
The research group TEATREL-SP has been active since 2019. Its project “T. S. Eliot’s Drama from Spain: Translation, Critical Study, Performance” is funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades. The second half of the project’s title defines the objectives: to analyse Eliot’s plays in-depth, to catalogue their productions in Spain, to study their translations into Spanish (and their reception), and to produce new updated translations (the most recent being from the 1960s).
The project’s website is now active, integrated with the portal of the Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales (LINHD) of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). It may be considered a significant addition to web-based resources on Eliot’s drama, which had largely been limited to Kate Pfeffer’s well-documented sections on Eliot’s plays on the webpage of the T. S. Eliot Foundation, various entries or articles in encyclopedias and literary websites (such as Literariness.org), and this blog.
As well as presenting the research project from which it derives, TEATREL-SP’s website sets Eliot’s drama in context, considering antecedents and comparative creative endeavours (in a text by Antonio Ballesteros González). It also examines the plays from the Spanish perspective, offering a detailed timeline of performances, from 1949 to 2016, as well as a complete list of Latin-American and Spanish translations (in some cases unpublished).
Each of Eliot’s five plays has its own reference entry, exploring its origins, dramatic technique, themes, sources, intertextual connections, language and reception. Extensive bibliographies (including DOI links) are provided, and each text contains cross-references that link to other sections of the website. The five entries of “The Plays” have been produced by Natalia Carbajosa, Isabel Castelao-Gómez, Teresa Gibert and Dídac Llorens-Cubedo. Sweeney Agonistes and The Rock have a specific section, as antecedents of Eliot’s main body of dramatic work (“Drama Before Drama”), but the approach to them – by Fabio L. Vericat and Viorica Patea – is similar.
Visitors may link to this blog and to various other webpages and resources, among which are an audio recording of The Cocktail Party and a filmed version of Ildebrando Pizzetti’s opera version of Murder in the Cathedral. The website, including its original illustrations, was designed by Iván Mezcua.