Keywords

Introduction: Genre and Gender

María Rosa de Gálvez (1768–1806) was the most successful Spanish woman writer of her day. She composed thirteen original dramas and translated at least four plays from French, almost all of them published during her lifetime, with eight pieces performed in the most important Madrid public theatres of the period.Footnote 1 María Rosa de Gálvez, who wrote openly about her professional struggles to see her writing published and presented on the public stage, dreamed of achieving renown through her plays, as she explains in the “Advertencia” to the second volume of her Obras poéticas of 1804, stating: “I am certain that posterity will make a place in its memory for this book, and thus the endeavours of its author will be rewarded at least in part” (Obras poéticas 1804 vol. 2, 8).Footnote 2 Earlier in this same introduction, Gálvez makes a case for her place in literary history by right of genre, specifically Neoclassical tragedy, stating: “The tragedies that I offer to the public are the fruit of my love for this genre of poetry” (Obras poéticas 1804 vol. 2, 3). But Gálvez also argues here and elsewhere for her place in history because of her gender: “the production of a Spanish woman” (Obras poéticas 1804 vol. 2, 6). These two elements—genre and gender—are defining characteristics of María Rosa de Gálvez as a dramatist and mark her contributions to eighteenth-century theatre. Critics have extensively studied varied aspects of gender in Gálvez’s work, from her strong female characters to themes that explore the concerns of eighteenth-century women’s lives. Scholars have also identified the ways in which María Rosa de Gálvez incorporated various dramatic formats including contemporary neoclassical tragedy and comedy as well as the Spanish eighteenth-century one-act comic sainete, the seventeenth-century comedia de figurón, eighteenth-century sentimental drama, and the comedia lacrimosa (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, Díaz Marcos 2009, Establier Pérez 2006, Lewis 2004 and 2022, Whitaker 1992 and 1993). Although in statements like this “Advertencia” Gálvez appeared to emphasize the value of her original plays only, we also find in her translated works the same ambitious incorporation of various dramatic genres circulating through eighteenth-century European theatre and an emphasis on the importance of gender.

While Gálvez’s original compositions have gained the most critical attention for their themes decrying women’s oppression and their strong intelligent female characters (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, Establier 2006, Lewis 2004, Establier 2006, Whitaker 1993), her translated works were the source of her greatest box-office success. Modern critical preference for her original compositions stems from comments by María Rosa de Gálvez herself, critical of translation and (poor) translators. In the same “Advertencia” mentioned above, she states that “it is very difficult to translate well, but there is as much difference between this and being a poet, as there is between illustrating a print and lifting the plate to reproduce that same print” (Obras poéticas 1804, vol. 2, 5).Footnote 3 And yet, in the first volume of her carefully curated three-volume Obras poéticas in which she purported to present original poetry, comedies, and tragedies, Gálvez had included a translation: the one-act translated “ópera lírica” Bion, which was also her longest running theatrical production, appearing 14 times between May and September in 1803 in the Madrid theatre Caños del Peral (Establier, “Cronología”, María Rosa de Gálvez 2012).

Gálvez is known to have translated four pieces from French: three comedies—Catalina o la bella labradora (1801, from Amélie-Julie Candeille’s 1792 Catherine, ou la belle fermière), La intriga epistolar (1802, from Philippe Fabre d’Églantine’s 1791 L’intrigue épistolaire), and La dama colérica (1806, after the 1804 La jeune femme colère by Charles-Georges Étienne)—as well as an opera—the aforementioned Bion (1804, after an opéra comique of the same title of 1800, libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman and music by Étienne Méhul).Footnote 4 These translations, as María Jesus García Garrosa points out, span her career, with the first (Catalina) in 1801—the same year as the publication of her first two original plays Ali-Bek and Un loco hace ciento—and the last (La dama colérica) appearing just before her death in 1806 (García Garrosa 2011, 41). Gálvez chose to translate recent plays that were proven box-office successes in France. She also chose plays of high quality that embraced the aesthetics and ideology of Enlightenment reformers (García Garrosa 2011, 44–45). Both García Garrosa and Bordiga Grinstein point to the economic motivations for María Rosa de Gálvez’s translations. The written record—prologues to her published work, letters requesting permission or assistance to publish or produce her work, and letters defending herself from censorship or criticism—shows that Gálvez sought both artistic and economic success in the publication and production of all her work—original compositions and translations.Footnote 5 Still, as with her original compositions, we see more than mere financial interests in her choices of texts to translate. Both in the genres she chose and the topics of gender she emphasized, we find parallels between the translations, her original works, and her life.

