Spanish Comedia Research Articles

Lope de Vega. La discreta enamorada / The Cleverest Girl in Madrid

Lope de Vega. <i>La discreta enamorada</i> / <i>The Cleverest Girl in Madrid</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.

Introduction. Confronting the Challenges of the 21st Century

Introduction. Confronting the Challenges of the 21st Century

La Pata de Cabra, Satire and Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century Mexico City

AbstractThe article examines how La Pata de Cabra (The Goat's Hoof ), an over-the-top fantastical Spanish comedia de magia (magic play), came to figure centrally in serious debates about Mexican politics and society between 1845 and 1857. The article explores the play's popularity and its resonance in the press – it spawned at least half a dozen satirical newspapers – to argue that satire became a critical political language and form of expression that broadened and sustained debates in an era marked by volatile and often heavily restricted press freedoms. The article's focus on the La Pata phenomenon brings two fields of study, theatre and the press, into productive and necessary conversation.

Grumelot & Escuela Nave 73: Defying Traditional Stage Presence Through Digital Media

As COVID-19 brought significant changes to the art industry, it forced creators to re-invent the way they collaborate and produce their work. Within Hispanic Classical Theater, these unforeseen circumstances led playwrights, directors, and performers to seek new ideas and venues of dissemination that may change the course of Spanish comedia productions for years to come. However, the proliferation of these digital productions raises several questions: How can multimedia outlets be used effectively to capture the audience’s attention and engage them in the same way as traditional theater? How can they create a sense of intimacy and recreate the perception of being present in the absence of the in-person theatrical experience? In order to answer these questions and to understand how these challenges can be overcome, this article examines the multimedia play Y es mayor dolor la ausencia que la muerte (Grumelot and Escuela Nave 73). A digital and interactive show that attempts to overcome the limitations imposed by digital broadcasting and implements social presence elements that allow the performers to create a sense of connectedness with the audience.

Honoring Thomas O’Connor

On the afternoon of December 30, 2020, I received an e-mail notifying me of the passing of David Gitlitz, one of the four founding members of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. The announcement of David’s passing followed this summer’s earlier announcement of the passing of Thomas O’Connor, who, among other things, had served as the book review editor for the Bulletin of the Comediantes.As I composed my own announcement of the news of David’s passing for the AHCT listserv, I realized that I had never actually had the chance to get to know David very well. Of course, I was very much aware of his foundational status in AHCT, and I was likewise familiar with his groundbreaking scholarship. But it occurred to me that, while I had developed professional relationships with Donald Dietz, Vern Williamsen, and Matthew Stroud over the years, I had had very little interaction with David. As the current president of AHCT, this realization made me profoundly sad.My interaction with Tom over the past two decades had been more substantial. Some years ago, when I was still relatively new to the profession, Tom asked me to write a book review for BCom. Throughout the process, I came to admire Tom, and I was always happy to see him whenever we crossed paths at one professional gathering or another.Over the past several months, as I have witnessed the great outpouring of love and respect for both Tom and David from friends and colleagues around the world, I have been humbled by the important legacy that they leave behind.Tom, of course, was a true comediante. He was a prolific writer whose work overwhelmingly focused on early modern Spanish theater, with a particular focus on Agustín de Salazar y Torres and Calderón de la Barca. Indeed, Tom’s monographic study Myth and Mythology in the Theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca is indispensable for students of the Spanish comedia, as is his Love in the ‘Corral’: Conjugal Spirituality and Anti-Theatrical Polemic in Early Modern Spain.Meanwhile, David’s research—like that of so many Hispanists—often crossed a number of disciplinary boundaries. Yes, he published on the Spanish comedia, with a particular focus on Lope de Vega (and, again, David’s La estructura lírica de la comedia de Lope de Vega is required reading), but he also published numerous books and articles in the field of Converso and Crypto-Judaic studies, on the Camino de Santiago, and even on Cervantes. (And this is in addition to his article on the auto sacramental and Disney’s Pinocchio, which, of course, is right up my alley.)Moreover, for members of AHCT, David’s pioneering legacy cannot be overstated. Along with Don Dietz, Vern Williamsen, and Matt Stroud, David’s visionary contribution to the study and teaching of early modern Spanish theater in performance was truly revolutionary at a time (the early 1980s) when scholars still approached Spanish comedias almost exclusively as literary texts rather than as blueprints for a live and vibrant theater tradition. Without David, the wonderful synergy between praxis and theory that became the decades-long nexus between the Chamizal Siglo de Oro Drama festival and the annual AHCT conference in El Paso, Texas, would never have happened. Nor would the AHCT video archive—which documents so much of the past 40 years’ performance history of the Spanish comedia from around the Spanish-speaking world and beyond—have ever existed.Thus, on behalf of all the members of AHCT (both past and present), I want to express our profound gratitude to both Tom and David for all that their work has meant to us over the years. I also want to extend our deepest sympathies to these dear colleagues’ families and friends. If I may be allowed to borrow and reframe a couple of comments that David and Tom themselves made at the time of the passing of Vern Williamsen, but which are equally true of them as well: “the world of the comedia is a poorer place without them” (David); and “we celebrate their lives well lived” (Tom).Bruce R. Burningham, President

