Vida escénica de ‘La Celestina’ en España (1909–2019) by María Bastianes

Abstract

 Reviews causes his downfall’ (p. ). Sentimental fictions rework the role of erotic desire in penitential fictions—as an energy that can be exploited for ethical conversion—into desire for narrative innovation. Miguel-Prendes restricts her analysis to works that feature a dream-vision frame or distort the consolation: Pedro de Portugal’s Sátira de infelice e felice vida; Triste deleytación; Francesc Alegre’s Somni and Rehonament; Juan de Flores’s Grimalte y Gradisa; and San Pedro’s Arnalte y Lucenda and Cárcel de amor. e chapter discusses other works that contain sentimental content but do not utilize the dream vision (e.g. Flores’s Grisel y Mirabella) to demarcate the genre’s boundaries (pp. –). e consolatory mode is thus transformed by ‘caballeros sçientes’ from maleoriented penitential fictions into sentimental fictions read by men and women at court. Narrating Desire is a major contribution to scholarship on both sentimental fiction and its literary and scholastic antecedents. Miguel-Prendes’s work effectively synthesizes all that came before and provides a clear argument as to why this new way of reading the genre gives it its long-wished-for unity. Summaries of the works discussed, together with English translations of quotations, also importantly open up this topic to a broader readership. H C, O R D S Vida escénica de ‘La Celestina’ en España (–). By M B. (Spanish Golden Age Studies) Oxford: Peter Lang. . xx+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. is exhaustive survey of theatrical representations of the Spanish masterpiece Celestina is not for the faint-hearted, and it helps if, like me, you have edited the text once or twice before, and thus can follow the extensive analyses of sub-acts and passages which have been removed, augmented, abridged, or otherwise altered for theatrical production. e problem, quite simply, is that the long sixteen- or twenty-one-act work is a dialogue novel and cannot be presented on the stage unless extensive surgery is performed. is means that the true genius of the work, its portrayal of figures who evolve and are influenced by the other characters, cannot be conveyed convincingly on stage and, essentially, we are oen given a plot summary rather than a genuine version. It is rather like claiming to have seen Romeo and Juliet aer attending the ballet, which itself is wonderful in the Prokofiev/MacMillan version but is not Shakespeare. However, some of the contradictions of Fernando de Rojas’s work about two lovers, less star-crossed than corrupted (by the cynicism of their servants and the go-between, sorceress, and possible witch Celestina), can be conveyed in semaphoric form, particularly the choice between Celestina’s forensic powers versus her putative witchcra to explain how the virgin Melibea is convinced so apparently easily, and seduced by the both parodic and basically cynical Calisto. María Bastianes’s analysis of the staging of the work since the s points out that my work and that of June Hall Martin [McCash] on parody—especially MLR, .,   as regards the figure of Calisto as inept courtly lover—has influenced numerous interpretations. e social realism of José Antonio Maravall’s work was similarly important for many productions from the s and s. It took international stagings by Jeanne Moreau (France), Robert Lepage (Spain and Italy), and Calixto Bieito (Edinburgh) to really set the ball rolling, and there was a veritable explosion of versions in the noughties and teens, especially among those small local theatres and travelling troupes in Spain that specialize in making set texts for the baccalaureate more accessible for students. Before that happened, the daunting and sexually quite explicit text was adapted very infrequently, and the fairly successful  version was not followed by another attempt until aer the Civil War in . A long silence followed again until the Franco period was nearing its end and liberalizing somewhat. Huberto Pérez de la Ossa and Luis Escobar’s version of – was popular in the early s, and Alejandro Casona’s adaptation had legs in the mid to late s. But it was not until the post-Franco era of the Movida that the sexual components of the plot were exploited, on...