Spanish Drama Research Articles

Enric Borràs and Margarita Xirgu: Two Catalans on the Spanish Stage

Enric Borràs and Margarita Xirgu were two of the best-known actors/actresses in the early twentieth century, not only in their native Catalonia, but in the whole of Spain and in Latin America. Xirgu, in particular, was much appreciated by contemporary Spanish and European dramatists. With their highly contrasting styles and repertoires both in Catalan and in Spanish, Borràs and Xirgu attained huge popularity in Madrid as well as in Barcelona. This response was not universal, however, and certain sections of the Catalan-language press were hostile to them, particularly to Xirgu, for what was perceived as their abandonment of the Catalan stage at a particularly difficult period in its development. Using contemporary newspaper reviews, their biographies and interviews with them, this article considers their reception in Madrid and Barcelona. It also examines their views on questions of identity and on acting. It deals with their contrasting repertoires and looks at their relationship with contemporary Spanish playwrights, particularly that between Xirgu and Garcia Lorca. We glimpse the interface between the theatre worlds of Madrid and Barcelona and conclude that the study of theatre involves much more than the analysis of dramatic texts.

Enric Borràs and Margarita Xirgu: Two Catalans on the Spanish Stage

Enric Borràs and Margarita Xirgu were two of the best-known actors/actresses in the early twentieth century, not only in their native Catalonia, but in the whole of Spain and in Latin America. Xirgu, in particular, was much appreciated by contemporary Spanish and European dramatists. With their highly contrasting styles and repertoires both in Catalan and in Spanish, Borràs and Xirgu attained huge popularity in Madrid as well as in Barcelona. This response was not universal, however, and certain sections of the Catalan-language press were hostile to them, particularly to Xirgu, for what was perceived as their abandonment of the Catalan stage at a particularly difficult period in its development. Using contemporary newspaper reviews, their biographies and interviews with them, this article considers their reception in Madrid and Barcelona. It also examines their views on questions of identity and on acting. It deals with their contrasting repertoires and looks at their relationship with contemporary Spanish playwrights, particularly that between Xirgu and Garcia Lorca. We glimpse the interface between the theatre worlds of Madrid and Barcelona and conclude that the study of theatre involves much more than the analysis of dramatic texts.

Neurología en la obra de Lope de Vega

The Madrilenian Félix Lope de Vega Carpio (1562 1635) was the first Spanish playwright. As a privileged witness to his time and with an exquisite knowledge of the human soul, he managed to portray all the social and human reality of the Golden Age in his more than 700 plays. Illnesses and those who suffer them are to be found throughout his works. Many neurological diseases, such as apoplexy, melancholy, headaches or epilepsy, appear quite often in his plays. His descriptions are accurate and the ideas about each disease reflect the knowledge that existed during his time (galenic, medieval or renaissance).

Como debajo de un vidrio: Rafael Alberti and the Autobiographical Act

It is my intention in this article to draw attention to the often undervalued autobiographical writings of the Spanish poet and dramatist Rafael Alberti (1902–1999), focusing specifically on his first libro de memorias, La arboleda perdida. Drawing on recent seminal criticism of autobiography as genre by John Paul Eakin and James Olney, amongst others, I will attempt to analyze some of the implications of biography for the writer and to focus on the conflict between truth and memory. I will also examine the narrative techniques employed by Alberti in the construction of an autobiographical self.

Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598-1621 by Elizabeth E. Wright (review)

