What this book most definitely is not is yet another academic discussion of Lope de Vega, Calderon and their contemporaries, divorced from any understanding of what makes these plays work so brilliantly on our stages. Instead it is a leading contemporary translator's account of why these plays deserve to assume their rightful place in our performance repertoire, firmly set within the demands and opportunities of how our theatre works.

In a way it is the story of a love affair between a translator and a dramatic tradition whose riches are only now becoming apparent to theatre audiences; but it is also an exploration of the ways in which translation itself takes plays that are distant from us in time and space and makes them real and visible in terms of our own experience and our contemporary sensibilities.

David Johnston is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Queen's University Belfast. His principal research lies in theatre, and the theory and practice of literary translation. He is co-director of the Queen's-based research forum Betwixt and Between: Translation and Cultural Encounter. He's a multi-award winning translator for the stage, and has written versions of over thirty plays from Spain, Latin America and France for professional performance around the world. One of the pioneers of the ground-breaking Spanish Golden Age season at London's Gate Theatre in the early 1990s, where he won The Observer Special Award for Achievement in Theatre and London Weekend Television's New Plays on Stage Award. He was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company to write a translation of Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano, he has worked closely with the Royal Court's International Department, and has had work performed on television and radio.