renewed and transformed. Literary theoretical movements and the globalization of literary studies propose a comparability based on discursive transparency, which is to ignore the aesthetic or in Emily Apter’s phrase the “poetics of translational difference.” For Lawrence, the canon has been one of the main victims of the emphasis on critique rather than commentary, which keeps intrinsic value and the aesthetic in view. A fascinating and vital study of what is being taught at UK universities by Stuart Davis corroborates Lawrance’s critique, showing how there has been a broadening of the range of texts offered and a move away from the canonical literary to historical and visual culture with a notable trans-Atlantic inflection. For those of us with skin in the game, it is a concern that just under half of Hispanic Departments in the country now offer no Golden Age whatsoever. Perceived ease and accessibility have undoubtedly played a role in this reshaping, however; equally significant, however, is how much is at stake for learners, along with a growing lack of familiarity attendant on the diminishing place of the period in the canon. Students want intellectual stretch and challenge unless it impairs their attainment.The Francoist promotion of Spain’s imperial glories has tarnished the celebration of its literature under democracy. Almudena García González rightly acclaims the sophisticated, witty, and playful TVE series, El ministerio del tiempo, as a tool for introducing students to history, literary figures, and even poetic ideas from the period. Its mash up of sci-fi and historical fiction, under the aegis of the idea that Spain’s history must be protected at all costs and remain what it is, offers a demythologising vision of its past that, in the words of Paul Julian Smith, is “affectionate but sceptical” while being genuinely “apasionante.” One of the powers of historical fiction is to reinsert us in media res, back into the drama and contingency of history. Two chapters specifically reference hip-hop and rap as ways of animating Golden Age poetry. Ted Bergman offers 50 Cent as bridge to Quevedo’s jácaras, foregrounding the figure of the anti-hero, dark humor, bravado, and cynicism implicit in the gangsta rap genre, fueled by professional and aesthetic competition. Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez takes this further. comparing the tit for tat between Góngora, Lope, and Quevedo with the East Coast–West Coast rivalry that marked the hip-hop scene in the late 1990s (NWA, Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Nas, Jay Z) and claimed several lives. Rubén Cristóbal Hornillos takes this rich set of analogies and affinities beyond the metric to look at the ways lyric can be used to open vistas onto classic poetry, exploring San Juan de la Cruz and Sor Juana in relation to reggaeton and folk rock, which of course draw a surprising amount of their imagery and metaphorics from this prior tradition. Karl McLaughlin explores how to get out from under the pall cast by Received Pronunciation versions of the classics, Shakespeare in this case, by searching for parallels that will resonate with students. Here, the seventeenth century’s poetic academies, salons, and competitions are set alongside Twitter storms, celebrity spats, and talent shows. All of these approaches are particularly effective in enlivening the consideration of the formal poetic qualities of lyric, although the contemporariness of their parallels fade fast in the churn of twenty-first-century music and celebrity culture.Another important approach to teaching the literature of the Golden Age promoted here is its combination with translation activities. Idoya Puig champions a multiliteracies approach in relation to “La española inglesa,” taking advantage of the 2015 TVE film and simultaneous need to incorporate intercultural awareness, aural, visual, and digital literacies into traditional pedagogy and explore the new social and collaborative possibilities afforded by digital technologies to how “traditional” texts are explored and taught. Such an approach is modeled by Jules Whicker’s use of concordance tools to produce word frequency lists and word clouds from a Góngora poem for a module exploring literature through translation, which culminates in students comparing the versions they have produced, part collaboratively, and part individually with published ones. Such approaches do undoubtedly support the deep engagement with the realia of the work and close reading of language. Collin McKinney advocates a different form of comparison, using the transgeneric adaptation of Don Quixote as a graphic novel as a support for introducing the novel itself, one advantage of which is the effectiveness of the form in conveying some of the humor of the original. Aroa Algaba Granero and Sara Sánchez-Hernández promote a performance studies approach and the use of contemporary performances of Golden Age drama as a crucial part of their pedagogy. Gema Cienfuegos Antelo proposes a transversal approach to Golden Age theatre focused on the female voice. The selection of like-minded female characters facilitates the identification of patterns and conventions in a student body lacking a broad contextual knowledge of the drama. The embodied, doing, and creative response are implicit in all the chapters explicitly addressing classroom methodologies.One thing that is clear from this cri de coeur is that the literary qualities of these texts need to remain at the heart of how and why they are taught. The need for critical reflection on how we approach Golden Age literature is underlined by Duncan Wheeler’s insightful concluding chapter, evaluating the possibilities and downsides of using cinematic adaptations, following a review of the cultural politics around education and national heritage. Pointing to the erosion of the place of the Golden Age within primary and secondary education since the Transición, he notes the problem that many of the Spanish attempts to bring their classics to the silver screen have been notably less successful than their British equivalents, especially in terms of international projection. Greater attention is needed to how Spain’s rich cultural patrimony can be communicated in ways that combine education and entertainment for a broad