Research

Prof Thacker is currently serving as Chair of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty Board (2022-25).

Jonathan Thacker's main research interests are in the Spanish Golden Age. He has written on the prose and drama of Miguel de Cervantes and on various aspects of Golden-Age drama, including its metatheatrical elements, its translation and performance, and its ideological content. He has been a member of the CATCOM project at the Univeristy of Valencia (http://dicat.uv.es/catcom.html) and the ProLope group at the Autònoma in Barcelona (http://www.prolope.es/). He was also an investigator on the AHRC-funded 'Out of the Wings' project which seeks to disseminate information about and encourage performance of Spanish theatre in English translation (http://www.outofthewings.org/). He has acted as a consultant on productions of Golden Age theatre including at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since 2004 he has been Series Editor for Aris and Phillips Hispanic Classics, published by Liverpool University Press (https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/series/series-12802/) and from 2023 he has been Director of the Fuentes para la historia del teatro en España series, published by Tamesis (Boydell and Brewer) (https://boydellandbrewer.com/search-results/?series=byd257-fuentes-para…).

Teaching

Professor Thacker lectures on Golden-Age literature and culture, especially drama.

Graduate Teaching

Professor Thacker has supervised doctoral theses on Cervantes's drama, the translation and performance of Golden Age drama, the performance history of Golden Age drama in Spain in theatre and on film, the religious theatre of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the comedia de privanza in the time of Philip III, the notion of the Golden Mean in Golden Age literature, Baltasar Gracián, the performance history of Calderón's La vida es sueño, the neo-Latin poetry of Benito Arias Montano (with Classics), and the German reception of Calderón de la Barca (jointly). He has also supervised doctoral work involving the edition of two plays by Lope de Vega, Contra valor no hay desdicha and San Nicolás de Tolentino. He is currently co-supervising theses on the reception of Don Quijote in France and seventeenth-century judeoconverso poetry.

On the MSt, he teaches on special subjects related to early modern Spain and supervises dissertations on Golden Age literature and culture.

Publications

‘“… a ninguno imitó; nació para maestro, y no discípulo”: Calderón’s early debt to Lope de Vega and others’, Comedia Performance, 21 (2024), 203-18

‘From Enacting to Acting: Two Snapshots of Female Roles in Early Modern Spanish Drama’, in Essays in Honour of Ángel María García Gómez, edited by Stephen M. Hart, Jonathan Thacker and Alexander Samson (London: Centre of César Vallejo Studies, 2023), pp. 111-22

‘Theatrical Processes and the Iberian Stage’, Special Issue of the Journal of Romance Studies, 23.2 (2023), edited with María Chouza-Calo and Esther Fernández

Daring Adaptations, Creative Failures, and Experimental Performances in Iberian Theater (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2023), co-edited with María Chouza-Calo and Esther Fernández

A Companion to Calderón de la Barca (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2021), co-edited with Roy Norton (including ‘Calderón, the Comedian’, pp.110-31)

‘The unclothed body on and off stage in the comedia nueva’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 72.2 (2020) [2021], 15-47

‘Cervantes and Lope de Vega’ in The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes, ed. Aaron Kahn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 514-30

‘La traducción del teatro clásico español al inglés’, in La traducción del teatro clásico español (siglos XIX-XXI), eds Claudia Demattè, Eugenio Maggi y Marco Presotto (Venice: Ca’Foscari, 2020), pp. 101-15

‘La creación del mundo on the Seventeenth-century Street and Stage’, Comedia Performance, 17 (2020), 8-25

‘The Alternative Genius of Lope de Vega’, in A Companion to World Literature, 6 vols, ed. Ken Seigneurie (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), III, pp. 1741-51

Luis Vélez de Guevara, La creación del mundo, edición crítica y anotada de William R. Manson y C. George Peale, estudio introductorio de Jonathan Thacker (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2018)

‘“Seré lo que tú quisieres”: Female Cross-dressers in Three Comedies by Tirso de Molina’ Modern Language Review, 113 (2018), 338-59

‘Para tiempos de veras / se ejercitan en las burlas’: Some Uses of Rehearsal on the Golden Age Stage’, in The Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, eds. Javier Muñoz-Basols, Laura Lonsdale and Manuel Delgado (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), pp. 226-37

