BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Sonido y afecto en Calderón. Un estudio de las asonancias by Simon Kroll
• Fausta Antonucci

EN ESTA DENSA MONOGRAFÍA, resultado de muchos años de estudio y de un constante interés por la recurrencia de sonidos en la poesía y por el teatro de Calderón, el autor plasma una sugerente lectura de las potencialidades semánticas de las asonancias calderonianas. Es el del dramaturgo un teatro poético y polimétrico como todo el del Siglo de Oro, que sobresale por su amplio uso del romance y por la magnitud del corpus de autos sacramentales, consagrados a escenificar la fábula de la salvación de la humanidad por la gracia divina y el sacrificio de Cristo. Es, por lo tanto, el banco de pruebas ideal para la investigación de Kroll, que incide repetidas veces en la relación entre el valor semántico que pueden adquirir los sonidos recurrentes de las asonancias y la idea de la armonía cósmica, de la música de las esferas. Para decirlo con palabras del autor, "la musicalidad del teatro calderoniano crea diferentes ambientaciones y tonos para las escenas, resalta los términos clave del momento, todo lo cual adquiere en las obras religiosas, bajo el marco de la armonía universal, un grado de expresividad mimética que ofrece momentos de participación en las verdades trascendentales del cristianismo" (253).

No por casualidad, el espacio que Kroll dedica a analizar los efectos de las asonancias en los autos sacramentales es, sin comparación, mayor que el que dedica a las comedias cómicas; y en general, los ejemplos extraídos de piezas de tono serio o trágico (dramas mitológicos, de honor o históricos) son numéricamente superiores a los ejemplos de obras cómicas. Puede verse en esta preferencia un influjo del ambiente académico y cultural en el que se ha formado el autor, del que da cuenta y razón en el prefacio, y de la herencia ineludible de la recepción alemana de Calderón, tan bien estudiada por Henry W. Sullivan en su monografía Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries: His Reception and Influence, 1654–1980 (Cambridge UP, 1983). Por otra parte, se trata también de un sesgo inevitable en un análisis dedicado a las asonancias de las series de romance, que debe tener en cuenta las características lingüísticas del español y la mayor frecuencia de las vocales /e/ y /a/ en esta lengua. Citemos del apartado 7, "Romances en -a", el último de la sección 2 del libro que estudia "Valores y funciones de las [End Page 437] asonancias calderonianas": "Las asonancias basadas en /a/ son, junto con las en /e/, las más frecuentes en el teatro de Calderón, lo que no sorprende, pues se trata de las dos letras

Reviewed by:

• Mirando desde el puente. Estudios en homenaje al profesor James S. Amelang ed. by Fernando Andrés Robres, Mauro Hernández Benítez y Saúl Martínez Bermejo
• Miguel Martínez

POCOS ESTUDIOSOS de la España moderna han hecho tanto por la continua renovación de la práctica historiográfica, de sus preguntas y métodos, de sus temas e implicaciones teóricas, como el profesor James S. Amelang. Pionero en España de la historia cultural y la historia urbana, sus aportaciones han sido fundamentales para comprender aspectos tan diversos como la cultura ciudadana de la Barcelona moderna, la historia de las mujeres, las prácticas literarias de los trabajadores manuales del Antiguo Régimen, la cultura popular o la historia comparada de moriscos y judeoconversos. Su mirada desde el puente, siempre en una bisagra que aspira a articular culturas académicas y tradiciones historiográficas diversas (y a veces enfrentadas), lo han convertido en un mediador fundamental y en un maestro insustituible de varias generaciones. Por otro lado, su proverbial generosidad y el rigor de su compromiso ético con una historia más democrática, y con la democratización del conocimiento histórico, han hecho de él figura ejemplar y excepcional en un contexto académico tantas veces ensimismado y competitivo. Amelang es ciudadano honrado, como pocos, de la profesión histórica y de la mundanal república con la que aquella está inevitablemente destinada a comprometerse.