range of learners both at home and abroad. As Lisa Jardine once said about Yann Martel’s novel The Life of Pi, without the tiger the eponymous hero would not have survived. Similarly, for us, there are positive signs for the future, not least this inspiring and innovative volume of essays, despite the tiger.Alba Carmona’s tour de force Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva is a definitive consideration of film versions of the comedia. Beautifully written and painstakingly documented in the face of the challenge posed by the absence in some cases of the films themselves. She takes us from the 1910s and the fragmentary remains of Adrià Gual’s El alcalde de Zalamea, whose adaptation as far as can be reconstructed is aimed at the aesthetic education of its audience rather than being pointedly political, through the 1920s and Ludwig Berger’s 1920 film version of the same play, Der Richter von Zalamea, that emphasized the question of honor, its Catholicism and superstition, transforming it into an “españolada” for its German audience. Stopping briefly, Carmona considers another lost film, an early biopic of Lope de Vega, La musa y el Fénix from 1935, which appears to have aspects in common with a theatre project under consideration by Federico García Lorca and coincided with the early work of La Barraca and Teatro Popular who sought to educate the people through a poet seen as revolutionary and of the people. Under the dictatorship, Antonio Román filmed a version of Fuenteovejuna (1947): praised for exalting “virtudes raciales,” it exaggerated the villainy of Fernán Gómez, even as it drew a veil over the sexual violence of the play and exalted the role of the Reyes Católicos, in keeping with their wider idealization under the Franco regime. A year earlier, a musical comedy version of La viuda valenciana directed by Fernando Cortés, adapted by Max Aub, had premiered in Mexico City. This had followed Aub’s collaboration with María Teresa León and Rafael Alberti the previous year on a film of La dama duende directed by Luis Saslavsky, which was shown in Buenos Aires. Here again, liberal use had been made of music and dance to lighten the tone. Neither film was given a general release in Spain no doubt due to their association with republican exiles like Aub and Alberti. The triumph of conservative appropriations of the classics have meant that the radical tradition headed by Lorca, Aub, Alberti, and others recognizing the modernity of these playwrights and their availability to progressive readings have largely been forgotten.Further conservative filmic readings of the comedia appeared in the 1950s, with a version of Don Juan, mixing Zorrilla and Tirso’s versions, directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, that emphasized Catholic redemption. A similarly reactionary version of El alcalde by José Gutiérrez Maesso emphasizing the heroic qualities of Pedro Crespo and his family, graced Spanish screens in 1954 to little acclaim, augmenting the presence of Philip II, six years after Spain had constituted itself as a kingdom again under Franco. In 1964, Vittorio Cottafavi directed an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s little known comedia, Las famosas asturianas, as Los cien caballeros, a work dramatizing the early period of the Reconquista and offering an unflattering picture of both Christian and Moors. The government worried about the negative representation of Muslim characters, given the regime’s dependence at that time on the Arabic world and the film’s light-hearted comic tone meant that its critical reception was similarly subdued. The first verse adaptation to screen finally arrived in 1974 with Juan Guerrero Zamora’s version of Fuenteovejuna, whose violence, often a gesture of political opposition, provoked censors to make 47 cuts, which led the director not to attend his own premiere. Another version of El alcalde by left-wing director Mario Camus appeared in 1973, shot through with indeterminacy in the script given that no censor would have passed a film that overtly represented a capricious and corrupt justice system.Twenty years would pass before another translation of Lope onto the silver screen would be attempted, with the ex-director of RTVE Pilar Miró’s version of the then little-known romantic(?) comedy El perro del hortelano in 1996. Despite skepticism, the film went on to be a commercial and critical success. The subtle changes made to Lope humanized the protagonist Diana, thus toning down the misogyny of the original and downplaying of Teodoro’s vaulting ambition. Carmona traces in forensic detail the extent to which Miró’s version may have built on a Russian version, Sobaka na sene, shown on Soviet TV in 1978 by Yan Frid. Passing over the commercial disaster of Manuel Iborra’s La dama boba from 2006, unfairly ignored by critics and the public, Carmona’s final chapter examines the last decade. It takes us from the 2010 Lope biopic by Andrucha Waddington, which focused reductively and romanticized the period of the dramatist’s life from about 1583–1588, availing itself of the cliché trope of the self-destructive genius, to his appearance in Cervantes contra Lope (2016) and El ministerio del tiempo (2015–2017). These most recent outings of the Fénix on screen are less overtly mythologizing and although they present a less than heroic version of the so-called womanizing playwright, there is a leavening injection of humor and wry winks at the popular historiography.In her conclusions, Carmona reflects on the lack of success, either commercial or critical, achieved by any of these filmic rewritings and compares this inheritance unfavorably with the English-speaking world’s. However, despite this somewhat disheartening end, the most recent outings of Spain’s Golden Age comedia on-screen have seen more playful, humorous, and less reverential experimentation. At the same time, much will depend on the success of the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico in its search for commercial success based on innovative and accessible stagings of the classics. The vast corpus of Golden Age comedias with their immeasurable potential for adaptation and transferral to the screen awaits that animating moment that will finally establish a tradition that cannot be ignored.