Category: Comedias

The Black Legend and the Golden Age Dramatic Canon

by Barbara Fuchs (University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA)

Published in LA LEYENDA NEGRA EN EL CRISOL DE LA COMEDIA. El teatro del Siglo de Oro frente a los estereotipos antihispánicos (2016)

Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez Antonio Sánchez Jiménez (eds.)

This essay examines how the canon of Hispanic Golden Age theater is constructed outside Spain, to consider, first, how it relates to Black Legend epiphenomena and, second, how it might be profitably expanded and diversified. I am interested not only in how our present-day canon came to be, but also in the critical and performance initiatives that might profitably change what otherwise seems like an unavoidable fait accompli. My premise is that the Black Legend impacts not only the content of specific works, but also the context in which they are received, particularly outside Spain. The discipline of literary criticism is not immune or impermeable to the Black Legend, and it behooves us as critics to identify the ideological contexts that mark the reception of Spanish literature in the longue durée. Just as Spain itself is tarred by the Black Legend, its literary production is understood according to the stereotypes and received wisdom that the legend fosters.

I. Black Legend Canons

«I hate your Spanish honor ever since it spoyl’d our English Playes».
Wildblood, in Dryden, An Evening’s Love (5.1)

«Anyone desirous of throwing light on the old English Drama should read extensively the less known works of the Spaniards».
George Henry Lewes, The Spanish Drama (7)

In my work on the uses of Spain and Spanish literary materials in early modern England, I have identified the persistence and utility of belligerent attitudes towards Spain, even at the moments of greatest English fascination with Spanish sources. Thus for much of the early modern period and well into our own time, literary transmission is imagined in terms of forcible taking or even looting, as appropriation is lionized into national heroism. This is what in The Poetics of Piracy I termed the «Armada paradigm» of Anglo-Spanish literary relations (Fuchs 2013). At least in Anglo-American contexts, this paradigm was alive and well throughout the twentieth century, if not into the twenty-first. A classic example is one of the very influential early Norton anthologies of Elizabethan poetry, from 1942, which was entitled The Golden Hind. In the prologue, the editors explain the symbolism of their title, which refers to the ship on which Francis Drake carried out his circumnavigation of the globe, looting and plundering Spanish possessions along the way: «Our title, taken from the name of Drake’s ship, seems to us an appropriate symbol of the riches the Elizabethans found in a new world and in the English language and of the spirit of freedom and defiance of tyranny which is the greatest link between their age and ours» (Lamson and Smith 1942). This kind of conflation between the riches of poetry, privateering, and a timeless English «defiance of tyranny» marks the Anglo-American stance towards Spanish cultural production across the centuries. The larger question I want to consider here is how this broader climate of an enduring Black Legend shapes the Hispanic theatrical canon, particularly in Anglo-American contexts.1

The long-term engagement of English letters with Spanish culture has been tinged with ambivalence at least since the Reformation. As Alexander Samson and others have shown, the fascination with Spanish letters paradoxically never waned, even at the times of greatest military and religious rivalry between England and Spain (Samson 2006, 2009; Darby and Samson 2009). Yet even as literary studies came into its own as a distinct discipline, it continued to reflect the Black Legend prejudices—and the imperial rivalries—that characterized the Elizabethan moment. While Shakespeare became canonized as a uniquely English author, a free spirit who might not conform to classical rules but who found direct inspiration in English nature, Spanish theater was generally characterized as a much more problematic reflection of the Spanish character. In the case of Shakespeare, nature denoted the untarnished and pure landscape that the poet channeled; conversely, when describing Spanish traditions nature meant a human nature marked by the genealogical taint of otherness. Especially in a comparative framework, Spanish theater was considered an extension of Spanish national traits.

