Expanding the Circle

This is what I've been able to dig up so far in attempting to expand my social media outlets:
I posted my question about Shakespeare in translation, and received two helpful comments on goodreads.com.

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1080666-shakespeare-in-translation
One user wrote this:

"I've often wondered about this. I remember a professor of German (he was English) telling me how much easier S was to follow at the theatre in German than in English. The German was modern and all the difficulties and complexities of language had, to some extent, been translated out."

I feel that I can relate to this experience, because reading Richard III in Spanish was much easier to understand than in English. While the English version has sentences dripping with words full of meaning, the Spanish text put the idea Shakespeare was trying to convey in a straightforward, unmistakeable manner. 

Shakespeare's Spanish Counterpart?

I am exploring Spanish translations of Shakespeare, and translation in general. I found a great clip from a documentary exploring the parallels between Spanish and English theater, and discovered a prolific Spanish playwright named Lope de Vega, who, according to shakespearetheater.org, is the "'father of Spanish national drama', reinventing (rather than reinterpreting) material taken from sources as varied as those of Shakespeare: history, legend, mythology, chronicles, ballads, Italian novellas, town life, country life, the lives of the saints and the Bible, while Shakespeare came forward after English theatre had already developed a variety of dramatic forms."

But you don't have to take my word for it . . . 12:18-12:46

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBXWn00Cc-8

The Spanish Shakespeare?

This got me thinking, that if Shakespeare is translated everywhere, what about Vega? Why is it that Shakespeare's words are translated into 72 languages and Vega remains well-known only to the Spanish literary tradition? Perhaps because although Vega has his own unique storylines, for Shakespeare, “the language IS the storyline" as one SpanishDict chatroom user put it. That leads me to my thesis: