BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES最新文献

Abstract:

This essay examines how Lope de Vega's Los melindres de Belisa, a comedia urbana composed circa 1608, represents the intersection of different types of slavery in Habsburg Spain. This play is especially pertinent to these questions as its composition coincided with the intense debates that culminated in Philip III's Order of the Expulsion of the Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula (1609), a time when sub-Saharan slavery was also firmly established in peninsular Spain. Lope de Vega's comic genius yields a rich dramatic canvas for exploring how racialized representations of enslaved Moriscos and sub-Saharan peoples intersect and interpellate one another in Spanish public theater. An analysis of racial imagery and plot twists in Los melindres de Belisa shows that even though early modern Spanish discourse often strategically essentialized differences between Black sub-Saharan Africans and Moriscos, the racial shimmer in Lope's representations of slavery discloses that these categories were fundamentally entangled with, and indeed, constructed one another.

Abstract:

This note on teaching explores counter-storytelling, a practice that gives voice to marginalized communities and confronts the narratives of benevolent meritocracy and color-blind power dynamics that have long shaped the hierarchies, hiring practices, and opportunities for advancement within institutions. I provide an experiential reflection on my use of counter-storytelling to teach early modern Spanish racial history and culture. First, I propose the use of counter-storytelling as a theoretical framework in early modern scholarly research. Second, I advocate for engaged editorial work that strives to rescue forgotten counter-stories from the past, especially in the field of early modern theater and performing arts. Third, I offer concrete teaching strategies that implement counter-storytelling in the classroom, where students learn to challenge common myths and majoritarian narratives about Black Spain, both past and present.

Reviewed by:

• Renaissance Fun: The Machines behind the Scenes by Philip Steadman
• Dale Shuger

IF YOU HAVE EVER READ A COMEDIA that features angels descending from on high or magically opening mountains and wondered "how exactly did that work?", then Philip Steadman's book is for you. The book is an engineer's-eye view of the Renaissance, but instead of focusing on the period's great innovations in weaponry, urban design, or agriculture, Steadman, an architect by training, takes us on a tour of the early modern machines designed principally for entertainment. His focus is almost exclusively on Italy—Spain is scarcely mentioned, and Steadman does not cite any Hispanic secondary scholarship—but the relevance to scholars of Iberian theater is obvious, given the outsized role that Italian designers played in Iberian architecture and engineering.

Renaissance Fun is encyclopedic in the number and variety of machines discussed (and beautifully illustrated), but it is very narrowly focused on the machines and their mechanics. The book is roughly split between two theaters: the theater stricto sensu and the gardens of the Italian nobility. Each of the two parts is subdivided into three chapters that focus on a different type of machinery, and between each chapter Steadman includes an "intermezzo" that showcases a more specific technological device in detail. Given the focus of this journal, I will emphasize the theater portion. Chapter 1 focuses on devices for moving or changing scenery, such as the periaktos (triangular prisms that could be rotated to change a stage set) and artificial stage lighting devices. Chapter 2 reviews the use of ropes, pulleys, and moving platforms (akin to the Spanish tramoya) that allowed for scenes of flying angels or ships at sea. The intermezzo chapters explain a remarkable early modern camera obscura and weather effects, respectively. The term intermezzo also echoes the theatrical form in which the majority of the theatrical effects were employed. Like Spanish entremeses, these were performed between the acts of a comedia, but unlike the Spanish counterpart, generally directed toward the vulgo, these intermezzi were "extraordinarily lavish productions put on in princely courts for weddings and other great occasions of state" (13). After the first two parts of the book, narrowly focused on how specific types of machines worked, the final part takes a step back and gives a more narrative [End Page 463] description of one specific garden (that of Franceso I at Pratolino) and one specific intermezzo production (Mercurio e Marte, performed for

Reviewed by:

• Performing Conversion: Cities, Theatre and Early Modern Transformations ed. by José R. Jouve Martín and Steven Wittek
• Benjamin Easton

THIS COLLABORATION connecting the fields of literary studies, architecture, history, and media studies presents conversion as an expansive conceptual tool to apprehend the transformations of urban spaces and cultural institutions in the early modern world. It follows on the heels of Ovidian Transversions: Iphis and Ianthe, 1300–1650 (edited by Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken, 2020) as the second installment of Edinburgh UP's Conversions series, which, in the words of the editors of the series, Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, "sets out to explore the efflorescence of various forms of conversion and their social, corporeal and material integuments as they played out across early modernity" (ix). The series thus examines conversion in a capacious sense that includes the transformation of people across various religious, political, and economic identity categories as well as the transformation of places through urban renovation projects, the European colonization of the Americas, and the rise of theater as a new form of mass culture. (A third volume, Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body, is forthcoming.) The present collection traces an itinerary through Lima, Venice, Amsterdam, Mexico City, London, Madrid, and Zurich, bringing to light both the ways in which such burgeoning urban centers increasingly made theater and theatrical activity possible and how various theatrical productions and behaviors reflected on and actively shaped early modern conversional experiences.

