Early Modern Spanish Drama Research Articles

Hercules and the King of Spain: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón's Spain by Dian Fox

Reviewed by: Hercules and the King of Spain: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón's Spain by Dian Fox Lucas A. Marchante-Aragón Keywords Dian Fox, Lucas Marchante-Aragon, Hercules, King Sebastian Of Portugal, Phillip Ii Of Spain, Masculinity, Nation, Drama, Calderon De La Barca fox, dian. Hercules and the King of Spain: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón's Spain. U of Nebraska P, 2019. 303 pp. Dian Fox's book is a decidedly welcome addition to the growing corpus of studies about masculinity in early modern Spain. A very intriguing question explored in this volume is the connection between performances of masculinity on stage and the formation of a Spanish national identity during this period. One of the arguments is that the ubiquity of theatrical performances throughout the Iberian Peninsula, and the social transversality of the audiences that enjoyed them, played a role in the promotion of a national identity built on notions of appropriate masculine performance. The study contains excellent analyses of the different representations of masculinity, both ideal and unacceptable, that can be found in plays built around the figures of the classical demigod Hercules and King Sebastian of Portugal. After an introduction and a framing chapter, the first part of the book is devoted to the figure of Hercules in early modern Spanish theater (chapters 2–4). The classical hero is connected both to the ruling dynasty by genealogical traditions and to the mythical foundational narratives of many Spanish locales. Representations of a virtuous Hercules who can control his passions served as a local example to combat the perceived crisis of masculinity in seventeenth-century Spain. However, the plays analyzed by Fox show an uncharacteristically feminized Hercules. This representation responds to the genealogical anxieties inherent to the discourse of honor that pervaded the post-1492 period in the Iberian Peninsula and that was central to the dramatic conflict of early modern Spanish drama. As she notes, paraphrasing Américo Castro, "Whereas historically the Spanish male suffered a crisis if his membership in the pure cast was questioned, dramatically the crisis occurred when the Spanish male's honor was doubted" (43). [End Page 124] When discussing Calderón's Los tres mayores prodigios and El pintor de su deshonra, the author superbly analyzes how the theme of honor/lineage is adapted into the classical myths reenacted onstage. In her study of Manos blancas no ofenden and Fieras afemina amor, which deals with an episode in which the hero will be made to dress in female attire (89), Fox sees the hero as an example of the hombre esquivo. This is a man that avoids/abhors women and marriage and seeks honor through deeds. Such a man is, according to the author, more transgressive of social order than the mujer esquiva that Melveena McKendrick had described (95). Fox explains how in both of these plays, "transvestism allows Calderon to expound with some depth not merely on masculinity and effeminacy, but also on reproductivity and succession" (109). The author clearly shows how these examples are very pertinent for the consideration of the figure of King Sebastian in the following chapters; however, the question of their implications for nation formation are not fully answered. This very interesting issue is dealt with briefly in the last two pages of the section. The second part of the book (chapters 5 to 7) deals with the figure of King Sebastian of Portugal and his context. The opening chapter is devoted to the poetry of Francisco de Aldana, who was sent to the court of Lisbon by Sebastian's uncle, Phillip II of Spain. His mission was to dissuade the young king from his plans to invade Morocco and persuade him to stay in Portugal, get married, and ensure dynastic continuation. Aldana not only failed in his mission, but was eventually seduced by the young king's project, and would ultimately die with him at the battle of Alcazarquivir. Fox analyzes here the tensions in Aldana's poetry with regard to the manly exercise of war and the desire for retirement in peace with his friend Benito Arias Montano. In these tensions, the author sees an expression of...

Roman Machiavels on the Spanish Stage: Pérez de Montalbán’s Amor, privanza y castigo

This essay incorporates the paradigms of Theory of Mind and Machiavellian intelligence to explore the cognitive and ideological implications of the dramatization of Roman political rivalries in early modern Spanish drama. Perez de Montalban’s Amor, privanza y castigo is analyzed as a distant mirror to the Spanish privanza system of its own time. Like other historians and playwrights of his era, Montalban highlights the duplicitous and manipulative cognitive activities of Roman politicians to examine the ethical dimensions and dilemmas in the contemporary institution of government by royal favorites.