María Rosa de Gálvez frequently emphasized her unique position as a woman writer. For example, in an 1803 letter to King Charles IV requesting a delay in her payment to the Royal Press for the publication of her Obras poéticas, she argues for the urgency and importance of its release, again by right of genre, gender, and originality:

(…) to make public a work that cannot be found in any other woman, of any nation, since even the most celebrated French women have limited themselves to translations, or at the most they have produced one dramatic composition; but none have presented a collection of original tragedies as have I.

Although she was a prolific and very successful writer, María Rosa de Gálvez was not the only woman writing and translating in the Spanish Enlightenment period. Other important contemporaries such as Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833), María Gertrudis Hore (1742–1801), Margarita Hickey (1753–1793), María Lorenza de los Ríos (1771–1821), and Inés Joyes y Blake (1731–1808), all wrote and published both original works as well as translations.Footnote 6 García Garrosa has recently documented 28 women translators in Spain working between 1755 and 1808 who published at least 31 translations (García Garrosa 2022). While French texts were the most common object of translation into Spanish (for both male and female translators), these women also translated texts from English and Italian. Translation was an important vehicle for the circulation of Enlightenment ideas and aesthetics, and for some translation was “part of a common heritage to be shared unreservedly by a literary republic without frontiers” (García Garrosa 2019, 259). However, the proliferation of translated texts was also viewed with suspicion by some, who saw it as undermining Spain’s proud national cultural and linguistic tradition. Translation was the subject of great debates in the Spanish periodical press, as well as of censorship by Spanish government and ecclesiastic officials, and we see this same ambivalence over the value of translation reflected in the work of María Rosa de Gálvez (García Garrosa 2011, 2019 and 2022).

Just as translation was an object of debate in eighteenth-century Spain, scholars of modern translation studies continue to discuss and explore the relationships of translation and translator to original texts and their authors in the transfer of ideas, aesthetics, and culture. In the twentieth century, Roman Jakobson identified three types of translation: intralingual (or rewording), interlingual (traditional translation), and intersemiotic (or transmutation) (Jakobson 1959; Bassnett 2014, 25). Umberto Eco discusses the relationship of all three forms of translation to interpretation (Eco 2001). Related to these ideas about translation and interpretation is the concept of adaptation. Linda Hutcheon points to the similarities of translation and adaptation, especially in the case of intersemiotic exchanges (or transmutation), for example from text to film (Hutcheon 2012, 16–17). Hutcheon sees adaptation as a “derivation without being derivative” to become “its own palimpsestic thing” (9). In addition to the above ideas on translation, interpretation, and adaptation, new understandings of culture and gender have challenged and extended traditional notions of translation. Lori Chamberlin sees in the traditional metaphorics of a gendered author/translator identification a “struggle for authority and the politics of originality” in which the author/original text is associated with the male and the translator/translated text is associated with a subservient female role (1992, 314–15). Chamberlin proposes a feminist conception of translation that will go beyond the “double-standard” of this metaphor and consider instead what Jacques Derrida has called a “double-bind”, a double-edged razor that views “translation as collaboration” (Chamberlin 1992, 326). The above theoretical ideas of translation in its various forms, of translation’s relationship to interpretation and adaptation, of translation as part of a process of cultural exchange, and of translation as gendered are all important to keep in mind as we consider Spanish eighteenth-century women translators and their translations, specifically in the case of María Rosa de Gálvez.

