Golden Age Drama Research Articles

Twenty-First Century Approaches to Hispanic Golden Age Drama

Diversity and inclusivity have guided many scholars of Hispanic Golden Age drama in their attempts to cover new ground and incorporate fresh insights in the first quarter of the twenty-first century on early modern theater written in Spanish. The six essays in this special issue provide a sampling of that spirit, exploring themes such as physical, ethnic, and political otherness, the dynamics of gender and caste in professional theater, and the ability of music to communicate transcendence and reconcile sacred and secular. Authors included are Glenda Nieto-Cuebas, Pablo García Piñar, Erin Cowling, Sharon Voros, Susan Paun de García, and J. Yuri Porras. They discuss the theatrical work of Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Diego Sánchez de Badajoz, Ignacio Amestoy, Ainhoa Amestoy, Bernarda Ramírez, and Petronila Jibaja.

Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, eds. Spanish Golden Age Texts in the Twenty-First Century: Teaching the Old Through the New; Alba Carmona. Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva: Un siglo en la gran pantalla

Idoya Puig and Karl McLaughlin, eds. <i>Spanish Golden Age Texts in the Twenty-First Century: Teaching the Old Through the New</i>; Alba Carmona. <i>Las reescrituras fílmicas de la comedia nueva: Un siglo en la gran pantalla</i>

Translocating Humour to Seventeenth-Century England: The Comic Afterlife of Spanish Drama

Abstract The term ‘Golden Age’ broadly describes a period (the mid-sixteenth to late-seventeenth centuries) of great literary flowering in Spain, above all in theatre, where honour, love and humour emerged as recurring motifs. Unsurprisingly, Caroline and even more so Restoration England took an interest in the genre and imported several Spanish comedias, which made a modest but essential qualitative contribution to the London stage during this age. This essay centres on the purposes and limitations of humour in Spanish Golden Age drama, and on the extent to which the linguistic and semiotic aspects linked to comic performance were successfully carried over into the seventeenth-century English versions. By examining a corpus of performance-oriented plays in translation, I seek to illustrate the way in which contemporary British translators rendered comicality, studying how it was maintained, modified or distorted in the process, and taking into account the particular landscape proper to drama-translation practice and its degree of acceptance in the recipient culture. The dramatic areas in which comic devices function – plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle – are given special attention. The results reveal how practitioners may have obliterated the so-called Spanish flavour of the original comedy in an attempt to seek deliberately audience-friendly solutions, so as to fall in line with the expectations of the target theatrical context.

A Wild Night in Toledo

A Wild Night in Toledo

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750–1850 ed. by Laura Deiulio, John B. Lyon

MLR, .,   creative aspects of Italian director Cottafavi’s intriguing apolitical approach to Lope’s Las famosas asturianas in I cento cavalleri (), which chose to read the Reconquest as an anti-historical tragicomic ‘fable’, are relinquished in order to concentrate on frictions with the Spanish censors arising from Franco’s contemporaneous attempts to open diplomatic links with Arab regimes. Likewise, the treatment of Miró’s irredeemably ‘light’ reading of El perro del hortelano, which excises all trace of Lope’s cynical satire of social mores—an approach Carmona conjectures was copied from Frid’s musical Sobaka na sene for Soviet TV (), ‘designed to transport its audience from an asphyxiating political reality (p. )— skirts the question of how far repackaging Lope as a writer of slushy Mills & Boon romance truly serves the cause of culture, history, or Golden Age drama. In this respect one may regret that the author chose not discuss what is by far the best screen rewriting of a Golden Age drama so far, Iborra’s La dama boba (), electing instead to devote her last chapter to superficial recent TV biopics of Lope. Nonetheless, the book fully realizes its aim: clear, concise, its muster of new facts both provoking and illuminating. It makes a worthy addition to Peter Lang’s new series, and le this reader eagerly looking forward to more. U  O J L Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, –. Ed. by L D and J B. L. (New Directions in German Studies, ) New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. . xiv+ pp. £ (ebk .). ISBN –––– (ebk ––– –). is volume considers twelve representative examples of same-sex or male–female partnerships ranging from spouses, lovers, and friends to teachers and students, charlatans and victims. Starting with the Francophile Gottscheds, a husband-andwife team whose translations, plays, and critical essays were the enduring offspring of the childless couple, the case studies extend as far as Bettina von Arnim’s Die Günderode, Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan, and beyond. Most chapters are of a respectable length, averaging around – pages apiece, accompanied by extensive bibliographies. Earlier scholarship tended to investigate direct influence, such as that of Herder on Goethe, while shying away from partnerships of equals, not least because the cult of the towering genius was fundamental to understandings of German culture in the wake of the Sturm und Drang. Despite male adulation of schöne Seelen and hyperbolic compliments (‘daß Sie [. . .] alle Dichter und Dichterinnen der ganzen Welt übertreffen’—Wieland to Sophie von La Roche, cited on page ), most women of the period were only too willing to submit their writings to masculine oversight. ere was little interest in the contributions made by wives and partners to their companions’ work, and it would have been thought downright heretical to salute them as equals. For Schopenhauer, woman was intellectually somewhere  Reviews halfway between the child and the adult man. e editors of this volume demonstrate that intergender collaboration was more frequent and more significant than is generally assumed, in line with what has been common knowledge since Roland Barthes unmasked the image of the solitary, godlike creator as a social construct. Not all collaborations were successful or equally productive. e Schumanns’ diaries, here examined by Brian Tucker, began with a commitment to equality of input, but eventually their gaps and imbalances came to reflect an uneven distribution of power within the family. Elisa von der Recke’s entanglement with the notorious impostor ‘Count’ Cagliostro turned sour and led to a publication that was read by Goethe, Schiller, and Empress Catherine the Great, effectively ruining his phenomenal success as a Spiritualist. A positive note is struck by Adrian Daub in his assessment of Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel’s joint projects. In contrast to the conventional view that Dorothea faded into obscurity aer the publication of her novel Florentin, Daub shows that their relationship remained fruitful until and indeed beyond Friedrich’s death, when Dorothea ensured that her husband’s legacy would be preserved. Among the less obvious relationships is the ‘virtual collaboration’ (p. ) between erese Robinson (née von Jakob) and Goethe, here based not, as one might expect, on Robinson’s Volkslieder der...

