Chilean translations of Shakespeare: do they constitute a national Shakespeare canon?

The publication of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays in 1623 raises a number of interesting questions for textual and translation studies. Has the Shakespeare canon remained stable? Is it the same in the playwright’s homeland than in other countries? How do translation, printing and publication policies define this canon? This paper examines how the Shakespeare canon is configured outside Britain, taking examples from translations done in Chile or by Chileans, and using The Tempest (Baldwin & Fernández, 2010) as a study case. It argues that the Shakespeare canon is no longer circumscribed to the British Isles, yet has become, at the same time, global in its scope and quite idiosyncratic in each particular country. It suggests that the playwright’s survival within the canon is not explained exclusively by the fact that his plays explore universal human conflicts, but also because translations, with their paratexts – at the service of a better reception of the text – make Shakespeare available to be published, read, and staged in many countries around the world.