Plagio y autoría en las obras de Shakespeare traducidas por R. Martínez Lafuente

In the first quarter of the 20th century, R. Martínez Lafuente published the, until then, most comprehensive collection of Shakespeare’s works in Spanish. This collection includes 35 plays translated, according to current literature on the subject, from French versions and published in twelve undated volumes. Although it offers the first Spanish version of one of Shakespeare’s plays, and it has reached significant popularity, little data has been provided up to the present time regarding the collection and its author. In this article I review this data and present evidence that, on the one hand, allows us to determine reliably the date of publication of the translations and, on the other hand, brings authorship problems to light and demonstrates that the vast majority of the translations were not based on French versions but instead plagiarised earlier Spanish versions.