‘Self-Construction and the Imagination in the Drama of Lope de Vega and Cervantes’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 7-8 (2016), 1415-44 (with Melanie Henry)

‘The first English versions of Cervantes’s Don Quijote’, In Other Words 47 (2016), 115-20

Lope de Vega, El castigo sin venganza (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), edited with an introduction, critical analysis, notes and vocabulary

‘Adapting Lope de Vega for the English-Speaking Stage’, in Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation, eds. Harley Erdman and Susan Paun de García (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2015), pp. 93-101

‘Don Quixote in English Translation’, in Approaches to Teaching Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Second edition, eds. James A. Parr and Lisa Vollendorf (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2015), pp. 32-47

‘La puesta en escena del teatro clásico español en Gran Bretaña: estado de la cuestión y últimas tendencias’, in Diálogos en las tablas: últimas tendencias de la puesta en escena del teatro clásico español, eds. María Bastianes, Esther Fernández y Purificació Mascarell (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2014), pp. 247-68

‘Play rehearsals on the Golden Age stage’, in Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age, eds. Stephen Boyd and Terence O’Reilly (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), pp. 126-35

Miguel de Cervantes, The Complete Exemplary Novels (Oxford: Aris and Phillips, 2013), co-edited with Barry Ife

‘Maravall and the self in the comedia nueva’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 65.1 (2013), 155-73

‘The translation of La vida es sueño for a twenty-first-century anglophone audience’, in Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia: Translation, Interpretation, and Performance. Essays in Honor of Susan L. Fischer, ed. Bárbara Mujica (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), pp. 43-65

‘Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina: Spain’s Golden Age Drama and its Legacy’, in A History of Theatre in Spain, eds Maria M. Delgado and David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 36-56

‘La puesta en escena en las ediciones del teatro del Siglo de Oro’, in El teatro del Siglo de Oro: edición e interpretación, eds. Alberto Blecua, Ignacio Arellano y Guillermo Serés (Madrid: Iberoamericana/ Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2009), pp. 455-64 

‘La autoridad de la figura del loco en las comedias de Lope de Vega’, in Autoridad y poder en el Siglo de Oro, eds Ignacio Arellano, Christoph Strosetzki and Edwin Williamson (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2009), pp. 175-88

‘“Véote, y no te conozco”: the unrecognizable form of Cervantes’s El rufián dichoso’, Hispanic Research Journal, 10 (2009), 206-26

'Tirso’s Tamar Untamed: A Lesson of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Production', in The Comedia in English: Translation and Performance, ed. Susan Paun de García and Donald R. Larson (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), pp. 164-76

A Companion to Lope de Vega (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), co-edited with Alexander Samson [published in paperback 2018]

'La figura de la Comedia en El rufián dichoso de Cervantes', in La comedia de santos, ed. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez y Almudena García González (Almagro: Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2008), pp. 121-34

A Companion to Golden Age Theatre (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007)

‘Lope de Vega, El cuerdo loco, and “la más discreta figura de la comedia”’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 81 (2004), 463-78

‘La locura en las obras dramáticas tempranas de Lope de Vega’, in Memoria de la palabra: Actas del VI Congreso de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro, ed. María Luisa Lobato y Francisco Domínguez Matito (Frankfurt and Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2004), II, 1717-30

‘“Puedo yo con sola la vista oír leyendo”: Reading, Seeing and Hearing the Comedia’, Comedia Performance, 1 (2004), 143-73

Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia (Liverpool University Press, 2002)

'"Que yo le haré de suerte que os espante, si el fingimiento a la verdad excede”: Creative Use of Art in Lope de Vega’s Los locos de Valencia (and Velázquez’s Fábula de Aracne)’, Modern Language Review, 95 (2000), 1007-18

‘Lope de Vega’s Exemplary Early Comedy: Los locos de Valencia’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 52 (2000), 9-29

‘Rethinking Golden-Age Drama: The Comedia and its Contexts’, Paragraph, 22 (1999), 14-34

‘Yearning to Play the Part: Social Role-play in Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre’, in A Society on Stage: Essays on Spanish Golden Age Drama, ed. E. H. Friedman, H. J. Manzari and D. D. Miller (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998), 223-37

‘Comedy’s Social Compromise: Tirso’s Marta la piadosa and the Refashioning of Role’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 47 (1995), 267-89