1012 Reviews provincial upbringing made for an ambivalent attitude towards Rome's intellectuals; similarly,aftera frustratingspell of location filmingon a beach forLo sceicco bianco, he subsequently preferred to reinvent reality on his own terms in the studios of Cinecitta. Virginia Picchietti's study of Lo sceicco bianco explores the paradox that emerges when differentdefinitions of femininity in a particular culture are deemed to be conflictual , and Aine O'Healy pursues a related theoretical strand in a discussion of the way Fellini foregrounds the cinematic construction of women as projections of male fantasy and desire, hovering ambivalently between voyeuristic indulgence and a cri? tique of the masculine biases of cinematic practices. Dorothee Bonnigal's analysis of Amarcord focuses profitably on the film's use of characters such as Gradisca to demystifythe kitsch self-idealization of Fascism and also to highlight the movement's compatibility with the phoney glamour and artistic totalitarianism of Hollywood. While Cosetta Gaudenzi raises a valid issue in her discussion of the youths' use of Romagnol dialect as a subversive device to undermine political and scholastic authori? tarianism in the same film,the critic is on less secure ground when she draws attention to the Tuscan and Neapolitan accents of the senior Fascist characters without exploring the possibility that Fellini may have been indulging in historical revisionism by distancing his compaesani from the party's upper echelons. The volume also contains a discussion by Helen Stoddart of Fellini's use of circus imagery and the carnivalesque, and an analysis by Marguerite Waller ofthe dissonant visual language within La dolce vita, while Carlo Testa explores Fellini's interest in the works of Kafka, an affinitythat resulted in America being used as the basis for the director's fictitious film project in Intervista. In a theoretical context, the recent critical work within filmstudies regarding the viewer's cognitive and affective involvement in films,an orientation typified by Plantinga and Smith's excellent Passionate Views: Film, Cognition and Emotion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), constitutes uncharted territoryforthis particular volume. Nevertheless, the traditional approaches employ ed here are perfectly legitimate and largely effective in terms of shedding light on the aesthetic choices and forms of representation to be found in Fellini's work. University of Salford William Hope Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 15Q8-1621. By Elizabeth E. Wright. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press; London: Asso? ciated University Presses. 2001. 184 pp. ?3?- ISBN 0-8387-5454-6. Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was arguably the greatest and undoubtedly the most prolific of Spanish dramatists. His three hundred or so surviving plays demonstrate an unrivalled ability to entertain all levels of Golden Age society. Yet, in spite of his enormous popularity, he had great difficultyin gaining formal recognition because the public theatre in Spain was still only very gradually beginning to acquire literary respectability. So, from the late 1590s, he began to broaden the scope of his writing, turning his attention to the publication of more ambitious works than the plays and short lyrical pieces to which he had previously dedicated his attention. Quite suddenly , epic poems such as La Dragontea (Valencia, 1598) and La Jerusalen conquistada (Madrid, 1609), the adventure romance El peregrino en supatria (Seville, 1604), the prose eclogue Arcadia (Madrid, 1598), and the enormous hagiographic epic Isidro (Madrid, 1599) rolled offthe presses as part of Lope's strategy to draw attention to his personal credentials as an author. Yet, at the same time, he continued his career as a popular dramatist, while also providing plays for the new court theatre, as well as producing verse that both praised and satirized the Spanish nobility. It is this MLRy 98.4, 2003 1013 prodigiously diverse output that provides the basis forElizabeth Wright's analysis of Lope's career at the court ofPhilip III, a king whose reign coincided with a significant period of social and political transition that is most closely linked to the ascendancy of the Duke of Lerma. As such, Wright's book complements recent research on the Spanish Habsburg court in the early seventeenth century, as well as New Historicist work on the changing social identities and motivations of early modern...

The Motif of the Reluctance to See the King in Lope de Vega's El Villano en su Rincon and James Shirley's The Royal Master

In 1890 the German scholar A. L. Stiefel published an article which for the first time solidly established an instance of textual relationship between Spanish and English dramas in the case of James Shirley's The Opportunity and Tirso de Molina's El castigo del penseque. In an intriguing footnote he declared that another five plays by Shirley had Spanish origin, and later successfully substantiated one of these cases: The Young Admiral, based on Lope de Vega's Don Lope de Cardona. Through a study of the motif of 'the reluctance to see the king' in another pair of plays proposed by Stiefel-Lope de Vega's El villano en su rincdn and Shirley's The Royal Master-the present article proposes a clear textual relationship, making good Stiefel's avowal in one more case.

Lope de Vega in lengua mexicana (Nahuatl): Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Translation of La madre de la mejor (1640)

In 1640, Don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of Nahua nobles and Spanish colonizers, translated four Spanish dramatic works from Castilian to Nahuatl ( lengua mexicana ). By identifying the titles and authors of the three longer Spanish texts and signing his name to the translation, this Mexican priest and scholar became a singular figure in the post-Conquest language encounter that shaped Mexico's hybrid society; specifically, he is the only translator of early-modern Spanish dramas into any Amerindian language whom we can identify by name. In these pages, we contemplate Alva's translation enterprise using La madre de la mejor , a comedia de santos built on the hagiographic accounts of the nativity of the Virgin Mary. We begin with a discussion of the complex, multicultural social context in which the translator and his interlocutors lived and worked. Then we compare the original Lopean drama and the Nahuatl translation. As we do so, we contemplate two key changes wrought in translation. First, the Mexican version of Lope's play erases the picturesque language of characters of humble origins, making all the characters speak like cultivated Nahuas. Second, the decidedly Castilian natural world celebrated in the Spanish drama gives way to a native, Mexican landscape strongly infused with sacred connotations. To close, we consider the implications of changes found in translation as they attest to emerging Mexican identities in the second century after the conquest. (LMB, BDS, ERW)

Theater as a mechanism for increasing farm health and safety knowledge.

The agricultural industry has one of the highest injury and fatality rates of all industries in the US. Hispanic farm workers constitute the largest percentage of farm workers on Eastern Washington farms. Literacy levels, language skills, and migration patterns need to be considered when developing farm health and safety education. Theater was chosen as a method to provide health education and farm safety training to farm workers and their families living in a three county region of Eastern Washington. The most urgent health and safety education needs of Hispanic farm workers were identified by a series of focus groups and key informant interviews. The resulting data was used to develop four Spanish one-act plays, which were presented in each of the three counties. To test the effectiveness of theater as an educational tool each of the plays was accompanied by pre-and post-play self-report questionnaires. These were analyzed using two-tailed Chi-square (chi(2)) tests of significance and a one-tail Marginal Homogeneity statistic. A total of 301 persons completed pre-test post-test questionnaires; 185 were farm workers and 115 were local community members. Thirteen of seventeen questions designed to measure information gained directly from the plays showed a significant degree of positive knowledge change (P = < 0.10). Follow-up interviews conducted 2 months after play viewing suggest that participants retain some of the health and safety messages in the plays. The hypothesis, "appropriate farm health and safety knowledge increases as a result of attendance at a one-act Spanish play enacted by a community players' group" was validated since 13 of 17 questions showed a significant degree of positive knowledge change. Overall, participants indicated that they liked the plays, recalled the story lines easily, and would attend additional plays if given the opportunity.

Modern Spanish dramatists: a bio-bibliographical sourcebook

Preface Carlos Arniches y Barrera by Nancy J. Membrez Fernando Arrabal by Peter L. Podol Max Aub by Arie Vicente Sergi Belbel by Maria Delgado and David George Jacinto Benavente by John Dowling Antonio Buero Vallejo by Martha T. Halsey Fermin Cabal by Candyce Leonard Alejandro Casona by Maria Delgado and David Price Ramon de la Cruz by Rebecca Haidt Ana Diosdado by Iride Lamartina-Lens Jose Echegaray by Wadda C. Rios-Font Antonio Gala by Hazel Cazorla Federico Garcia Lorca by Ada Ortuzar-Young Antonio Garcia GuiTErrez by George O. Mansour Agustin Gomez-Acros by Sharon Feldman Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch by Linda S. Materna Enrique Jardiel Poncela by Douglas McKay Jose Lopez Rubio by Marion Peter Holt Francisco Martinez de la Rosa by Robert and Nancy Mayberry Manuel Martinez Mediero by John R. Gabriele Alfonso Paso by Nuria Triana Toribio Paloma Pedrero by Candyce Leonard Benito Perez Galdos by Lisa Pauline Conde Jose Martin Recuerda by Danise G. Mills Duque de Rivas (Angel Saavedra) by Alvin F. Sherman Sr. Jose Maris Rodriguez Mendez by Martha T. Halsey Concha Romero by Carolyn J. Harris Pedro Salinas by Susan G. Polansky Jaime Salom by Phllys Zatlin Alfonso Sastre by Nancy Vogeley Miguel de Unamuno by Robert L. Nicholas Ramon del Valle Inclan by Felicia Londre Jose Zorrilla y Moral by Salvador Garcia Casteneda General Bibliography

Convencion y recepcion. Estudios sobre el teatro del Siglo de Oro

Convencion y recepcion. Estudios sobre el teatro del Siglo de Oro. By Ignacio Arellano. Madrid: Gredos, 1999. 349 pages. Ignacio Arellano, the driving force behind GRISO (Grupo de Investigaci6n Siglo de Oro, Universidad de Navarra), has authored another provocative and original book on Spanish drama in the Golden Age that will likely elicit much discussion. Convencion y recepcion. Estudios sobre el teatro del Siglo de Oro brings together in a surprisingly coherent fashion nine studies previously published as articles in earlier versions. The point of departure for Convention y reception, as articulated in the Introduction, is an indictment of two fallacies that have plagued recent comedia scholarship. The first of these methodological errors is to place all plays of the period into one group and study them in light of a single code of conventions, without recognizing that the corpus of dramatic works is made up of a number of different subgenres. The second failure noted by Arellano is the tendency to approach Golden Age playtexts with critical anachronism (9), which, while valid, ignores the cultural codes that inform the plays. The purpose of Arellano's study, then, is to reconstruct the conventional and cultural codes that will allow a reader to understand a Spanish Golden Age play. The first of three main sections of the book, Claves y codigos genericos, utilizes the drama de capa y espada as a kind of case study to debunk misconceptions about this subgenre and identify some of its main conventions. One of the consequences of applying global criteria to all Spanish Golden Age drama has been the repeated insistence on its ultimate seriousness of purpose, something that Arellano finds absurd for the cape and sword plays. The essential characteristics of these plays are wit and love. Arellano concludes that the cape and sword plays generally observe the precept of the unity of time in order to stress their lack of verisimilitude and to elicit responses of admiration and suspense in the spectators in the face of ingenious plot entanglements. Other features of the cape and sword plays are their rupture of decorum (54), generalization of comic agents (58), setting in Spanish cities at a present time, use of common names, exploitation of the honor theme as caricature, and a ludic purpose designed primarily to display the wit of the dramatist. In the second part of his book, De Lope a Bances Candamo, Arellano compares and contrasts the reception to date with the actual conventions discovered in his own reading of Lope's early urban comedies, Tirso's Marta la piadosa, Calder6n's El mayor monstruo del mundo, and literary and theoretical works by Bances Candamo. …

Entre actos: Dialogos sobre teatro espanol entre siglos

Entre actos: ditlogos sobre teatro espanol entre siglos. Eds. Martha T. Halsey and Phyllis Zatlin. U Park, PA Estreno, 1999. 398 pages. Entre actos consists of 42 papers presented at the International Symposium on Spanish Theatre held at Penn State University in September, 1997. The first of five sections begins with essays by five distinguished Spanish playwrights. Luis Araujo, for example, explores 6 of his own works illustrate how selection of the right form of play best brings out its content. Also analyzing his own theatre, Benet y Jornet expresses his hopes of giving his audience small measure of inspiration carry on in the face of life's vicissitudes, while Lopez Mozo offers useful history of avant garde writers in the post-Franco era. We discover more of the human side of Paloma Pedrero as she talks of her struggles overcome the handicaps of being woman in man's world. Rodriguez Mendez illustrates how his plays closely reflect the history of post-Civil War Spain and how he was personally involved in that history. Women playwrights are the subject of the second section. In plays by Teresa Garcia and Lourdes Ortiz, Wendy-Lyn Zaza discusses the courage of women characters condemned post-war concentration camps and later, their disillusionment with the failure of the Spanish socialist government implement promised reforms. Carolyn Harris in politically correct interpretation of Concha Romero's Juego de reinas, sees Juana la Loca's choice of love over duty as refusal to accept the values of the patriarchal order and the reason for her being declared insane. Possibly anachronistic in Romero's play, is Juana's defense of the Jews, Moors and Gypsies who were expelled from Spain by her mother Isabel la Cat6lica. Thus, Juana says, they were denied the right to think, pray or love in freedom. Iride Martina-Lens' study of Female Rage is the most optimistic in this section. After analyzing three American films (Thelma and Louise, Waiting Exhale, and First Wives Club) in which wives in their forties and fifties are abandoned by their boomer husbands, Martina-Lens points out that the only good coming out of their rage is bonding among the women. In contrast, Ana Diosdado's Camino de plata and Pedrero's Locus de amar, portray women victims who are able reconstruct their lives, gain insight into themselves and find a balance between love and independence. In the third section, under the title Estudios generates, Francisca Vilches de Frutos seeks define the Generacion Simbolista, and then describes the trials of these writers in the post-Civil War period and their comeback in the nineties. Ursula Aszyk of the University of Warsaw offers an analysis of the Vanguard theatre in the transition period and shows how European Vanguard writers and directors including Brecht, Stanislavski, Artaud and Grotowski influenced Spanish theatre. There are essays on Postmodernism by Wilfred Floeck and by Peter Podol who also treats metatheatre and the theme of exploitation in the contemporary theatre. Three studies on Buero Vallejo conclude this section: Victor Dixon sees Buero's La Fundacion as re-creation of La vida es sueno. …

Editor's Note

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

Actividad teatral en Cordoba y arrendamientos de la casa de las comedias: 1602-1737. Estudio y documentos

Professor Garcia presents here an edition of a large corpus of unpublished documents from local archives on theatrical life in this Andalusian city during the Golden Age of Spanish drama. Like other Spanish municipal playhouses, the Casa de las comedias was leased to businessmen, and the lease-contracts form the core of the volume. They are supplemented by a rich and colourful range of information on actors, audiences, theatre finances, municipal policy and many other matters. An extensive introductory study traces the fortunes of the theatre and its lessees in detail through the documents, setting this in the context of the changing local and national picture. Professor Ngel Mara Garca Gmez is Head of the Department of Spanish and Latin-American Studies at University College London.

No Longer in Search of an Author, a Character Defines Herself: Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and Eugenio Barba's Experimental Performance Methodology

Luigi Pirandello's work is unique. among early-twentieth-century playwrights, in part because of his freedom from false intellectual positions the isms. In his coup de theatre, Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922), Pirandello took neither August Strindberg's theoretical stance proposing a characterless drama in his Foreword to Miss Julie (64) nor Bertolt Brecht's position, in his Short Organum for the Theatre, that a should be constructed out of opposites, as a man standing in a valley and making a speech whose gradually changing views echo off the mountainside only to meet and contradict each other as they reverberate (191). Both Brecht and Strindberg saw the notion of as c1assist; Strindberg called character the middle class term for the automaton (64). For them, was a static, prefabricated facet of the mainstream theatre apparatus that reflects the value system of the ruling class, or what has come to be known as dominant culture. Yet by thus attacking the notion of as an agent of dominant culture, they confirm the incredible power of as performance's mystical unifying factor. In Six Characters Pirandello demonstrates that characters are autonomous and that their organic composition stems from something other than the author, actor, or culture. This article establishes a link between Pirandello's exploration of characters and Eugenio Barba's more recent examination of the actor! relationship. First, however, it is necessary to provide a Pirandellian context for characters and actors. It may seem ironic that Pirandello was on good terms with the ruling class. He publicly supported Mussolini, but his writing in no way reflects Fascist ideology; in fact, it may resist such authority. The subtle metatheatricality and formalism of Pi ran delio's plays are also evinced by authors in other nations under authoritarian if not totalitarian regimes, most notably Spanish dramatists Lope de Vega, Calder6n de la Barca, Ramon Valle-Inclan, Federico Garefa Lorca, and Antonio Buero Vallejo. These dramatists use what has come to be known as the

The Significance of the "Multi" in "Multiethnic Literatures of the US"

Presidential Address March 2, 2001 MELUS 2001 Conference Knoxville, Tennessee She starts up stairs to bed. `Don't get me up with rest in morning.' `But thought you were having midterms.' `Oh, those,' she comes back in, kisses me, and says quite lightly, `in a couple of years when we'll all be atom-dead they won't matter a bit.' Some of you will no doubt recognize this passage from Tillie Olsen's often-anthologized mother-daughter story, I Stand Here Ironing. Well, half a century after publication of daughter Emily's glum prediction, we're still here. In a way, studying, reading, and writing imaginative literature implicates all of in Emily's worldview. Why bother? outsiders ask us--and at times we ask ourselves. Today, American youth say AS ...--or, Do care?--to render this point. Obviously, some of us--we suckers at this conference, for example--do care. And this is foundation to build on. As people who believe that literature by ethnic Americans matters, we have opportunity to challenge Emily's fatalism. Through an act of faith, we can reclaim two syllables in English language and convert AS IF from a dismissal to a promise. We continue to create works of art and to share these creations with others because life has value and we are not atom-dead. As long as life has value, ethnic literature is valuable--for this body of literature brilliantly captures life experiences and complex worldviews of a culturally and racially diverse people known as Americans. did not find my way back to academia until my mid-thirties, and to study of multiethnic literatures of United States until my doctoral dissertation in American studies. The first time around in college had gravitated toward newer discipline of comparative At Queens College in New York, instinctively knew that English curriculum in literature was hopelessly entrenched--leaving marginalized searchers like me no room to expand my thinking. took shelter in a crossover program that allowed me to include classical Chinese poetry, modern French novels, and seventeenth-century Spanish drama in their original languages. This seemingly eclectic menu taught me respect for written word; it cultivated my interest in peoples and cultures across time and space. was also built into field of comparative literature, however, was notion that American literature was a poor relation of great world literature. Europe was often equated with the world, and white male writers and professors were assumed to be--by birthright--unequivocally great. After a progressively alienating couple of years toward a PhD at University of Wisconsin, Madison, dropped out of academia. So here am at dawning of new millennium, back in academia and president of MELUS. Having served first year of my three-year term, what would like to say to all of you who made effort to be here today? Well, presenting my argument for an ethical approach to study of American literature is a start. As a multicultural, multiracial society, our literary productions are both culture-specific and nation-bound. Emphasizing ethnicity--as MELUS does--is decidedly a political stance. We should not take our academic positioning lightly. submit that when we use term multiethnic, we should mean it. Multiethnic means that our separately categorized ethnic identities--be they African American, Latino/a, American Indian, or whatever--should be approached cross-culturally. Each of is a member of at least one ethnic community that embraces other ethnicities, thereby moving all of past us against them habit of thought. The model of multiethnicity undercuts balkanization. In announcing theme of this year's conference MELUS call for papers asked question: What is relationship between literature of particular ethnic groups and broader study of multiethnic literature, and what are possible tensions? …

DIE REZEPTION SPANISCHER DRAMEN AM WIENER KAISERHOF DES 17. JAHRHUNDERTS

The study opens with an outline of the state of research concerning the reception of the Spanish drama at the imperial court of Vienna in the 17th century, the historical connections between the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs forming the starting point for a description of Emperor Leopold's I. literary interests as weH as the activities of his ambassador in Spain, Franz Eusebius count pötting. In particular, the Viennese representation of Calderón's Fineza contra fineza (1671) proves its importance by the editio princeps being realised in the imperial capital. The foHowing part of the study offers a chronological analysis of the 15 documented representations of Spanish dramas at the Viennese court. The reader will find short summaries of the identified plays as weH as references to tranlations, adaptations and similarities with contemporary works of imperial court poets.

Rewriting Melodrama. The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater

Rewriting Melodrama. The Hidden Paradigm in Modern Spanish Theater. By Wadda C. Rios-Font. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP and Associated UP, 1997. 233 pages. In Rewriting Melodrama, Wadda Rios-Font reminds us that the prevailing esthetic form in late nineteenth-century Europe was melodrama, both in fiction and on the stage. The form's association with low culture explains, perhaps, its relative neglect by serious scholars until Peter Brooks published his ground-breaking study, The Melodramatic Imagination, in 1985. The theoretical framework provided by Brooks coincided with the rise of cultural studies to prompt a new look at this popular theatrical form. Rewriting Melodrama examines the genre in Spain, tracing its history from Jose Echegaray, who established the melodramatic paradigm in Madrid, to Valle-- Inclan, the playwright who, by subverting melodrama, opened the stage to modernizing tendencies. over fifty years Spanish playwrights and audiences identified melodrama with the very essence of theater. We have Wadda Rios-Font to thank for charting the rise and fall of this popular theatrical genre in Spain. Why rewriting melodrama? Rios-Font argues that Echegaray was so successful in equating theater with melodrama that all of Spain's elite playwrights from the 1870s to the 1920s had to engage the form, either to adapt it to new horizons (Eugenio Selles, Leopoldo Cano, Jose Feliu y Codina, Joaquin Dicenta), to write against it (Enrique Gaspar, Galdos, Benavente) or to subvert it from within (Valle-Inclan). The idea is convincingly argued and provides an artistic gauge of Spain's resistance to modernization from the Restoration to Primo de Rivera's coup in 1923: unlike Spanish society in general, the theater evolved slowly, stretching a traditional moral paradigm to fit swiftly changing social circumstances until the rupture between stage and life could not be avoided. Melodrama, as RiosFont explains, was not just a theatrical code. It was a ritualized representation of the struggle between good and evil in a society that was experiencing the loss of the Sacred and the dissolution of the correspondence between signs and their referents. For a bourgeoisie overwhelmed by vertiginous innovations in science, politics and economics, as well as concerned about controlling the very social mobility that had raised it from poverty, melodrama's traditionalism and reliance on institutional structures of power were comforting (35). …

