Spanish Golden Age Theatre Research Articles

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al. (review)

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al. (review)

Between safeguarding and translating: Chinese classical opera and Spanish Golden Age theatre

ABSTRACT Chinese classical opera is caught in a stranglehold, promoted as a key art form in China’s assertion of its global presence but declared untranslatable by gatekeepers distrustful of Western appropriative translation practices, and concerned to safeguard the form as the unique expression of Chinese identity. There is a parallel here with Spanish Golden Age theatre, which has struggled against the tag of an untranslatability rooted in the inviolability of its polymetric form and obsession with a seemingly arcane honour code. By acknowledging the tensions that exist between practitioners and gatekeepers of these two theatrical forms, this article examines translation as an ecology of affordance spaces that extends Chinese classical opera and Spanish Golden Age theatre into new performance practices.

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre

Ecologies of translation: Chinese classical opera and Spanish Golden Age Theatre

Este artículo examina una tarea clave del traductor, que es identificar las «affordances», o prestaciones, de los contextos receptores en los que el texto traducido puede prosperar como obra independiente. El artículo sugiere que nuestro creciente interés contemporáneo en lo que podríamos denominar el retorno del espíritu del barroco como estética escénica proporciona un marco significativo para realizar el potencial en inglés tanto de las obras de teatro del Siglo de Oro español como de las óperas clásicas chinas. Ambas formas, en mayor o menor medida, se han visto atrapadas en un punto muerto de unicidad nocional, en el sentido de que muchos críticos, traductores y, en el caso de las óperas clásicas chinas en particular, el peso de la interpretación nacionalista, insisten en la reverencia textual más que su posible presencia poderosa en el escenario extranjero. Dicha presencia, de ambas formas, se construye a base de la energía direccional sostenida de la emoción como principal agente de la participación por parte del público. Tal emoción, está claro, no excluye el pensamiento, sino que lo inserta dentro del poder afectivo general que tanto la comedia como la ópera china innegablemente ejercen en el escenario.

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al

Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al

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 que puntea las extrañas fantasías: Bances Candamo y la función dramática de los cordófonos

Los instrumentos de cuerda, cuando no van acompañados de canto, pasan generalmente desapercibidos en el teatro del Siglo de Oro, pero los dramaturgos asignaban a su sonoridad determinadas funciones. Este artículo analiza todas las apariciones de cordófonos en las comedias de Francisco Bances Candamo con el objetivo de sacar a la luz las dificultades para la investigación actual y los fundamentos que permiten extraer una semántica de estos instrumentos musicales a partir de los contextos dramáticos en los que se insertan. El resultado es un buen número de recursos poético-musicales derivados de una sonoridad que queda muchas veces enterrada en acotaciones imprecisas, pero que inspiró toda la obra del dramaturgo oficial de Carlos II y buena parte del teatro áulico de su tiempo.

Un estruendo invisible: las cajas en el teatro de Bances Candamo

El objetivo de este trabajo es reflexionar acerca de uno de los ingredientes más invisibles del teatro del Siglo de Oro: la música instrumental y los efectos acústicos que no incluyen la participación de cantantes. Mediante el análisis de todas las apariciones de cajas o tambores militares percutidos en las comedias de Francisco Bances Candamo, con la dificultad que supone la escasez generalizada de acotaciones destinadas a la música instrumental, se dibuja una estrategia dramática para vincular el oído con lo bélico, sea para animar al soldado, sea para las honras fúnebres de los caídos, con las implicaciones ideológicas que ello tiene en el primer gran espectáculo de masas de la modernidad. The aim of this paper is to reflect on one of the most invisible ingredients of the Spanish Golden Age theatre: instrumental music and acoustic effects that do not include the participation of singers. Through the analysis of all the occurrences of cajas or percussed military drums in the plays of Francisco Bances Candamo, with the difficulty that supposes the generalized scarcity of stage directions destined to the instrumental music, a dramatic strategy is drawn to link the ear with war, either to animate to the soldier, or for the funeral honors of the fallen, with the ideological implications that this has in the first great mass spectacle of modernity.

Crumbling Walls, Crumbling Roles: Metatheatricality and Gender Performativity in Héctor Mendoza’s La dama boba (1981)

Despite his prodigious output, the work of the Mexican dramaturge, playwright, and director Héctor Mendoza has been little studied academically. Those who have examined his works have dismissed his adaptations as merely playing with staging techniques while attempting to remain true to the adapted works’ “essence.” However, a close examination of one of these adaptations, La dama boba (1981), reveals that Mendoza draws on Spanish Golden Age theater to comment on contemporary issues facing Mexican theater and masculinity. In this paper, I engage with Richard Hornby's varieties of “metadrama” and Judith Butler's notions of gender performativity and citationality to argue that Mendoza employs metatheatrical techniques in order to contribute simultaneously to a postmodern questioning of the notion of the “author” and a destabilization and dismissal of the hegemonic Mexican masculine ideal of the macho.

Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín: el universo lorquiano del erotismo a la tragedia

La obra Amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín, subtitulada Aleluya erótica, es una de las obras vanguardistas de Federico García Lorca. Pertenece a sus farsas y parte de un tema clásico en el teatro español, el amor entre un viejo y una bella joven, que Lorca trata también en La zapatera prodigiosa. La obra refleja los motivos centrales del teatro lorquiano: la dualidad entre el erotismo y la muerte, el amor imposible, la presencia de símbolos y el enfrentamiento entre las convenciones sociales y los deseos del hombre. Por otra parte, el texto plantea un tema procedente del teatro clásico español, el honor, aunque en este caso la resolución del conflicto lleva al héroe a la muerte mediante un desdoblamiento de su personalidad. El libro contiene en los elementos líricos intercalados símbolos asociados al erotismo en otras obras lorquianas, como el pez o el agua. Existe una revisión del modelo patriarcal y una crítica del matrimonio como rito social, frente al erotismo y la sensualidad que emanan. Se defienden los instintos y deseos sexuales en una sociedad convencional y llena de prejuicios. En definitiva, esta pieza teatral recoge en temas y formas la estética lorquiana y su visión del mundo, dominada por el amor y la muerte.

El Cura De Madrilejos Im Kontext Des Dämonologischen Schrifttums

In the early modern period, demons and evil spirits don't only occupy the minds of clergymen like Castañega, Ciruelo and Delrío as can be seen in their scientific documents, but they also crowd the stages of Spanish Golden Age theatre. On the basis of the comedia El cura de Madrilejos, this article examines the overlaps of demonological discourses coming from theology, literature, medicine, law and stage technology. The analysis is focused on the phenomena of sorcery, possession and exorcism which will be situated in their multidiscursive historical context.

La reescritura en colaboración: "El príncipe perseguido" de Luis Belmonte, Agustín Moreto y Antonio Martínez de Meneses frente a la comedia fuente "El gran duque de Moscovia y Emperador perseguido" de Lope de Vega

El principe perseguido offers an interesting example of theatrical rewriting. The comedia was written by three authors –Luis Belmonte Bermudez, Agustin Moreto and Antonio Martinez de Meneses– before 16th of April 1645. The three poets used a relatively early play by Lope de Vega El gran duque de Moscovia y Emperador perseguido (Parte septima, 1616). The comparison of both texts –the comedia colaborada and its source– allows to investigate the modes of collaborative writing for stage in the Spanish Golden Age theatre. The analysis concentrates on the plot (based on the history of the false Dmitry) and macro- and microtextual quotes. The study refers to one of the most complex moments in the history of public theatre in the 17th century Spain (1644-1651).

Una nueva comedia en colaboración entre ¿Calderón?, Rojas Zorrilla y Montalbán: "Empezar a ser amigos" a la luz del análisis estilométrico

A play of doubtful authorship is included in Agustin Moreto’s Tercera parte de comedias: Empezar a ser amigos is a play about a common theme in Spanish Golden Age theatre, i.e. loyalty between friends that love the same woman. The play is conserved in a suelta whose author is Juan Perez de Montalban but also in two manuscripts and a print edition all ascribed to Moreto. The research presents an hypothesis of dating and debates the question of authorship. Together with the philological and critical instruments, we analyse the play with package Stylo in order to support with stylometry the thesis that Empezar a ser amigos is a play written in collaboration between Calderon, Rojas Zorrilla y Montalban.

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...

Enfrentamientos entre reinas y validos en el teatro áureo español

En el teatro español del Siglo de Oro son muy frecuentes las reflexiones sobre el ejercicio del poder. Por ello, no es extraño que por las tablas desfilen personajes como el rey, la reina y los validos. Estos dos últimos –soberana y privado–, en ocasiones, son protagonistas de relaciones muy tirantes, o bien por motivos gubernamentales (ambición de poder), o bien por asuntos amorosos.

La figura del mercader en el teatro del Siglo de Oro

Our article aims at determining a scheme in order to group the main information about the merchant in the Spanish Golden Age theater, having a look at both the positive and negative images, in perfect agreement with the doctrines of that time. In order to achieve our purpose, we will be using a wide corpus of plays belonging to Alarcon, Calderon, Guillen de Castro, Juan de Matos, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, focusing on the commercial vocabulary (to have, to give, to buy, to sell), the relation between the merchant and power, the allegorical image of the merchant´s ship or the relation between the merchant and women.

