BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES最新文献

Abstract:

In plays such as Los melindres de Belisa, Lope de Vega's characters pretend to be enslaved people who have been branded on the face. Their cosmetic brands or fingidos hierros act as signs within a system of figuration I call typeface. In Lope's typeface plays, hierros are removed easily but are undetectable as fake. These simulated brandings do not disfigure the characters pretending to be enslaved; instead, branding makes the character feigning unfreedom appear simultaneously more sexually attractive and racially ambiguous to other characters. Rather than clarifying racial hierarchies, as Miles Grier demonstrates is the case with the phenomenon he calls "inkface," typeface performances of enslavement represent what is for Lope a metaphysical reality: all human beings are enslaved and branded. Typeface goes beyond the appropriation of enslavement and entails a theory of signification in which human identities circulate as fungible signs, conflating the slave trade and literary dissemination, typographical characters and characterization. By elucidating how simulated brandings signify in plays Lope wrote across decades, this article identifies typeface plays as a subset of Lope's oeuvre, suggesting new ways of understanding his attitudes toward race and enslavement.

Abstract:

In 1690, Capeverdean freedman and servant Patrício de Andrade was sentenced to exile by the Portuguese Inquisition for putting on performances of bodily invulnerability so convincing that no one could believe he had not made a pact with the devil. These performances, which he called experiências (from experientia meaning both experience and experiment), had a purpose: to demonstrate the protective powers of the amulets he made and sold, later known as bolsas de mandinga. But Patrício, as he sought to prove to the inquisitors, was an illusionist and swindler, whose experiences relied not on diabolical assistance, but on his own dexterity, artifice, and pretense. This article reconstructs and analyzes these performances inside and outside the space of the inquisition tribunal, showing how mandingueiros like Patrício both dramatized and promised a solution to pervasive fears around violence and bodily insecurity in Lisbon and across the empire, and mastered a vocabulary of experiential proof that, before the law, put considerable pressure on existing regimes of verification.

Abstract:

This study of theatrical performance in Portuguese America examines the prevalence of Black and African descendant performers onstage, whether enslaved or free. On the one hand, I consider the artistic implications of these performers' prominence in terms of how their performances fused European theatrical elements, for instance, with plays being staged in opera houses and featuring works by Pietro Metastasio and Carlo Goldoni. Other engagements with the European tradition suggest Spanish influences, such as performances of comedias and comic farces (entremezes). On the other hand, we find Afro-diasporic performance practices on the Portuguese American stage. Additionally, I address methodological challenges: How can this kind of theatricality be analyzed? Is it possible to reconstitute such scenes of Black performance and analyze acting methods, notwithstanding the scarce documentation? Finally, must we interrogate the connections between social organization in colonial Brazil's slave-holding society and forms of artistic expression. Sources mobilized for these queries include travelers' descriptions of performances, documents found in archival sources, and firsthand accounts of fêtes.

• Guest Editor IntroductionOn Recovery and Reparation
• Nicholas R. Jones

FOLLOWING IN THE TRADITION of ethnologist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, I have always been keenly aware of and compelled by—perhaps blindly, to a fault—the richness of black culture and its materiality, speech acts, and verve. Hurston comments on this in her oft-cited essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (1934). She teaches us that "every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized … everything is acted out" (830). Like Hurston, I, too, wanted to—and continue to still—preserve blackness in its beauty, spectacularism, vibrancy, and wholeness. Such an act to preserve blackness in its complexity, humanity, and vitality foments the work of recovery and reparation characterized by this double special issue Recovering Black Performance in Early Modern Iberia.

The vision and work carried out in this double special issue draws on over two decades of my biographic, humanistic, political, and scholarly commitment to centering sub-Saharan and diasporic African blackness in early modern Iberian Studies. Quiet as it is kept, at the onset of my formative days as an undergraduate student at Haverford College (2001–05) and a PhD candidate at New York University (2005–13), I have always toiled and troubled—fighting tooth-and-nail—over creating and developing interdisciplinary methodologies that render legible and visible the legitimacy of recovering black agency, black resistance, and black subjectivity through the prisms of embodied, materialized, and performative blackness. A handful of colleagues and peers dismissed, discouraged, and scoffed at my ideas for taking up such interpretive strategies and scholarly pursuits. Undeterred by the challenge, I came to realize that, in order to shatter the unspoken structural glass ceiling edified and erected within publishing venues—that both catapult and protect discourses of literary criticism and thought in early modern Iberian Studies, most notably amongst Hispanists working across all literary genres—I had to institute my own alternative and radical ways of approaching criticism and history. While writing my doctoral dissertation, "Hyperbolic Hybridities: Habla de Negros and the Economies of Race and Language in Early Modern Spanish Poetry and Theater," I began to learn to jettison and marshal my own unique reading-against-the-grain critical approach and methodology. In doing so, that dissertation—and the constellation of scholarly and public-facing work volleyed from it—set a precedent that would intervene in the status quo apparatus of reading blackness uncritically and unimaginatively—yet willingly so—through the valences of abjection, buffoonery, deracination, stereotype, and subjection. Freudian- and Hegelian-like