La puesta en escena del teatro áureo. Ayer, hoy y mañana by Duncan Wheeler

Reviewed by: La puesta en escena del teatro áureo. Ayer, hoy y mañana by Duncan Wheeler Philip Allen Wheeler, Duncan. La puesta en escena del teatro áureo. Ayer, hoy y mañana. Translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido, Reichenberger, 2020. 269 pp. ISBN: 978-3-944244-91-4. Readers of the present collection of articles and chapters previously published in English will find a refreshing—and all too uncommon—compilation of recent historiography and literary theory complimented by contemporary accounts of the reception of Golden Age plays that spans nearly six centuries of the Spanish theatrical tradition. In doing so, Wheeler's contribution not only challenges and successfully dismantles many unfavorable stereotypes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish plays, but also delves into a contemplation of how these works are still relevant today. Moreover, the author reiterates that the underlying themes and motives found in these works can still resonate with today's audiences if they allow for the innate plurality of possible interpretations of these masterpieces to foster a new vision of Spanish Golden Age theater and a reconsideration of the literary canon. Wheeler recounts a narrative of the evolution of Spanish theater, following a chronological timeline that he establishes in Chapter 1 by placing the reader in late sixteenth-century Seville. The chapter presents a treasure of examples of the controversies and academic debates that surrounded the popularity of the corrales there during this time. Wheeler further posits that the exoticism of the Andalusian capital as represented in the comedias facilitated the dissemination of the city's culture throughout the realm, asserting that the newly established Spanish court in Madrid created a cultural identity inspired by that of Seville and illustrates the strong interrelationship between theater and politics that he uses as a point of departure for the upcoming chapters (21). Wheeler's exploration of the evolution of representations of Baroque Spanish theater and its broader sociopolitical implications continues in Chapter 2, in which Wheeler addresses how certain interpretations of gender relations in Golden Age dramas contributed to Spain's "Black Legend" throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The assertion made is that other European countries used topics like uxoricide to perpetuate the conceptualization of Spain as a retrograde, uncivilized society. The chapter refutes this negative stereotype by demonstrating how its detractors selectively ignore the fact that the same issues are present in works like Shakespeare's Othello. Wheeler also provides textual evidence to spotlight the instances in which spousal abuse against women is condemned by authors, both in canonical and non-canonical works, whereas cases in which women murdered their husbands are not present. Chapter 3 expands on such considerations of Golden Age Spanish theater and how they have contributed to a misunderstanding of the role of these literary works during [End Page 236] Francisco Franco's dictatorship, misconceptions that were perpetuated by the theories of José Antonio Maravall, whose conceptualizations of Golden Age Spanish theater have been embraced in Spain, leading to the widely-accepted notion that "Lope y Calderón eran considerados lacayos del Estado por excelencia" (71). Wheeler uses textual evidence from Maravall's own writings (that have been echoed by subsequent scholars) to discredit these ideas, arguing that they stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the original works. Chapter 4 uses mid-twentieth-century adaptations released outside of Spain as further evidence to counterargue the notion that Golden Age plays only resurfaced in the twentieth century as state-sponsored propaganda. The fifth chapter of the volume quickly concludes the examination of Golden Age plays during the dictatorship and focuses on how national initiatives—such as the National Theater Company—have taken strides to find a place for the early modern masterpieces in today's popular culture. Wheeler goes beyond identifying the challenges that these initiatives have presented and offers suggestions as to how to make these productions resonate better in the twenty-first century by drawing inspiration from techniques that have proven successful with recent audiences. The author reserves the most salient example of a Golden Age drama adaptation that was embraced by audiences and critics alike, both inside and outside of Spain—Pilar Miró's feature film El perro del hortelano...