En el presente volumen, colegas y alumnos rinden homenaje al profesor con treinta y tres ensayos que constituyen en sí mismos una importante contribución a la historia moderna de la Península Ibérica. Tras una completa semblanza a cargo de los editores, el volumen se organiza en torno a varios temas y áreas de trabajo que han estado en el centro de la producción historiográfica de Amelang. La sección 1, sobre escrituras populares y autobiografía, refleja el ensanchamiento del territorio de lo autobiográfico a que dio lugar, entre algunos otros, el trabajo archivísitico, bibliográfico [End Page 377] e interpretativo de Amelang. Mónica Bolufer comienza revisando algunos "avisos a herederas" y consejos a las hijas escritos por mujeres aristócratas, centrándose en los Consejos cristianos y políticos escritos en torno a 1782 por María Dolores Josefa Tirry y Lacy, marquesa de Ureña. Robres lee el Diario (1652) del vicecanciller del Consejo de Aragón Cristóbal Crespí de Valldaura como "memoria profesional" que pone especial atención en el desempeño y dignidad de su puesto con

• Prologue
• Elizabeth R. Wright

THIS DOUBLE ISSUE OF VOLUME 74 of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, featuring Nicholas R. Jones as guest editor, emerged from the colloquium devoted to Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia, held at Yale University on 29–30 April 2022. We are grateful to Jesús Velasco, chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, for hosting us at a time where restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic were severely limiting opportunities for scholarly community. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided the financing needed for an international gathering of this scale, as well as for the complex editing and production needed to transform the conference papers into research articles.

Nicholas Jones outlines the guiding principles and intellectual lineage for this issue in his prefatory essay, "On Recovery and Reparation." A few words are in order here about how this project on Recovering Black Performance has also expanded our horizons as a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. Aware of the rigors of the dynamic academic fields that converge around this topic, we instituted a two-staged peer-review process. In phase 1, a cadre of early career scholars provided a first line of feedback and recommendations based on the papers and ensuing debates at the colloquium. We thank Esteban Crespo Jaramillo, Jorge García Granados, Julia C. Hernández, Yelsy Hernández Zamora, Brais Lamela Gómez, and Cornesha Tweede. In turn, we elicited outside evaluations for each contribution following standard practices of a peer-reviewed journal. Our aim here was to make the scholarship published in this issue responsive to the questions and criteria of early-career academics, in addition to those of mid-career and senior scholars.

This particularly ambitious and capacious volume of the Bulletin of the Comediantes—with sixteen contributions and an introduction focused on Recovering Black Performance, plus a substantive research note by Jane W. Albrecht on the application of stylometric analysis of authorial attributions to the Spanish comedia, and twenty-three book reviews—drew on the astounding talents, energy, and devotion of the team of collaborators listed in our masthead and on our website. A heartfelt thanks.

As we prepared this issue, we lost three cherished colleagues who made enormous contributions to the fields that converge around this journal. We honor and celebrate this journal's long-serving editor, James A. Parr, with a pair of remembrances—from emeritus editor Edward Friedman and stalwart Editorial Board member Sharon Voros. We also lost Donald R. Larson, a [End Page 5] guiding light of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, revered scholar,

Reviewed by:

• Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539–1640 by Miguel A. Valerio
• José Ramón Jouve Martín

"WHAT COULD BE MORE RADICAL than performing as a sovereign people in a slavocracy?" (xii). Esta es la pregunta que Miguel A. Valerio se hace en el prefacio de su libro. En cierto sentido, la respuesta presupone el libro entero y la interpretación que el autor hace de los eventos que en él se narran. La mayor parte de los lectores encontrarán aquí un trabajo fascinante, y lo es, pero también puede que algunos consideren una pregunta de este tipo algo innecesario, como si tratar de entender la vida y experiencias de las personas que vivieron durante la época colonial, y en particular de los afromexicanos, dependiera de que satisfagan o no lo que nosotros definimos contemporáneamente como radicalidad. Supongamos por un momento que las sorprendentes y en algunos casos trágicas representaciones y eventos que se narran en este libro no tuvieran el carácter de radical "agency" o "sovereignty" que el autor les atribuye y que sus protagonistas no buscaran actuar como "sovereign people" frente a las autoridades coloniales, sino algo, de hecho, mucho menos ambicioso políticamente: ¿acaso tendrían menos valor sus actos por ser menos radicales? No es que las luchas del presente no tengan una historia, y quizás Valerio tiene razón y las representaciones y festividades que analiza en su libro son parte de esa historia, pero no siempre se entiende bien qué ocurrió en el pasado cuando este se ve a través de las luchas contemporáneas. Sea cual sea la respuesta correcta, si es que la hay, Sovereign Joy se inserta en este debate, y no es el único aspecto del libro que puede resultar controvertido.

