Autos Sacramentales Research Articles

De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926) by Sergio Adillo Rufo

Reviewed by: De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926) by Sergio Adillo Rufo Susan Paun de García De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926). By Sergio Adillo Rufo. Kassel: Reichenberger. 2021. viii+176 pp. €48. ISBN 978–3–967280–06–7. One of the brightest stars of the Spanish Golden Age dramatic constellation, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) is said to have written around 120 plays, a modest number compared to the 600–800 attributed to Lope de Vega (1562–1635). Yet, at the beginning of the eighteenth century Calderón's plays accounted for [End Page 267] 25 per cent of all performances in Spain. In the present, he may be a canonical figure but only a handful of his comedias are regularly staged: La vida es sueño, El alcalde de Zalamea, La dama duende. Contextualizing and charting the changing fortunes of Calderón was the subject of Sergio Adillo Rufo's Ph.D. thesis, which he has mined for the publication of no fewer than three books. In the publication under consideration here, Adillo analyses the presence (or absence) of the dramatist on commercial stages in Spain between 1715 and 1926 in relation to how the theatrical profession was progressively articulating itself around Calderón as a field of cultural production. Adillo surveys the nature and evolution of the Calderonian canon and the factors that influenced its configuration. He applies the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to examine how productions of Calderón's plays evolved from being entertainment to symbols of identity, gradually departing from the commercial repertoire to form part of the elite canon. Considering important factors of influence (prevailing cultural trends and tastes as well as reforms and regulations of governmental and cultural institutions, including performance spaces), he seeks to answer an overarching question: why were certain texts performed at certain times? Structured chronologically, the book is divided into two main sections (each comprising three chapters) that discuss performances of Calderón plays within the commercial, political, cultural, and historical currents of the periods in question. In the first section—covering the years between the end of the Spanish War of Succession (1715) and the bicentenary of Calderón's death (1881)—Adillo traces the prehistory of the field of theatre, using performances of Calderón as a case study. The second section surveys the years between 1881 and 1927, a date that gave name to the Generación del 1927, a group of writers who rose to prominence in the late 1920s, many of whom produced important commemorative editions of the poetry of Luis de Góngora to mark the tercentenary of his death. Chapter 1 focuses on late baroque productions, contrasting what survived from the previous century and what was new in the first half of the eighteenth century, or to be precise, until 1765, when autos sacramentales were prohibited. Chapter 2 reviews the effects on the repertoire of successive (attempted) reforms of theatre from 1765 until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Chapter 3 Adillo turns to the period from the War of Independence until the liberalization of commercial theatre in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, noting that with the beginnings of a 'teatro nacional' and the incipient field of theatre (seen as art, not an industry subject to the market rules of supply and demand), Calderón was becoming a figure around whom national identity could be articulated. Chapter 4 concentrates exclusively on the celebrations of the bicentenary of Calderón's death and the importance they had in officially consolidating his canonical status. Chapter 5, covering the reign of Alfonso XII and the first years of the regency of María Cristina, reviews how famous actors (Rafael Calvo, Antonio Vico, and María Guerrero) kept 'classic' Spanish theatre on the stage at the end of the century as a cornerstone of the relationship they established with the dominant class that constituted their audience. Adillo observes that Calderón was by this time [End Page 268] an emblem of national identity and sign...

Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage by Andrés Pérez-Simón

Reviewed by: Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage by Andrés Pérez-Simón Andrew A. Anderson Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage. By Andrés Pérez-Simón. New York and London: Routledge. 2020. xii+158 pp. £48.95. ISBN 978–1–0320–4820–8. In his Introduction, Andrés Pérez-Simón states clearly the three basic aims of his book on Lorca's drama: to draw attention away from the so-called rural tragedies and focus instead on works more modernist in nature; to study Lorca's activity as a theoretician of the stage and as a hands-on director; and finally to propose a vision of Lorca 'as archaist playwright and director', informed above all by 'the tradition of Spanish Baroque' (pp. 4–5). The rationale for the first two goals is overstated. The last twenty-plus years have witnessed a major shift in Lorca criticism away from Bodas de sangre, Yerma, and La casa de Bernarda Alba (and Romancero gitano) and towards El público, Así que [End Page 512] pasen cinco años, and El sueño de la vida (and Poeta en Nueva York). Likewise, there are multiple studies of Lorca's theoretical statements on drama and his leadership of La Barraca. The real novelty of Pérez-Simón's book resides, therefore, within the remit of the third contention: while other critics have pointed to Lorca's two-pronged approach, seeking inspiration in foreign avant-garde theatrical movements (Symbolism, Expressionism) as well as classical Spanish theatre, he proposes that the two approaches need to be understood holistically and that Lorca's forward-looking reform and modernist innovation lie precisely in the very appropriation and utilization of a variety of works and genres originating mainly in the Golden Age. Other notable aspects of the book include the emphasis on the role of Eduardo Marquina in Lorca's career, the contextualization of the latter's oeuvre within the framework of the drama rural, and some provocative comparisons drawn with Pirandello's dramatic output. The five chapters offer analyses of El maleficio de la mariposa and Mariana Pineda; the puppet plays La zapatera prodigiosa and Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín; El público; El sueño de la vida; and the rural trilogy. Así que pasen cinco años and Doña Rosita la soltera are not studied. There is much thought-provoking critical commentary here, with plenty of fresh ideas as well as controversial contentions. True to his title and subtitle, throughout Pérez-Simón teases out persuasively the intertextual presence, in one or other play, of the Auto de los Reyes Magos, Cervantes's entremeses, Lope de Vega, Calderón's honour plays, and, perhaps above all, Calderón's autos sacramentales, especially El gran teatro del mundo, allegorical texts that were only just beginning to be rehabilitated in the 1920s. (There are also, naturally, references to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream.) The author relies heavily on William Egginton's concept of the baroque, while his Lorca critics of choice appear to be María Delgado, Luis Fernández-Cifuentes, Paul Julian Smith, Christopher Soufas, and Sarah Wright. I was not always convinced by interpretations based on different strains of modern theory. While rightly debunking simplistic life-to-literature approaches, Pérez-Simón does not always have the full biographical, historical, textual, and editorial facts at his fingertips. This results in overly convoluted readings of, for instance, the prologue to El maleficio de la mariposa, the incomplete state of the unique surviving manuscript of El público, or the fine political line Lorca trod as director of La Barraca. Chapter 2 would have benefited from a discussion of Edward Gordon Craig's notion of the Übermarionette and perhaps of Jacinto Grau's El señor de Pigmalión; there is no puppet show in La zapatera prodigiosa (p. 62); and the chronology for El retablillo de don Cristóbal is incorrect (pp. 45–46). No one writing on Lorca today could be expected to have consulted everything...

“Támbico pilar”: A Precolumbian Eco in Calderón de la Barca?

This short article analyses an apparent hapax (“támbico pilar”) in an auto sacramental by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La cena del rey Baltasar (c. 1630-1635). After presenting the passage and the critics’ opinion on the subject, this essay contextualises the phrase and formulates a hypothesis to clarify the passage by using, among other arguments, other seventeenth-century printed texts.

La creación del mundo by Luis Vélez de Guevara

MLR, .,   de príncipes texts, from the classical notions of imitatio, enarratio, and compilatio, to the Genettian ideas of the hypotext and hypertext, and Zumthor’s mouvance, which Gutiérrez Trápaga adopts to frame the highly deliberate and multifaceted rewritings which each of the works subsequently discussed will perform. Aer concluding Chapter  with a solid examination of Garcí Rodríguez de Montalvo’s foundational Amadís de Gaula (c. ), and the same author’s continuation in the Sergas de Esplandián (before ), Gutiérrez Trápaga provides in the second chapter an illuminating account of the two branches of the cycle that Montalvo had consciously inaugurated. e two writers who constitute the ‘heterodox’ current of the Amadís sequels, Ruy Páez de Ribera () and Juan Díaz (), strove to introduce greater verisimilitude into Montalvo’s cycle and to promote a more explicitly Christian didacticism, but, in commercial terms, they foundered, whereas the more successful, ‘orthodox’ continuations by Feliciano de Silva heightened the adventures of Amadís’s successors and enhanced the entertainment function of the original works. If the books of the Amadís cycle were among the strongest examples of the genre in the first half of the sixteenth century, the three printed works of the Espejo de príncipes y caballeros tradition, by Diego Ortúñez de Calahorra (), Pedro de la Sierra Infanzón (), and Marcos Martínez (), occupy a similar status in the latter part of the century, with the last of these in fact remaining in print until , and it is to these that Gutiérrez Trápaga turns in his final chapter. As in the previous sections of the monograph, the author is able to range across these lengthy romances without stretching his analysis too thinly, and, as well as establishing how these works relate to each other and their genre, he brings out those qualities which, for all the brickbats that were hurled at the libros de caballerías by authorities as illustrious as Joan Lluís Vives, made this type of book evidently so attractive to the reading public. U  E J D B La creación del mundo. By L V  G. Ed. by W R. M and C. G P. Intro. by J T. (Ediciones críticas, ) Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta. .  pp. $.. ISBN ––– –. e list of works by Luis Vélez de Guevara edited by William R. Manson and C. George Peale continues to grow in size and scope. La creación del mundo, a comedia ‘a lo divino’, first made available in print in , now reappears in a new critical edition with an in-depth Introduction by Jonathan acker. is edition brings the play to a deservedly wider readership and, presented with its production history, may engender future performances. acker makes the case that this Old Testament play could plausibly have been conceived for the Corpus Christi celebrations in  in Badajoz, where a range of commissions transcended generic expectations for the auto sacramental. Comparing Vélez’s play to Lope de Vega’s similarly themed La creación del mundo y primera culpa de hombre, acker carefully disregards the possibility of mutual influence (p. ). Peale and acker debate  Reviews the possibility that Vélez’s La creación del mundo was the basis for a comedia de repente (partially improvised play) in the court of Felipe IV c. . As opposed to a mere dramatization of Genesis, Vélez brings his creative nous and experience as a theatre-maker to embody the visual and verbal features of the narrative. In the trove of elucidations featured in the endnotes, Peale is able to draw on his cumulative experience of working with so many of Vélez’s dramatic works. Readers are fortunate that Juan de la Cuesta has continued to publish these editions, with three others having already appeared in the same year. As the title suggests, La creación del mundo commences as Dios Padre relates the creation of the world in conversation with Adán. Geared up for the war to capture the human soul, ‘[l]os más demonios que pudieren salir’ (p. ) fight with comediaworthy motivation (and arrayed with detailed costuming described...

Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas

Esther in Early Modern Iberia and the Sephardic Diaspora: Queen of the Conversas

The Corpus of Hebrew and Jewish Autos Sacramentales: Self-deception and Conversion

Abstract This article identifies a set of plays written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by ‘new Jews’ in the Western Sephardi Diaspora, as autos sacramentales. It discusses essential characteristics of this genre, such as the dual—theomachic and psychomachic—level, the triangle constellation of allegorical characters with human nature in its center and the representatives of good and evil on both sides, and the parallelism created in the play between the cosmic story, the story of humanity, and the story of the individual human soul. It is argued that these characteristics are to be found in plays written by Jews in the Early Modern Era. The article maintains that the appearance of this corpus of plays in the history of Jewish writing indicates that an underlying structure of the psychic and historical consciousness of Western culture had not skipped the Jewish cultural world.

La Virgen de los Reyes y las sombras errantes de su leyenda

El presente artículo tiene como objeto establecer los paralelismos existentes entre la iconografía y los recursos orales vinculados a la tradición de las leyendas marianas a ambos lados del Atlántico. A partir de la reproducción de una variante inédita de la leyenda de la sevillana Virgen de los Reyes, auspiciadora de las conquistas de Fernando III el Santo, se dará cuenta de una rica tradición reflejada en autos sacramentales durante los Siglos de Oro y de relatos populares que conjugarán los hechos históricos con lo maravilloso y sobrenatural.

The «Autos Sacramentales» of Lope de Vega: Project for a Critical Edition

The critical edition of Lope's autos sacramentales, included in El peregrino en su patria, marks the beginning of a new age in the recovery of a part of Lope's work, his autos sacramentales, quite discredited by critics. The philological notes of the texts, full of cultural, historical, literary and biblical references, may be very helpful to relocate Lope de Vega in a privileged place, denied until now under the shadow of Calderon.

La presencia escénica de Andrés de Claramonte en el Siglo de Oro a partir de las bases de datos Manos y CATCOM

Mining the wealth of new information about manuscript preparation and circulation in the Manos database (manos.net) and about the authorship of theater texts in the CATCOM (catcom.uv.es) portal, this article proposes a comprehensive assessment of the literary career of Andres de Claramonte. Data analysis rooted in the Manos and CATCOM sites allows for a thorough reconsideration of the staging and manuscript circulation of Claramonte's plays during the seventeenth century. Three points of inquiry underpin my examination. First, I search for evidence of autograph manuscripts by Claramonte. In turn, I survey the indications of his success writing comedias and autos sacramentales, where the professional relationships he established with several theatrical companies between 1617 and his death in 1626 are of particular interest. Finally, I consider Claramonte's enduring popular appeal after his death.