El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead ed. by Valerie Hegstrom, and: The Golden Age of Spanish Drama ed. by Barbara Fuchs

Reviewed by: El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead ed. by Valerie Hegstrom, and: The Golden Age of Spanish Drama ed. by Barbara Fuchs Tatevik Gyulamiryan Hegstrom, Valerie, editor; Larson, Catherine, translator. El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead. Liverpool UP, 2018. Pp. 327. ISBN 978-1-78694-072-8. Fuchs, Barbara, editor; Racz, G. J., translator. The Golden Age of Spanish Drama. Norton, 2018. Pp. 612. ISBN 978-0-39392-362-9. There has been renewed interest in Spanish Golden Age performance studies with an increasing focus on presenting renowned dramaturgs and their works to Anglophone audiences. Edited and translated works by Valerie Hegstrom, Catherine Larson, and Barbara Fuchs and G. J. Racz complement the rich tradition of early modern Spanish performance studies and expand this scholarly area reaching out to more readers and viewers not necessarily familiar with Peninsular Spanish studies. El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead and The Golden Age of Spanish Drama invite any reader—particularly those with no prior experience or expertise in the area of Spanish drama—to delve into the world of performances and traditions of the sixteen and seventeenth-century Iberian Peninsula. While Hegstrom’s edition focuses on a single play written by Ângela de Azevedo, Fuchs’s edition presents an overview of the Golden Age Spanish drama. Both editions provide the reader with thorough and essential information about the evolution of performances, dating from the oral tradition to the making of a comedia. Hegstrom includes information about the Spanish drama and its influences—both historical and literary—in Portugal and presents the reader with Spanish and English versions of Azevedo’s El muerto disimulado. The edition by Fuchs focuses on several seminal plays of the era and their significance in cultural, literary, and performance studies. Both editions would be valuable in literature in translation courses, [End Page 143] as well as in theater studies. Fuchs’s edition could even be used as a textbook for a course on Spanish Golden Age drama taught in English. As Fuchs and Racz mention in their introduction, “While this volume is aimed primarily at readers—scholars, students, and anyone interested in the comedia as text—our hope is that the encounter with these texts, and the rich documentary and critical contexts that surround them, will also inspire them to support, attend, and perhaps even perform or direct the plays” (xvii). Keeping this interest in mind, it suits to look at each volume separately as, although similar in intent, the books focus on different dramaturgs of the Golden Age Era. Valerie Hegstrom’s edition of Ângela de Azevedo’s El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead is a singular work shedding light on less studied women dramaturgs’ works of early modern period. Hegstrom and Larson’s research on Ângela de Azevedo provides a thorough insight into her life, connections between early modern Portugal and Spain, as well as Azevedo’s brilliant play, one of the few ones known and preserved. Given that only five “women playwrights found their way into print in the seventeenth century,” Hegstrom and Larson’s edition and translation of Ângela de Azevedo is vital for understanding women dramaturgs of the Golden Age residing and writing in the Iberian Peninsula (3). Thus, unlike The Golden Age, which concentrates on a more comprehensive yet generally known by the scholars information about the world of performance of the early modern era, El muerto disimulado aims to increase representation of women and less studied writers in the canonical theatrical (and literary) tradition of the Golden Age (71). El muerto disimulado’s Introduction includes an overview of theater in early modern Spain, women playwrights, and information about Azevedo’s little known life. Following the Introduction is a contextual and textual analysis of El muerto disimulado succeeded by different practices of staging the play then and now. After that, the reader is provided with the Metrical Scheme of Azevedo’s work followed by Editor and Translator’s Notes. The play closes the book with Spanish and English versions presented on the same open page (Spanish on the left and English on the right side). Azevedo, born in Portugal, was one of several authors known to write and publish in Spanish. In the Introduction, Hegstrom and...

Théophile Gautier, Œuvres complètes, Romans, contes et nouvelles, iv: Le Capitaine Fracasse. Édition critique par Sarah Mombert

