Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage (review)

Abstract

BURNINGHAM, BRUCE R. Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Stage. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2007. xii + 260 pages.The primary focus of studies of the comedia was once the literary artifact-its structure and themes, language and imagery, text and context. That is far from the case today. Since John Varey and N. D. Shergold began their series Fuentes para la Historia del Teatro en Espana in the 1960s, scholars have paid increasing attention to theaters, theater companies, actors, stagings, and textual issues (e.g., prompters' copies versus dramatists' printings). In the past fifteen years, performance-oriented studies have multiplied with the publication of such fundamental contributions as J. M. Ruano de la Haza and John J. Allen's Los teatros comerciales del siglo XVII y la escenificacion de la comedia (1994), Evangelina Rodriguez Cuadros's La tecnica del actor espanol en el Barroco (1999), and Carmen Sanz Ayan and Bernardo J. Garcia Garcia's Teatros y comediantes en el Madrid de Felipe II (2000). In 2004, the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (AHCT) launched the journal Comedia Performance. The subject of excellent article-length studies by Maria Luisa Lobato (Dos nuevos entremeses para Juan [1998] and Un actor para Palacio: Felipe IV escribe sobre Juan [1999]), the famous actor/persona Juan Rana is also the star of two recent books, Francisco Saez Raposo's Juan Rana y el teatro comico breve del siglo XVII (2005) and Peter Thompson's The Triumphant Juan Rana: A Gay Actor of the Golden Age (2006).Bruce Burningham's engaging and original Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early shares this commitment to a performance approach to classical theater, but takes it in new and wider directions. As the tide suggests, rather than focus on particular actors, playhouses, or play texts, it proposes a radical theatrical revisioning of the stage, a phrase Burningham employs in deliberate contradistinction to terms such as Spain's or the more traditional Spanish comedia. Stage privileges the theater as a living performance phenomenon rather than a literary genre; instead of early modern emphasizes continuities in theatrical practice from the Middle Ages through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is precisely the book's point of departure: whereas literary approaches would have us believe that theater history prior to Encina's eglogas and Rueda's pasos can be reduced to the thirteenth-century Auto de los reyes magos, Burningham argues that the activities of bards, mimes, and jongleurs constituted a dynamic performance tradition in medieval Iberia-a poetics of the jongleuresque-that remained a vital force in shaping sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theater. Burningham's geographic and temporal scope goes yet further. A comparatist with a command of wo rid-theater history (including the history of film) and contemporary performance theory, as well as a Hispanist with expertise in medieval and literature and drama, he has the scholarly training-and the creative intellect-to situate theater within a trajectory of performance traditions extending from the ancient Greek odeon to Shakespeare's Globe to Hollywood cinema.After a brief but effective introduction, chapter 1 establishes the theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book. Burningham takes on traditional narratives of the development of theater in the West, beginning with Thespis, who supposedly became the first actor-and the inventor of drama-the moment he separated himself from the chorus to introduce character dialogue on the stage. Ancient Greek theater went on to evolve into the elaborate spectacles of the Roman Empire, and then, after a hiatus coinciding with Rome's fall, was reborn again in the liturgical plays of the Middle Ages and transformed into the secular drama of the Renaissance. …