Already in the late seventeenth century, John Dryden, who made extensive use of Spanish materials in his own plays, wrote «the first important English criticism of Spanish drama» (Loftis 1973: 3) in his dialogue Of Dramatick Poesie (1668). The comedia was an uneasy fit for Dryden’s neoclassicist preconceptions, especially when compared to the more recent French drama—one of the interlocutors decries the theater of Calderón for «being hurried from one thing to another» (Dryden 1668: 59). Nonetheless, Dryden favored the tragicomedy, and with it the long English tradition of turning to Spanish plots, from Fletcher until Dryden’s own time. Yet in his own play An Evening’s Love, or, The Mock Astrologer (based on Calderón’s El astrólogo fingido), Dryden has a character voice his reservations about Spanish honor in the drama, which I reproduce in the first epigraph above. John Loftis argues that Wildblood’s complaint is generalizable more broadly to the dramatists of the Restoration, «who treated the pundonor with casualness or contempt» (1973: 252). Loftis’ own account of this dynamic—unsupported except for Wildblood’s line—betrays the critic’s prejudices as much as the writers’: «Few of the better dramatists cared to approximate, without satirical comment, the Spanish gravity of manner and sensitivity to affront. Hence the paradox that the best renderings of Spanish plots, by Dryden and his younger contemporaries, are those most thoroughly anglicized…» (Loftis 1973: 253). Eliding the distance between Spaniards and their texts, Loftis has made up his mind about their character, as well as their characters. Moreover, the many critics who stress the English turn to Spanish sources in the drama, as does Loftis, beg the question of the difference between the corpora: whatever distinctive national characters marked the Spanish and the English, it remained eminently possible for a transnational drama to emerge.

A striking text in the development of a literary history marred by national prejudice is the colorful A Complete History of the English Stage (London, 1800), a survey by the composer, writer, and consummate man of the theater Charles Dibdin. Dibdin was a prolific song-writer and occasional collaborator with the famous theater impresario David Garrick; he composed some of the music for Garrick’s famous Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. Dibdin’s assessment of Spanish theater in his History sets up a tacit contrast with Shakespeare, whom the era crowned as the epitome of Englishness, magically produced by English soil. At the same time, the critic betrays a certain envy of Spanish prolificness: although he is critical of the Spanish theater’s disregard for classical measure, he reluctantly acknowledges his admiration for the sheer number of Spanish plays. Even this praise, however, undergoes a tortuous rhetorical operation to become a criticism of Spanish facility:

The Spaniards have a great number of rhapsodies under the titles of chronicles, annals, romances, and legends. In these they find some historical anecdote, some entertaining adventure, which they transcribe without choice or exception. All the details they put into dialogue and to this compilation is given the distinction, PLAY: thus one can easily imagine that a man in the habit of copying with facility, could write forty of these plays in less time than an author of real genius and regulated habitude could put out of his hands a single act, for the latter is obliged to design his characters, to prepare, graduate, and develop his intrigue, and to reconcile all this to the rules of decency, taste, probability and, indeed, custom (Dibdin 1800: 1.138).

The comparison with Shakespeare is implicit but no less powerful for that: by implication, the Spanish playwrights do not possess the «regulated habitude» that a more decorous, less excessive corpus signals. Thus is the uncomfortable question of the sheer numerical superiority of the Spanish canon handled—there may be more plays, but they are superficial, mere copies, requiring nothing like what an author of «real genius» would need for a play.

Dibdin is ambivalent about Spanish theater throughout, recognizing the power of the comedia yet qualifying his praise with his account of the Spanish national character. He emphasizes the utility of Spanish materials for other literatures, returning to the long tradition of figuration that makes Spain the source for a second-order English extraction, whether by piracy, looting, or other forms of forcible taking (Fuchs 2013; Jones 1953).2 Spanish theater is the mother lode, providing the ore that other Europeans will mine to mint treasures:

The wit and humour that have so lavishly pervaded [Spanish theater], manifest the most luxuriant fertility in the genius of their dramatic writers; whose works, crude and irregular as they are, have served like a rich mine for the French, and, indeed, the English at second hand to dig in. Their wit, however, like their hard dollars, can never be considered as staple, but a useless mass of no intrinsic value till manufactured into literary merchandize by the ingenuity and labour of other countries (Dibdin 1800: 1.131).

