Cervantes’s La entretenida: Translation, Performance and a Digital Edition
The results of the research are presented in two forms—a digital edition of the play, viewable at http://entretenida.outofthewings.org/index.html, and this written submission. Chapter 1 focuses on the quasi-improvisational quality of La entretenida, exploring connections with Plautus, the rhetorical tradition, the commedia dell’arte, jazz, storytelling, and metatheatre. Chapter 2 challenges the widely held view that La entretenida is a parody of the comedia nueva, and looks at the way in which Cervantes engaged with dramatic theory, and in particular with the principle of decorum. Chapter 3 shows how the play reflects Cervantes’s tendency to view life through literature, relating this aspect of his writing to the role of memory in Early Modern culture, while Chapter 4 demonstrates how this metaliterary quality becomes a means whereby Cervantes explores social issues. Chapter 5 examines the circumstances surrounding the publication of Ocho comedias, revealing an interesting connection with the second part of Don Quijote, and arguing that Cervantes had a highly ambivalent attitude to print. Chapters 6 and 7 investigate the process of production, with particular reference to the punctuation of the published volume. Chapter 8 presents the rationale for the digital edition, which, because of its special advantages in generating different views of the text and navigating between them, can facilitate engagement with the text from a number of different perspectives and reflect the web-like nature of Cervantes’s writings. Chapters 9 and 10 describe the multidimensional approach that was adopted in the process of translating and performing the play, which involved extensive preparatory work with a group of actors. Interrogation of the text through translation and performance was able to inform, as well as be informed by, its scholarly investigation.
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