Tradición, modernidad y transgresión en las artes escénicas españolas durante el franquismo: Víctor Cortezo y la escenografía de La cena del rey Baltasar (1939-1954) = Tradition, Modernity and Transgression during Francoism: Víctor Cortezo and the Scenography of La Cena del Rey Baltasar (1939-1945)

Los autos sacramentales gozaron durante el “primer franquismo” de una segunda época de esplendor relacionada con su poder propagandístico. Su conexión con el Imperio, su evocación de un pasado glorioso y su exaltación político-religiosa los asociaban con las principales directrices de la ideología nacionalcatólica imperante. Representados en distintos actos de la dictadura, algunos de ellos, como los decorados por el pintor Víctor Cortezo, presentan características controvertidas que pueden ser explicadas por su vínculo con una modernidad pocas veces planteada para el arte de ese período. Las creaciones de este artista ponen de relieve la capacidad transgresora de las artes escénicas dentro de la más férrea oficialidad de la dictadura franquista.The Autos sacramentales reached their second splendour period during the “first Francoism”, given their propagandist power. Their connections to the Empire, their evocation of a glorious past, and their political and religious resonances associated them with the prevailing National Catholicism. These were played in several of the dictatorship official acts, and some of them, such as those with sceneries created by painter Victor Cortezo, introduce some controversial features which have linked their art to a modernity which was rarely seen during this period. The painter’s creations also highlight the performing arts’ capacity of transgression within the strictness of the Franco dictatorship.

Autos sacramentales completos de Lope de Vega by Lope de Vega

Reviewed by: Autos sacramentales completos de Lope de Vega by Lope de Vega Hilaire Kallendorf Lope de Vega. Autos sacramentales completos de Lope de Vega. Edición crítica de J. Enrique Duarte (vol. 1) y Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán (vol. 2). edition reichenberger, 2017, 2 vols. 282 pp. (vol. 1) y 231 pp. (vol. 2). these are the initial two volumes of a planned six-volume series of critical editions of Lope de Vega's autos sacramentales, or sacramental plays; the other four volumes have already been assigned to specific editors. Perhaps reflective of the amount of work involved in preparing a critical edition, the other four volumes will each contain two plays apiece, as do these volumes; but most of the future plays will be edited by two different scholars. In the case of these first two installments, a single scholar prepared both critical editions within each separate book. Volume 1, edited by J. Enrique Duarte, contains Las bodas entre el Alma y el Amor divino along with El hijo pródigo; volume 2, edited by Juan Manuel Escudero Baztán, contains La Maya and El viaje del alma. Escudero Baztán is also the coordinator for the series, whose chief editor is Ignacio Arellano. These projects have been developed under the auspices of GRISO (Grupo de Investigación Siglo de Oro), based at the University of navarra in Pamplona and funded by a grant from Spain's Ministerio de Economía, Industria y competividad. A presentation note at the outset of the first volume indicates that this is only the first phase of a project that may later double in size to include editions of all twenty-four of Lope de Vega's autos sacramentales that do not pose problems of dubious authorship. This number in itself is astoundingly small, given that at various points through the centuries since [End Page 201] the death of this author, scholars have estimated that Lope de Vega might possibly have written as many as one hundred, two hundred, or even six hundred autos sacramentales (the true number of comedias attributable to him is likewise debated). In modern times, this number has been reduced to a corpus of some forty-four sacramental plays, with only about half of those attributable to Lope with any stable degree of certainty. Presumably, the same research team will solicit another, similar grant from the spanish government to finance the preparation of the next dozen editions. It should be noted that this is the same scholarly network responsible for producing scholarly editions of the complete autos sacramentales of Pedro calderón de la Barca, one of Lope's seventeenth-century literary successors and by far the most famous cultivator of this dramatic genre. The reasons to review these two books together are multiple. Not only were they published in the same year, together forming the first fruits of a multiyear collaborative endeavor, but these four autos sacramentales also appeared together when they were first published in the seventeenth century, namely, as intercalated dramatic pieces appearing at the end of each of the first four books within Lope de Vega's Byzantine novel El peregrino en su patria (Seville, 1604). Given that they were originally incorporated into a larger work, the decision to publish them separately might seem debatable, especially in light of what historians of the book as artifact have taught us about the inseparability of a book's form from its content. However—especially since at least one of the plays, namely, Las bodas entre el Alma y el Amor divino, boasts a documented performance history apart from the novel—the option of lifting them out of their original context to place them alongside Lope de Vega's other, similar autos is at least justifiable. At least two complete editions of this novel have been released by reputable academic university or commercial presses within the past two years: in April of 2016 Cátedra published a version with notes in Spanish edited by Julián González Barrera, while in 2017 there appeared in the north carolina studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures series a new six hundred-page critical annotated edition and...