Notwithstanding the author-narrator’s compulsive name-dropping and word-dropping, at one level Le Capitaine Fracasse does not require extensive annotation. Such is Théophile Gautier’s infectious delight in his medium that readers may rest content with a sense of the general category to which certain examples of his rarefied lexis belong, while its picturesque obscurity may, quite properly, provoke hilarity in younger readers, a reaction denied them by a modern version said to be ‘en français facile’ (Paris: Hachette, 1971). At another level, the encyclopaedic nature of Gautier’s deceptively naïve narrative undoubtedly fosters intellectual curiosity, so scholars will value Sarah Mombert’s magnificent critical edition. It meets superlatively the demands made by Gautier’s personal lexicon and his vast range of literary, historical, mythological, and artistic references. Mombert’s elucidations exploit widespread familiarity with seventeenth-century French theatre, poetry, and narrative prose, although Les Grotesques provides invaluable pointers. Alive to Gautier’s readiness to recall his own writings, she is also at ease with classical authors, medieval French epic, Spanish Golden Age drama, all five books of Rabelais (plus the apocryphal Songes drolatiques), and such earlier nineteenth-century works as Notre-Dame de Paris or descriptions of seventeenth-century Paris by nineteenth-century antiquarians. Painstaking research underpins Mombert’s explanations of the many technical terms relating to medicine (human and veterinary), architecture, costume, jewellery, cosmetics, perfumery, pharmaceuticals, fauna and flora, modes of transport, arms and armour, cookery, hunting, implements of torture, heraldry, and games. Symptomatic of her attention to detail are the instances given of Gautier’s occasional slips. The comprehensive Introduction is judicious and informative, drawing, for example, on surviving financial documents to trace Gautier’s rhythm of production. It also instigates a suggestive discussion of the composition as both a reflection of the practices of Gautier’s Jeune-France period and a pastiche of seventeenth-century modes of perception and expression. The parodic dimension is addressed, though without acknowledging Gautier’s channelling of a self-parodic strain into the speech of ‘Le Pédant’, Blazius. (We are reminded that the latter’s name features in On ne badine pas avec l’amour, but anagrammatic hints of ‘Balzac’ would likewise seem plausible.) Consideration of Le Pédant joué would have been appropriate, not least because Gautier’s assigning of provincials to the category of ‘Topinambou’ ([sic], p. 172) echoes Cyrano’s play. Reference is made (pp. 60–61) to the celebrated salon scene in Sodome et Gomorrhe, though not to the pages in Proust’s Sur la lecture. The note identifying Virgil’s ‘trahit sua quemque voluptas’ (p. 593) might have indicated that both Bianchon in Le Père Goriot and the pedantic schoolmaster in Balzac’s Le Vicaire des Ardennes spout the phrase. Another note (p. 231) might have incorporated Nodier’s use of ‘suer d’ahan’ in Histoire du roi de Bohême. Chère lie (p. 499, n. 4) invites reference to Rabelais. More could be said about Pactole/pactole (p. 307, n. 31). Errors as such are almost non-existent, although Rossini’s Tancredi (p. 571, n. 14) was premiered in 1813, not 1816. Misprints are notably few. The text is, however, disfigured by superscript references to variants that are ordered by chapter rather than page, thereby leading to multiple sequences of the same alphabetic character that are sometimes illegible.

Les Mots et les choses du théâtre: France, Italie, Espagne, xvie–xviie siècles. Sous la direction d’Anne Cayeula et Marc Vuillermoz

The present volume is a careful and complex interweaving of a number of critical concepts in theatre studies, examined from interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. It gathers together seventeen articles first presented in 2015 at the international conference ‘Les Mots et les choses du théâtre’, itself a corollary of the major project Les Idées du théâtre, which interrogates liminary dramatic material in France, Italy, and Spain across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Les Idées du théâtre has also produced an extensive online collection of theatrical paratexts (<www.idt.paris-sorbonne.fr> [accessed 4 February 2019]), widely celebrated as a valuable research tool, and the articles assembled in this volume are a testament to the possibilities presented by this project and database. Bringing together wide-ranging and lucid insights into early modern and Golden Age drama in France, Italy, and Spain, it sets out with great erudition and clarity the reciprocal relationship between ‘mots’ and ‘choses’ in theatre, also making a convincing case for greater scholarly attention to be paid to the dramatic paratext. Although the arguments proposed in this collection are dense and largely interconnected, the volume is structured into five sections, which renders it more easily accessible to the general reader and to specialists in search of precise material. The first section focuses on the dramatic author and incorporates detailed studies of theatrical lexis: the term ‘travail’, for instance, is investigated and contextualized within dramatic culture; the power and significance of metaphor in liminary material is also considered in relation to the playwright. The second section moves on to aesthetics and dramaturgy and brings out more strongly the Foucauldian link between ‘mots’ and ‘choses’ in theatre: here, a particularly engaging article by Enrica Zanin traces frameworks of theatrical vocabulary in the earliest French, Italian, and Spanish dictionaries, drawing fascinating parallels with the reality of the practices denoted by this vocabulary. Turning to dramatic genres, the third section re-assesses the process of identifying a play with a genre and uses paratexts to explore how such classification can influence, undermine, or enhance the public understanding and reception of a comedy. The fourth section centres on actors and characters, presenting some innovative work on the often overlooked tension between author and performer; a further concern in this cluster is the French imitation of Italian comic stock types, frequently employed to political and polemical ends. The final section focuses on reception and evaluates the nature and impact of dramatic theory and the prologue in France, Italy, and Spain, also taking stock of the language of laughter and moral elevation in theatrical comic paratexts. Together these sections form a rich and productive discussion not only of theatrical practices in three countries which led the way for dramatic culture, but also of lexical, ideological, and transnational exchange across the centuries in question. This volume makes a substantial contribution to theatre studies and scholars of drama and of comparative literature will find it an exciting and insightful read.

Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation ed. by Harley Erdman, and Susan Paun de García

Reviewed by: Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation ed. by Harley Erdman, and Susan Paun de García Carmela V. Mattza Erdman, Harley, and Susan Paun de García, editors. Remaking the Comedia: Spanish Classical Theater in Adaptation. Tamesis, 2015. 303 pp. ISBN: 978-18-5566-292-6. The present volume is an important contribution to both the field of performance studies and the interdisciplinary effort to perceive, conceptualize and study the 400 years history of the Spanish Golden Age comedias. Such a history should include not only a history of a text or play, but also of its adaptations and performances. The authors of this volume, who are a mix of 21 well-known international scholars in the fields of History, Literature and Theater, and 5 actors and directors with an established professional trajectory, take on the common criticism of "(in)fidelity to the text" made to contemporary staging of the comedias to show how decisive it is not to lose sight of the fact that these Early Modern plays were very often a "freewheeling adaptation or refundición of others" (xvi). This reminder becomes the epistemological ground to understand why every adaptation and/or performance studied in this volume is not a negation of past scholarship, but an interdisciplinary effort to foreground our own methodological practices when studying comedias. An interdisciplinary approach engages and challenges not only the text, but also its adaptation and performance in a way that becomes meaningful to today's spectator. The volume contains 26 short essays grouped in four sections: theorizing, surveying, spotlighting and shifting. In "Theorizing," Catherine Larson's contribution takes on Sander's and Hutcheon's theories on adaptation to highlight the complex process of translation of plays from Early Modern Spain into a different language and their performance in front of a contemporary public. Her essay links well with Susan Fischer's on the process and value of "appropriation" that any adaptation and performance entail, which echoes well Lope de Vega's aim to produce theater based on the public's preferences, the most important feature of the comedia nueva. The works by Alejandro González Puche reminds us the ludic aspect behind every staging (31); while Laurence Boswell meditates on how every performance and staging make possible almost a phenomenological continuity, one that "transcends time, culture and language. It is profoundly human; it is human beyond language" (41). [End Page 145] The next cluster is called "Surveying," and it analyzes the staging of the Early Modern comedia in specific socio-cultural circumstances, in a specific moment or in relation to global concerns. Charles Ganelin takes on the staging in nineteenth century Spain to study how Spanish Baroque plays were modified to address the political anxieties aroused by the question of individual or collective identity (50). Duncan Wheeler ponders on the potential of Golden Age drama for the modern stage by examining the performance of La dama boba, La vida es sueño, La dama duende, etc. during the Franco regime. It adds a transatlantic perspective to get an insight into the plays' "dialectical and intercultural relationships, adaptations and appropriations" (64). Robert Bayliss examines "the inherent complexity of studying contemporary performances of early modern comedias by addressing how they constitute a nexus of cultural, economic and political concerns that operates simultaneously at local, national, and global levels" (65) as he sets out to evaluate the liveliness of today's Spanish Golden Age Theater. Jason Yancey's essay surveys four decades of the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Festival in El Paso, Texas to note its pioneering role and to address the importance of a more collaborative approach between academics and artists in order to facilitate more annotated English translations of the comedias to the potential public we can find in high school. A co-authored essay by Hegstrom and Williamsen focuses on contemporary performances of plays by Early Modern dramaturgas as a fruitful field for the interrogation of postmodern subjectivity (91). Jonathan Thacker's article on the cultural and linguistic challenges on staging among others, Lope de Vega's comedias in British theaters closes this section. With ten essays, "Spotlighting" becomes the largest section of this book whose focus...

Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama. Reviving and Revising the Comedia

Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama. Reviving and Revising the Comedia

Lope in Manhattan: Hyperreality, Space, and Violence in Julián Mesri’s «Fuenteovejuna»

This analysis of Repertorio Espanol’s 2013 production of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna in New York City focuses on the elements of communication, space, and violence. In director Julian Mesri’s staging, modern media or technology at times replace the human messengers of the original text, which has the double effect of distancing the audience emotionally from the events reported while calling attention to the mediums themselves and their agendas. In this contemporary urban world of simulacra, space seems compressed and violence appears conceptual. Mesri presents Fuenteovejuna as a Baudrillardian hyperreality, in which representations eclipse “reality.” In doing so, however, he does not so much alter Lope’s original as highlight, with modern touches, a dynamic that pervades the original play, Lope’s corpus, and much of Spanish Golden Age drama. Mesri’s vision may appear strikingly contemporary, yet the mode of representation it foregrounds is classic Lope.