Chapters 1 to 3 consider conversion not in the theater per se, but in paratheatrical sites such as public squares, urban pleasure parks, and even lecture halls. In chapter 1, "Venice: The Converted City," Iain Fenlon examines the theatrical dimensions of the Piazza San Marco, where both ecclesiastical elites and patricians collaborated in ritualized public performances to consolidate the city's sense of political stability during a time of widespread disease and overseas military conflict. Renovated according to the designs of Florentine architect Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570), the piazza served as a potent "locus of devotional activity" throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth [End Page 431] centuries (21). Clerics and magistrates worked together to employ the city's large repository of relics (mostly acquired centuries before as spoils brought back from the Fourth Crusade) to stage frequent processions in the

Abstract:

Sung inside and beyond the confines of cathedrals during the principal religious celebrations, the musical-poetic genre of the villancico took on a special vibrancy in the viceregal city of Santafé (today, Bogotá, Colombia) from the later sixteenth century onward. The singers themselves not only played (sung) the roles of angels and shepherds, but also of others, often adapted from stock comic characters, such as the "Negro" or "Negra" (Black man or woman), found in the widely popular short comic dramas of the Spanish-speaking world. This article studies the manuscript evidence of how the villancicos composed, sung, and performed in the Bogotá Cathedral attest to the contribution of the "black voices" that were heard in this viceregal metropolis, to be embodied in these pieces. I provide transcriptions and analysis of the poems, and even theatrical scripts, found in the musical scores of a corpus of "villancicos de nacimiento" preserved in the Archive of Bogotá's Cathedral. In turn, these musical-poetic works open a window through which to better understand devotional and festive practices in a stratified colonial society and, in so doing, can give us also a picture of performance practices developed by largely unheralded and mostly anonymous Black performers of the territory of New Granada (which coincides with present-day Panamá, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador), which was administered through the Viceroyalty of Peru until 1717.

Abstract:

This study examines and recontextualizes the anonymous Entremés segundo del negro, whose Black protagonist is a courageous swordsman and a poet skilled in sonnet writing. Comic intrigue focuses on the marriage his enslavers arrange to Francisca, a Black woman. To date, scholars have relegated this entremés to secondary importance by contemplating it as a sequel to another entremés, Luis Quiñones de Benavente's El negrito hablador. Following on methodological proposals for "critical fabulation" (Saidiya Hartman) and "responsible speculation" (Rebecca Olson), this study presents the entremés as a point of departure for new methods of analysis, with the goal of recovering underexplored images of Blacks as active cultural agents in early modern Spain. To bring new attention to this comic drama that survives in just one seventeenth-century manuscript, an appendix offers an annotated edition in modernized orthography.

Reviewed by:

• Arms and Letters: Military Life Writing in Early Modern Spain by Faith S. Harden
• Luis F. Avilés

THIS BOOK analyzes a select number of autobiographies written by soldiers in early modern Spain, with a special emphasis on the literary and social forces that contributed to their authorial self-fashioning. The constitution of a first-person narrative voice depended upon several factors. Faith Harden's approach focuses on the central role played by honor in the writing of a soldier's experiences, at times imposing limits while at others promoting creativity and nuance. This allowed soldiers of lower social rank to infuse dignity in their writings even when their deeds were questionable. Honor was highly important for soldiers whose purpose was to receive a reward, enhance their stature, or simply produce a spectacle of their own self. Harden proposes that the fashioning of a self depended on a creative understanding of honor as a public extension of the author's lived experiences in a complex economy of benefits, recognition, rewards, pleasure, social mobility, and the dangers of public self-exposure. Another factor crucial for fashioning an authorial voice was the diversity of genres available. Harden convincingly traces genres such as chivalric romances, lives of martyrs, military treatises, legal testimonies, and the picaresque novel, among others. She documents very well the variety of ways in which these genres were incorporated into soldiers' autobiographies. Harden makes a strong argument for the importance of taking into account all the forces (literary, material, social, and sexual) that intervene in the creation of the written self.

Chapter 1 is devoted to Diego García de Paredes's (1468–1533) Breve Suma, giving an account of how he was able to appropriate and transform the negative perspective of the mercenary soldier into a record of experiences that are worthy of emulation. Harden focuses on the way García de Paredes emphasizes his strong sense of personal honor and camaraderie towards other soldiers, effectively counteracting the negative perception of mercenary soldiers by prospective readers. For this soldier-autobiographer, individuality and loyalty to himself and his fellow comrades was more important than obeying superiors. Harden identifies a shifting articulation of exemplarity as well, arguing that García de Paredes proposes himself as a heroic model for other soldiers. Exemplarity also stems from the chivalric code and how [End Page 423] it was appropriated by soldiers like Paredes, who were from lower social strata. Harden provides a lucid account of the idiosyn

• James A. Parr, sin par (1936–2022)Editor, Bulletin of the Comediantes 1973–98 PART II
• Edward H. Friedman