In the following pages, we will explore the importance of translation and adaptation in three plays by María Rosa de Gálvez: her first translation, Catalina o la bella labradora; an opera published in volume one of her Obras poéticas and the only translation of that series, Bion; and the sentimental drama that followed Bion in that same volume, El egoísta. These plays exemplify the various ways that María Rosa Gálvez borrowed from previous texts, and the choices she made as she endeavoured to make her mark on the Spanish stage. Although the first two plays are acknowledged translations of French texts and the last identified by Gálvez herself as “original”, we will see in these texts elements of direct interlingual translation, as well as of intersemiotic translation or transmutation, and finally of adaptation. We will also see the importance of genre and gender in the aesthetic and thematic choices that Gálvez made in her translations, adaptations, and original texts. Ultimately, we will go beyond the dichotomy of previous approaches to Gálvez’s work, seeing her translated and original work as separate and unequal endeavours, to see how her choices of genre and emphasis on gender run throughout her career.

María Rosa de Gálvez’s Social and Literary Connections, and Rejections

In order to understand better María Rosa de Gálvez’s translated and original compositions and the ideas and aesthetics that moved through them, we should consider briefly her interactions with the people, ideas, and texts that were circulating in the last decades of eighteenth-century Spain. Her life, work, and social and familial ties raise important questions, many that remain unanswered. She was part of one of the most well-connected and influential families of her day: her uncle Matías and cousin Bernardo Gálvez served as viceroys of Mexico; and her uncle José Gálvez held important posts with Charles III’s court including as Inspector General of New Spain (Mexico) and later in the Council of the Indies in Madrid. María Rosa de Gálvez was the adopted daughter and only child of a lesser-known brother of this wealthy family, Antonio Gálvez and his wife Mariana Ramírez de Velázquez, and many speculate that she was likely the illegitimate child of her adoptive father (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, 20). Although deposited briefly after her birth in 1768 in an orphanage in Ronda, she is thought to have had a privileged upbringing in her family home in Málaga. In 1789 at the age of 21, she married a man younger than she from a much less important family distantly related to her own, José Cabrera. That she did not make a better match was possibly due to the circumstances of her birth, but also possibly because of her own status as an unwed mother, as Elisa Martín-Valdepeñas (2017) has discovered. Throughout their troubled marriage, José Cabrera caused María Rosa and the Gálvez family embarrassment and a cost them a lot of money, punctuated by Cabrera’s expulsion from his post with the Spanish embassy in Philadelphia in 1805 for writing bad checks, among other things (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, 30). The couple had a daughter together who died in infancy, and they separated in 1794, although their troubled relationship continued until her death in 1806 (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, Martín Valdepeñas 2017).

But María Rosa de Gálvez also had good friends in high places including fellow writers Rita Barrenechea and Manuel José Quintana, as well as Charles IV’s powerful First Secretary of State Manuel Godoy. She describes the importance of these close relationships in several poems published in volume one of her Obras poéticas.Footnote 7 Friendship was an important emotional and intellectual support for the aspiring writer, but these friends and their respected positions in Spanish Enlightenment circles must have also included her in the aesthetic and philosophical conversations happening among artists and social reformers. Barrenechea, Countess of Carpio, hosted a tertulia (salon) in Madrid with her husband. Perhaps it was attended by the couple’s influential friends, which included Jovellanos, the Duchess of Alba, and maybe even María Rosa de Gálvez (Urzainqui 2006, XXVI). Barrenechea, who was a member of the Basque Society of Friends of the Country, and of the first Spanish all-female civic organization, the Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito, was the author of two plays—Catalín (1783) and the undated La aya. Manuel José Quintana was already a celebrated poet by the early 1800s. He published and staged his two plays during Gálvez’s lifetime: El Duque de Viera (1801, an adaptation of Matthew Monk Lewis’s The Castle Spectre of 1797) and Pelayo (1805). He would eventually host his own tertulia and become one of the most influential thinkers of Spanish liberalism.

Gálvez called upon her connections to the highest levels of the Bourbon government to see her work produced and published. In a letter addressed to King Charles IV requesting funding to publish her three-volume collected works of poetry and drama, the Obras poéticas, Gálvez argues that hers is “work which cannot be found in any other woman or nation” (Gálvez 1803). And when she saw her efforts challenged or blocked, Gálvez fiercely defended her work from censors and critics. For example, when the comedy La familia a la moda (Fashionable Family) was prohibited by the ecclesiastical censor, she appealed it to the governor of the Council of Castille, calling the censorship unjust, complaining that such action denies her the reward she deserved for her work, and that it unfairly damages her reputation Gálvez (1805a). When another comedy, Las esclavas amazonas (Amazon Slavewomen), received a somewhat critical review in the Memorial literario, she responded defending herself in a letter to another publication, the Variedades de ciencias, literatura, y arte (Gálvez 1805b). In the letter she explains that she considered not responding publicly but decided to defend herself, less others take her silence for acceptance of the critique. In these and other documents, it is evident that María Rosa de Gálvez felt compelled to defend herself against both professional and personal obstacles and injustices.