Morals, Manners, and the Middlebrow

Critics have long portrayed Lionel Trilling as a cultural mandarin. However, this well-regarded critical orthodoxy neglects Trilling’s work in the mass media. Trilling’s affiliations with Columbia University and the New York Intellectuals are well attested, but his coeditorship of two book clubs and his work as a guest on radio and television programs have been almost forgotten. Seeking to redress this oversight, this essay focuses on Trilling’s work as a script supervisor for Channing (1963–64), a television series adaptation of his campus fiction “Of This Time, of That Place.” The essay argues that as a public intellectual, Trilling presented himself as a “cultural supervisor” whose criticism and fiction sought to guide the culture as a whole. While Trilling’s supervision rested on having access to a variety of institutions, both elite and popular, he was unable to effect the supervision that he desired in television. Thus while “Of This Time, of That Place” was an antimiddlebrow polemic, Channing drew on the conventions of golden age drama anthologies and was the very embodiment of middlebrow culture. As a script consultant, Trilling resisted these changes, but his advice was disregarded. By delving into this neglected episode in Trilling’s career, the essay shows that Trilling’s position as a supervisor of culture could be assumed rhetorically but could not be achieved in practice. Ironically, in taking on the role of a script supervisor Trilling was unable to act as a supervisor of culture

The Archival Value of Television in the “Golden Age” of Media Collecting

The Archival Value of Television in the “Golden Age” of Media Collecting Lauren Bratslavsky Television’s Golden Age ended almost as quickly as it began, with writers, directors, programmers, and critics pining over the “quality” days of certain live programs. The Golden Age for American television refers to “the medium’s first decade, from 1948–1958, when (or so the myth goes) program forms and norms were not yet entrenched, and the level of ingenuity and sheer talent on display was unparalleled.”1 The live drama anthology was at the heart of this myth, giving “the new medium respectability and prestige,” especially when stage plays and movies were adapted from the television scripts as a “new body of literature.”2 Complicating television historians’ critical assessment of the Golden Age myth is the lack of moving-image records (e.g., films and tapes).3 Yet numerous archives hold manuscript collections documenting the creative and industrial processes behind Golden Age drama anthologies and a larger swath of television from that era and later. These materials began to be collected in the 1960s during what we might call a golden age of (media) collecting—a window of time with favorable conditions for building collections. Although many major archives devoted to television had yet to be fully established, the “Golden Age” label helped launch the acquisition and preservation of television in existing institutions.4 This article contributes to television historiography by tracing the entry of television materials into one particular media archive with attention to discourses about the preservation of television (or lack thereof) and factors that influenced the archival process in the 1960s. Click for larger view View full resolution Examining the formation of an archive devoted to the performing arts—how archivists and scholars tasked with archival duties decided which materials merited preservation—explains how parts of television came to be thought of as a subject worthy of academic study. Curated repositories preserve important cultural memories and their [End Page 12] associated artifacts, generally connoting “notions of sanctioned cultural value, protection, ownership, and power.”5 As one film historian explains, “If we understand the archive as a site with its own histories, we can better know the histories of which the archive is a custodian.”6 Using the Wisconsin Center for Theater Research (an affiliate of the International Federation of Film Archives) and the Wisconsin Historical Society’s documentation of the relevant archival processes, including solicitation letters, donor correspondence, and internal reports and its first decade of operation in the 1960s, I want to show how a case study of an archival process can reveal the way archivists and academics conceptualized the worth of television as they crisscrossed cultural and economic systems of value. Although television was not identified explicitly in the Center’s scope, television materials make up a considerable portion of its holdings. Television studies ascended into the academy alongside critiques of literary canons and critical appreciation for popular culture and cultural histories.7 To be accepted as a legitimate field, however, television studies required that, one, scholars recognize television as a distinct medium with its own contexts of production and reception and, two, scholars take television as seriously as other cultural forms such as the literary, visual, and established performing arts.8 In the early days of archiving television, archivists and academics used relationships between television and already-valued art forms as a means to justify the medium’s entry into archival spaces. Indeed, the scholars in charge of the Center approached television as part of the field of theater rather than evaluating television as its own entity. By the end of the decade, however, new leadership led to new acquisition priorities and a more expansive conception of television’s archival and scholarly worth, welcoming television as a unique medium with its own artistic and industrial properties, albeit limited by markers of taste and quality. Later, though, changes in the federal tax codes effectively closed the golden age of media collecting. As a result, the Center forged a more explicit case for television’s distinct cultural value. Television in the Theatrical Tradition The way archivists and academics defined television (and the rigidity or flexibility of those definitions) influenced the...