I ALWAYS WILL CHERISH MY CONTACT with James Parr. He was a revered colleague, mentor, and friend for over forty-five years. As I was completing my graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, I submitted an essay on Calderón's El mayor monstruo, los celos to Bulletin of the Comediantes, and it would be my first published article. This was in 1974, and I had the opportunity to meet James Parr, editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, at the December 1975 Modern Language Association convention in San Francisco. I used the occasion to express my profound gratitude. From the beginning of our interaction, Jim Parr showed himself to be gracious, generous, and wise. The group known as the Comediantes generally held a banquet at MLA, to get together as comrades, naturally, but also to welcome new members of the community of early modern (then Golden Age) theater scholars. A guiding force of this blend of academics and collegiality was Everett W. Hesse, who founded the Bulletin of the Comediantes in 1948 and served as its editor until 1972. Jim Parr not only followed Everett Hesse as editor of the journal, but he maintained the tradition of supporting young scholars and engaging devotees of the comedia in a variety of dialogues. He had a style that was learned, critical, and empathetic; that is, he had many ideas to share and superb people skills, which made him a first-rate scholar and teacher. I read Jim's publications with great interest, and I truly enjoyed corresponding with him and seeing him at conferences.

In 1989, under the auspices of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University, where I taught at the time, I applied to direct a National Endowment for the Humanities six-week summer institute for college teachers on the topic of Don Quixote. I invited Jim Parr, whose groundbreaking Don Quixote: An Anatomy of Subversive Discourse (Juan de la Cuesta, 1988) had just appeared, to codirect the program with me, and he accepted. We received the grant, and Jim rented the home of an ASU professor for the period. We had an outstanding group of applicants, and those chosen—specialists in Hispanic and English literature and one in history—were exceptional. They ranged from established scholars to recent graduates of doctoral programs. The schedule included visits by six Cervantes scholars and a number of events outside the classroom. I depended on Jim to [End Page 23] stimulate the participants, who were studious, creative, and motivated, but who had to deal with the stifling summer heat of the Phoenix area. The dat

Reviewed by:

• A Companion to Calderón de la Barca ed. by Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker
• Sofie Kluge

THERE ARE ANTHOLOGIES of scholarly essays on Calderón in various languages; there are biographies of his life and monographs on specific aspects of his work; there are introductions to individual plays and myriad scholarly articles on every Calderonian topic imaginable. Yet following brilliant books published in the 1980s by the likes of Frederick de Armas, Alexander Parker, and Robert ter Horst, and notwithstanding the ongoing curricular presence of early modern Spanish studies in British and American universities, we were lacking a comprehensive, English-language study of the most important playwright of the Spanish baroque. Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker's Companion to Calderón de la Barca is the first "general guide to the interested reader" (xv), which I take to mean not only students and scholars of early modern Spanish literature and early modernists in other fields but also comparatists and people interested in theater history and the theater more broadly. Appealing to this wide range of readers, this comprehensive volume sends two unmistakable signals: first, that Calderón is as fresh and relevant as ever, and not just to specialists; and second, that Tamesis Books is an essential player in the academic book market, serving the Hispanist community as well as the educated public.

The Companion to Calderón de la Barca is comprised of the editors' introduction; fourteen original and substantial essays (each of about 20–25 pages, three of them translated from Spanish); two useful appendices, one listing key digital and print sources and the works by Calderón mentioned in each contribution (appendix I), the other providing an introduction to Calderonian versification (appendix II); a full bibliography of all of the works referenced by the contributors; and an index. The volume is meticulously edited—the only minor inconsistency I noted was the subheading format in chapter 8, which is really quite impressive for a volume of over 400 pages—and the contributions are overall both magisterially written and pedagogically oriented. For the most part, individual chapters take off from one, or in most cases several, plays, as case studies for establishing broader syntheses (regarding, for instance, Calderón's worldview and his religious comedias) and creating subclassifications (biblical comedias, saints' plays, [End Page 449] and Marian dramas). Envisioning readers both inside and outside Hispanic Studies departments, all Spanish titles, quotations, and concepts are followed by an English translat

Abstract:

Drawing from critical race theorists and focusing on premodern ideas of race, inheritance, and hereditary imprinting, this essay explores the alternative possibilities for governance suggested by Luis Vélez de Guevara in Virtudes vencen señales through his conceptualization of race, inherited traits, gender, and exemplarity. As the play's semiotic argument is anticipated by its title, an examination of exemplarity and precisely coded "señales"—that is, "signs," or "marks"—helps inform the disparity between who is initially assumed to be "virtuous" and who is ultimately proven to be so. The "señales" represented in the play confront ideas of political and hereditary continuity and rigid theories of legal and genetic succession that account for, mitigate, and hierarchize difference. In its engagement with exemplarity via key intertextual borrowings, Virtudes situates race and gender as the problematic backdrop for gauging an exemplar's replicability against its singularity and difference, thus offering a pointed critique of governmental continuity and hierarchal understandings of inheritance.