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• El universo de una polémica. Góngora y la cultura española del siglo XVII ed. by Mercedes Blanco y Aude Plagnard
• Ana Garriga

TAN SOLO UNOS MESES DESPUÉS del fallecimiento del añorado gongorista francés Robert Jammes (1927–2020), llegaba a las librerías el volumen que Mercedes Blanco y Aude Plagnard habían editado con ánimo de ofrecer una "reflexión inédita" (9) en torno al encendido y abultado debate que suscitaron, desde su aparición en los albores del siglo XVII, los grandes poemas de Luis de Góngora. La infeliz coincidencia me invitó, de primeras, a acercarme a El universo de una polémica, concibiéndolo como una esmerada continuación del prolífico campo de estudio que había abierto el catálogo de la contienda publicado por Jammes hacía ya casi treinta años (Castalia, 1994, pp. 607–719). Pero tras un ejercicio de lectura detenida puedo confirmar que, junto a la fineza con la que los autores asumen el legado de estudios precedentes, El universo de una polémica leído en su conjunto sobresale por ese carácter inédito y novedoso que las editoras prometían a sus lectores y colegas en las primeras líneas de la introducción. Extenso y polifónico como la propia polémica, el volumen está compuesto por un total de diecinueve capítulos arropados por una introducción y un apéndice.

Ningún rincón de la literatura del siglo XVII logró repercutir con tanta virulencia y notoriedad en la vida letrada, las nociones estéticas, los entramados políticos y la ideología lingüística del periodo como los versos de Góngora. Por eso, su estudio puede resultar a veces resbaladizo y complejo, pero también, como demuestran ampliamente las contribuciones que integran este volumen, se convierte en una piedra de toque idónea para entender un cambio de paradigma cultural que superó con creces lo meramente literario. En palabras de Blanco y Plagnard en su introducción, el terremoto cultural suscitado por Góngora interesa no tanto porque fuera un fenómeno indudablemente "vistoso", sino más bien porque "su propuesta poética tuvo un eco y unos efectos amplísimos e integradores, durante todo el arco temporal que estuvo activo" (9–10). [End Page 387]

Para aquellos que conozcan ya el laborioso proyecto de "edición digital, crítica y anotada" (9) de los textos de la polémica impulsado en 2014 por Blanco y un nutrido equipo de investigación en el marco del Observatoire de la vie littéraire (OBVIL, obvil.sorbonne-universite.fr) de la Universidad de la Sorbona (París), no resultarán sorprendentes ni la exhaustividad ni el gratificante eclect

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• La discreta enamorada / The Cleverest Girl in Madrid by Lope de Vega
• Robin Alfriend Kello

THE FELICITOUS CHOICES on offer in La discreta enamorada / The Cleverest Girl in Madrid begin with the title. An urban comedia composed circa 1606 and set in the bustling city of Madrid, Lope's play explores the tension between forces of desire and obligation in romantic entanglements. While the present connotations of discretion in English might suggest an excess of prudence or a quiet assent to a pact of secrecy, the discreción that distinguishes Lope's Fenisa is the plot-fueling intelligence that allows her to navigate a dizzying palimpsest of love triangles through fortune and stratagem and come out on the other side with Lucindo, her galán of choice. Rather than solely a quality of her character, Fenisa's ingenuity as an architect of enredo becomes a contagion that suffuses the entire plot, dramatizing that only sharpness of mind can match the passions of the heart and articulating that drama itself is born at the intersection of cleverness and desire.

About those love triangles: Lope sets two households in play—one that holds a mother and daughter and another, a father and son. Belisa, Fenisa's mother, wishes to marry Captain Bernardo, who is after Fenisa. She, however, has her eye set on Bernardo's son, Lucindo, himself entangled in a tumultuous game of celos with the courtesan Gerarda, who has captured the attention of Doristeo. To provoke jealousy in Gerarda, Lucindo offers words of love to the gracioso, Hernando, cross-dressed in the role of Estefanía. As Lucindo's fictional lady happens to share a name with Doristeo's sister, a perceived threat to male honor compounds substantial difficulties of courtship already present. If that series of fortuitous complications designed to delight the audience sounds like a familiar Lopean chain reaction of plot device, La discreta enamorada differs from many [End Page 475] comedias by making the parents not only the classic blocking figures they so often are but also rivals to the young lovers.

