1600s and 1700s: cape and sword

Calderón evidently exerted no direct influence on English playwrights before 1660, although one play by John Fletcher and one by Philip Massinger are probably based to some extent on Spanish originals, and James Shirley's The Young Admiral and The Opportunity are adaptations of plays by Calderón's contemporaries Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina respectively.^[4]

The wild success of Sir Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours,^[5] a 1663 adaptation of a play by Spanish playwright Antonio Coello, began a fashion for Spanish adaptations on the English Restoration stage. Within 4 years, George Digby had translated 3 comedies by Calderón. After this "bubble" based on Calderón's reputation as a popular playwright, his direct influence vanishes almost entirely from the English stage for over a century.

1800s: the Spanish Shakespeare

At the beginning of the 19th century, international interest in Calderón was resurrected by August Schlegel, and English translation resumed. Now, Calderón was more often seen as a philosophical, literary, or religious — rather than a popular — dramatist. The two giants of 19th-century Calderón translation exhibit opposing approaches to the "Spanish Shakespeare". Edward Fitzgerald, turning Calderón into a pseudo-Elizabethan, states:

I do not believe an exact translation of this poet can be very successful… I have, while faithfully trying to retain what was fine and efficient, sunk, reduced, altered, and replaced, much that seemed not…^[6]

Denis Florence MacCarthy exhibiting a more formal "bardolotry" writes:

All the forms of verse have been preserved; while the closeness of the translation may be inferred from the fact, that not only the whole play but every speech and fragment of a speech are represented in English in the exact number of lines of the original, without the sacrifice, it is to be hoped, of one important idea.^[7]

It might be said that Fitzgerald's translations were quite English, but not Calderón; while Mac-Carthy's were Calderón, but not quite English.^[8]

Key

• Spanish Title — The original comedia or auto that serves as the basis of the English text.
• English Title — The title of the English text, as it appears in the particular translation. Because one Spanish title may suggest alternate English titles (e.g. Life is a Dream, Life's a Dream, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of), sorting by this column is not a reliable way to group all translations of a particular original together; to do so, sort on Spanish Title.
• Year — The year of the translation's first publication (except where * indicates "first production"). Some translations were written or produced earlier than this date, and some were republished subsequently, but this is not noted here.
• Publication — The publication in which the translation first appeared. When the publication consisted only of the single named play this information is not repeated, except in cases where the publication title is used as an external link to the work, or when it is matched with an ISBN.
• Notes — May indicate the style of translation or significant republications; "auto" indicates an auto sacramentale; all other works are comedias.

Table