Spain's Golden Age of Theater

While Shakespeare was reshaping English drama, a parallel theatrical revolution was unfolding in Spain. During the Spanish Golden Age, playwright Lope de Vega pioneered the comedia nueva, a bold new dramatic form that broke classical rules in favor of fast-paced plots, emotional intensity, and popular appeal.

Scholar and translator Barbara Fuchs shares how the theatrical innovations of Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, and others—from a three-act structure to blended genres and complex female roles—helped redefine early modern theater and influenced the kinds of stories told on the English stage. Fuchs traces the rich cultural exchange between Spain and England and the work that she is doing now with Diversifying the Classics to bring plays in Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic to new audiences.

Fuchs also discusses her adaptation for young audiences of de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, a powerful story of collective resistance, which will be featured in Folger Theatre’s Reading Room Festival on Saturday, January 24.

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published January 13, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. We had technical help from Christophe Zajac-Denek in Santa Monica, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

Barbara Fuchs works on European cultural production from the late 15th through the 17th centuries, with a special emphasis on literature and empire, and on theater and performance in transnational contexts. As part of her commitment to the public humanities and collaborative work, she directs the UCLA Diversifying the Classics initiative and edits the series “The Comedia in Translation and Performance” for Juan de la Cuesta. She is also the founding director of LA Escena, Los Angeles’ biennial festival of Hispanic classical theater.

Fuchs’ recent books include Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World (Penn 2021); The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs (Juan de la Cuesta 2021), a collaborative translation of Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio y mujer; and The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe (Toronto 2020), co-edited with Mercedes García-Arenal. She is also one of the editors for the Norton Anthology of World Literature (2012, 2018, 2024). Her Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a time of Pandemic, the first book-length study of how theater was transformed by COVID-19, was published by Methuen in September 2021. She is currently working on a translation and critical edition of The Second Part of Lazarillo de Tormes. 

In 2021, Fuchs served as President of the Modern Language Association. Also in 2021, she was awarded the inaugural “Premio Ñ” from the Instituto Cervantes, for the promotion of Spanish language and culture.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

[Music fades]

KARIM-COOPER: Here at the Folger, we naturally spend a lot of time talking about Shakespeare and his contemporaries on the English stage. But in their day, Europe’s literary hot spot wasn’t London. It was Madrid.

Spain’s Golden Age overflowed with literature—novels, plays, and poetry—that greatly influenced English writers.

A theatrical form called the comedia nueva dominated the Spanish stage. Playwrights like Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Lope de Vega used the form to satirize contemporary Spanish society.

But comedias weren’t just comedies. There were histories, tragedies, and tragicomedies in comedia as well.

Taken together, there’s a vast body of plays from Golden Age Spain and its colonies. Hundreds of plays survive from de Vega alone, and he claimed to have written hundreds more.

Barbara Fuchs teaches English, Spanish, and Portuguese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She leads a workshop translating comedias into English, many for the first time.

Fuchs also directs an initiative called Diversifying the Classics, which brings plays in Spanish from both sides of the Atlantic to new audiences.

Her adaptation of Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna will be presented as part of the Folger’s Reading Room Festival later this month.

Here’s Barbara Fuchs, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: I thought we’d start with your play premiering in our Reading Room Festival. Lope de Vega’s play is based on a real event in the 15th century. Why don’t you tell us about that?

BARBARA FUCHS: So, Lope uses this historical incident of a town rising up against an abusive overlord essentially to warn his own society about the dangers of rulers who let other figures take on too much power. I was teaching this play actually in January 2025, and it was almost uncanny.  So, he is constantly working between that earlier time and his own time. Along the way he writes this extraordinary story of, really, the power of solidarity, and he gives a lot of agency to one of the young women in the town, Laurencia, the incredible protagonist of his play, who is the one who will really ultimately persuade the town to resist.

The original play is very carefully bounded by the authority of the monarchs. They have to come to the town and interrogate the townspeople, try to find out what happened, and try to assign punishment. The town sticks together and will only respond, “Fuente Ovejuna lo hizo. Fuente Ovejuna did it.” The kings eventually have to recognize that they can’t assign individual punishment. They instead bring the town directly under their control so it can never have the same kind of abusive overlord.

In the 20th century, at the beginning of the 20th century, the play becomes fascinating to leftists in Russia and that’s when it really becomes a canonical play because those readers recognize the force of this story as one about political solidarity.

BOGAEV: Obviously, Lope de Vega’s classic about standing up to tyranny resonates with our current political moment. But I still have to ask, why did you want to adapt this particular play for a young audience now?

