Comedia: Art and History (review)

Abstract

Reviews21 7 pletely unplayable and unfaithful to the literary quality of the original upon which it is based. Vern G. Williamsen Association for Hispanic Classic Theater Blue, William R. Comedia: Art and History. New York: Peter Lang, 1989. University of Kansas Humanistic Studies, Volume 55. 204 pp. $40.30. In a number of critical essays and in a book on the imagery of Calderón's comedias, William R. Blue has shown himself to be an intelligent and perceptive reader of Golden Age drama. Comedia: Art and History looks at the interplay of art (the dramatic creation) and history (the contexts which affect writing, performance , and interpretation). The introductory chapter discusses approaches to the comedia, and each of the following nine chapters focuses on a particular play: El Undo don Diego, No hay mal que por bien no venga, La verdad sospechosa , Los mal casados de Valencia, El castigo del discreto, Por el sótano y el torno, Don Gil de las calzas verdes, La adversa fortuna de don Alvaro de Luna, and El mayor encanto amor. Blue distinguishes those plays which deal with what he classifies as "odd characters" from those which feature "odd couples," married and unmarried, and those which deal directly or indirectly with political questions. There are several common threads in the analyses. The critic points to the "paradoxical dialectic between art and history": "the highly trope-ridden, quick-silver, ambiguous language of comedia jeopardizes the very superstructure it has often been seen as upholding" (24). That is, every text has a subtext, or, more properly, a number of subtexts, conditioned by history and by the passage of time. Every text has the capacity to exalt and to undermine its premises. Although he does not express it in precisely these terms, Blue ultimately seems interested in the value systems of the texts and of Golden Age theater in general. One could argue perhaps that in each of the plays under scrutiny the relative poses as the absolute, that at the foundation of the text —and at the foundation of the society reflected in the text—the established, or restored, order is precarious at best. Like society and the playwright, the reader/spectator sits in judgment of the norms which govern behavior and art. Blue challenges facile or conventional readings of the plays. He looks beyond such odd characters as Ruiz de Alarcón's Don García or Moreto's Don Diego, for example, to show that the institutions and laws aimed at upholding morality often may be, like truth, suspicious. Similarly, in a play such as El casti- 218BCom, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter 1 990) go del discreto, Lope de Vega puts his audience in the position "of being in a house of mirrors and suddenly 'finding a door out.' But stepping outside the house of mirrors and finding oneself in the midst of the ongoing carnival, raises the question of whether the 'outside' is less or more labyrinthine than the 'inside' " (97). The motif of judgment, in its various connotations, is most evident in La adversa fortuna de don Aluaro de Luna, in which Mira de Amescua foregrounds the judge (the king) over the judged (his favorite) . The play is not so much about the victim as about the arbiter of fate. Calderón's mythological play, El mayor encanto amor, is likewise, and ironically, about judgment. The playwright distances himself from political reality to make a political statement. The character Antistes, who may represent Calderón, "warns Ulysses of Circe's deadening charms, advises him to flee, bewails his slothful forgetfulness of duty and country, and tries to awaken his commander by 'putting on a play.' The play 'fails' because with it he cannot awaken the leader's conscience, yet Antistes knows that he must try no matter what the personal consequences" (167). The study demonstrates the importance of contextual considerations of the comedia, in conjunction with solid readings of the nine plays. The writing is clear, and the commentary is sound. Blue might have given greater attention to critical precedents on the individual plays. In light of his knowledge of drama and literary theory, one might have hoped for a more...