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain

A Wild Night in Toledo

A Wild Night in Toledo

Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture by Anne Fuchs

MLR, .,   character who speaks. Chapter  examines the difficulties of conveying the shis in tone and situation that this rich polymetric verse marks in the original. Jeffs examines the opening stanzas of the four plays that were staged in the Swan to exemplify the kinds of decisions that were taken to preserve some sense of the original verse structure. Chapter  augments the analysis of these decisions with respect to characterization, while Chapter  analyses the deployment of metatheatrical moments, particularly with respect to the play-within-the-play sequences, ceremonies, and role-play. ese two chapters offer a wealth of individual case studies of how the texts were explored in rehearsal and how they worked in performance. e final chapter considers the impact that the RSC’s Golden Age season has had on subsequent productions in the US, Spain, and, more centrally, the UK until . Apart from briefly considering two American stagings of e Dog in the Manger, it traces Boswell’s subsequent comedia productions, first in Madrid with Rakatá (El perro del hortelano in – and Fuente Ovejuna in , both performed in Spanish) and then in Bath. As Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio in the latter city, he produced e Phoenix of Madrid (a reworking of No hay burlas con el amor) by Calderón in , and then a three-play season in : A Lady of Little Sense (La dama boba) by Lope de Vega, Don Gil of the Green Breeches (Don Gil de las calzas verdes) by Tirso de Molina, and Punishment without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza) by Lope de Vega. Jeffs’s book is a stimulating and hugely detailed account of the making of the landmark RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season. It analyses the challenges of working on the interface between two very different dramatic traditions and languages, displaying rigorous linguistic, cultural, and scholarly awareness of the processes of translation and adaptation. is book proposes a model to foster more widespread production of these plays, a kind of collaborative toolbox to revive Spanish comedias for modern English-speaking audiences in the twenty-first century. We can only hope that theatre practitioners and producers may draw inspiration from Jeffs’s painstaking work to revive more of the hidden treasures of Spain’s rich dramatic heritage. U  L J A. P D Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture. By A F. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. . xx+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Precarious Times takes as its starting point fundamental shis in the temporal conditions of the twenty-first century brought about by the interconnected forces of digitization, globalization, and accelerated capitalism. As Anne Fuchs observes, much recent criticism on these matters is imbued with ‘temporal anxieties’ (p. ) and pervaded by a crisis narrative that paints present-day experiences of time as stagnant, flat, disembedded, or atomized. Wary of such ‘monolithic and deterministic ’ (p. ) perspectives, Fuchs turns to the realm of culture to draw a more  Reviews multifaceted picture of our contemporary timescapes. Engaging with a remarkable collection of authors and genres, ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and focusing on German-language literature and culture in particular, Fuchs interrogates the alarmism underpinning much of the recent temporal diagnostics. She convincingly illustrates that temporal anxieties and complexities ‘are part and parcel of the complicated story of modernity’ (p. ) and hence not solely a problem of the here and now. Moreover, she emphasizes that artistic practice has since modernity provided opportunities for questioning dominant time regimes, allowing for the exploration of alternative temporal trajectories and the recuperation of Eigenzeit (pp. –). Fuchs is careful, though, not simply to celebrate art as a panacea for modern culture’s continuing struggles with time. While contemporary art in particular is deeply committed to the possibility of alternative experiences of time, oen accompanied by more attentive relationships with the world and others, these attempts oen remain fleeting and precarious. e book’s first chapter introduces key theoretical engagements with time in the era of digitization, including seminal accounts by Hartmut Rosa, Byung-Chul Han, John Tomlinson, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Harvey, and Robert Hassan. Fuchs identifies...

Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos

Reviewed by: Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England by Francisco Gómez Martos Carl Austin Wise Francisco Gómez Martos. Staging Favorites: Theatrical Representations of Political Favoritism in the Early Modern Courts of Spain, France, and England. ROUTLEDGE, 2021. 128 PP. FRANCISCO GÓMEZ MARTOS takes a pan-European approach to analyzing the figure of the king’s favorite minister in the theatrical traditions of Spain, France, and England during the seventeenth century. This comparative method is a fitting lens for an installment in Routledge Press’s Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge Series, which aims to frame its scholarship from a globally connected perspective. Historians have long presented royal favoritism from a broader European position after the seminal studies of J.H. Elliott’s Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge UP, 1984) and Elliott and Laurence Brockliss’s subsequent The World of the Favourite (Yale UP, 1998), yet scholars of literature have largely remained siloed in their respective national literatures. Spain’s comedias de privanza, France’s drames des favoris, and England’s body of theater featuring Tudor and Stuart favorites all enjoy some degree of critical attention, yet, as Gómez Martos points out, there is a notable lack of literary scholarship that takes a comparative, pan-European perspective to favoritism plays as a single corpus. In adopting just such an approach, Staging Favorites examines how three select early modern plays from Spain, France, and England present royal favorites from the perspective of neo-Stoicism. Beyond its comparativism, perhaps the book’s most interesting contribution is the chapter on La paciencia en la fortuna (ca. 1615), an unattributed comedia that had never been published. Gómez Martos argues in another study that the two surviving manuscripts are copies of a play performed in Madrid in 1615, and he uses both the play’s production records and meter analysis to propose Lope de Vega as the author (“La paciencia en la fortuna: An Unprinted Play by Lope de Vega,” Arte nuevo: Revista de estudios áureos, vol. 6, 2019, pp. 57–89). After a brief introduction, chapter 1 gives a short overview of political favoritism in early modern Europe and discusses how court culture and literary patronage responded to the near absolute power over court life exerted by Philip III and Philip IV’s privados, the Duke of Lerma and the Count-Duke of Olivares; Louis XIII’s ministre Cardinal Richelieu; and James [End Page 107] II’s favorites, the Earl of Somerset and the Duke of Buckingham. Despite the enormous variety of plays about royal favorites and the lack of consensus among scholars on how to classify them, Gómez Martos proposes that this genre of plays is connected by a neo-Stoic understanding of kingship and royal favoritism. Developed in the writings of the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), neo-Stoicism merged the classical philosophy of Seneca with Christian theology to propose the notion of how an ideal person, in this case the royal favorite, should behave. Chapter 2 looks at Spanish comedias de privanza, which emerged in the early seventeenth century when the newly crowned Philip III anointed the Duke of Lerma as his privado and gave him near king-like authority to rule in Philip’s absence. To seventeenth-century courtiers, Lerma’s rapid rise to power and unorthodox control over the monarchy strongly resembled Juan II’s medieval advisor Álvaro de Luna (ca. 1388–1453), who ruled Castile for decades before suffering a spectacular fall from power, imprisonment, and execution. Pulling from their own history of Juan II and Luna, Spanish writers saw royal favoritism as an unstable institution that could rise or fall without warning on the whims of the monarch. Damián Salucio del Poyo’s two-part La próspera fortuna and La adversa fortuna de Ruy López de Ávalos, and La privanza y caída de don Álvaro de Luna appeared in 1612 almost immediately after Lerma’s arrival in court and serve as the model for most of the privanza plays in the decades to follow. After discussing these well-known privanza plays, Gómez Martos...