FUCHS: Well, the project began a few years ago, and then the political moment sort of caught up to it, you might say. We’ve been very interested in making versions of the Hispanic classics available for kids for some time now. This project actually began with an idea to produce storybooks for kids. We are publishing those over the course of this year. They’re coming out from a Mexican university press, beautiful, illustrated books for kids with very short plays after the story for kids to put on at school or at home.

BOGAEV: I just have to say that sounds so fun and makes me think of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare.

FUCHS: Exactly. The Spanish plays didn’t get a Lamb, so we are trying to fill that gap. And, you know, I sort of set it up as a challenge for myself. I thought if I can adapt Fuente Ovejuna for kids I can adapt anything because it’s a very adult play.

BOGAEV: That’s really true. I mean, there’s a lot of politics in here.

FUCHS: Sex and violence, you name it.

BOGAEV: Yeah, all of it.

FUCHS: But then I was very pleasantly surprised to find that after you make one basic move, which is to turn from the Commander’s sexual inappropriateness to think about greed creating a character who thinks everything is for himself. The moral storyline of the play is so clear that it actually works beautifully for kids, right? Kids have experiences with bullying, with the importance of standing up for yourself, and so, it works really well in those contexts.

BOGAEV: Wow. So, you had to find that throughline and that was so clear to children. I’m going to roll back too, just to give us some context. Lope de Vega, for listeners not familiar with the playwright, why is he considered one of Spain’s greatest dramatists? Really pretty big question, right?

FUCHS: Yes, so, he might have trouble with “One of” in that he considers his own status undisputed. Lope essentially, more or less, invents the new form of playwriting in the 1590s that has a lot in common with the innovations that are occurring in England at the same time. He is very ready to shed all of the classical forms that don’t work for him or for his audiences—and above all, wants to emphasize what audiences will love. So, for Lope, this is the guiding principle. You need to write plays that audiences will enjoy. He is so successful in his formula that he writes, we think, 800 plays. But more of them keep turning up.

BOGAEV: I think I read somewhere something like 1,500 three-act plays.

FUCHS: I have read everything from 400 to the upper limit of 1,500. The truth is that he publishes many of them in collections of comedias, you know, under his own supervision. But we really have no exact count because there are so many. And people love them. In the period, the expression Es de Lope is like saying “It’s fantastic, right?” So, you can say it about, I don’t know, a guitar, right? It just means it’s first-rate.

He’s writing at that incredible pace because there is an infinite market for his work. He buys himself a beautiful house in Madrid. He is really, one could say, the first commercially successful playwright living off of his pen.

This, of course, is happening at exactly the same time as Shakespeare in England. But the figures are extraordinary, right?

BOGAEV: Yes, they are, and this is all sounding very familiar I’m sure to our listeners. If they don’t know this playwright, he was also referred to as Spain’s Shakespeare over the ages. But two things: one, we’re talking about comedia nueva. What are the distinguishing features of that genre?

FUCHS: So, the older forms were five acts. A lot of tragedies, a lot of very careful tales from Greek and Roman sources. Lope is working much more freely with a number of different sources. Some of them from Renaissance Italy or novellas, as well as from the classical tradition. He pares things down to three acts.

He is very interested in lively plots, usually with a subplot. He comes up with the figure of the gracioso, the comic sidekick, as a figure that is able to comment on the action, that often takes on a breaking-the-fourth-wall role.

He’s very interested in the possibilities of cross-dressing, which, of course, all the dramatists of this period take from the epic and romance tradition. But on stage, you know, it makes for incredible excitement.

His plays reflect a society undergoing tremendous changes, and in which, perhaps, the most important plot is the plot of self-creation, right? What you make of yourself through your presentation in a newly urban society. This is the period in which Madrid explodes into a capital city. So, it’s a city where if you come from your small town in pursuit of the lover who’s abandoned you, as is the plot of Don Gil of The Green Breaches, you might suddenly be anonymous and the possibilities there are tremendous in terms of self-creation.

BOGAEV: So many similarities with Shakespeare. In part it’s the historical moment, but also, the early modern period. But they had a very different life story, right? He was in and out of the military and considered the priesthood. Very tempestuous life. He took vows, didn’t he?

FUCHS: He actually took orders, yes. He had very tempestuous affairs with many actresses, especially. He was exiled to Valencia for several years because of one affair that went particularly poorly. He served as a secretary for a duke for several years and the story goes that he wrote the duke’s love letters. So yes, it’s an extraordinary biography.

