Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 by Elizabeth E. Wright (review)

Abstract

1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when differentdefinitions of femininity in a particular culture are deemed to be conflictual , and Aine O'Healy pursues a related theoretical strand in a discussion of the way Fellini foregrounds the cinematic construction of women as projections of male fantasy and desire, hovering ambivalently between voyeuristic indulgence and a cri? tique of the masculine biases of cinematic practices. Dorothee Bonnigal's analysis of Amarcord focuses profitably on the film's use of characters such as Gradisca to demystifythe kitsch self-idealization of Fascism and also to highlight the movement's compatibility with the phoney glamour and artistic totalitarianism of Hollywood. While Cosetta Gaudenzi raises a valid issue in her discussion of the youths' use of Romagnol dialect as a subversive device to undermine political and scholastic authori? tarianism in the same film,the critic is on less secure ground when she draws attention to the Tuscan and Neapolitan accents of the senior Fascist characters without exploring the possibility that Fellini may have been indulging in historical revisionism by distancing his compaesani from the party's upper echelons. The volume also contains a discussion by Helen Stoddart of Fellini's use of circus imagery and the carnivalesque, and an analysis by Marguerite Waller ofthe dissonant visual language within La dolce vita, while Carlo Testa explores Fellini's interest in the works of Kafka, an affinitythat resulted in America being used as the basis for the director's fictitious film project in Intervista. In a theoretical context, the recent critical work within filmstudies regarding the viewer's cognitive and affective involvement in films,an orientation typified by Plantinga and Smith's excellent Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), constitutes uncharted territoryforthis particular volume. Nevertheless, the traditional approaches employ ed here are perfectly legitimate and largely effective in terms of shedding light on the aesthetic choices and forms of representation to be found in Fellini's work. University of Salford William Hope Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 15Q8-1621. By Elizabeth E. Wright. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Asso? ciated University Presses. 2001. 184 pp. ?3?- ISBN 0-8387-5454-6. Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was arguably the greatest and undoubtedly the most prolific of Spanish dramatists. His three hundred or so surviving plays demonstrate an unrivalled ability to entertain all levels of Golden Age society. Yet, in spite of his enormous popularity, he had great difficultyin gaining formal recognition because the public theatre in Spain was still only very gradually beginning to acquire literary respectability. So, from the late 1590s, he began to broaden the scope of his writing, turning his attention to the publication of more ambitious works than the plays and short lyrical pieces to which he had previously dedicated his attention. Quite suddenly , epic poems such as La Dragontea (Valencia, 1598) and La Jerusalen conquistada (Madrid, 1609), the adventure romance El peregrino en supatria (Seville, 1604), the prose eclogue Arcadia (Madrid, 1598), and the enormous hagiographic epic Isidro (Madrid, 1599) rolled offthe presses as part of Lope's strategy to draw attention to his personal credentials as an author. Yet, at the same time, he continued his career as a popular dramatist, while also providing plays for the new court theatre, as well as producing verse that both praised and satirized the Spanish nobility. It is this MLRy 98.4, 2003 1013 prodigiously diverse output that provides the basis forElizabeth Wright's analysis of Lope's career at the court ofPhilip III, a king whose reign coincided with a significant period of social and political transition that is most closely linked to the ascendancy of the Duke of Lerma. As such, Wright's book complements recent research on the Spanish Habsburg court in the early seventeenth century, as well as New Historicist work on the changing social identities and motivations of early modern...