Bilingual Shakespeares

In honor of Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, Carla Della Gatta looks at the extraordinary mix of Latinx-inspired productions and adaptations performed on stages, large and small, across the United States.

Bilingual Shakespeares are adaptations and productions that integrate a significant portion of another language into Shakespeare’s plays. Productions that have fewer than 25% of the words in another language are perceived by audiences as “semi-bilingual” theater. When more than 25% of Shakespeare’s words are translated, audiences perceive a production to be bilingual. This type of creative work has been staged across the United States, in big and small theaters, Shakespeare theaters and community theaters. The word “Shakespeare” in Bilingual Shakespeares is pluralized to connote both linguistic hybridity and a Cultural Studies lens.

Today, many bilingual and semi-bilingual Shakespeares are in fact multilingual theater, bringing in tertiary languages or amplifying the diversity in Shakespearean English. Shakespeare disseminated new terms and phrases through his works, and his verse and prose are comprised of words from a variety of languages and linguistic origins. It is for this reason that I noted in an interview with the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast that Shakespeare’s plays are not monolingual English-language plays.

While Shakespeare has been translated into languages all over the world, in honor of Hispanic/Latinx Heritage Month, I look to the diversity of Latinx-inspired productions and adaptations as examples of the many ways that Shakespeare can be made semi-bilingual, bilingual, and multilingual in performance.

The Spanish language is a key signifier of Latinx cultures, both onstage and off. But it can also be used to make bilingual Shakespeares without a specific tie to a Latinx culture or setting. For example, Merced Shakespearefest, located in Merced, California, staged a bilingual adaptation of Richard II, Ricardo II (directed by William Wolfgang, Maria Nguyen-Cruz, and Angel Nunez) in 2020. Since it was mounted during COVID-19, it was filmed, and as the dialogue alternated between Spanish and English, the captions did so as well. This gave both monolingual and bilingual viewers the option to shift between reading and listening.

This type of dramaturgy—the context of the production—is a linguistic dramaturgy: it integrates Spanish and/or Indigenous or African languages into Shakespeare’s dialogue to create bilingual and semi-bilingual theater. An example of a multilingual Shakespearean adaptation is Carlos-Zenen Trujillo’s 2019 adaptation of The Winter’s Tale, The Island in Winter / La Isla es Invierno (directed by Scott Palmer) staged at Bag & Baggage Productions in Hillsboro, Oregon. Trujillo’s script included Shakespearean English, modern-day English, Spanish, and the Yoruba language of Lucumí.

Making Shakespeare Latinx, or Latinx Shakespeares, involve integrating Latinx cultures into a Shakespearean play. The Spanish language is always a part of Latinx Shakespeares, even if it is only heard in the larger soundscape. In Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s 2022 Measure for Measure (directed by Henry Godinez), the action was set in 1950s Cuba, with a diverse group of predominantly Latinx actors, many of whom speak Spanish. Director Henry Godinez chose not to integrate any Spanish into the text, but the opening musical number (that is not part of Shakespeare’s play) included music and some dialogue in Spanish.

A different form of bilingual theater occurs when theaters perform the same show with the same cast in different languages on alternating nights. The 1993 production of Edgar Landa’s The Taming of la Shrew (directed by Colin Cox) by Will & Company in Los Angeles had the same cast perform the show in Shakespearean English on one night and then entirely in Landa’s contemporary Spanish translation on the next, alternating throughout the run. The show included multiple actors in gender-swapped roles, including siblings Benito Martinez (Widow) and Benita Martinez (Grumio), and their sister Patrice Martinez, who had starred in the 1986 film, ¡Three Amigos!, playing Kate.

Spanish-language Shakespearean productions are less often performed in the United States, with the most prominent exception the widely-performed Pablo Neruda 1961 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo y Julieta. In 1979, Repertorio Español, one of the primary Latinx and Spanish-language theaters in New York, staged a production of Neruda’s Romeo y Julieta (directed by René Buch) starring a young Elizabeth Peña as Juliet. The theater focuses on contemporary Spanish and Spanish Golden Age theater; Romeo y Julieta is the only Shakespeare play they have staged in their now more than 50-year history. Perhaps the most successful Spanish-language Latinx Shakespeares is Antonio Morales’ 2001 Por Amor en el Caserío (directed by Antonio Morales), a Romeo and Juliet adaptation set in a housing project in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Morales wrote the play while earning his undergraduate degree at Universidad de Puerto Rico. It was first performed at the university and went on to be performed over 500 times before it was made into a feature film in 2014.

The Spanish language can also be used to invoke a theme within the production. In the 2013 production of Romeo and Julieta (directed by David Lozano) at Cara Mía Theatre in Dallas, the Nurse primarily spoke Spanish, bringing Spanish through the Nurse’s humorous lines into a mostly English-language production. By contrast, Spanish has sometimes been used to accentuate ostracization. In Joseph Papp’s 1968 Naked Hamlet, in which he stripped the text and wrote in new scenes, a young Martin Sheen played the title role and performed several key monologues in Spanish. Sheen, born Ramón Antonio Gerardo Estévez, is of Spanish descent, and he played Hamlet’s alter-ego named “Ramon” as a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican janitor.

Spanish has been used to connote intimacy between characters, the audience, and to signal generational change. In The Goodman Theatre’s 2013 production of Measure for Measure (directed by Robert Falls), the action was set in 1970s New York with siblings Claudio and Isabella as Dominican New Yorkers. Dialogue in Spanish between these characters showed their connection. In Rebecca Martínez and Julián Mesri’s bilingual adaptation of The Comedy of Errors (directed by Rebecca Martínez) performed by The Public Theater Mobile Unit in 2023 and 2024, Spanish was used for various reasons throughout, including direct address to the audience. As the production traveled outside of traditional theater spaces, the actors addressed the bilingual and monolingual Spanish-speaking audiences in the five boroughs of New York. The Folger Theatre’s 2024 production of Romeo and Juliet (directed by Raymond O. Caldwell) staged the Capulet family as Puerto Rican, and Juliet’s bilingualism was in contrast to her mother’s almost sole use of Spanish inside their home.

Most often, Latinx Shakespeares employ Spanish to create physical and/more metaphorical spaces for culture. Chola Vision Productions in Los Angeles produced Alex Alpharaoh’s 2023 adaptation, Romeo & Juliet: Rolling Through East L.A. (directed by Alex Alpharaoh), and the use of Spanish integrated with the setting of the concept production, casting strategies, and other dramaturgical signifiers to create a Latinx setting. Likewise, the 2023 St. Louis Shakespeare Festival production of Twelfth Night (directed by Lisa Portes) included several lines that were repeated in Spanish after they were spoken in English. In this way, Spanish was used not just to ethnicize Shakespeare, but to modernize and clarify Shakespeare’s English.

Latinx Shakespeares are just one example of bilingual classical theater. Making Shakespeare bilingual or multilingual is sometimes an act of linguistic inclusion and sometimes a desire for Latinx representation: to challenge theatrical tropes of embodiment and identity categories. In addition, many Bilingual Shakespeares result from integrating Latinx storytelling modes into Shakespearean performance, and the bilingualism, language play, and linguistic and cultural code-switching have become part of Shakespearean acting techniques, vocal methods, and staging practices to the delight of audiences everywhere.