Entremeses nuevos (1643) edited by Juan C. González Mata (review)

Abstract

Entremeses nuevos (1643) Ed. Juan C. Gonzalez Mata. Prologo de Abraham Madronal. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2012. 442 pp.An awning of paradox covers Spanish comedia studies. Scholars and critics seek to understand this patrimony through ever-larger bodies of documentation and hermeneutics. Every year more classics are revived and staged as two-act plays in proscenium venues before spectators who are usually seated, at the least, several yards away from the action. For the most part, scholarship and performances, however plausible, persuasive, moving, and even brilliant, assume epistemologies and empirical realities that have little to do with comedia perfomance in the seventeenth century. The fact remains that there is a great deal that we do not know about theatrical productions in the 1600s. Like the scholars and philosophers described by Plato in Phaedo 99-100, we contemplate past existences through the medium of thought, but see them only through a glass darkly. Even an entire genre remains unrecognized by and large in scholarship and in performance: the entremes. Despite a century that has given us Emilio Cotarelo's monumental Coleccion de entremeses, loas, bailes, jacaras y mojigangas (1911), the masterful projects of Hannah Bergman (1965, 1968, 1970) and Eugenio Asensio (1971), excellent editions by Rodriguez and Tordera (1982), Lobato (1989), Madronal (1996), Huerta Calvo (1999), Arellano, Escudero and Madronal (2001), Buezo (2005), Garcia Valdes (2005), and innumerable commentaries on Cervantes's short plays, the entremes as genre and as cultural practice remains an open field. On both counts, Gonzalez Maya's (hereafter, GM) edition of Entremeses nuevos de diferentes autores (1643) lays a solid foundation and points to directions for future enquiry.The volume's prologue and opening chapters deftly establish the entremes as a literary canon: forty-three collections of one-act plays between 1640 and 1742, some of which enjoyed two or three printings, plus nineteen miscellanies containing short works. In chapter 3, GM enumerates the authors whose works constituted the 1643 anthology: Quinones de Benavente (12 titles), Calderon and Quevedo (3 titles each), Antonio de Solis and Juan Navarro de Espinosa (1 title each). The last-named author surprised this reviewer, because he was the censor who between 1638 and 1656 inflicted his orthodoxy and editorial judgments on three generations of playwrights. In chapter 4, GM discusses the art and technique of parody and, with admirable clarity, outlines an ars poetica of the entremes, organized around its parodie situations, characters, and language:Plot situations-a) picaresque episodes; b) generational conflicts between parents and their offspring; c) marital (and extramarital) tensions; d) strategies and tactics in the war of the sexes; e) the never-ending skirmishes between masters and their servants; f) the ruses that quacks foist upon their patients; g) parades of dandies, fops, and fools; and h) the comedy of street life: vendors, sticky-fingered cops, politicians, prostitutes.Comic premises-a) ridiculous stories, songs, plays on words, sayings, and proverbs that are used to artfully fleece, swindle, or pick a victim's pocket; b) physical humor, bawdy tales, practical jokes, and other pranks; c) ever-escalating battles of words, insults, and name-calling; d) hilarious use of props, costume, choreography, and visual effects, usually indicated in stage directions; e) use of disguise, male-seldom female-transvestism, and buffoonish costuming for doctors, barbers, sextons, and ghosts-again, for male characters, seldom for actresses. …