New Historicism and the Comedia: Poetics, Politics and Praxis

Abstract

Historicism and Comedia: Poetics, Politics and Praxis. Ed. Jose A. Madrigal. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 1997. 236 pages. Historicized by own moments of reception and production, eleven authors of essays contained in this seminal volume on comedia and legacies of Historicism seek to provide a critique of methodology, at same time that they test its applicability to a variety of Golden Age pre-texts and diachronically reassessed, and, in case of Denise DiPuccio's incisive contribution on contemporary Spanish and Mexican playwrights (e.g., Manuel Martinez Medeiro, Carlos Muniz, Ana Diosdado, Miguel Sabido, Elena Garro), intertextually refashioned in light of Quincentennial. Whether considered discretely or holistically, these essays illustrate, from standpoint of both theory and praxis, a dynamic rendered by Louis Montrose as the historicity of texts and textuality of history (Professing Renaissance, The ed. H. Aram Veeser, London: Routledge, 1989. 20). Taken in totality essays, in greater or lesser theoretical approach to phenomenon of new historicism and its aftermath, provide an enlightened inquiry into relationship between cultural forms, structures of state, institutional authority and theatrical representations. They elude in main a reductively polarized opposition between containment and subversion, which Montrose cites as a perennial pitfall of a contextual understanding of historical and aesthetic canon and, by extension, of a revisionist rewriting of supplementarity on either side of Atlantic. A. Robert Lauer's neo-historical reading of Fuenteovejuna posits an intertextual relationship between work and its cultural system (Hayden White, New Historicism, London: Routledge, 1989. 294), whereby Lope's text a decentering product of verbal and social practices which questions and destabilizes itself and its milieu (16) and which reiterates, essentially, that there are no 'winners' in this play and that the Catholic Monarchs's 'minor' dramatic role is in effect a major one (24). William R. Blue's essay on Calderon's Gustos y disgustos no son mds que imagination is a selfconsciously dissident amalgamation of theory and praxis which, in its topical transcendence of deterministic gossip in playworld, and of radical causality in its (meta)critique, deftly reveals how author can take a critical view of what he sees around him without demanding a complete overthrow of system in which he lives (37). Margaret Rich Greer takes a fresh look primarily at Calderon's paired autos, La semilla y la cizana and El cubo de la Almudena, in context of subversion-containment debate, questioning utility of such a binary formulation (45) and emphasizing sociopolitical system of meaning embedded therein and their psychological importance in constitution of community (49), which work to complement, not replace, traditional notion of performance pieces as religious dogma turned dramatic poetry. David Roman's examination of El secreto a votes is part of an intent to view Calder6n's capa y espada plays as localized sites of contestation and perhaps even negotiation that refute totalizing-Maravallian-concepts of period and point to moments of resistance (70), thereby positing both a subversive potential in staging royal instability and a recuperative measure through resolution within conventions of comedy (79). …