«En los mayores peligros se conoce la amistad», auto sacramental de José de Valdivielso, representado en el Corpus hispalense de 1619. Estudio y reconstrucción virtual

This paper studies Jose de Valdivieso’s En los mayores peligros se conoce la amistad ( Friendship is best acknowledged when in danger ) one of the five autos sacramentales (Eucharistic morality plays) staged at the Corpus Christi feast in Seville, in 1619, by Diego de Vallejo. It also bears the title La amistad en el peligro (Friendship when in danger), and has never been published in a modern critical edition, though two published records (1622 and 1624) bear witness to the play, of which there are two 17 th Century manuscript versions extant. This article, based on contemporary records, studies the historical socio-religious- urban context of the Corpus Christi feast in Seville and virtually reconstructs the play’s performance, on pageant wagons, and its subsequent procession within the town.

El desarrollo dramático de la parábola del hijo pródigo en el auto sacramental de Alonso Remón

The parable of the prodigal son is circumscribed as a predominant theme for the authors of the Spanish Golden Age to develop the plot of some of his autos sacramentales. However, among all these playwrights, the figure of Alonso Remon and his piece have been largely ignored. This article reviews the sacramental career of this author and highlights its importance and differences compared to other comedies that address the same theme.

Los autos sacramentales en Palacio: algo más que una fiesta

This article undertakes the study of the allegorical plays that Calderon composed for Corpus Christi in Madrid as a form of Palace theater. Taking into consideration that these works were composed primarily to be staged for the King and his family, this study sheds new light on certain textual passages at the same time that it allows for an interpretation from an historical-political perspective that, in some cases, proves to be very enlightening. The fi rst part of the article shows how those individuals responsible for the organization of the Corpus Christi plays were very close to the King, and in some cases used their positions in order to serve the monarch’s interests, and even to assure that he received certain messages. In the second part a number of the Corpus plays are analyzed summarily in order to show that this perspective adds new information that allows the autos sacramentales to be interpreted more completely and correctly.

