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In the past decade, Peribáñez y d Comendador de Ocaña was not only produced once in Spain (2002), but also translated and mounted twice in England (1998, 2002). Florence Delay's faithful French rendering under the title of Pedro et le Commendeur reached the boards of The Comédie-Française in 2006 under the aegis of Colombian director Omar Porras. Porras deployed the mask à la James Ensor--with its contrastive elements of illumination and color--to depict the feudal story of eroticism, transgression, and vengeance in his mise en scène. In view of the extreme appropriation of an early modern text that Porras's staging represents, one wonders to what extent the ideologically encoded liminalities affecting the audience's perception of the performance generated a sophisticared confrontation with René Girard's so-called brand of "anticathartic irony": irony that is "experienced in a flash of complicity with the writer at his most subtle, against the larger part of the audience that remains blind to these subtleties" (A Theatre of Envy 253). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focuses on the book "The Genius of Shakespeare," by Jonathan Bate. In this book he has asked to contemplate the existence of an "alternative universe." There is no doubt in his mind that William Shakespeare would have met his match in that "monster of nature," Lope de Vega, alternatively dubbed as the Mozart of literature. This book is related to counter-reformation, which had stamped out protestantism or the Spanish armada in 1588. In short, where Spain had triumphed over England and not gone into decline in the late seventeenth century.