The circumstances of her life, her family and social connections, her personal tragedies and frustrations, all of them must have contributed to her formation as a person and as an artist, to what she wrote, and to how she was able (or not) to achieve the success she sought. Given that she was part of a well-connected family, both her struggles and her accomplishments must have also been well known among her peers and her audiences. Because of these family and social ties, she was also part of an environment in which people, ideas, and money circulated between regions of the Spanish Empire and between the cultures and countries beyond Spain. Both her life and her texts reflect these circulations, especially as Gálvez experimented with various genres—poetry, comedy, tragedy, and musical theatre—to make her gendered mark as a lonely woman writing in a male-dominated world, albeit not as the lone female voice as she might have had us believe. The translation of texts from French to Spanish was another way that genre and gender circulated in and through María Rosa de Gálvez’s work. It brought her much-needed income, recognition, and success. But these translations were more than reproductions of an original French text into the Spanish language. As translator, Gálvez went beyond “lifting a stamp to reproduce a print” as she once described it. She was also interpreter and artist, as she circulated both contemporary artistic forms and ideas about gender through her work.

An Early Translation from the French: Catalina (1801)

María Rosa de Gálvez’s first translation, Catalina o la bella labradora, tells the sentimental story of a long-suffering widow whose hidden identity is revealed and eventually whose social standing is restored. It was the translation of a French work by another female dramatist, Amélie-Julie Candeille’s Catherine, ou la belle fermière, which debuted in 1792. The original work was an opera and in fact is the longest running opera written by a woman (Letzer and Adelson 2004, 11). Candeille herself was part of an “explosion” of French female librettists between 1770 and 1820, and her opera Catherine, along with Constance Pipelet de Salm’s Sapho (1794) were among the most performed operas of the period—by women or men (Letzer and Adelson 2000, 73). Letzer and Adelson believe that the popularity of these female-authored operas was in part because they often embraced qualities of sentimental drama espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that exalted feeling and domesticity. Ironically, the very philosophy that so famously excluded women from the public sphere also exalted their ability to emote (2000, 74). In addition, the close autobiographical association between Candeille (who was both author and actress, playing the lead role of Catherine) and the story of a wronged woman who found love in a second marriage, also touched on another Rousseauian idea: the importance of the unmediated communication of emotion, as expressed in his Lettre à D’Alembert (Letzer and Adelson 2004, 11).

Gálvez’s translation of Candeille’s libretto is faithful in some ways and not in others. She keeps the same characters, storyline, and setting. A contemporary critic complains about Gálvez’s translation: “This drama is translated from French, but rather than being rendered into Castillian, it has come out in a hybrid form, which is so much in fashion among the throng of bad translators” (“Crítica en el Memorial Literario de 1802 a la comedia ‘Catalina o la bella labradora’, traducida por Gálvez”). Among recent studies of Gálvez’s Catalina, both Bordiga Grinstein and García Garrosa also find this first attempt at translation lacking. Bordiga Grinstein notes her “attempts at a literal translation that was full of errors”, especially in her rendering of French idiomatic phrases (2003, 70). García Garrosa believes that what may seem as lack of skill was more due to lack of time—that Gálvez may have been pressed to complete her translation to take advantage of placing it and her other two original plays (Ali-Bek and Un loco hace ciento) in volume V of the Teatro Nuevo Español, undoubtedly a great opportunity for Gálvez to associate her work with this collection of plays deemed exemplary by the official government Plan de Reforma de los Teatros (Theatre Reform Plan) (García Garrosa 2011, 47).