BOGAEV: Well, he’s a contemporary of Shakespeare. Do we know if Shakespeare knew his work? And what kind of cultural exchange was going on between England and Spain in the early modern period?

FUCHS: What I think surprises modern readers or modern audiences is that in the period, the exchange is really going primarily one way and that is that the English are looking to Spain. Madrid is the imperial capital. There’s a tremendous degree of literary invention happening in the second half of the 16th century in Madrid. And the English playwrights are turning primarily, I would say, to prose texts rather than plays themselves because the prose texts can travel, can make their way back to England as books. So, everything from the purported Cardenio based on an episode in Cervante’s Don Quixote to much of the work of Fletcher, Massinger. We have abundant evidence of the English playwrights and basically English literary culture more generally taking from Spain and almost nothing in the other direction in this period. Things would be very different later, of course.

BOGAEV: And just to get a fix, pulling back on the big picture, we talk a lot here about the theater during Shakespeare’s time and what it was like to attend a play—as they said, listen to a play at the Globe. But what was it like in Spain in that period? Was theater as popular as it was in England? And did people of all classes go and mix at the theater?

FUCHS: It was extraordinarily popular. I say that in terms of popularity it was like the Netflix of its day but, of course, you enjoyed it with other people. So, very, very similar. They also said Oír a comedia, to listen to a play.

The theaters were these vibrant spaces that brought together people of all classes in urban spaces. There were theaters in Manila, in Seville, in Lima, in Mexico, all over the Spanish Empire. They had begun as fairly informal spaces. Patios between buildings. They’re called, Corrales de comedia, which is the same word that we use for corral. They became more elaborate with time, gradually adding balconies and other seating areas where people were separated by class and sometimes by gender. Very similar sense that on the ground you had the common people, but that nobles were also attending, very interestingly, often attending with their retinue, so, all the servants of their household so that the theater—again, much like in England—becomes a place where you figure out how different classes present themselves on stage and what it looks like to be a noble, to be a lady.

BOGAEV: But one big difference of course, and you mentioned it already, is that a woman stars in this play that you’ve adapted. Women performed on stage in Spain.

FUCHS: Oh, my goodness, yes, and what a difference it makes. After much hand wringing, they do decide to allow actresses on stage. This is not an easy decision, but eventually they come to this.

The playwrights know that these extraordinary actresses are available and they write roles for them. They are paid more than the male actors. I always say Hollywood could learn a thing or two.

They are the divas of their time and that makes a difference in terms of the kinds of plays we get and the roles that they imagine for these extraordinary actresses. There are also women who run theater companies and serve as producers. There are women playwrights which is extraordinary.

BOGAEV: That’s true. This adaptation we have been talking about for the Reading Room Festival is just one example of this larger project that you direct at UCLA to bring Spanish classic theater to global audiences. Another production that came out of your translation initiative there is Valor, Agravio y Mujer and that is by the 17^th-century writer, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto—please excuse my pronunciation. But she sounds fascinating. Who was she?

FUCHS: Ana Caro is an extraordinary figure. We assume that she was probably a Morisca, part of a repressed minority of people who were descended from Muslims in Spain, forcibly converted, marginalized over the 16th century, many of them enslaved after an uprising in the 1570s. We know this because we know she was born enslaved and then adopted by an officer of the law in Granada who may well have been her father. We have just a couple of documents around her birth and then we jump to contracts from the city of Seville for her public entertainments for religious festivals. She also wrote commercial plays that were presented in the 1640s.

We unfortunately only have two of her plays, not hundreds as for some of the male playwrights, but they are fascinating plays. Valor, which we translated as The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs, is basically a rewrite of the Don Juan story that imagines one of the many women wronged by Don Juan deciding to take matters into her own hands. She dresses as a man, follows him to Brussels, and essentially tangles him in so many of her webs that he is forced to marry her in which she succeeds. She also spends much of the play unsure of whether she would rather kill him or force him to marry her.

[Clip; Natalia Noble as Leonor and John Dellaporta as Ribete, Act I, scene 2, The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs, translated by Diversifying the Classics from Valor, Agravio y Mujer by Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, audio courtesy of Diversifying the Classics]

LEONOR: I made up my mind
and bravely crossed the sea 460
to accomplish my purpose
or to die in the attempt.
By the heavens above,
I will be a new Amazon,
a courageous Camilla,18 465
and avenge myself
on this treacherous liar.

RIBETE: Listen to you, by God!
I do believe your new attire
has given you a new spirit.

LEONOR: I am who I am!
You are mistaken, Ribete,
if you think I am a woman.
The wrong done to me changed me.