A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies

Reviewed by: A History of Theatre in Spain ed. by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies Bárbara Mujica María M. Delgado and David T. Gies, editors. A History of Theatre in Spain. CAMBRIDGE UP, 2012 (PAPERBACK EDITION 2015). 558 pp. THIS NEW CONTRIBUTION TO HISPANISM by María M. Delgado and David T. Gies is an unconventional literary history. Because it is a compendium of articles by specialists, A History of Theatre in Spain avoids some of the major pitfalls that plague other literary histories. Single-authored chronicles inevitably offer a limited perspective, as no one scholar can be an expert in every aspect or period of a national literature. Even highly qualified experts in one area—say, the Spanish comedia—may be deficient in others, such as the zarzuela or contemporary feminist theater. However, the editors of A History of Theatre in Spain offer an overview of Spanish theater from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century provided by over two dozen eminent scholars of diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, and approaches. The result is a history of Spanish theater that is panoramic, profound, and multifaceted. The editors' insightful Introduction poses some questions usually ignored by scholars. The most basic is: What is Spanish theater? The tendency of critics, historians, and politicians to equate Spain with Madrid or Castile has led scholars to overlook the existence of cultures that have flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in languages other than Spanish, for example, Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Navarro-Aragonese. Furthermore, the primacy given to Spain's Golden Age has led scholars to neglect the rich theatrical traditions of Spain's eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Theatrical culture is much broader than a selected group of canonical works, argue the editors. Performance techniques, audience tastes, dramatic space, and myriad other elements all come into play. Rather than assigning hegemony to either text or performance-related issues, the editors have sought to view theater in its totality, including script, stage architecture, kinetics, the role of publishers, and paralinguistic material. Although their focus is on peninsular Spain, they have sought to expand our notion of Spanish theater by exploring issues of colonialism and the broad influence of Spain's theater abroad, both in Latin America and Europe. The editors' frankly revisionist approach calls into questions conventional assumptions about what constitutes a national theater and the parameters of Spain's theater. [End Page 135] In "The Challenges of Historiography: The Theatre in Medieval Spain," Ángel Gómez Moreno challenges the long-accepted 1958 statement by Fernando Lázaro Carreter that the history of theater in Medieval Spain is "the history of an absence" (18). For decades it has been assumed that almost no evidence exists of a theatrical tradition between the Auto de los Reyes Magos, composed at the end of the twelfth century, and the plays of Juan del Encina, the first of which appeared in the Cancionero de 1496. However, Gómez Moreno argues that records attesting to payments for scenery and costumes and references to paratheatrical productions do survive. Furthermore, scholars are now recovering some missing theatrical texts or finding references to them in other works. To gain an understanding of the breadth of theatrical activity in medieval Iberia, argues Gómez Moreno, we need to expand our horizons. Gómez Moreno examines the liturgical theater of Toledo and elsewhere, as well as momos and other medieval theatrical forms in Portugal. He concludes, "Modern scholarship has allowed us to perceive, albeit in indirect ways, the existence of a vigorous tradition of performance during the Middle Ages in Spain" (35). The following four chapters examine different aspects of the theater of the Golden Age, impugning some widely held assumptions. In "Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina: Spain's Golden Age Drama and its Legacy," Jonathan Thacker considers Lope de Vega, the most influential playwright of Spain's Golden Age, not only as a creator of plays but also as a theatergoer. Thacker believes that Lope's greatest source of inspiration was his experience as a spectator. By watching plays, he learned what pleased the audience. If Lope rejected the neo-Aristotelian rules that...

Teatros nacionales republicanos: la Segunda República y el teatro clásico español by David Rodríguez-Solás

Reviewed by: Teatros nacionales republicanos: la Segunda República y el teatro clásico español by David Rodríguez-Solás John London KEYWORDS Golden-Age Theatre, Second Republic, Cervantes, Lope De Vega, Calderón david rodríguez-solás. Teatros nacionales republicanos: la Segunda República y el teatro clásico español. Iberoamericana, 2014, 237pp. Within an unobtrusive methodological framework borrowed from Bourdieu, David Rodríguez-Solás has written a perceptive study of the reception of Spanish Golden Age theater within the Second Republic, or, as he defines it, “la renegociación del valor del pasado a través del análisis del teatro clásico que se representó y circuló en la década de los treinta” (14). Despite the idealism of much Republican rhetoric, there is a sense of failure in each of the five sections of the book, perhaps ultimately deriving from the fact that the original context of the plays involved the consolidation of the Spanish monarchy. With a national illiteracy rate of 32 percent, the primary aim of the Misiones Pedagógicas was to set up libraries in more remote areas. Among the books provided were Golden Age plays, but Rodríguez-Solás is careful to point out (in chapter 1) the limited success of what would appear to be a laudable exercise. Although many libraries were established, the evidence of library inspectors and the scholarship of Ana Martínez Rus demonstrate how provincial administrators did not always support the venture, and the more powerful sectors within villages sometimes automatically associated libraries with subversive ideas. Talks on the new constitution given by visiting representatives have to be seen in this light. Meanwhile, art from the Golden Age traveled to rural areas in itinerant exhibitions of painted reproductions of famous pictures. Other educational events included screenings of Kodak informative films often inapplicable to a Spanish setting: one notorious example showed irrigation systems of a sophistication totally alien to the audience. It is indeed possible to argue that the cultural shock of such initiatives did much to distance some Spaniards from the Second Republic. One has only to consider the policy on rewriting national history: in 1932, a government circular instructed school inspectors to check books used for teaching and remove those containing “apologías del exrey [sic] o de la monarquía” (61). Spanish history was reinvented by underlining every possible continuity or evolution from previous institutions to those of the current regime. Historians emphasized every [End Page 234] possible role for the people—rather than individuals—in national events, although a pantheon of new national heroes developed simultaneously, including Mariana Pineda, Joaquín Costa and Francisco Giner de los Ríos. All these endeavors provide a backdrop against which the role of Golden Age drama can be assessed in the two theatrical projects most closely associated with the Second Republic: the Teatro del Pueblo, dependent on the Misiones Pedagógicas (chapter 2), and La Barraca, directly subsidized by the government (chapter 3). The Teatro del Pueblo, composed of about fifty Madrid students and directed by Alejandro Casona (after a brief period with Rafael Marquina), visited more than two hundred villages in the course of its four-year-long existence. Its repertoire included plays by Lope de Rueda, Cervantes, and Calderón. Rodríguez-Solás gives political readings of two entremeses by Cervantes: La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo (in which the clergy—in a proleptic Republican gesture—are denied any agency in decisions of civil power) and El juez de los divorcios (premiered two months after the divorce law had been passed on 2 March 1932). For his adaptation of an episode from Don Quijote called Sancho Panza en laínsula, Casona added passages praising popular wisdom and peasant life. Given that these performances took place beyond a forum judged by newspaper critics, it is hard to gauge how successful they were; Rodríguez-Solás can refer only to the propagandistic photographs and accounts of open-mouthed wonder as affirmative evidence. Since La Barraca performed in bigger towns than the Teatro del Pueblo (as well as in Madrid) and frequently drew educated audiences, it has left...

Shakespeare in La Mancha: Performing Shakespeare at the Almagro Corral

Shakespeare is one of the most often performed playwrights at the Festival de Teatro Clásico de Almagro [The Almagro Festival of Classical Theater], an event initially created to celebrate Golden Age drama in which, nowadays, Shakespearean productions often outnumber those by individual national authors. Throughout the history of the festival, several Shakespearean productions have been staged in the Corral de Comedias, an original seventeenth-century venue that reactivates the use of space encoded in the playtext due to its similarities with Renaissance playhouses. This article has a double purpose: first, to examine the abundance of Shakespeare in Almagro as a phenomenon that finds its explanation in factors ranging from Shakespeare’s popularity to the role of modern translation and, second, to focus on how Shakespearean productions at the Corral de Comedias have negotiated new meanings of Shakespeare in performance, generating an interplay between Renaissance and Golden Age venues in contemporary performance.

Motivos clásicos en el teatro español de los Siglos de Oro

El objetivo del siguiente trabajo es delimitar a partir de un análisis comparativo la relación entre los motivos renacentistas y los barrocos dentro del marco del teatro español de los Siglos de Oro, elaborando así el corpus de los motivos clásicos fundamentales empleados, entre otros, por los autores españoles de los Siglos de Oro. El foco de nuestra investigación han sido los siguientes temas:• la pervivencia de los motivos clásicos grecorromanos en los Siglos de Oro,• las obras clásicas que representan sus respectivas fuentes,• los autores que emplean los motivos clásicos,• la posible tipología de los motivos, empleados por ciertos autores,• la existencia de las transformaciones (o la limitación de los autores en la simple imitación),• el papel intermediario del teatro renacentista italiano,• las diferencias entre el Renacimiento y Barroco en cuanto a la cantidad y el contenido de los motivos.

La anagnórisis como proceso dramático: análisis comparado en "Los siete infantes de Lara", de Juan de la Cueva, y "El bastardo Mudarra", de Lope de Vega

En este trabajo se propone un análisis comparado sobre el uso y la función de la anagnórisis en la tragedia española renacentista y barroca. En una primera parte se realiza un acercamiento a la Poética de Aristóteles para delimitar los modos y los tipos de anagnórisis susceptibles de estudio. Después se lleva a cabo una aplicación teórico-práctica en dos obras representativas de la tragedia española del Siglo de Oro para mostrar las implicaciones que este proceso dramático generaba en la representación. Al final, se muestran sus semejanzas y divergencias en el desarrollo de la tragedia moderna.

Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama: Reviving and Revising the Comedia. Laura L. Vidler. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xvi + 188 pp. $90.

Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama: Reviving and Revising the Comedia. Laura L. Vidler. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. xvi + 188 pp. $90. - Volume 69 Issue 2