Role and Freedom in Calderón's The Great Theater of the World

Every individual intelligence can be regarded as a constitutive part of God, or of the moral world-order. --E W. J. Schelling (1) I. Pedro Calderon de la Barca's drama The Great Theater of the World belongs to the genre of autos sacramentales that arose in Spain in the sixteenth, reached its height in the seventeenth, and disappeared from the stage in the early eighteenth century. (2) It did not spawn imitators outside of the Spanish-speaking world. An auto sacramental is a play performed on Corpus Christi. In 1264, Pope Urban IV introduced the feast of Corpus Christi for the purpose of glorifying the Eucharist. John XXII (1316-34) advocated the institutional and liturgical arrangement of the feast; he decreed, for instance, that its celebration include a procession wherein the consecrated host in the monstrance would be brought outside of the church into the world and then carried back again into the church. The Corpus Christi procession articulates the sacred along with the profane as a liturgical act. In Spain, the arrangement of the procession became more and more splendid over time. Wagons with superstructure provided display areas during the procession; while at first these featured paintings of biblical scenes or saints, later such figures were represented by real persons as tableaux vivants and eventually were scenically reenacted. In the wake of the sixteenth-century schism initiated by the Protestant Reformation, which objected, among other things, to Eucharistic dogma, the feast of Corpus Christi became increasingly valorized among Catholics. In Spain's Siglo de Oro, it became the most important feast of the year. As the scenic representations on the wagons became progressively more complex over the course of the sixteenth century, they were finally spun off from the procession and performed at its end. Thus arose from various sources--for example, the liturgical dramas performed around Christmas and Easter since the Middle Ages and the dramaturgical elements of the comedia nueva that developed in the sixteenth century--the auto sacramental in Spain as the independent literary genre of the Corpus Christi plays. (3) By the second half of the sixteenth century, it became an integral part of the feast of Corpus Christi. The autos sacramentales--just as the classical tragedies for the Dionysia--were newly written each year for the feast. An auto sacramental is a one-act play whose subject matter refers to the sacrament of the Eucharist. Etymologically, the determinatum auto comes from the Latin actus; sacramental is the determinans. Thus the auto sacramental, by means of its generic term, refers to the liturgical actus sacramentalis as its subject matter: the transformation of the bread and wine, during the Mass, into the sacramental body and blood of Christ, who is truly present then--really present--in this sacramental form. Calderon's introduction to the first volume of his collected autos sacramentales (1677) includes an innovative pair of concepts that has been broadly adopted by recent research. He draws a distinction between argumento and asunto, between the action and the subject matter of the plays. The subject matter of the Eucharist underlies all the plays in equal measure; the action that stages the subject matter varies from one play to another. In most of the autos sacramentales, the subject matter of the Eucharistic transformation is displayed in an action whose protagonist is the human soul. Its conversion constitutes the theme; from an initially good life, it transforms itself into evil and is finally, through the redemptive act of Christ, the bloody sacrifice on the cross, redeemed and retransformed into good. The sacrament of the Eucharist is the spiritual and unbloody repetition of the sacrifice on the cross. From this perspective, The Great Theater of the World seems an untypical play. The fall that makes up the conceptual center of almost all the other autos sacramentales occurs only parenthetically in this play (115, 259, 344, 558, 1198). …

Corografía mística: Babilonia y Sión en los autos sacramentales de Calderón

This article explores the symbolic use of the description and evocation of the cities of Babylon and Jerusalem in Calderón's autos sacramentales, where they are systematically contrasted to represent allegorically the kingdom of evil and that of Paradise. The way in which the paradigm is mapped out confirms yet again the high level of structural organization in Calderón's autos sacramentales. As in the case of the schema of the four elements, the technique of etymological interpretation, or the various ways in which wit is expressed, the exploration of the antithetical symbols of Babylon and Sion, involving a wealth of complex meanings from the Bible and its commentators, show the skill of the poet in writing his dramatic works.

Wisdom on Stage: The Evolution of Sabiduría in Calderón's autos sacramentales

The allegorical figure of Sabiduría, which appears in several of Calderón's autos sacramentales, evolves throughout the playwright's career. In his earlier plays Sabiduría appears as an elegantly attired dama who wears feathers or flowers, adornments that would have signalled her identity to audiences. This image of Sabiduría derives from a Sophianic tradition that depicts Wisdom as a female, the divine Sophia. However, in the second version of La vida es sueño (1673), which Calderón wrote at the end of his life, Sabiduría appears as a male, first as a galán and then as a pilgrim, without any of the customary accoutrements. The change in gender and costume is not gratuitous, but required by the doctrinal meaning of the auto, which reflects Calderón's mature understanding of the Trinity and his efforts to bring some of the complexities of Thomistic teachings on the subject to his audiences.

«Estando ausente Carlos, / ¿qué importa que las festivas voces le aplauden, si nada escucha?»: las loas a los años del rey Carlos II de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Starting in 1650, Calderon de la Barca assigned a new role to the ‘loa’, elevating it artistically to the level of the ‘auto’. In America, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz followed the Spaniard’s example by aggrandizing the panegyric loa and including the essential elements: allegorical characters, hermetic fragments, emblematic reminiscences and a sensorial setting. These loas are pieces that adhere to certain templates to glorify power and exalt authority. These templates are constituted of compositional paradigms that structure the design, in part or as a whole, of the stylistic and argumentative architecture, as Arellano correctly asserts about the Auto Sacramental but also applicable to Sor Juana’s last half of the 17th century panegyric loas. I propose an analysis of the five loas that the nun composed for Carlos the Second’s birthday that consists in identifying and comparing the compositional paradigms, to be able to formulate a three act structure based on the functional identification of the paradigms.