A la hora de aproximarse a su tema de estudio —las celebraciones organizadas por la comunidad afrodescendiente de México entre 1539 y 1640 y, en particular, el motivo festivo del rey y la reina africanos dentro de la vida de esa comunidad y del orden colonial— el autor adopta una estrategia interpretativa a la que denomina "diasporic framework" (4), que consiste en la utilización de material histórico procedente de otras épocas (la Edad Media, el siglo XVIII e incluso el siglo XIX) y otras geografías (notablemente Brasil, pero también Perú, Portugal, España, Italia e incluso otros lugares en Europa y África) "to supplement the Mexican texts, which more often than not provide scant information" (4). La portada misma del [End Page 471] libro, en la que se observa a un rey africano a lomos de un elefante, es una imagen proveniente no de México, sino de Brasil, y constituye un ejemplo particularmente

Abstract:

This article draws new attention to El negro del serafín, by Luis Vélez de Guevara, a hagiographic drama focused on the struggle for freedom and the rise to fame as a Franciscan friar of a Black protagonist. Despite evidence of enthusiastic reception at its time of composition and staging (ca. 1642–43), the comedia has remained obscure in recent times. In considering the historical and cultural contexts of the notion of Black sainthood in early modern Spain and Sicily overall and the theatrical subgenre of plays celebrating Black saints (comedia de santos negros), the article finds the comedia serves as a window through which to examine how religious beliefs and cultural practices informed representations of Blackness. Through a close reading of the play, I explore how Vélez de Guevara builds a hagiographic drama that epitomizes the fundamental duality of Renaissance and Baroque comedies that is the interplay of contradiction and celebration. As well, I ponder how the representation of the comedia's protagonist, Rosambuco, illustrates elements of the Franciscan order's quest to bring about the acculturation of Blacks in the early modern Spanish world.

Reviewed by:

• Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience and Performance ed. by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday
• Jennifer Ruiz-Morgan

THIS VOLUME is a fundamental contribution to the study of early modern theater. The double focus on playing (with attention to actors and issues of performance) and playgoing (with a focus on audiences) opens a wide lens onto the vibrant theatrical culture of Elizabethan and Jacobean England. The volume is divided into three main sections—Players, Playgoers, and Playhouses—each inviting readers to evaluate and reassess various aspects of the theatrical culture of the early modern period, such as the significance of the embodied and kinesthetic skills of actors, audience engagement, and the culture of playhouses.

The collection adopts an interdisciplinary approach, addressing debates and concerns raised by the well-established fields of theater history and performance studies. Following current tendencies in early modern scholarly research, theatrical-historical questions are examined, taking into account new approaches to the study of early modern drama, including sensory approaches, practice-as-research, the spatial turn, and new theoretical models of performance and spectatorship. Thus, the volume offers broad critical engagement with past and new debates that have shaped early modern scholarship, with such points of deliberation analyzed through the lens of emerging methodologies in the field. The result is a comprehensive and holistic understanding of actors, audience, and performance in early modern England.

Each section of the volume is divided into four chapters. Part 1, "Players," provides new perspectives on the actors' craft, drawing on new methodologies borrowed from fields such as repertory studies. Special attention is devoted to the analysis of the embodied and kinaesthetic skills of the player, in line with the new sensory turn in theater history, with its emphasis on the actors' ability to transmit embodied emotion. In chapter 1, "Shakespeare's Motists," Natasha Korda examines the significance of motion in theater. Rejecting the traditional focus on the eye–ear matrix, Korda analyzes theatrical gesture, drawing on new work on early modern embodiment, kinetic Shakespeare, and kinesthesis. Her focus lies on what she terms "kin-aesthetics," the aesthetic significance [End Page 459] of motion and action in the arts, arguing that the actor's body-in-motion has the power to move playgoers. In chapter 2, Emma Whipday focuses on the narration and performance of blanching and blushing (involuntary physical

Abstract:

Developments in computational analysis, corpus construction, and text editing have opened exciting new areas of inquiry in comedia studies. The first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen a swell of stylometric studies dedicated to comedias of unknown or disputed authorship. This essay gives an account of stylometry, or the quantitative analysis of textual evidence, and appraises it in plain, nontechnical language. Taking the perspective most germane to comedia studies, the article reviews stylometry's place in authorship studies; considers the mechanics of performing it and some of the tests and methods employed; provides a brief history of stylometry in the early modern Spanish theater context; comments on the preparation of adequate texts and corpora; and offers conclusions about the overall implications of this mode of analysis.