This translation was also a transmutation (to follow Jakobson’s categorization) from opera to sentimental comedy. Gálvez not only removed music from the original—sung musical elements were changed to spoken verse, and the concluding section of music and dance was eliminated—but there were other changes as well. In Act II, scene three of the original French version, Catherine is being observed by Lussan, who has fallen in love with her. He sees her take up the harp in the scene, and secretly listens in on her singing, which she prefaces with the following statement:

Dear talent, the secret charm of my sad existence! Be again the intepreter and consolation of a sorrow that I do not dare seek the cause. (II.iii, 45)

Music is Catherine’s secret talent and her consolation when troubled. In Gálvez’s version, although the harp is described as present in the stage description at the beginning of the act, instead of picking up that instrument of music, Catalina picks up her pen. Catherine’s music is transformed into Catalina’s poetry, and her hidden talent that brings her solace becomes writing:

Catalina sits again, takes paper and pen: [Lussan] rises and observes her while hidden.

Lussan: What do I see? It seems she’s going to write… Let’s observe.

Catalina: Inspiration of sweet poetry! Captivating charm of my sad existence! Help me interpret my true feelings, and console the pains whose cause I dare not explore. (II.iii, 51).

Bordiga Grinstein believes that by replacing sung lyrics with spoken verse, the main character Catalina became more like Gálvez herself—a writer and poet, who too was ruined by a rake of a husband (2003, 70). In this way the autobiographical elements of Candeille’s opera that closely associated that author with her main character and played on the sentiments of her audience on multiple levels (as identified by Letzer and Adelson 2000, 2004), also worked for Gálvez on various levels with her audience as well. By choosing a play by a woman who achieved renown from her work, about a woman who was wronged in marriage and who rejected love and men, at least initially, Gálvez tied her life and career as a writer to Candeille’s, and with it sought some of the success Candeille had achieved. While Gálvez did not attempt to create an opera in this first foray into translation, certainly it planted the seed that would eventually lead her to a translation that she would be much prouder of: the opera Bion.

The Box-Office and Artistic Success of Bion (1803)

While Gálvez avoided operatic elements in Catalina, just two years later she would translate another opera as opera. Bion ran throughout the months of May, June, and September of 1803 at the Caños del Peral Theatre in Madrid (where today’s Royal Theatre stands), earning decent revenues at the Box Office.Footnote 8 This successful run was less than three years after the piece upon which it was based (libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman and music by Étienne Méhul) premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in December of 1800. Opera, although introduced into Spain during the seventeenth century, gained in popularity throughout the eighteenth century, due in no small part to the Bourbon dynasty, with its French and Italian roots, and it appeared that with this successful translation, María Rosa de Gálvez was riding its wave of popularity (Stein and Leza 2009). María Jesús García Garrosa has pointed out Gálvez’s “skill in versification as well as in translation” in this piece (2011, 54).Footnote 9Gálvez was able not only to translate meaning accurately, but she also adapted the language to Spanish lyric that could also appropriately accompany Méhul’s score.

Méhul and Hoffman’s Bion is set in Classical Greece and tells the story of a poet, Bion, who is the guardian of beautiful young Nysa. Together they lead an idyllic life on an island away from the rest of Greek society.Footnote 10 Two male visitors from the mainland—Agenor (a philosopher trained by Plato) and Crates—upset their peace and when Agenor falls in love with Nysa. Nysa is confused about her feelings of attraction to the young philosopher and of gratitude to her older benefactor Bion, who encourages her to follow her heart. Bion and Nysa set up a fake wedding between them to test Agenor. In the end, Bion makes it known that Nysa should choose her own match, and she chooses Agenor.

A comparison of the two texts—Hoffman’s original and Gálvez’s translation—reveals very little variance between them. María Rosa de Gálvez’s translation keeps the same storyline and characters, and the structure is basically the same, with the exception of the omission of one brief scene towards the end of the play. Gálvez also strives to produce similar versification to the original. For example, in a duo between Bion and Nysa from the second scene, Gálvez imitates the French verse with Spanish metre, as well as the AB consonant rhyme scheme. She prefers to preserve these qualities over direct translation, as in the line “Nuestra unión siempre fue dichosa” (our union was always happy) for “Nous étions toujours seuls ensemble” (we were always alone together). Gálvez explains her choices this way in a note at the end of the published text:

The freedom of the translation of the sung verses and the irregularity of their meter are born of the need to accommodate the long or short syllables to the points of stress in the music: such that in other translators we hear sung in the theatre corázon instead of corazón, the lyrics not making sense, the verse ending where it shouldn’t, and other defects, which music professors know well although they try to cover up with the orchestral score. (108–109)

Gálvez’s choice to translate Bion also highlights the circulation of gender and genre. Gálvez was the first and only woman to translate a successful opera in eighteenth-century Spain, and we could speculate that she must have chosen this popular genre in part to boost her own success as a woman writer. But she also states in an “Advertencia” to the play that it was the technical challenge that this endeavour posed, and her success at it, that led her to include a translation in her collection of otherwise original works:

The following translation is included in this volume because it pertains to the lyrical genre, and is thought preferable to infinite other poems whose merit depends more on the circumstances in which they were written than on their difficulty, invention or context. (57)

Although in the brief introduction to the volume in which Bion appears, Gálvez seems to play the role of humble female writer so typical of the time, calling her own poetry “hijas de las circunstancias” (daughters of circumstance), with Bion, she wants to show off her poetic skills as proof that she was up to the challenge. With Bion, María Rosa de Gálvez attempted to translate not just the storyline from French to Spanish language, but she strove to adapt story and lyric for Spanish audiences.

Adaptation and Transformation in El egoísta (1804)

Immediately following Gálvez’s translated opera Bion in volume one of the Obras poéticas is an original work: El egoísta. Set in current-day England, this sentimental drama is in the style of the eighteenth-century comedia lacrimosa (lachrymose comedy) with its contemporary bourgeois setting, melodramatic confrontations between good and evil, and copious tears. Gálvez’s adoption of this eighteenth-century genre with its roots in British and French sentimental literature connects her with other contemporary Spanish dramatists such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos.Footnote 11 El egoísta tells the story of Nancy, the long-suffering and abandoned wife of the rake Sidney, who has come to the outskirts of London (Windsor) from Gloucester in search of her husband. Sidney scandalously flaunts his lover (Jenny Marvod) to his wife, refuses to disavow his licentious lifestyle and his equally corrupt friends, and openly voices his contempt for his wife and their child. He uses all around him for money and position, and shockingly attempts to poison his wife after thinking that he has successfully used her connections to achieve a government appointment in India.

Although claimed by the author as original, El egoísta has much in common with other texts, beginning with her first translation Catalina o la bella labradora. As with Catalina, the lead female character is also an innocent woman wronged by a philandering husband. At the end of the first act of the earlier translation, Catalina sings of this plight, describing another young woman who had been married off for her money and abandoned:

Verse

Verse No sooner had they married Than the penniless man Looked for pleasures Away from home. And Julia was oppressed By a thousand terrible humiliations And poverty followed Such crude misfortunes. (I.xi, 36)

Nancy of El egoísta describes a similar fate shortly after marrying Sidney:

Verse

Verse The ungrateful man, quickly carried away by the force of the bad example of others, forgot me, insulted me and despised me; and there was not an excess or disgrace into which he did not fall; (I.iv, 125–6)

But while both women are abandoned and financially destroyed, Nancy is also threatened with physical harm and even death. In the first act, Bety, the innkeeper of the guesthouse where Nancy and her son are staying in Windsor, asks Nancy if she is afraid of her husband:

Verse

Verse BETY (…) Tell me, do you fear Some sort of danger with the unexpected return of my lord? Smith, who brought this news, perhaps came only to make annoying inquiries NANCY Oh, Bety, I am very suspicious that my lord, due to the violence of his arrogant character, has squandered my good reputation. (I.iii, 119)

The violence of Sidney’s character becomes evident not only in his attitudes and actions towards Nancy, but also in his other relationships with women, especially with his lover Jenny Marvod. At first the audience sees Jenny Marvod as the immoral “other woman”, whose behaviour betrays her supposed aristocratic identity as the Duchess of Cumberland: “Your grace expresses herself in a way improper for her class and position” (I.vii, 134). But later we find that she too is a victim of Sidney’s abuse—“For him only I suffered the flames of love; for this ingrate my fierce heart was humiliated” (II.iv, 166)—and that now Sidney has set his sights on Jenny’s 12-year-old sister, whom he plans to seduce (167). Sidney is called a calavera various times in the play, a character type well known in Spanish drama from his appearance as Don Juan in the Burlador de Sevilla (1630), and his adaptation across the international stage including Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787). In British drama, he is the rake, who first appears onstage in Restoration comedies of the late seventeenth century, continues his presence in eighteenth-century British sentimental drama, and eventually appears in the sentimental novel from the late eighteenth century on.Footnote 12

