Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage

resulting seamless admixture of the decorous and the indecorous—of wit and shit—is something students of early modern English literature have come to regard as commonplace, as more recently have those whose focus is France or Italy. Yet in Spain, as the editors point out, “su huella apenas si se ha rastreado” (10). Among other things, the volume demonstrates that the Spanish court of Philip III and Philip IV was, as in so many ways, more akin to that of other European nations than it was once fashionable to suggest. The essays also prompt further thoughts, not all of them comfortable. We today bask in a supposedly new-found openness on sexual questions, even if we still remain a tad coy about matters faecal. But as some taboos fall, others rise. Today’s boundaries may not be set by authorities of church and state, nor by what Anthony Burgess damned as the “mockAugustanism, good manners, and weak tea” that, just a century ago, kept Joyce at a distance from his readers. Many are the product of increasingly rigid creeds of political, linguistic, and gender correctness. It may have been real, fatwa-inspired fear that persuaded even “liberal” publishing houses not to reproduce the Danish cartoons that in 2005 triggered violence, riot, and murder. Yet, to take just one example, what are the odds these days on persuading a publisher to print, even in a serious history, direct quotations from rave turnof-the-century press reviews of minstrel shows with their “plantation darkeys,” “nigger songs,” and “Indian-rubber gum-elastic coons”? Shit may be the least of our troubles.