En défense de l’honneur de la comedia de Castilla. En trois actes: 1635, 1792, 1830

La querelle du Cid and la bataille d’Hernani show how much French theatre was dependent on Spain: the Spanish comedia used to be criticised for its irregularity by the classics (Voltaire) and praised for liberality by the romantics (Hugo). The article presents three moments in the history of Spanish theatre and its political involvement. (1) Idea de la comedia de Castilla by José Pellicer de Ossau y Tovar, who defined twenty rules of Spanish comedia in 1635, is analysed in the context of the theatre activity at the very moment when the king of France decided to declare war on the king of Spain. (2) La comedia nueva o el café by Leandro Fernández de Moratín, a metatheatrical master-piece, is presented as a confrontation of the Enlightenment with traditional Spanish theatre. (3) Aben Humeya by Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, a Spanish liberal exiled in Paris, and its French premiere in July of 1830 shows the implication of politics and theatre in both France and Spain.

Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain. Edited by Enrique García Santo-Tomás. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii+278.

<i>Science on Stage in Early Modern Spain</i>. Edited by Enrique García Santo-Tomás. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. Pp. viii+278.

The Mountain Girl from La Vera

The Mountain Girl from La Vera

90 Monologues from Classical Spanish Theater in Spanish and in English

90 Monologues from Classical Spanish Theater in Spanish and in English

Counter/acting the Body Politic: Leonor de la Cueva's "La firmeza en la ausencia"

Although women protagonists in male-authored Spanish comedias were cast in pivotal roles, they remained as objects for which the male protagonists competed and contended. It has not been until recently that women playwrights have been studied by feminist critics, who have shed light on the reestablishment of the relational union of men and women. Nonetheless, while these female-authored comedias counter male authority, they often seemed to act out the part of the patriarchy. My analysis of Leonor de la Cueva’s La firmeza en la ausencia intends to measure the impact of women’s destabilizing force as it is introduced and asserted in the play. Through the female protagonist’s constancy, Cueva’s play counters the political authority as it is represented by the male protagonists—her king, her lover, and her lover’s friend. Moreover, in its geopolitical proximity to Cueva’s own time, the play acts out its realism, inverting the male-authored comedia’s motifs of honor, homosocial bonding, and mirror of princes. In the end, it is her body that disrupts the political and moral order, acting as both destabilizing factor and catalyst that calls the political body to order, and that is itself mirrored in the body of the text as poetic difference.

Seicento intersections of Spanish comedy and Italian theatre

In January 2015 Fausta Antonucci and Anna Tedesco (specialists respectively in Spanish literature and music history of the 17th century) organized an interdisciplinary conference in Rome, focusing on the intersections of their interests and involving also scholars of theatre and Italian literature. The results are published in the edited volume now under review, where Antonucci and Tedesco each outline their own perspective in separate prefaces. The book comprises eleven chapters by different contributors in three languages, Italian, English and Spanish: the multilingual structure, in addition to the multiple disciplines involved, should ensure a wide circulation among academic readers. The opening chapter is written by Maria Grazia Profeti, the pioneer of research in Spain and Italy on the diffusion of the ‘Comedia nueva’ in the Spanish Golden Age (‘Siglo de Oro’). Profeti, now emerita of the University of Florence, was the main organizer and chair of several meetings of scholars interested in this topic, whose proceedings were later published in the series ‘Commedia aurea spagnola e pubblico italiano’, in which ten volumes have appeared (Florence: Alinea, 1996–). Her chapter summarizes the state of research on this topic during the last three decades, mainly from the point of view of the history of theatre and comparative literature. A similar introductory summary on the musicological side is entrusted to Lorenzo Bianconi, one of the main protagonists in the reappraisal of the Spanish comedias as sources for Italian opera librettos during the 17th century. Around Bianconi, similarly to what happened around Profeti with young scholars of Spanish theatre and literature, a group of young (mostly Italian) musicologists have started a systematic investigation of the Spanish models for Italian operas. The two groups exchanged their results for the first time during the 2015 conference in Rome. In the proceedings their contributions are complemented with work by historians of Baroque theatre (chaired by Silvia Carandini, who includes a further introductory essay, this time on the bibliography of studies on Spanish–Italian theatrical exchanges in the 17th century), and by eminent musicologists such as Margaret Murata and Louise Stein.