Donald R. Larson's translation excels by rendering the pleasures of such cleverness in a modern English idiom, allowing audiences to orient themselves within the mounting confusion of the plot and share in the joy of its unexpected twists and the emotional intensity of its characters. As Larson writes in the translator's note, this edition began in a workshop with David Johnston at the 2015 Associat

Abstract:

Andrés de Claramonte's El valiente negro en Flandes (ca. 1620) reframes the representation of Blackness in Spain, presenting the possibility for Black people to reproduce themselves in freedom. This essay, through a reading of Frantz Fanon, addresses how, in Juan de Mérida's journey to overcome the social inferiority of his Blackness, he faces the threat of sodomy. Sodomy conjures the Black protagonist's fears about white supremacy. The two different endings the textual transmission of the play offers, one in which the Black hero marries his former enslaver, and another in which the marriage scene is excised, signal the anxiety in Spain about the increased presence of a free Black population in the midst of a society that enslaved kidnapped Africans and their descendants, the scenes of sodomy performance functioning as a form of symbolic containment.

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• The Poetics of Friendship in Early Modern Spain: A Study in Literary Form by Donald Gilbert-Santamaría
• Shai Zamir

THIS STUDY explores literary representations of ideal friendships and friends. The author argues that such representations were part of a poetic form that emphasized the impossible quest to achieve such sublime relationships in actual, lived human experience. A growing awareness of the scriptedness of literary friendships pushed Spanish writers to question longstanding notions of such ties. Cervantes's novella "El curioso impertinente," intercalated in Don Quijote, Parte 1, delivered the ultimate blow to this tradition: "The betrayal and death of the two friends, Anselmo and Lotario, and the attendant destruction of the tale of two friends paradigm, may be read … as a symbolic act designed to clear the way for the new literary order of the novel's main narrative" (10).

The book begins with a compelling introduction to the fundamental questions and canonical texts related to friendship, above all Aristotle's Ethics and Cicero's more skeptical responses to it. While Aristotle portrayed friendship as an idealized relationship between the good, Cicero suggested a more pragmatic vision, in which friendships change over time, and friends must adjust themselves accordingly. Such a realist approach allowed Cicero to escape the more general "problem of epistemological alienation" described by Gilbert-Santamaría (15): that too perfect of a friendship, for the sake of the friend alone, will lead us to say nothing of importance about the friend, because the friend who is loved for his particular attributes will not be loved for himself (the paradigmatic friend in this tradition is male). The perfect friend is therefore known through acts of self-sacrifice. Cicero, however, chose a different path. In his epistolary writings, he was able to combine the ideals of perfect friendship with the instrumentalist practices of epistolary and gift exchange; one could enjoy friendship and benefit from it aesthetically and rhetorically without giving up on the entire enterprise of virtuous friendship.

The plot thickens: Petrarch brought Ciceronian friendship to the attention of early moderns, who practiced the writing and reading of intimate letters in imitation of both him and Cicero. In chapter 1, Gilbert-Santamaría [End Page 413] demonstrates that Petrarch's friend, Boccaccio, while at first glance seeming to simply write his own version of perfect friendship in the Decameron, was in fact somewhat satirical. In the story of Gisippus and Ti

Abstract:

The Entremés de los compadres en celebridad del nacimiento del niño Dios and the Entremés gracioso—short comic pieces from the eighteenth century preserved in manuscripts from the Convent of Santa Teresa, Villa Imperial de Potosí (present-day Bolivia)—invite scrutiny of the comic characterization of the Black- and Africandescendant populations in the Andes region during the later colonial period. To begin, this study considers how the author or authors of the entremeses maintain an imperial gaze by characterizing Afro-descendants through a grotesque performativity. Yet on closer inspection, we find these texts place Blacks in a central position, conferring a visibility in a manner that draws attention to a history of discrimination. Notably, Black and Afro-descendant characters do not appear alone, but rather interact and share protagonism with characters representing Amerindians from this region of colonial Bolivia. Also notable is how the comic pieces blend the Quechua language with habla de negros and bear witness to the violence suffered by both ethnic groups.

Abstract:

This article considers how Bartolomé de Torres Naharro's Comedia Trofea (1517) represents the process of global colonization of the African and Southeast Asian coasts initiated with the Portuguese imperial expansion of the mid- to late fifteenth century. This drama, in essence, maps an emerging empire, highlighting key protagonists and places. Analysis here concentrates on the drama's parade of African kings (Monicongo, Mandinga, Capa, Milindo, Aden), considering how the representation of these rulers on stage proffers a cartography that supersedes the longstanding European conception of Africa that had remained entrenched from the influential world map of Claudius Ptolemy dating from Antiquity to the mid-fifteenth century. New place names and ethnicities evoked within the Comedia Trofea align with European imperialist projects and colonization, both justified in the drama with reference to evangelization and a Eurocentric notion of a civilizing process. This study also ponders the implications of this play's composition and performance in the context of ostentatious courtly festivities, where the aim was to elicit orientalist wonder through the representation of African kings.