Monarchy and the Limits of Exemplarity in the Teatro palaciego of Francisco Bances Candamo

Abstract

, hroughout history, theater has provided a place &0 for structuring the vision of a particular community. Because theater implies the collective remembrance and construction of certain common Sstories or myths, it often becomes the site of a NV society's self-imagining. The comedia that flourished in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Spain was no exception. Whether invoking the protocols of courtship and honor or dramatizing the myth of Spain's imperial destiny, Golden Age theater became a mirror of a particular system of values and the locus for forging a communal, if imagined, identity. With its dazzling pageantry and spectacle, the teatro palaciego of the Habsburg Court during the last part of the seventeenth century represents a peculiar manifestation of that society's self-fashioning. Although its immediate audience was an elite group, seemingly distant from the collective experience of the corrales, Court theater nevertheless became a politically charged manifestation of a society's assumptions about the structures that governed it. The confined space of the Court was, after all, a highly politicized community, one intensely self-conscious about the need to affirm its authority and control through the manipulation and preservation of certain symbols and myths of power. Theatrical spectacle provided the ideal vehicle for the ongoing process of constructing, mythifying, and mystifying absolutist power.