Imágenes del triunfo de Carlos Quinto en el teatro del Siglo de Oro

Our article focuses on the analysis of the triumphant images of Charles V in the Spanish Golden Age theatre, having at its very core two key words, authority and power. Throughout the study of several plays that build up our corpus, we can identify the main sources of inspiration for the imperial image of the Habsburgs in the 16th century: the Greco-Roman world, with constant allusions to Ares/Mars, the anti-Ottoman crusade, the importance of the faith.

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...

La Comedia nueva e le scene italiane nel Seicento: trame, drammaturgie, contesti a confronto ed. by Fausta Antonucci and Anna Tedesco

Reviewed by: La Comedia nueva e le scene italiane nel Seicento: trame, drammaturgie, contesti a confronto ed. by Fausta Antonucci and Anna Tedesco Guillaume Bernardi Fausta Antonucci and Anna Tedesco, editors. La Comedia nueva e le scene italiane nel Seicento: trame, drammaturgie, contesti a confronto. Leo S. Olschki, 2016. 339 Pp. THE RICH AND COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP that developed during the seventeenth century between the comedia nueva and the various forms of Italian theater (theater, commedia dell’arte, opera) has been a steady object of study by several talented Italian Hispanists since the 1980s. Yet, this field has remained something of a specialist niche. This might be explained in part by the fact that, for several historical reasons, the literary Seicento was traditionally the poor relation of studies in Italian literature, and its richness has generated little attention. Also, until recently, as we shall see, Italian stage works of the seventeenth century were not performed regularly, so there was little practical incentive to examine them as literature. In the last couple of decades, though, interest in Venetian opera of that period has grown rapidly, not only in academia—as attested by the now classic study by Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (U of California P, 1991)—but also in the opera houses of Europe and North America, in which the operas of a composer like Francesco Cavalli have now become quite popular. In parallel, the discovery that many Venetian operas had Spanish comedias as their sources has energized the research on the theater connections between Spain and Italy, yielding much new scholarship, predictably often produced by musicologists (e.g., Anna Tedesco, “Teatro del Siglo de Oro y ópera italiana del Seiscientos: un balance,” Criticón, vol. 116, 2012, pp. 113–35). The volume La Comedia nueva e le scene italiane nel Seicento: trame, drammaturgie, contesti a confronto, edited by Fausta Antonucci, a Hispanist, and Anna Tedesco, a musicologist, is a magnificent result of this new synergy between scholars of different disciplines. The book gathers the proceedings of a conference held in Rome in January 2015 and jointly organized by the volume’s editors. Proposing a very strong interdisciplinary vision for [End Page 111] the field, the editors invited scholars from various disciplines (Hispanists, musicologists, Italianists, and theater historians) to participate in the conference. This handsome volume published by Olschki, the prestigious Italian academic press, presents twenty-three contributions from scholars based in Italy, Spain, France, and the United States, with most texts written in Italian, though two articles are in English and two in Spanish. There are two substantial introductions—one by each editor—with the rest of the essays divided among five sections. The introductions and the first section present comprehensive overviews of the field, whereas the remaining four sections feature thematically related articles—although some of the subject matter addressed could fit in more than one section, and the volume does encourage a transversal reading of the articles. The introductions by Antonucci and Tedesco present the vision, goals, and achievements of the conference and of the book, each writer addressing the issues from their own specific disciplinary point of view. These two texts set the tone of the volume and establish with great clarity the motivations and ambitions of the book. They situate the state of the scholarship today but also trace the many avenues of research for the years to come. A section in three voices follows this dialogical opening, as the editors asked three seniors scholars to survey the field through the lens of their own disciplines. Understandably, the opening statement is by Hispanist Maria Grazia Profeti, widely recognized as a pioneer and a major contributor to the study of the relationships between the comedia and the Italian stage. Profeti first offers a survey of the critical reception of Spanish Golden Age theater in Italy from the nineteenth century to today. A substantial part of her study, as her audience would expect, is dedicated to an examination of her own production and role in the development of the studies of the Spain–Italy relationship since the 1980s. It is fascinating to see such an eminent scholar revisit and interpret her...

Lo cómico y lo serio mezclado en el festejo jesuita para la Comedia de la invención de la sortija (Monforte de Lemos, 1594)

Analysis of the two parts that make up the Comedia de la invencion de la sortija (recently discovered and added to the extant corpus of Spanish Golden Age theater) within the frame of the festivities in honor of Cardinal Don Rodrigo de Castro during his visit to Monforte de Lemos (1594). This work, which belongs to the genre of Jesuit Theater and includes numerous elements of court theater (e.g., the chivalric game of sortija), combines a serious didactic purpose with a more playful vein aimed at entertaining the audience. This is obtained through the inclusion of four interludes (entremeses) in between the scenes of the two parts in the main play as well as comic elements within those scenes themselves. The mentality of that period saw no aesthetic nor ideological contradiction between these two seemingly opposite poles; the serious and morally driven message of the play is complemented by its humorous dimension (the two aspects of theater).