Sidney’s egotism and disregard for decorum, morals, and the law lead him to plot his wife’s demise at the end of the second act. Thinking that he has gotten what he wanted from Nancy—an appointment as governor of India—he reasons he would be better off without her:

Verse

Verse There is no doubt that my appointment will be granted; and everywhere a bachelor achieves more distinction than a married man, and attracts a thousand young ladies to run around with Above all, he doesn’t have the continual grind of a complaining wife, her whining and nagging sermons; (II, xi, 184)

Sidney poisons Nancy’s hot chocolate, and, anticipating her imminent death, describes the feelings of pity and desire that his last interaction with her aroused:

Verse

Verse Nancy was so pretty seated on her bed, tearful and grateful, that I felt a certain desire that she live…But it was too late; She had already drunk the poison calmly, and said: “Oh Sidney, I owe you so much!” Such words! I don’t know why I keep thinking about them constantly; So what if I lose Nancy, what do I lose? Such a strange woman, who doesn’t take advantage of her attractiveness… Come on, I am embarrassed more each time I think about how I felt pity for her. (II.xiii, 196)

Jesús Pérez-Magallón has studied the character of Sidney as an “anti-model” of Enlightened masculinity, in contrast to the “hombre de bien” (good man) found in so many Spanish Enlightenment texts, such as in Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’ El delincuente honrado. Pérez-Magallón points out that in contrast to the sincere and moral behaviour of characters like Nancy and her protector Lord Nelson, who follow social norms and decorum, Sidney and his friends violate those norms. In the same scene mentioned earlier when Nancy meets her husband’s lover Jenny Marvod and is confused by her improper behaviour, she is equally stunned by the brash forwardness of her husband’s friend Belford. These open displays of self-centeredness, and of a lack of honour, which in the eighteenth century was tied to one’s conduct rather than to one’s social position, lead to the dissolution of the bourgeois family, the centre of Spanish Enlightenment society (Pérez-Magallón).

Bordiga Grinstein believes that a French opera Le délire, ou les suites d'une erreur (1800) by Jacques-Antoine Révéroni Saint-Cyr and the German play Menschenhass und Reue (1790) by August von Kotzebue (both translated by Dionisio Solís) could have been inspirations for El egoísta (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, 107). The English setting of this play along with the English names of the characters also point to possible influence from English sources. Yvonne Fuentes, in her study of Spanish sentimental drama as part of a “triangle” of influence between English, French, and Spanish drama, addresses not only direct translations of works among these three traditions, but also of other points of contact expressed in a general “gusto por lo inglés” (“enthusiasm for things English”, 233). Beyond direct influence of source text to translation, Fuentes finds that there “existed a philosophical and aesthetic affinity, admiration, and perhaps even a nose for commercial success in Spain that had been seen in other countries” (234). While a number of English sentimental dramas made their way into Spain, often through a Spanish translation of a French translation, perhaps the most influential English texts were the sentimental novel, especially Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), both of which were translated as novels and also adapted for the stage. Clarissa in particular was a model for the popular Spanish sentimental novel La Leandra (1797–1807) by Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor. Could El egoísta be another example of Richardson’s influence? Some of the circumstances, themes, and character types of El egoísta are similar to Clarissa—the licentious and egotistical rake, the setting in an English inn, the drugging/poisoning of the heroine, as well as her impending death. The strongest of these connections to Clarissa is the character Belford, who not only shares the same name as this secondary character in Richardson’s novel, but also changes from friend and confident of the rake, to a man sympathetic to the unjust plight of the mistreated heroine.