“Create an Unexpected Context”: A Conversation about Adaptation and Performance with Playwright Dave Dalton

Playwright Dave Dalton is a director and adaptor of classic plays who has a special interest in Spanish comedias. In 2006, his adaptation of Lope de Vega’s The Dog in the Manger was produced by Quinnopolis at the Sanford Meisner Theater in New York. In recent years, he has been at work on adaptations of Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes. In April 2017, the Studio Series project of Portland Stage hosted a reading and talkback with the artists of his “loose adaptation” Love’s a Bitch. The three-act play is cast for seven actors, and there is a focus on the exploits of Doña Juana. I followed up with the playwright to learn more about his adaptation process, specific to this production and more generally as well his plans and aspirations for the show. The interview has been edited for brevity.

Interpreting the Gitana: Translation and Cross-Dressing in Lope de Rueda’s Medora

This study examines translation and cross-dressing in Lope de Rueda’s play, Medora. While Medora is translated from Gigio Artemio Giancarli’s play Zingana, whose title showcases the Gypsy, Rueda’s title announces transformation—Medora is a perpetually feminized version of the gender-bending Medoro. The play’s central drama involves the shifting identities of Gargullo and the Gitana. Building on Sidney Donnell’s perception of the early modern audience’s metatheatrical response to the male actor playing the Gypsy, which underscores a male actor playing the Gitana, I argue that in Medora, cross-dressing functions within an even larger system of translation that encompasses the fluid exchange between Spanish and Italian theatre. This study suggests that Lope de Rueda’s Medora—exemplified by a Gitana cross-dressed ostensibly in traditional Gypsy garb­­ and the self-declared converso and indiano, Gargullo—underscores the importance of transformation, translation, and cross-dressing in the genesis of the emerging Spanish Comedia.

Esbozo de un teoría verbal de la comedia

Theater is constituted by a double and correlative tension between auditory and visual elements, on one hand, and verbal and factual components, on the other. Due to restrictions in staging or to aesthetic preference, in the Spanish Golden Age Comedia there is an initial preference for auditory constituents over visual elements. However, this partiality does not entail, as could be expected from the double binary, a supremacy of the verbal over the factual, but rather requires an equivalence between both dimensions. Given the original diminished role of visual action, in the Spanish Comedia the word becomes the action; both are one and the same. From this hypothesis, I propose an analytical model wherein the play’s plot appears as set of verbal incidents that could be reduced to four: utterance of a statement, silence, correct and incorrect interpretation of an utterance. To prove or test the validity and the critical fruits of this theorization of the Comedia and the analytical method derived from it, the essay reviews (or better, rehears) a corpus of representative plays: El medico de su honra, El desden con el desden, El condenado por desconfiado, and Entre bobos anda el juego.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico

Book Review| April 01 2017 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico Kirk, Stephanie. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. Routledge, 2016. HB. 230 pp. ISBN: 9781409438458. Bonnie L. Gasior Bonnie L. Gasior California State University, Long Beach Bonnie L. Gasior is Professor of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach. She is co-author of the textbook Redes literarias: la literatura hispánica en su contexto socio-histórico (forthcoming, McFarland Press, 2017). She has also co-edited two volumes: Crosscurrents: Transatlantic Perspectives on Early Modern Hispanic Drama (Bucknell, 2006) and Making Sense of the Senses in the Spanish Comedia (forthcoming, Juan de la Cuesta, 2017). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Calíope (2017) 22 (1): 192–195. https://doi.org/10.5325/caliope.22.1.0192 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Bonnie L. Gasior; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. Calíope 1 April 2017; 22 (1): 192–195. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/caliope.22.1.0192 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressCalíope Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2017 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2017The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.