Despite increasing interest both in the translation and reception of Shakespeare in Europe and in the impact of foreign Shakespeares in performance, relatively little attention has been paid to the case of Spain. As Gregor himself points out, drawing on the authority of the eminent hispanist Paul Julian Smith, this is in part due to Spain's ‘ostracism from the main currents of political and cultural power because of its alleged sensuality and emotionalism’ (p. 6). Indeed, he goes on to present his own project as ‘a modest attempt to set the record straight’, excavating the presence and importance of Shakespeare in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish theatrical culture in order both to contextualize the ongoing ‘addiction’ to the Bard and to argue for the necessary inclusion of Spain's contribution to the making of Shakespeare in Europe. Yet whilst Gregor provides an admirable focus on the diverse histories of Shakespeare's plays on Spanish stages, together with careful evaluation of the influence of other European sources, traditions and practitioners, he is generally far more apologetic about the originality or relevance of Hispanic productions.

The first four chapters trace the history of Shakespeare's ‘false beginnings’ in Spain, from the earliest productions which drew on translations of Ducis's adaptations to the more expansive vision of directors like Adrià Gual in the decades before the Spanish Civil War. Whilst coverage is largely chronological, it is nevertheless informed by a more genealogical project in order to demonstrate how Shakespearean performance practice contributed to shifts in theatrical taste and aesthetics, through the mediation of actors like Isidoro Máiquez, engagement with foreign companies and the inventiveness of work in non-official or peripheral theatres. The latter, in particular, underpin the narrative in later chapters, where the major state-subsidized spectacles of the Franco years are contrasted with initiatives from other regions, such as Núria Espert's Hamlet from 1960, mistakenly presented here as having been performed in Catalan, and the political rereadings of the Transition making way for a greater plurality of approaches, explored in depth in Chapter 7, with attention to work in Catalonia, the Basque country, Galicia and Andalusia.

As Gregor shows, it is this plurality which ensured that by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Shakespeare ‘had not only become the best known and most successful of foreign dramatists, but . . . had even supplanted native authors . . . as one of the most performable playwrights’ (p. 117). For the author, current trends in Shakespeare performance thus reflect a ‘centrifugal movement’ (p. 144) in Spanish culture capable of generating the internationally renowned edginess of Catalan directors like Calixto Bieito and Alex Rigola alongside the ‘new austerity’ (p. 149) of work by the CDG in Galicia (2004), Lluís Pasqual's Hamlet-Tempest diptych (2006) and the Gerardo Vega King Lear (2008). It remains to be seen whether the more centripetal political tendencies born of the current economic crisis will undermine what this study celebrates as Shakespeare's reinvention for modern times (p. 157).