The second of the four Golden Age plays produced for its 2004 Stratford season by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) was Tirso de Molina's Tamar's Revenge (La venganza de Tamar). The drama follows the Old Testament story of King David's heir, Amnon, who becomes obsessed with and eventually rapes his half-sister, Tamar, before being murdered in revenge by her brother, the vain and power-hungry Absalom. The RSC's production permitted an all-too-rare opportunity to assess a professional director's and cast's “reading” of a classical Spanish play against interpretations offered by scholars based almost invariably on the play's text. It forced a reconsideration of a number of critical assumptions about Tirso's play, with the fact that it was performed in English, initially to a non-Spanish audience, and at the home of Shakespeare, being factors important to its novelty and freshness.

Before considering in detail the most striking aspect of the RSC's production, that is, the characterization of Tamar herself, it is worth expanding briefly on this point. The last major staging of Tirso's Old Testament play, by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) in 1997, illustrated some of the difficulties that productions of Golden Age works can face in Spain. Interviews with the play's director, José Carlos Plaza, in advance of its opening nights in Almagro, Madrid, and Barcelona, betrayed his custodial impulse to respect the original tragedy (as he saw it) and resist any attempt to modernize it. The overriding defensive and proprietorial functions of the director and the company are underlined by Plaza's assertion that the play is as good as a Shakespeare work, and his keenness to note that he is rediscovering (perhaps re-displaying) a work not performed since the seventeenth century (Bravo, Escarré, Galindo). Theatre critics were generally unimpressed with the production. Although the “version” of the playtext, done by José Hierro, tended to be admired for its sensitive cuts and replacing of “frases obsoletas que romperían el clima atemporal” (“obsolete phrases which would destroy the effect of timelessness”) (López Sancho), it failed to win audiences over on other counts. The speaking of the verse and the grandiloquent style of acting were both criticized (Pérez de Olaguer, Haro Tecglén) and there ensued a general wringing of hands over the purpose of the CNTC (see especially Ley).