Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre by Henry W. Sullivan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre by Henry W. Sullivan Jane W. Albrecht Henry W. Sullivan. Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre. sullivan's splendid study is presented in seven interwoven essays that cover a lot of ground in great depth. They move nimbly from consideration of early modern literary treatises to German Romantic and idealist philosophy to Greek mythology and drama, Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology, and more; from analysis of plays by Luis Velez de Guevara and Lope de Vega to those by Antonio Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and others. Those familiar with Sullivan's decades of scholarship will see its stamp on several of the new essays, along with his characteristic luminous prose and affable style. The thread that Sullivan keenly advances throughout the chapters of Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain is that, contrary to what was claimed for centuries, there was "a lucid and tangible 'idea of tragedy'" in the Golden Age made manifest in a uniquely Spanish style (35). That style is founded on the "embrace of Aristotle as to key affective features such as the Oedipal conflict, uxoricide, hamartia, Fate, catharsis of pity and fear, anagnorisis, and poesis" (33). Golden Age Spanish tragedy has found its champion in Henry Sullivan. Chapter 1, necessarily the longest, reviews the history of scholarly interest in the theory and practice of Spanish Golden Age tragedy, including the genre's rejection by eighteenth-century classicists in Spain and France. Sullivan singles out three moments of heightened critical attention to tragedy. The 1630s in Spain produced two notable works, González de Salas's "A New Idea of Ancient Tragedy," a lengthy exegesis of Aristotle's Poetics, and Lope de Vega's prologue to El castigo sin venganza, a brief commentary on Spanish-style tragedy (32). Second, the German Romantic movement of the nineteenth century yielded the insights of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel on the opposition of freedom versus necessity as the axis of Spanish drama (103). Finally, the British Calderón school of criticism of the twentieth century bore fruit in the achievements of, among others, A. A. Parker on the domination of action over character and subordination of theme to poetic justice in the comedia and the concept of "diffused responsibility" in [End Page 337] Calderonian tragedy; Bruce Wardropper on Spanish admiración as "the new catharsis"; Peter Dunn on the Christian background of Calderonian tragedy; and A. Irvine Watson on the neo-Aristotelianism of Golden Age tragedy (98–100). Sullivan, a son of the British school, takes up these topics in later chapters, drawing on some of those scholars' insights, repudiating others, and mostly relying on his own ideas and convictions. Chapter 2 illustrates a Spanish-style tragedy in extended analysis of Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza. An extraordinarily practical review of the uses of meter is followed by examination of the play's base images and poetic images. Sullivan shows that, similar to Shakespeare, Lope obeyed a formal design that reached back to the "affective substance and human interest of Ancient Greek theater described by Aristotle" (164). Chapter 3, to my mind the highlight of the volume, treats family tragedy in dramas of parricide and incest. Sullivan highlights two points where Spanish tragedy diverges from Western tradition, which have gone unremarked by scholars. First, in a reversal of Greek myth, sons are immolated by their fathers and never the other way around (205). Second, the status of the wife and wife murder are idiosyncratic (205): "Spanish drama inverts the mythic Kronos tradition of the wife winning out over an injurious husband by showing a jealous husband winning out over his [innocent] wife" (211). The lessons of this chapter will resonate in theater studies for years to come. Chapter 4 treats hamartia. First, Sullivan establishes that Spanish dramatists rejected fate as pagan destiny (in the manner of ancient Greek dramatists) as well as fate as character (in the style of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English playwrights). Instead, fate...