Truth, Only More So: Bances Candamo Beyond the Limits of Embodiment

Abstract Bances’ Theatro de los theatros is, without question, an exceedingly odd work of expository prose. However, there are reasons we should try to understand what Bances is up to if we want to understand early modern Spanish drama better, both from a historical perspective and from the perspective of performance. This is because Bances’ real object is the nature of theatrical representation and the nature of what, exactly, is embodied through performance. Bances does not argue that theater is a mirror of life, or that theater is life as it might be, or that theater indicates the reality of something true beyond itself. Instead, Bances says that the staging of a play manifests physically the physical reality of the universe.

Introduction: “The Comedia and Cultural Control: The Legacy of José Antonio Maravall”

Introduction:“The Comedia and Cultural Control: The Legacy of José Antonio Maravall” Laura R. Bass The influence of the twentieth-century Spanish cultural historian José Antonio Maravall on comedia studies is indisputable. First developed in Teatro y literatura en la sociedad barroca (1972) and subsequently echoed in La cultura del Barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica (1975), Maravall’s thesis that seventeenth-century Spain’s most important popular form of entertainment served the interests of a top-down monarchical-seigniorial order has been the point of departure for countless investigations into the historical and ideological workings of individual plays, groups of plays, and the comedia as a whole. Maravall did not invent sociohistorical approaches to the genre (any more than Lope de Vega “fathered” the arte nuevo).1 However, he brought them into the mainstream, inspiring such important books as José María Díez Borque’s Sociedad y teatro en la España de Lope de Vega (1978). Moreover, Maravall’s broad view that the theater of Lope de Vega and his followers emerged out of a reactionary impulse to stave off change in a period of crisis continues to echo in major scholarly venues today,2 even among scholars who have otherwise refined many of his ideas. In their introduction to Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, for example, Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín Estudillo consider the comedia together with sermons and autos sacramentales as “‘mass-oriented’ cultural products” (xv) that manipulated a “non-discriminating” populace into unreflective obedience to God and monarch (xix). Along similar lines, in his contribution to a 2009 PMLA cluster on the Neobaroque, William Egginton offers up Lope’s Fuenteovejuna as an example of how mainstream baroque culture (anticipating postmodernity) lured commoners into identifying with a social and economic system that went against their own best interests and instead promoted elite privileges and power.3 As Luis Gonzalo Portugal points out in his contribution below, scholars such as Spadaccini, Estudillo, and Egginton, whose overall take on the seventeenth-century Spanish stage follows that of Maravall, are generally [End Page 1] not comedia specialists but rather scholars of the Hispanic baroque. But what about Maravall’s place within the field of early modern Spanish drama? What was the genesis for his understanding of this theater? What were his major contributions to comedia studies, and how relevant is he to our discipline today? To explore these broad questions, the Division on 16th- and 17th-Century Spanish Drama organized a roundtable at the 2011 MLA Convention in Los Angeles titled “The Comedia and the Culture of the Baroque: Reconsiderations of the Legacy of José Antonio Maravall.” The pre-circulated papers approached his intellectual trajectory and views of seventeenth-century Spanish theater in such innovative ways that it was clear they merited an audience beyond the conference. The roundtable itself was so well attended and generated so much discussion that Edward Friedman and Vincent Martin agreed, and the idea for this Bulletin of the Comediantes special issue was launched. The issue is comprised of contributions by all five of the panel’s original participants—Ted Bergman, Vicente Pérez de León, Luis Gonzalo Portugal, Jonathan Thacker, and Duncan Wheeler (listed here in alphabetical order)—with two additional articles by Bruce Burningham and Ruth MacKay. I have slightly revised the title from the roundtable, replacing the phrase “The Culture of the Baroque” with “Cultural Control.” Overall, Maravall’s baroque as a general structure receives less attention in the essays than one of its pillars—his concept of the cultura dirigida, according to which the ruling classes mobilized a new mass culture to ensure popular identification with sovereign power.4 To be sure, readers of this journal will largely be familiar with critiques to Maravall’s thesis by scholars in the field, perhaps most well known among them, Melveena McKendrick’s Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity (2000). Yet, the essays herein take the reappraisal of Maravall in new directions, whether in terms of historicizing the historian’s work, bringing it into dialogue with recent theories on theater and social control in early modern England, or considering how...

Lope's Imperial Geography: Cosmography, Gender, and Dietetics in Los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria

This essay examines the legitimizing role that the interaction between cosmography, gender, and dietetics plays in the troping of conquest and land acquisition in Lope de Vega's Comedia famosa de los guanches de Tenerife y conquista de Canaria . In Lope's play, the political desire for control and possession of Tenerife as a colonial space is articulated through images of penetration and ingestion that find their ultimate source of legitimacy in the cosmographic, sexual, and dietary discourses of early modern Europe and the Spanish crónicas de Indias . The discourses intersect at various points in the play to shape the contours of an "imperial geography" whose purpose is to validate and supplement the ethnographic and cultural strategies of dispossession that Lope employs throughout the comedia : his depiction of the guanches or native Canarians as primitive and unaware of the economic potential of their land, their technological backwardness, and their ignorance of the "true faith." While these strategies have been sufficiently analyzed and contextualized in previous studies of the play, the complex geography that codifies and justifies the appropriation of the guanches ' land has received almost no attention from the critics. By focusing on this particular aspect of the play, my essay fills a substantial gap in the existing critical literature on the play and offers new insights into the colonial complicities of early modern Spanish drama as revealed through its peculiar reading of space.

The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (review)

bass, laura R. The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2008. 196 pp.This magnificently illustrated book provides an excellent entry into the uses of visual culture in early modern Spain. With sixty-seven illustrations, most of them in color, and with five chapters, an introduction, and profuse notes, Laura Bass's The Drama of the Portrait provides the first major overview of this important subject. As she makes clear, any reader or audience of early modern Spanish drama will eagerly follow the complex ways in which portraits circulate in these comedias: serve as tokens of love, objects of jealous passion, and icons of royalty. They are commissioned by lovers and kings, exchanged in marriage negotiations, and manipulated in political plots (1). The abundance of portraits in these plays should not come as a surprise since the Golden Age of literature coincided with the Golden Age of painting in Spain, a period when texts and art were constantly circulating. Writers often deployed the rhetorical trope of ekphrasis, the verbal description of a work of art, so as to underscore that they were writing for the eyes. Plays and paintings even competed with each other. We need only think of Maino's Recapture of Bahia and Lope de Vega's El Brasil restituido, or Velazquez's Surrender of Breda and Calderon's El sitio de Breda. Kings became collectors of art, precisely when art depicting kings circulated throughout Europe. Private collectors imitated the monarchs, exhibiting their canvases as proof of their taste and dis- cernment. While many forms of art were prized by the royalty and nobility, por- trait miniatures appealed far beyond elite tastes. Bass adds an important element to the discussion here: even the middling sorts were taken by this art, as court painters disparaged this proliferation of portraits as a debasement of their art.While providing an important introduction to the art of portraiture, The Drama of the Portrait is much more about specific uses of women's portraits in the plays of the period. The three central chapters deal with this topic. This central core of the book is framed by two chapters, the first and the fifth, which discuss women as viewers of the male portrait. The first chapter introduces the reader to the art world in Madrid during its Golden Age. Using examples from several plays, Bass points out that portraits of family members were prominently displayed in homes and that the practice of sitting for one's portrait [was] a defining feature of Madrid's court society (15). While portraiture becomes available to the bourgeoi- sie, the lower classes valued religious images more than portraits. The chapter then discusses Lope de Vega's La dama boba, in which the simple-minded is unable to appreciate the portrait of her future husband. Taking the image at face value, she complains that her husband has no legs, has no body from the waist down. This scene points to the importance of being able to read art, to grasp its conventions at a time when it was a key topic among the aristocracy. At the same time, the image provided by deflates idealizing Neoplatonic conceptions of the portrait as being able to reflect the sitter's soul. La dama boba shows how can learn through love, how desire awakens her imagination. She will marry Laurencio who desires her wealth. And yet, Bass argues that not only learns to learn, but learns to playact so as to capture Laurencio: Finea becomes an alter ego of the playwright himself, who . . . spent much of his life fashioning and refashioning himself to fulfill his social ambitions (27). A similar play on wealth and want, on portraiture and knowledge, takes place in Castillo Solorzano's come- dia, El mayorazgo figura. Here, Don Diego pretends he is not inheriting wealth from Peru in order to test the two women whom he is considering marrying. In this context the reader or spectator is presented with Leonor's paintings in her home. …

Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (review)

{ 264 } Book Reviews sentence descriptions are readily available on Wikipedia. Along similar lines, some judicious pruning of the articles would have ameliorated the book’s turgidity (do we really need, for instance, a description of George C. Scott’s ­ living room?). Finally, Senelick reports that Edith Isaacs, one of the journal’s editors, dedicated “the August 1942 issue of Theatre Arts to ‘the Negro in Ameri­ can theatre’” (xvi). This important issue was later expanded into a book published by Theatre Arts in 1947. Why, then, were none of the comments about African Ameri­ can acting made in the 1942 issue reprinted in this collection? Other than Young’s essay on Mei Lan-­ Fang, the anthology lacks contributions beyond the white establishment. Despite misgivings, the significance of this collection is evident, and Laurence Senelick has done a great service to the scholarly and professional community. David Krasner — Emerson College \ \ Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. By Scott K. Taylor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $55.00 cloth. Scott K. Taylor’s Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain offers a fresh approach to understanding the Spanish concept of honor and its prominence in the cultural landscape of seventeenth-­ century Spain. Although Taylor is an early mod­ ern historian, his work is interdisciplinary in its breadth of scholarship as it touches on literary criticism, cultural anthropology, legal studies, and theatre history. In this book, he challenges the dominant theory that Spanish honor was a rigid social code based on shame and cultural anxieties as depicted in early modern Spanish drama and literature. In contrast to the strict “code of honor” traditionally ascribed to Spanish culture, Taylor introduces his concept of the “rhetoric of honor,” which he defines as “the conscious use of phrases, gestures, and actions—including elements of the duel—to convey information about the issues in contention while simultaneously advancing a violent confrontation”(21).Finding the term“code” too limiting in its implication of a formal process, Taylor’s “rhetoric” creates a loose template of action that establishes an accretion of shame which can then rise to violent confrontations—a fluid and performative approach to honor as a construct in early modern society and literature. Taylor presents his theory in juxtaposition to the previously published { 265 } Book Reviews theories of social anthropologists Julian Pitt-­ Rivers, J. G. Peristiany, and Jane Schneider, who have explained honor as a strict code that supported a family-­ centered morality, acting in and influenced by a larger sense of community. Taylor asserts that their concept of honor developed in part by using the“honor plays” of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca and discussions of dueling in fencing manuals as examples of actual behavior. Taylor contends, however , that social interactions involving violence in dueling manuals, law books, and “honor plays” of the period do not accurately depict Spanish behavior. For him, these printed accounts of violence depict Spanish life in an imagined or idealized form where two wronged parties duel in accordance to a strict code of actions. He therefore places de Vega, Calderón, and other Spanish playwrights in the ranks of early modern moralists and an “elite culture” of Spanish authors . Rather then relying solely on dramatic and other literary representations, such as novels or dueling manuals, to illuminate the workings of “honor” and “violence” during the era, Taylor focuses on legal documentation of actual historical events. He does employ the plays, however, as tools for an intellectual discourse of honor contrasted with the factual events documented in legal records , by introducing each chapter with a dramatic scene treating the chapter’s topic, followed by an explication of the topic gleaned from his research into the courts. Through this methodology he deconstructs the romanticized anthropological and artistic concepts of honor by comparing them with descriptions of real-­ life confrontations involving civil matters of “honor” in early modern Spain. For example, in chapter 4, titled “Men,” which explores the anxieties of masculine honor and its dependency on the behavior of others, Taylor pre­ sents the opening scene of Calderón’s El pintor de su deshonra (The Painter of His Dishonor). He then contrasts the...

The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth Century Spanish Theater (review)

Reviewed by: The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth Century Spanish Theater Hilaire Kallendorf Robert Bayliss . The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth Century Spanish Theater. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Pp. 204. $45.00. This revised dissertation, the product of Indiana University's traditionally strong Comparative Literature Department, is arguably one of the most important comparative contributions to be made by a young scholar to the field of early modern Spanish drama in recent years. Executed within the framework of discourse analysis, it is both theoretically informed and intellectually engaging. It is well organized to the point of becoming a bit predictable (the formula for each chapter involves a section on non-Spanish courtly love intertexts, then echoes of these intertexts in Spanish nondramatic works, then discussion of a canonical comedia written by a man, and then, finally, discussion of a more "marginal" comedia written by a woman). But this author is admittedly trying to keep quite a few critical balls in the air, and he juggles them nicely. For a comparatist, the most gratifying part of the study is its rich comparative texture on multiple levels—both historical (medieval texts are juxtaposed to seventeenth-century ones) and transnational (Old French, Italian, and Spanish passages are interwoven seamlessly). Bayliss is in complete control of the three languages in question. He has clearly been impeccably trained. Another refreshing aspect of this book is that it is somewhat unusual to find such a sensitive feminist critique written by a man. This is in fact the larger ideological project of the work. I particularly like how he historicizes current scholarly debates (typically performed by male versus female scholars, both playing predictable roles) in terms of the medieval tenso, or elaborately staged courtly love debate between the troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz. I only wish some of my male colleagues would start strolling down the hallway, singing to me with lutes … The introduction to this study, "Courtly Love and the Comedia as Discourse," sets up the methodology of discourse analysis as applied to these two distinct literary genres. In this section, Bayliss argues convincingly that "the variety of texts and contexts often subsumed by the label 'courtly love' suggests that it is a procrustean term exercised by modern scholars to create a tradition out of disparate texts that have been taken out of their original contexts" (13). While [End Page 521] not so iconoclastic as to deny some validity to the gran récit established by such grand old men as Denis de Rougemont and C. S. Lewis, Bayliss nevertheless makes the case that their formulation is in need of updating and nuance. In his self-described "pluralistic reading of courtly love" (14), he is cautious enough to identify three main hallmarks of this tradition that he declares to be constant: "its performative and self-referential nature, its implicit construction of ideologically determined gender roles, and its dynamic treatment of the relationship between the sexes" (14). Invoking Foucault, he reminds us that once upon a time, courtly love must have seemed revolutionary, and that the role it assumed in Western culture unfortunately became one of power, dominance, and exclusion of the female speaking subject. Now, he rightly points out that this exclusion was not absolute: in fact, he resurrects a little-known feminine tradition within courtly discourse (namely, the performances of female trobairitz) to illustrate the discursive complexity of the original courtly love scenario, not to mention its subsequent instantiations. But this brings us to his book's greatest vulnerability, and to describe it we shall have to take a short detour. Bayliss himself admits that the "engagement of male courtly discourse in dialogue by the trobairitz has only recently been studied by literary scholars; it is the monologic male troubadour tradition that exercised influence on future generations and schools of lyric poets through the early modern period" (44). Indeed, he finds himself forced to acknowledge that "widespread dissemination of trobairitz poetry … would not occur for seven hundred years" (44). The same problem may be found, likewise, on the other side of Bayliss's critical equation: namely, that extant works by Golden Age Spanish female dramatists are lamentably few and...

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama by Laura R. Bass, Margaret R. Greer

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama by Laura R. Bass, Margaret R. Greer

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Edward H. Friedman Several years ago, I wrote an essay on the relation of trends in scholarship and on their influence on Comedia studies, specifically on approaches to El burlador de Sevilla. One of my main points was that Comedia scholarship has always been enhanced by the work of critics, academics from, among other places, Spain, Latin America, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and the United States. I recall that, as a beginning graduate student at Johns Hopkins University in the early 1970s, I was struck by the richness of early modern Spanish drama and by the breadth and engaging quality of the criticism on the plays. Harry Sieber, himself a student of Bruce W. Wardropper, helped to introduce me to what might be called a metacritical strain in the study of literature and theater. I loved studying both the plays and their critical reception, which, logically, became inseparable. My studies with Elias Rivers allowed me to focus on language and on language as an implicit, if not explicit, ideology. As we moved into the new millennium, the impact of theory was ever increasing, and criticism often seemed to take on a life of its own. This is a fittingly baroque analogue, in which the already complex aesthetic object fosters theoretical responses that are as intricate, or more so, than the texts under scrutiny. In my ten years as editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, I have relished the variety and range of essays submitted to the journal, by scholars of many persuasions and at radically different stages of their careers. We encourage our readers to submit their work, and we look forward to the sharing of new ideas and new perspectives. I will end with two notes, one happy and one quite sad. Our colleague and board member Frank P. Casa was recently honored by the University of Michigan and by an international group of colleagues for his many brilliant contributions to the field. We congratulate Frank on his fine work and his splendid example of professionalism. Enrique García Santo-Tomás has written a brief description of the celebration, and we have asked him for permission to include his introductory remarks in this number of the journal. Anyone who has studied Spanish literature will note, with sorrow, the passing of the renowned British scholar Alan Deyermond, a great medievalist who was so much more. No one who worked with him could fail to see his exceptional intelligence and generous spirit. We send our condolences to his family and friends. Thanks, as always, to the members of the editorial board and to the contributors. [End Page vii] Copyright © 2009 Bulletin of the Comediantes

Approaches to Teaching in Early Modern Spanish Drama de Laura R. Bass y Margaret R. Greer

<i>Approaches to Teaching in Early Modern Spanish Drama</i> de Laura R. Bass y Margaret R. Greer

:Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama

At the start of the twenty-first century, performances of early modern Spanish drama experienced resurgent popularity--not only in Spain but also on stages across Europe, Latin America, and the United States. In the academy the comedia, which includes comic, tragicomic, and tragic works, is widely taught in a range of contexts to a variety of students, in Spanish and in translation. Given the steady increase of Spanish as the language of choice in foreign language departments, these courses will continue to flourish. This volume offers guidance to teachers in helping students engage with and understand these late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century works. Part 1, Materials, evaluates editions and anthologies in English and Spanish; identifies important critical works and historical studies; and surveys illustrated books, films, and Internet resources. In part 2, Approaches, experienced teachers discuss the way the plays challenged the interests of the monarchial state; examine the obsession with honor shared by Spanish men and women alike; explain the key role costume played in providing both pleasure and meaning; and explore how late-twentieth-century films reflect elements of these early Spanish plays. Other approaches center on five women playwrights; delve into the complex theological and philosophical underpinnings of the plays; pair the plays with Shakespearean drama; show how Spanish plays influenced French dramatists; and trace the appeal of the Don Juan figure.

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama. Ed. Laura R. Bass & Margaret R. Greer. New York: The Modern Language Association of America (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), 2006. xiii + 281 pp. $37.50 (hardback); $19.75 (paperback). ISBN 0–87352–994–4/995–2

Journal Article Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama. Ed. Laura R. Bass & Margaret R. Greer. New York: The Modern Language Association of America (Approaches to Teaching World Literature), 2006. xiii + 281 pp. $37.50 (hardback); $19.75 (paperback). ISBN 0–87352–994–4/995–2 Get access Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, JULY 2007, Page 317, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm013 Published: 01 January 2007

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama (review)

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama Chad M. Gasta Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama Modern Language Association of America, 2006 Edited by Laura R. Bass and Margaret R. Greer This volume is the latest in the Approaches series published by the Modern Language Association. As the series editor points out, The principal objective of the series is to collect within each volume different points of view on teaching a specific literary work, a literary tradition, or a writer widely taught at the undergraduate level. Indicative of its title, then, this volume is an assortment of teaching methodologies and perspectives on the early modern comedia by many of the field's most well-known scholars. Part One, written by the editors, Laura R. Bass and Margaret R. Greer, is dedicated to "Materials" and highlights the tools available to university instructors who teach the comedia: "Editions of Comedias" (anthologies, editions in [End Page 234] Spanish, and bilingual editions), "The Instructor's Library" (background studies, critical and scholarly studies, journals and series), and "Aids to Teaching" (illustrated books, films, internet resources). Though not intended to be comprehensive, this overview provides a fairly complete accounting of the principal resources available today. Part Two is dedicated to "Approaches" with an introduction by the editors that offers a brief commentary on the corral and the court, and takes up questions of authorship before moving on to the genre's original socio-historical context. The introduction also discusses key questions (some might say "debates") in early modern drama, many of which are featured in subsequent essays: gender studies and otherness, performance, the honor code, women authors, the "Golden Age" vs. "Early Modern" designation for the period, historicity, and transatlantic perspectives, among others. The first section of Part Two, "The Past in the Present: Historical Framework and Visual Contexts," features essays on historical contextualization (Melveena McKendrick), the Spanish code of honor (Renato Barahona), Italian Renaissance Art and the comedia (Frederick A. de Armas), geography and theories of space (Enrique García Santo Tomás), costume and dress (Laura R. Bass), and cinematic adaptations of popular comedias (Carmen García de la Rasilla). McKendrick's essay, "Communicating the Past," does a formidable job of contextualizing the comedia within its socio-historical moment by discussing such key questions as "honor" and "limpieza de sangre." Barahona's contribution, "Between Ideals and Pragmatism: Honor in Early Modern Spain," is a highly localized and research-oriented study of honor and litigation in the Basque Country which resists some of McKendrick's views. The second section, "Language, Theory, and (Teaching) Philosophy," includes very good essays on theoretical approaches: using polymetric analysis (Mary Malcolm Gaylord), theories on the comedia and graduate education (Edward H. Friedman), Golden Age Women dramatists (Teresa S. Soufas), and moral philosophy and the concept of "desengaño" (Manuel Delgado). Friedman's essay, "The Comedia and the Theoretical Imperative," provides a "checklist" of topics for instructors to consider when teaching early modern drama to graduate students, and how that list can be transported to the undergraduate classroom. He then goes on to espouse an approach that studies the comedia "as a progression that reflects literary history, the theoretical present, and a faith in the critical (and metacritical) skills of graduate students" (85). Whether you advocate Friedman's approach or not, he provides an excellent road map for teaching drama from the very first day. In the third section, "Theater History, Practice, and Comparative Contexts," essays are dedicated to performance and performance theory (Bruce R. Burningham), teaching non-comedia festive drama such as jácaras and entremeses (Vincent Martin), and comparative approaches: the comedia and Shakespeare (Susan L. Fischer), the comedia and French theater (Leah Middlebrook), and contrasting the Don Juan figures (James Mandrell). Burningham's essay, "Placing the Comedia in Performative Context," provides a brief, but concise, overview of theater from the Greeks through the Medieval period, before encouraging a class performance of a single play. His suggestion is a good one, but some instructors might not agree to putting so much time into one play at the expense of so many others. In the Fourth section, "Cross-Cultural Approaches," essays take up issues of race and...

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama (review)

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama (review)

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama

Approaches to Teaching Early Modern Spanish Drama

Editor's Note

EDITOR'S NOTE We are happy to present a group of essays covering a wide variety of topics and texts. One may observe that a good proportion of the articles in this number of the Bulletin of the Comediantes deal with plays by women dramatists and with the representation ofwomen in early modern Spanish drama. This is a testament to those who in recent years have rediscovered and studied these plays and playwrights, and who have helped to make the works more accessible to scholars and students ofthe Comedia. We take this opportunity to mourn the passing ofan illustrious Golden Age scholar and member of the editorial advisory board for many years, Professor Willard F. King of Bryn Mawr College. Our colleague Cynthia Leone Halpern, a friend and former student of Professor King, has written a tribute to her mentor. We also remember fondly Professor Ann E. Wiltrout of Mississippi State University, a fine Comedia scholar and a frequent contributor to this journal. Their loss will be felt, but "las obras quedan. ..." Special thanks to Robert Lauer, Darci Strother, and Susan Fisher for their reports on international theater festivals, and to Robert Lauer again for setting up a website for the journal. As always, we acknowledge the work of our board members and contributors, and we invite scholars to submit their work on all aspects of early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American drama to the Bulletin ofthe Comediantes. E.H.F. ...

Editor's Note

EDITOR'S NOTE The editors would like to thank the contributors to this number of the Bulletin of the Comediantes and to invite scholars to submit their work to the journal. In recognition of the upcoming four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Part 1 ofDon Quijote, we will devote a number of the journal to Cervantes's theater and to theatrical elements in Cervantes's writings. As a means of extending the celebration, we also would like to feature essays on the comedias and entremeses , by scholars from the U.S. and abroad, in the next few volumes ; please think of BCom if you are working in this area. We are interested in publishing essays, perhaps in the form of a special number, on current theoretical approaches to early modern Spanish drama. Please let me know, by letter or e-mail, if you are interesting in participating in such a project. I am thinking of something along the lines of several studies published in recent years, with the participation of a number of comediantes ; an example is the beautifully titled El arte nuevo de estudiar comedias, edited by Barbara Simerka. As we end another publishing year, I would like to thank the members of the editorial advisory board, assistant editor Bradley Nelson, and book review editor Thomas O'Connor, for their tireless efforts on behalf of the journal. I would like publicly to thank the managing editor José A. Madrigal, without whom there would be no Bulletin of the Comediantes. E.H.F. 247 ...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note I am honored to have been named editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes . It is a journal that I associate with the best traditions of scholarship and collegiality. The efforts of the late Everett W. Hesse—the breath of his scholarly activities, his enthusiasm, and his good will—continue to inform the Bulletin and the international community of comediantes. During the past twenty-six years, the Bulletin has been in the extremely capable hands of James A. Pan, who turned a wonderful small journal into a major tool of scholarship. Jim's contributions, both quantitative and qualitative , are enormous. His professionalism, his energy, and his generosity deserve the appreciation of all of us who are interested in early modern Spanish drama. I also would like to express our collective gratitude to Charlotte Stern for her devoted service as Book Review Editor. José Antonio Madrigal, whom Jim Pan rightly has called "indispensable ," will continue as Managing Editor, and Szilvia Szmuk will continue as Bibliographer. Many thanks to them, as well as to Szilvia's collaborators in the U.S. and abroad. Margaret Greer is the new Associate Editor and Thomas O'Connor the new Book Review Editor, and Charles Ganelin , Barbara Kurtz, Catherine Larson, and Robert Lauer are new members of the Editorial Advisory Board. We welcome them and acknowledge the fine work of their colleagues on the board. We dedicate Volume 51 of the Bulletin of the Comediantes to the memory of Daniel L. Heiple. Dan's scholarship was innovative and profound . His work will remain with us, but we will miss his special graciousness , his wit, and his intellectual zeal. Fred de Armas has written a tribute to his good friend for the volume. E.H.F. ...