Though the Royal Shakespeare Company set a deliciously high standard for producing comedias on the British stage with their 2004–05 Spanish Golden Age season, since that time only a handful of major companies have risen to the challenge. Laurence Boswell, the artistic director for that RSC season, has carried on his project to remake the Comedia for British audiences, this time in his new role as the artistic director for the ustinov Studio in Bath. The first Golden Age play he translated and directed in Bath was Calderón's No hay burlas con el amor, reborn as The Phoenix of madrid. Form and content interact dynamically in the Comedia, and in this study I investigate Boswell's formal translation choices in terms of verse forms, rhyme, and structure, and examine the decisions he made in terms of the relationships between masters and servants, and of course his rendering of the verbally dexterous Beatriz. Boswell articulates his aim in bringing Golden Age plays to the English stage thus:

Boswell remade No hay burlas into a light-hearted evening of theatre that raised the play from the ashes of relative obscurity in Britain into a colorful and contemporary exploration of the changeable flight path of love.

My past experience with this director means that I did not attend The Phoenix of madrid as a detached observer. I have collaborated with Boswell since 2004, serving as script consultant and rehearsal dramaturg for two of the plays in the RSC season, and as script consultant for his English Fuenteovejuna in Canada.