Baroque, Allegory, Comedia: The Transfiguration of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century spain. by Kluge, Sofie (review)

Reviewed by: Baroque, Allegory, Comedia: The Transfiguration of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century spain. by Kluge, Sofie Margaret M. Olsen Kluge, Sofie. Baroque, Allegory, Comedia: The Transfiguration of Tragedy in Seventeenth-Century Spain. Estudios de Literatura 114. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2010. 327 pp. Sofie Kluge’s erudite study Baroque, Allegory, Comedia posits that the Spanish Baroque evolves in equivocal tension between medievalism and modernity and that this ideological conflict generates a unique creative impetus in the literary arts, particularly in the comedia. Kluge views this innovative spirit as an alternative modernity in the realm of aesthetics, one that seeks to resolve anxieties arising from the significant historical transformations taking place in seventeenth-century Spain: bankruptcy, decadence, and the loss of global hegemony, the rise of early modern capitalism, and concomitant societal reconfigurations. Kluge argues that allegory is the primary device by which Baroque artists and critics confront secular materialism, and that they do so by employing allegory’s ambiguous capacities to transfigure the aesthetic pursuits of classical antiquity and Renaissance neo-paganism into morally didactic works that reflect post-Tridentine concerns. Kluge succinctly states that “allegory is an essentially syncretistic mode and its revival at different times in Western literary history is always a symptom of the co-existence of profound cultural contradictions as well as of the endeavour to reconcile them” (287). Thus, Baroque aesthetics turns to allegory in the midst of a historical, ideological crisis in order to assuage the tension between the immanent and the transcendent, the profane and the sacred. While her central thesis may not seem especially novel to some scholars, Kluge’s extensive and meticulous exemplification of seventeenth-century allegory, as well as her elegant form of expression, make this book a valuable contribution to the fields of early modern studies and Baroque aesthetics. Kluge demonstrates an extensive knowledge of Renaissance and Baroque literary works and of the ancient texts with which they are in dialogue. Moreover, her discussion of aesthetics includes an array of written and visual genres from the Golden Age that includes poetics, literary criticism, masterworks of Baroque painting, emblems, and all manner of dramatic expression such as the comedia, autos sacramentales, and seventeenth-century tragedy. This reviewer especially appreciates Kluge’s discussion of desengaño and apotheosis in [End Page 181] Baroque painting, along with a detailed analysis of how the Jesuits made use of ancient culture and myth according to moral-didactic exigencies of the Baroque. Equally instructive is the author’s thorough outlining of the emergence of the comedia as a hybrid, even monstrous, dramatic form in which playwrights reinvent classical topoi such as theatrum mundi and somnium. To exemplify this point fully, Kluge uses select plays of Lope and Calderón and contemporary seventeenth-century criticism to show how both playwrights attempt to appeal at once to the secular and sacred interests of their wide publics. The final chapter of the book, which treats comedy and tragedy in Calderón’s dramatic works, reveals how La vida es sueño simultaneously respects Sophocles’s Oedipus the King but also places increased moral agency in the hands of his protagonist, thus defying Fortune’s tragic determinism. The book’s seven chapters are organized into three central parts, in addition to an introduction and closing remarks, both of which serve to successfully frame the text with thoughtful critical commentary. Kluge dedicates the first two chapters of the book to well-researched and useful discussions of the concept of the Baroque and the history of allegory, properly orienting the reader to the textual analysis that follows. While there is lamentably no index to the book, likely a characteristic of the series or publisher, each of the chapters is divided into smaller sections indicated by page numbers in the table of contents, allowing the reader to make quick consultation of specific topics of interest. Each of the sections of the text is effective as a discreet piece of research, but all of the chapters also flow together with elegant coherence as a full book-length study. Finally, extensive and meticulously detailed footnotes provide the reader with immediate bibliographic references as well as additional textual citations and critical commentary on the primary sources...

Paraísos ‘barrosos’: el éxtasis como foco central de la poética de Néstor Perlongher

The last period of Perlongher’s poetry has been considered with some ‘concern’ by criticswho have read the poet's interest in mysticism (especially the cult of the Santo Daime) as a consequence of the abrupt change in his life due to the discovery of seropositivity and, therefore, the impossibility of continuing with sexuality as an instrument of liberation and transcendence. Consequently his latter production (Aguas Aereas, El chorreo de las iluminaciones, El Auto Sacramental) has been considered in the line of ‘discontinuity’. In this essay, on the contrary, I propose a reading of Perlongher’s mystical production based on the idea of continuity with his previous works to show how this perspective can help the critics to focus more clearly the core of his poetical experience.