Dibdin further characterizes the French and English use of Spanish sources as «plunder» (Dibdin 1800: 1.139), imagining the exploitation of Spanish theater in terms of European imperial rivalries. Spanish literature thus becomes the mine to be dug, the raw material to be manufactured into a valuable commodity. As the metaphor evolves, the French and the English become «theatrical chymists» who «have ingeniously extracted» from the «very rich materials» of Spanish theater «to ornament their own productions» (Dibdin 1800: 1.145). Dibdin here voices a fantasy of appropriation by which the Spanish New World wealth of minerals is transmuted into a literary lode available for English extraction.

Yet even this recognition of a valuable source is tinged with ambivalence. Most striking in this respect, perhaps, is Dibdin’s move to characterize Spanish literary production in racialized and genealogical terms, as tainted with Moorishness:

Spanish gallantry consists entirely of stratagem; and fancy is perpetually upon the stretch to bring about natural events by extraordinary means. Their manners are derived originally from the Moors, and are tinged with a sort of African taste, too wilde and extravagant for the adoption of other nations, and which cannot accommodate itself to rule or precision.

Impressed with an idea of that knight errantry which Cervantes so successfully exposed, Spanish lovers seem as if they took a gloomy pleasure in disappointment. They enter the lists of gallantry as if they were more pleased with the dangers of the tournament than the enjoyment of the reward; and, at length, when they arrive at the possession of that object with which they were originally smitten with a glance from a lattice, or a regard in a cloister through a thick veil; disappointment succeeds to admiration, and they grow jealous and outrageous to find that love is the very reverse of caprice, and that happiness cannot be ensured but by a long and intimate acquaintance with the heart.

On the other side, the lady, immured from the sight of men, reads romances, and heroically resolves to consider, as her destined lover, the first who has the address and the courage to rescue her from her giant father, and her monster duenna. Reason, prudence, mutual intelligence, purity of sentiments, and affection; these have nothing to do in the affair (Dibdin 1800: 1.140-41).

Theater, and literature more broadly, are here presumed to reflect national characteristics. Spain’s ‘Moorish’ or ‘African’ manners lie behind its extravagant plots, its histrionic affairs. Already in this account the anxiety about sexual propriety looms large—in the gallant’s outrageous jealousy, or the exaggerated protection of the lady— setting the stage for the characterization of Spanish drama as obsessively concerned with honra.

Although the Romantic triumph of Calderón in Germany at the hands of Schlegel and other critics somewhat countered neo-Classical prejudice, it failed to dislodge stubborn conceptions about the Spanish national character (Sullivan 1983: 4). As literary history became increasingly formalized on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, it continued to be conceived as a discipline that shed light on national characteristics. «I have been persuaded that literary history… should be made, like civil history, to give a knowledge of the character of the people to which it relates. I have endeavored, therefore, so to write my account of Spanish literature as to make the literature itself the exponent of the peculiar culture and civilization of the Spanish people», claimed George Ticknor in a letter that accompanied a presentation copy of his signal History of Spanish Literature (1849), the first exclusive treatment of the subject, with six editions over the course of the century (Hillard in Kagan 2002: 106). In discussing Golden Age theater, Ticknor attributes Lope de Vega’s greatness to the way in which «he gave himself up to the leading of the national spirit» (Ticknor 1849: 2.229) in his plays. Yet even though he regards Spain as fanatically religious and characterized by an «over-sensitive honor» (Ticknor 1849: 2.257), he himself looks beyond. Even as he commends a number of other plays for how they channel the national character, Ticknor cannot help but praise a play like El acero de Madrid, which he compares favorably to Molière and in which he praises female agency and the proximity to «the manners of its time» (Ticknor 1849: 2.246-48). Although Ticknor does not reflect on the tension between an immutable national character and the manners of early modern Madrid, for the attentive reader the praise of the fashionable play complicates any claim for an unchanging Spanish character expressed in the national literature.