FUCHS:  She also spends most of the play unsure of whether she would rather kill him or force him to marry her.

BOGAEV: This is a revenge play—

FUCHS: It’s extraordinary.

BOGAEV: Except it ends in marriage.

FUCHS: It’s a little less bloody than the Jacobean revenge plays, but yes, you could say it as a revenge comedy.

BOGAEV: Depends on what you think of marriage.

FUCHS: Yes.

BOGAEV: So, a lot of cross-dressing, gender bending, and trickery.

FUCHS: Absolutely. The play is full of the frisson of what happens when this character dresses as a man and presents as a man. She makes a fine young gentleman, so, the titillation in the play is around the attraction of this figure for everyone else on stage. Lope was not wrong when he talked about the appeal of the cross-dressing plots, right? They are one of these very conventional forms that at the same time allow us to envision all kinds of possibilities around the construction of gender.

BOGAEV: Well, she had such a high profile. Odds are she wrote so many more plays than just the two we know of.

FUCHS: Yes, it’s unfortunate that only two plays have come down to us. But she is praised by other writers. We have little tidbits of references to her here and there. But unfortunately, only these two plays, Valor, Agravio y Mujer, and the other one, El Conde Partinuplés, which is a sort of fairytale story also featuring relationships between women and a great deal of female agency.

BOGAEV: I’m thinking back to your adaptation for young audiences in which you use the main character of Mengo, the storyteller in the Lope de Vega play, in an interesting way to encourage participation and improv. Tell us more about that.

FUCHS: So, in the original, Mengo is just one of the town’s people. He is singled out at certain points. People are more worried that he will be the one to break when interrogated but otherwise, you know, he’s not one of the main characters.

He seemed like an interesting figure to turn to as a way to connect with the audience. The process of trying to adapt for children always is a little bit about trying to figure out what they can follow, how much material they can take in. The warmth of a storyteller who engages them seems to me really important. It seems to me that the liveness of theater is made patent to kids when someone speaks to them from the stage. I think that it leads to a moment of incredible delight. And so, there seemed to be an opportunity here to bring them in through this direct address from Mengo, who might refer to the specific conditions of the production here talking about the town of Fuente Ovejuna, the town where we are presenting the play, etc., so that was some of the thinking behind that.

BOGAEV: And you have audience participation from the moment go with Mengo. He picks some kids to play sheep. Do you throw sheepskins on them?

FUCHS: That is the hope, I mean, you know, we have never actually done this version. I’m very much looking forward to the Folger Reading Room Festival experience to see how it will work with kids. But yes, that is the hope, that it goes smoothly, that we don’t have a stampede of child sheep.

BOGAEV: I’d like to see that. I understand you also composed music for this reading. Was there often music in these comedia neuva plays?

FUCHS: The comedia was a whole afternoon of fun so there would definitely have been music. There were short pieces before the play. There were short pieces between each act. All of these would have involved music.

We are very fortunate that as part of our collective we have an amazing musician and composer Galo Ahmed Lopez. He had just very spontaneously composed some music when we did the short play at our workshops so I turned to him when the Folger announced that it would do the reading and said, “Galo, can we do a little bit more? Can we compose some more music for the reading?” He came back with six or seven different pieces of music that he had composed to accompany this very short play. So, we have just an embarrassment of riches. I’m looking forward to seeing what our director Kelsey Mesa will do with it.

[Clip: music for Fuente Ovejuna written and performed by Galo Ahmed Lopez. Courtesy of the artist.]

Lopez (singing): So brave in battle, so quick to fight, let no one doubt that what you do is right.
Welcome, welcome el comendador. Truly, truly you are el mejor.
Welcome, welcome el comendador. Truly, truly you are el mejor.

BOGAEV: Wow. Your adaptation of this play, and many of the plays, is bilingual. So, what does that mean?

FUCHS: When we translate the plays, the originals, we translate every line into English. But we often hope that directors will then bring back some of the Spanish or be interested in including Spanish depending on the audiences that they are imagining the play will serve.

In the case of the children’s adaptations, we are imagining these as a project that we want to do in Spanish and in English. As I mentioned, the story books are coming out in Spanish first. In the adaptation that is being presented at the Folger, I did want to have a little bit of the flavor of the Spanish to remind audiences of the origins of this text and to make audiences who might gravitate to it because they have some connection to Latino cultures to feel welcome at this play.

I think it’s interesting to be playful with the Spanish and assume that audiences can follow—there have been arguments for, what, 30 years now that Spanish is not actually a foreign language in the United States so, it’s in that spirit, I think, that there are bits and pieces of Spanish in it.

