Reviewed by: Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation Ivan Cañadas Campbell, Jodi, Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006; hardback; pp. vi, 175; RRP US$99.95/£50.00; ISBN 0754654184. In this study of the treatment of kingship in the Spanish drama of the seventeenth century, Jodi Campbell focuses on the reigns of Philip IV (1621-65) and Charles II (1665-1700), which were marked in Spain by a series of military reverses and political crises. As she observes, Spanish subjects faced a 'paradox', in having to reconcile the prevailing official absolutist ideology of the period, with the reality of the nation's decline in Europe (p. 3). In the introductory chapter, 'Plays and Politics', Campbell situates her study as a contribution to recent revaluations of the traditional view of the drama of the period as an essentially monologic form, in the service of the aristocratic social order – at worst 'a form of propaganda' – traditional ideas associated with the influential historian José Antonio Maravall (p. 9). In its place, Campbell observes that the evidence of the drama 'suggests that seventeenth-century Spaniards expected their kings to be powerful, but within carefully prescribed limits of behavior corresponding to Christian virtue and a healthy respect for the rights and interests of their subjects' (p. 140). Absolutist ideology, thus, jostled with other political theories concerning the obligations of the ruler, oppositional ideologies [End Page 171] typified by the writing of political theorists known as arbitristas, as well as a deeply engrained ancestral belief in a consensual, rather than contractual, concept of allegiance to the monarch, traceable to the middle ages; hence, Campbell's view of the theatre of the late Golden Age, indicated in her title, that it was a 'theater of negotiation.' The sheer number of surviving plays makes a survey of a particular theme a daunting scholarly project, a difficulty which Campbell addresses by focusing on the role of kingship within the work of four dramatists, selected for their popularity in the period. Campbell's focus is, thus, on four playwrights working in Madrid, including Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), as well as some less-known talents: Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (1607–48), Juan de Matos Fragoso (1610–92), and Juan Bautista Diamante (1622–87). Although Campbell is particularly interested in audiences and audience-responses to the drama (20), in the absence of adequate performance records, she relies on publication to gauge the relative popularity of given playwrights. That sheer abundance of plays – and, admittedly, their less than consistent quality – has resulted in a limited canon of Golden Age drama, to which scholars turn repeatedly, though Campbell can overstate the dearth of existing material dealing with the period after Lope's death in 1635, when she contends, for instance, that 'for the rest of the century, theatre scholarship fades into obscurity' (p. 25). Suffice it to point out that Calderón – one of the four dramatists discussed by Campbell – is, along with Lope, the Golden Age dramatist most represented in theatre scholarship. As Campbell notes, Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was an exceptionally successful and influential playwright, who also produced a key contribution to Golden Age drama theory, his treatise, the Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609), giving 'the comedia the definitive form that it would keep' (p. 25). Campbell sets out to trace the comedia's subsequent 'trajectory and decline in the following decades' (p. 25). That initial period, of course – and the work of Lope, in particular – has been explored masterfully in Melveena McKendrick's Playing the King (2000), which, despite Campbell's efforts to extend that research to a later period, remains the definitive study of this issue. Given that the drama of the latter seventeenth century was properly speaking a development of the form as manifested in Lope's time, rather than a new form, a critical analysis needs to come to terms with the dramatic and social characteristics of the earlier period – to work as a comparatist, in a sense. The need for such a comprehensive, comparative analysis is particularly apparent in Campbell's discussion...