A Lifetime's Reading: Hispanic Essays for Patrick Gallagher by Don W. Cruickshank (review)

MLR, 96.I, 200I MLR, 96.I, 200I picture is meticulously and clearly documented through referencesto the collected works and other published and manuscriptmaterial by Calvino, but relies also on an extremely wide range of critical studies on this author. The overall result is a powerful tool for readers of Calvino at all levels (it has certainly enhanced the quality of discussion at undergraduatelevel in the two years since its publication) but it is indispensable to those who are interested in literature as an intellectual catalystwithin a culture.Both as a studyof the mechanismsof an author'screativity (see, for example, the enticing web of associations generated by the Prefazione to II sentiero deinididi ragno,itself a reflection on the representation of personal and collective experience) and as a studyof contemporaryaesthetics,thisvolume shows McLaughlin to be not just well-versed in facts but a stimulatinginterlocutorwith Calvino. My one objection is to the editorial choice of presenting most quotations from Calvino only in English, while those left in Italian are solely to provide evidence of linguistic variants. Despite the obvious advantages of a critical study being in English, the quality of Calvino's prose is such that, like poetry, it suffersa distinctloss of aura in translation.It is to be hoped that one day McLaughlin'stext will be translatedinto Italian,so that the quotationswill be in the original. UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH CLAUDIA NOCENTINI A Lifetime'sReading.HispanicEssaysforPatrickGallagher.Ed. by DONW. CRUICKSHANK. Dublin: University College Dublin Press. I999. x + 229 pp. [28.95. Readers of this book are faced with a wide variety of texts, rangingfrom essayson subjectsof literarycriticism,linguisticanalysisand language learning strategies,to originalverseand prose translation.A briefeditorialprefaceexplainsthat the essays which follow are varied both in the disciplinesthey representand their authorship. All sixteen contributorsto thiscollection have had some associationwith University College Dublin and, consequently, with ProfessorPatrickGallagher.Eleven of the contributions are written in English, the remaining five in Spanish. The link between all sixteen is, simply, that they are examples of the variety of work encouraged by ProfessorGallagherduring his thirtyyears at UCD. As such, they are a fittingand eloquent tributeto a retiredProfessorof Spanish. The collection opens in verse with a contribution from Antonio GonzalezGuerrero : 'Yo amaba aquellos ojos tan azules' (pp. I-3). The poet draws a congenial and somewhat nostalgicpicture of the meeting of Hispanistson Irishsoil. The next contribution completely changes the mood: M. Angeles Conde-Parrilla offersher translationinto Spanishof Chapter I ofJames Joyce's APortrait ofthe Artist asa Young Man(pp. 4-25). Extensive annotations/notes follow the Spanishtext and provide background information on Joyce's time at 'Clongowes Wood College'. Don W. Cruickshank'sessay, 'On the Stage, on the Page: Some Developments in Spanish Drama, 168I-I833', is again a change of mood (pp. 26-43). As its title suggests, the subject of interest is the relationship between staged plays and their printed form. Cruickshanksetsabout analysingwho, particularlyin the second half of the eighteenth century,were the trendsettersandwho were the followersof trends in four activities linked with the stage: writing and performing;printing of plays; advertizingofprintedversion;newspaperadvertizingandcriticism(p. 28).Through his painstakinganalysis,an overview of the intricaciesinvolved in the promotion of dramain the eighteenth centuryemerges. Martin G. Cunningham's essay, "'Discantando la pasi6n": Garci Sanchez de Badajoz and the Art of Renaissance Song' (pp. 44-59), brings the reader back in time to consider 'GarciSanchez'srole in the historyof song' (p. 46). Whetheror not picture is meticulously and clearly documented through referencesto the collected works and other published and manuscriptmaterial by Calvino, but relies also on an extremely wide range of critical studies on this author. The overall result is a powerful tool for readers of Calvino at all levels (it has certainly enhanced the quality of discussion at undergraduatelevel in the two years since its publication) but it is indispensable to those who are interested in literature as an intellectual catalystwithin a culture.Both as a studyof the mechanismsof an author'screativity (see, for example, the enticing web of associations generated by the Prefazione to II sentiero deinididi ragno,itself a reflection on the representation of personal and collective experience) and as a studyof contemporaryaesthetics,thisvolume shows McLaughlin to be not just well-versed in facts but a stimulatinginterlocutorwith...

Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor. La traicion en la amistad

Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor. La traicion en la amistad. Ed. Valerie Hegstrom. Tran. Catherine Larson. USA: Associated UP, 1999. 197 pages. Reliable, readily accessible editions of works by seventeenth-century Spanish women writers are essential to all who are determined to include women's voices in our personal reading, our courses and our research. The current bilingual edition of La traicion en la amistad will be particularly valuable to students of Spanish drama as well as to a wider audience. In their eleven-page Introduction, Valerie Hegstrom and Catherine Larson ably contextualize the life and work of Maria de Zayas, mention other contemporaneous women playwrights, and summarize what little is known of Zayas' life and her possible relationship with other female dramaturgs. They also present abbreviated versions of their previous publications on the work as part of a particularly adept summary and comparison of major critical views on the play. Although they cite Teresa Scott Soufas' edition, Women's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain's Golden Age, and her companion volume of studies, Dramas of Distinction (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1997) in the Bibliography, they do not refer to them in the Introduction, perhaps because, as Hegstrom points out in a note, the current edition was in the later stages of preparation when Soufas' volumes appeared. Larson and Hegstrom conclude their Introduction by emphasizing the variety of critical opinions the text has evoked, which they rightly view as evidence of the richness and complexity of Zayas' play. The manuscript description, unexpectedly inserted in the Introduction between comments on women writers of the comedia and biographical and literary information about Zayas, would have formed a more coherent part of Hegstrom's Editor's Note. The intriguing mention of crossed-out words and marginal notes begs for a statement clarifying the nature and extent of editorial intervention in the codex. Reference to other descriptions of the manuscript, more detail in the description of the codex, and a more explicit statement of how the text was prepared would also be welcome. The Spanish text may be somewhat liberally punctuated, for example, the commas could be omitted in lines 6, 10, 43, 80, 113, 157, etc. Typographical errors are infrequent, consisting mainly of omission of some accent marks on solo or como, todas instead of todos (1465) or adorer in place of adoran (1518). In the main, the orthographic alterations Hegstrom has imposed on the text make it more accessible to a wider range of readers. …

Fuente Ovejuna : History, Historiography, and Literary History

Understanding the discovery of Fuente Ovejuna by Menéndez Pelayo and the various receptions of Lope's comedia over the past one hundred years as they relate to the historical and political developments of the twentieth century is key to understanding the diversity of Fuente Ovejuna 's readings, interpretations, and productions. Its fame in literary and academic circles as Lope's most important play is closely linked to the ebb and flow of the political tides that have swept across this century. This brief history of the modern receptions of Fuente Ovejuna demonstrates that the play's continuing popularity can be tied to the social and political interests that have informed literary criticism for the last century. The issue of understanding the play's central action—the killing of the Comendador and the liberation of the village from his tyranny—is not only one of modern interpretation but of the evolution of a conservative seventeenth-century adaptation (of fifteenth-century history) to the radically modern reading of the play as a commentary on contemporary political issues. Without a doubt, it is the play's twentieth-century reception, four centuries removed from the play's origin, which makes it the so-called "queen of Spanish drama." Debate about the play's content—either pro-monarchy or pro-revolution—has made Fuente Ovejuna both popular and polemical.