SPANISH PUPPET THEATER OF 17TH CENTURY SEVILLE

Abstract

In the history of world theater studies, there has been a tradition of identifying puppet theater as a separate art direction, isolating it from the current theatrical process. If you open the article by B. V. Goldovsky’s “Puppet Theater” in the modern “Great Soviet Encyclopedia”, then from the definition it is obvious that puppet theater belongs to theatrical art. In the tradition of Western and domestic theater studies, it is customary to view history through the prism of the biographies of authors woven into the fabric of the historical context, as well as the surviving texts of plays. Based on this method, bypassing historical documents, over the centuries a picture of the formation of professional theater has emerged. With the advent of computer technology and the beginning of the process of digitization of archives, it became possible to work with documentary primary sources. That is why it is necessary to re-clarify and supplement existing information in order to have a correct understanding of the history of world theater, which certainly influences the modern theatrical process. Spanish puppet theater, unfortunately, also became an exception from teaching aids, although throughout the history of the theater, puppet shows accompanied performances in the Corrals and enjoyed no less success with the public. The center of development of puppet theater in the 16th century was Seville, which was experiencing the Golden Age of theatrical culture. Thanks to the successful completion of the archive digitization process, based on primary sources, it is possible to reconstruct the puppet theater and compare it with modern analogues. Since there are no monographs on Spanish puppet theater in Russian theater studies, the purpose of the article is to draw attention to the relevance of the problem and clarify key points using the example of the reconstruction of the performance of the troupe of V. Colomer in the Monteria Corral in Seville in the 17th century.