Daniel Whitaker finds in this play another example of how Gálvez used female voices in her plays to address contemporary issues—in this case that of legal separation and divorce for a married couple, and thus “an alternative to the patriarchal status quo” (1990, 41). Nancy herself, although she shows herself to be a loyal and virtuous wife throughout, brings up the idea of divorce in Act III, when Sidney refuses to let her leave the inn with their son after her poisoning:

Verse

Verse Evil man Unmoved by crime And by love, man of marble Here is my divorce sentence (taking out the papers from his suit) Here is evidence Of your disgrace, and my death. (III.xi, 223)

The papers she takes out are not legal papers, but rather papers proving that he has poisoned her. Still, new divorce laws had been recently passed in France and divorce was an increasingly debated topic among Spanish intellectuals (Whitaker 1990, 39). When Nancy utters these words, and when her marriage is ultimately permanently broken not by death but by her husband’s arrest, we cannot ignore the parallels with the author’s own biography. Bordiga Grinstein notes in detail many autobiographical parallels in the play—from its setting (the capital settings of London and nearby Windsor standing in for Gálvez’s own life in Madrid and Aranjuez), to details of the play such as the instrument with which Sidney stirs the poison into Nancy’s chocolate—a pen—to specific actions and situations by the fictional Sidney that are similar to Gálvez’s estranged husband José Cabrera including his ruinous gambling debts, his appointment to an overseas post through his wife’s influential connections, and his imprisonment (Bordiga Grinstein 2003, 107–112). Gálvez, like her heroine Nancy, also appeared to have suffered at the hands of a cruel husband. Perhaps she found writing El egoísta helpful, in the words of her previous heroine Catalina, “to interpret her true feelings” and “consolation for the pains” she endured. Additionally, much as occurred with Candeille’s Catherine, the strong personal identification between the author and the themes and characters in this play allowed Gálvez to present intense emotions, and the moral lessons drawn from them, from the authority of a woman’s experience.

Conclusion: Circulating Genre and Gender

In their study of gender and translation in two eighteenth-century plays, Catherine Jaffe and Elisa Martín-Valdepeñas Yagüe examine two plays as translations/adaptations of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais's Eugénie (1767): Elizabeth Griffith's The School for Rakes (1769) and María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo's El Eugenio (1801). These two plays adapted different elements of Beaumarchais’s text (itself an adaptation of another French text that was in turn a translation/adaptation of a seventeenth-century Spanish text), and each also produced their plays under very different circumstances. Griffith, an actress, wrote for the London commercial stage. De los Ríos, an aristocrat and intellectual, wrote for an intimate group of friends. Despite these differences, Griffith and de los Ríos as translators and adaptors of Beaumarchais’s text were part of the larger circulation of genre (in this case the sentimental drama) and gender in the eighteenth century, interpreting Beaumarchais’s play for their own national contexts while at the same time they “introduce new possibilities for gender roles” (53). These women translators and adaptors were not merely conduits of culture from one language to the next. They, like Gálvez, participated actively in the circulation of ideas and aesthetics, all the while interpreting and adding new possibilities. The choices they made of the texts and stories they translated or adapted; the culturally specific ways they re-presented them; their emphasis on aspects of gender, writing from the authority of their own positions as women; and finally their choices of genre all placed them squarely in the midst of the Enlightenment movement, which they too helped shape.

Linda Hutcheon, in her exploration of a theory of adaptation, defines adaptation “as a product (as extensive particular transcoding) and as a process (as creative reinterpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality)” (22). Throughout María Rosa de Gálvez’s plays—translations and originals—we see a similar process of “creative reinterpretation and palimpsestic intertextuality”: an aria becomes a poem, a French opera is produced in traditional Spanish metre, the rake is an iconic Spanish calavera, or the name of a secondary character and English setting evoke a best-selling novel. Gálvez’s connection with her audience—spectator or reader—is important too, and Gálvez seems to invite associations between what they are seeing on stage or reading on the page, what they may know of previous or contemporary works, even works of other genres, and sometimes what they may know of Gálvez herself.

What María Rosa de Gálvez wanted more than anything else was to make her mark, to be remembered as a woman dramatist. She knew that given the secondary role assigned to translation, it would be through her original work that she could best make literary history. Still, in her translations, she worked with genres that would put her squarely in the midst of a dynamic Enlightenment culture, allowing her to creatively reinterpret their stance on gender for Spanish audiences.