BOGAEV: And all of this really begs another question: why are Spanish playwrights so underrepresented in literature curriculum and in theater companies? I mean theater companies stage Ibsen and Molière and Chekov and Brecht and Shakespeare.

FUCHS: How long do we have, Barbara?

BOGAEV: Here’s your platform. Go ahead.

FUCHS: This is a long and complicated story, and it has everything to do with stereotypes about Spain and long histories of the relation between England and Spain. I think it’s perhaps most productive to focus on all the reasons that companies and theater makers should know this work now and really that’s what we’ve been up to for the past 12 years. We think it’s really important both in terms of recognizing the place of Spanish and Spanish culture within the US and the English-speaking world more broadly.

We think it’s very important in terms of rounding out that theatrical tradition, that sense of the classics. You know, our project is called Diversifying the Classics because we think that it’s very important to think about diversity in terms of what is being presented, in addition to who is doing the presenting. When we started the project, we were coming out of a very salutary period in which people had been rethinking their relationship to the classics and who got to act in these plays, who got to direct these plays, so we had already come a great distance in terms of the diversity of the people presenting the classics. But our sense was that there was a lot more work to be done in terms of thinking about the diversity of what was being presented and that bringing this incredibly rich body of work—I mean, there are 10,000 extent plays from the Hispanic classical tradition—bringing this work to the table was absolutely critical.

BOGAEV: I do want to ask you whether the theater world’s glorification of and focus on Shakespeare makes it more difficult for these pieces from Spanish classical theater to get staged?

FUCHS: Yes, and also, I think that Shakespeare has made room, right? So, the fact that we think that seasons need a classical play is due to Shakespeare. I have nothing but admiration for Shakespeare.

I sometimes think that companies might be very excited to know that if they go beyond England there are extraordinary plays written by women in Shakespeare’s time, that there are plays that center women in a way that is less frequent in the English tradition. So, for companies that have put on umpteen Hamlets and one too many Romeo and Juliets, here are some interesting versions you might want to think of instead. Here are some other ways of looking at the world from that period that you might find and that your audiences might find absolutely compelling.

BOGAEV: Well, what reaction do you get from your students when they first encountered these plays? Do they say something similar, like, “Why haven’t I read the heard of this guy Lope de Vega before?”

FUCHS: Those were some of the most amazing moments when, you know, we will have a performance or a reading and some college student will come up to us and say, “Why did I never encounter this in years of high school and college? Why am I first encountering this now?” That’s extraordinary. What’s also incredibly satisfying is when the students say, “This was written in the 17th century?” We always say that part of our mission is to convey that the past is not reactionary just because it is the past.

BOGAEV: So, they’re shocked by the sex and the cross-dressing or what?

FUCHS: The idea that people in earlier periods also questioned things that they might be questioning today. That these things were not always settled. These plays are extraordinary for showing us characters who figure out how to make their way through the rules of their time. I think students often tend to think that societies of the past, you know, “Everyone followed those rules,” and of course, that’s not the case.

BOGAEV: Well, we’ve been talking so much about classical theater, but you also work with contemporary playwrights.

FUCHS: Yes. When we started this project, we were very clear that we were starting from such a dearth that it was really important to think about all the ways in which we could engage audiences and theater makers, and so, early on we launched a project to engage contemporary playwrights with this corpus. It’s an adaptation project called Golden Tongues, in which we pair LA playwrights with a comedia text they selected. We guide them in that selection and then they produce a brand-new play based on that comedia source text. We are now up to 17 or 18 plays. We published a number of them in an anthology called Golden Tongues just last year.

We also present these adaptations at the festival that we run every other year in Los Angeles called LA Escena which is a Hispanic classical theater. We present plays in the original. We bring companies from Mexico, Spain, and elsewhere. We present some plays in translation and also these adaptations, these brand-new plays.

We’ve also expanded to doing similar work with playwrights in Mexico and in Argentina. We think that the traditions remain vibrant when they are transformed. We think a really important part of the project is to have that constant re-creation and transformation at the hand of writers today.

BOGAEV: Well, I can’t wait to see what comes out of your project and to hear more comedia nueva from your translations and your adaptations. Thank you so much for this.

FUCHS: Thank you, Barbara.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Barbara Fuchs, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Fuchs’s adaptation of Lope de Vega’s play Fuente Ovejuna will premiere on January 24th as part of the Folger’s Reading Room Festival. For tickets and more information, visit Folger.edu/readingroom.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from Christophe Zajac-Denek in Santa Monica, and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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