The lively Siglo de Oro theatre festivals of Almagro, Spain, and El Paso, Texas; Madrid's Teatro de la Comedia; Washington, D.C.'s GALA Hispanic Theatre; New York City's Repertorio Español; the theatre festivals of Stratford, Ontario and Stratford-upon-Avon: theatre companies and university theatre departments are today all engaged in a constantly evolving project of performing dramatic works from Europe's first national theatre, the Comedia. It is important to take note of these international theatrical efforts because for many years Spain's “Golden Age” (or early modern, as one prefers) plays languished—in comparison to England's ongoing celebration of Shakespeare—except in limited venues or classrooms as objects for reading and critique or the occasional “revival” of Lope's Fuenteovejuna or Calderón's La vida es sueño. Such widespread performances of comedias, whether in the original language and costume or “modernized,” “recast,” or “rewritten,” present us with a happy conundrum: how to define these recreated stagings. Publicity may call them “versions,” or “updates,” or “translations,” or refundiciones; those of us who engage with the Comedia, at one time strictly academically but now more often theatrically, are concerned with what these products are because these varying terms do not carry the same value. In these brief pages I propose to discuss the refundición primarily within the context of its flowering in nineteenth-century Spain but with the occasional glance at twentieth- and twenty-first-century performances, all of which appropriate the Comedia's vibrancy.

One of the most challenging tasks for a playwright and/or theatre director undertaking a classic play is to decide how faithful to remain to the original text. (Here and below I refer to actually rewriting the text, and not necessarily staging it in its original form. However, that, too, is a subject fraught with questions similar to the ones I pose immediately below.) As we cannot know for certain the original authorial intent beyond what analysis of content and context yields for the careful reader/spectator, any restaging confronts an array of possibilities.