La cisma de Ingalaterra by Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Abstract

Reviewed by: La cisma de Ingalaterra by Pedro Calderón de la Barca Roy Norton Pedro Calderón de la Barca. La cisma de Ingalaterra. Edición de Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán. cátedra, 2018. 309 pp. calderón's la cisma de ingalaterra has provoked a flurry of interest in recent years, having long suffered relative neglect. Its characters were the subject of Braulio Fernández-Biggs's 2012 monograph, Calderón y Shakespeare: los personajes en La cisma de Ingalaterra y Henry VIII (Iberoamericana / Vervuert). An adaptation of the play was staged by Spain's Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) in 2015, and in April 2018 La cisma was the focus of an international symposium co-hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro (AITENSO), and organized by Susana Hernández Araico. It is to be hoped that the publication of Escudero Baztán's Cátedra edition will help sustain the momentum of critical and artistic engagement with Calderón's Henry VIII play, a work that might easily strike a chord with twenty-first-century readers and spectators. La cisma nicely illustrates the wisdom of the author of Ecclesiastes that "there is no new thing under the sun." It depicts a society that is deeply divided, where long-standing dispensations are being painfully overthrown. Under the leadership of a man prone to acting impetuously and capriciously, confident that his cynical motivations will remain opaque to his subjects, the English court begins to subscribe to alternative truths: Enrique's realm is a universe with two suns, where to fall is to rise and where men publicly deny the faith that, privately, they profess to love. Escudero's edited, annotated text is accompanied by an introductory study divided into five sections. These deal, in turn, with the play's structure, its source, its characters, and—the subject of the final two sections—the play's textual history. In addition, following the well-established template for critical editions of Golden Age comedias, the book contains a synopsis of versification, a list of variants, and an index of footnotes. An appendix reproduces selected extracts from the first part of Pedro de Rivadeneyra's Historia eclesiástica del cisma del reyno de Inglaterra (1588), from which Calderón drew the historical content of La cisma. [End Page 223] The introduction's first section emphasizes the importance of "el Hado" as the play's major structuring device. Enrique's dream, Volseo's horoscope, and Pasquín's prophecy regarding Ana Bolena all point from an early stage to the seemingly inevitable tragic denouement, so that, as with many history plays, the locus of interest is not the what of events but the how. Escudero shows that many of the concerns so central to Calderón's mature cosmology are present in this early play (ca. 1627): he highlights the opposition between passion and reason and between moral freedom and determinism, as well as the heavy price characters pay for errors of judgment. This section of the introduction also incorporates a plot summary that usefully shows how, through careful control of the character combinations present on stage in successive scenes, Calderón neatly reveals distinct facets of his characters' personalities as, at times, they allow the masks of their charades to drop. Also useful here are Escudero's comments on the playwright's modulation of dramatic pace, in particular the acceleration of the play's action towards its climax through the division of the third act into six blocks (the first two acts are split into just two blocks each). The editor's analysis draws fruitfully in this introduction on the scholarship of one of the most insightful critics to have worked on La cisma to date, the late Francisco Ruiz Ramón. Escudero's discussion of the dramatic treatment of the Rivadeneyra source underlines that the play is very much a "reescritura" (45) of the rather shrill, moralizing Historia, undertaken with a full measure of poetic licence. It is helpful that Escudero draws together here extracts from the works of Golden...