Abstract:

I examine the first performance of Los empeños de una casa in the context of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's experiences with finance and investment, arguing the centrality of the enslaved Juana de San José to her namesake's engagement with concepts of debt, worth, and price. I analyze these entanglements by considering economic historians' discussions of accounting's role in the formation of capitalism as a political economy. I then read the Sarao of Empeños as an accounting abstraction that includes Black voices of New Spain via Sor Juana's reckoning with marronage along silver routes; these were salient to the site of the first performance: the house of Fernando de Deza, the factor for the Spanish crown in New Spain. I thus explore the abstraction of Blackness in the Sarao, which, I contend, is like the fetishization and erasure performed by double-entry bookkeeping vis à vis commodities.

Abstract:

This essay is a reflection on the performance of the villancico de negro in an early modern Ibero-American context as well as on the musical subgenre's contested meaning in present-day concert programs. The first part examines the coro, a privileged space within a viceregal cathedral where ecclesiastical ritual devotion enacted a collective sensorial experience. This was a site where male choristers embodied the performance of villancicos through voice, taking on stock theatrical characters on the margins of empire. The second part explores the villancico de negro "Vengan, que lo plegona la negla," scored for two tiple singers and instrumental accompaniment, which is preserved in a manuscript dated 1704 from the archive of the Bogotá Cathedral. Here, I offer a close reading of the text's construction of Black women's voices and bodies as they participate in the narration and action of a Christmas play. The final section briefly looks at the discourses of silencing in the performance of villancicos de negro in the United States today. This reflection is informed by my experience as a scholar and performer of early modern Iberian and Ibero-American repertoires.

Reviewed by:

• Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo: historia y ficción en la obra del pintor de Felipe IV by Héctor Ruiz Soto
• Jeremy Roe

THE PUBLICATION of a new monographic study of the life and work of Diego Velázquez is an event not to be overlooked, and this book is no exception. First, it offers an insightful introduction to the work of Velázquez that engages with a range of recent research on the artist's life, paintings, and cultural context. As such it will undoubtedly provide a valuable teaching aid. Ruiz Soto's prose is well paced, and his succinct discussion of art historical, literary, cultural, and political themes distills for a new generation of students and scholars the major historiographical advances made in Velázquez studies over the last few decades by Jonathan Brown and John Elliott—needless to say—as well as Svetlana Alpers, Julián Gallego, Giles Knox, Felipe Pereda, and Victor Stoichita, among others. I highlight this facet of his book first, as it is seemingly the publisher's intended readership. The generic textbook cover informs the reader that Diego Velázquez, Apeles de su siglo is intended to réussir, and, in this case, put to very good use, the author's agrégation d'espagnol: Ruiz's book forms part of a collaboration between the publisher and France's Centre National d'Enseignement à Distance. Presenting scholarly research for a student readership is by no means an easy task, and Ruiz's work is an excellent example of how successfully this can be done. Nevertheless, one shortcoming of this book is its lack of images. As a volume that analyzes pictorial composition and color, it might have been better off as an exclusively digital publication, which would have permitted a greater budget for image rights, as well as the possibility of adding hyperlinks within the text to the many images discussed.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to judge this book by its cover and pigeonhole it merely as undergraduate reading. Indeed, the second reason to hail the publication of this book is that it is more than a textbook. Despite the academic constraints of the agrégation and those imposed by the publisher, the author presents an approach to the life and work of Velázquez that merits the attention of those already immersed in the current debates and critical minutiae of Velázquez studies and Spanish Golden Age culture more broadly. [End Page 455] For those already acquainted with Ruiz's scholarship on Golden Age theater, Góngora, and other early modern Spanish authors, this will come as no surprise; the footnotes, u