As Ticknor turns to considering Calderón’s wife-murder plays and the question of honor, he refutes the idea that Spanish sexual morality is «derived from the Arabs» (1849: 2.473), attributing it instead to «ancient Gothic laws» which far predate the Moorish invasion. Strikingly anticipating the recent work of historians who have urged us to reconsider the place of honra in actual social and legal contexts (Taylor 2008), Ticknor argues moreover that only the distance between the reality of early modern Spain and the excesses committed on stage in the name of honor would have protected the comedia from even greater censure than it received. Overall, Ticknor seems attached to his theory of national characters but able to see beyond it to the merits of individual plays, many of which in no way fit his own preconceived notion of a Spanish national character. Recent work on Ticknor’s extensive collaboration with—and dependence on—the Spanish polymath Pascual de Gayangos suggests that this may have influenced the Bostonian’s specific, fine-grained departures from the broad prejudice that he announces at the outset (Heide 2008).

In general, US histories of Spanish literature are less prejudicial than comparative works, even when they do invoke comparisons between Spanish classical theater and other European corpora. Thus Hugo Rennert, in his The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega (New York, 1909), argues that «the Spanish comedia, especially as it is represented by three of its greatest writers, Lope de Vega, Alarcon and Calderon [sic], compares very favorably, as regards its moral tone, with the contemporary plays of England, Italy or France» (Rennert 1909: 266). Rennert acknowledges that the same, distinguishing high moral tone may not be found in Tirso de Molina, but notes the censure of the playwright in his own time. Even when Rennert foregrounds the national character of Spanish drama, he does so in order to praise it:

Whatever its subject-matter, whether mythology, history, or legend, all was translated into the Spain of the day; its characters not only spoke Spanish, but they were Spaniards in every vein and fiber. In a word, it was truly national in character, and herein lies one of the chief glories of the Spanish drama, which is shared only by England among the countries of modern Europe (Rennert 1909: 339).

Rennert in no way challenges the idea that Hispanic drama encapsulates and reflects a national identity; he simply valorizes that identity rather than condemning it.

Less nuanced is the treatment of Spain in a comparative early twentieth-century history such as Sheldon Cheney’s The Theater: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting, and Stagecraft (1929). Cheney’s chapter on Spain betrays his preconceptions from its very title— «The Chivalrous Theater of Spain». The figure he chooses to move his discussion from Italy to Spain— the vainglorious Capitano of commedia dell’arte, whom he rightly associates with Italian resentment of Spanish invaders (Cheney 1929: 242)—further underscores the chapter’s reliance on hallmarks of the Black Legend. Cheney depicts Spain as having essentially missed out on the Renaissance: it was «too fiercely Catholic to welcome that new freedom of thought», «an organized religion and an artificial code of honor ruling all men’s actions, drama and literature failed to take on that warm glow of humanism so notable elsewhere» (Cheney 1929: 244). Lope, for his part, «purveying to a mass public that demanded sensation, and asked constantly for racial flattery… failed to write any drama that has lived through the years with the best out of the Greek, English, French, and German theatres» (Cheney 1929: 250). If Lope’s plays are not serene or deep enough, Cheney argues, it is because Spain itself was too violent for such reflection (Cheney 1929: 251-252)—life was cheap, murder common. In discussing Calderón, whom he deems deeper and «the greater poet» than Lope (Cheney 1929: 256), Cheney focuses on El médico de su honra, as an illustration of the «over-punctiliousness that excuses even murder, which is so favorite a theme in Spanish drama and romance» (Cheney 1929: 256), and offers the soliloquy of Isabel in the last act of El alcalde de Zalamea to drive home his points about an excessive concern for honor (Cheney 1929: 258).

Even a text focused on Spain, such as Ernest Mérimée’s History of Spanish Literature, translated from the French and expanded by the Berkeley scholar S. Griswold Morley (1930), describes Calderón’s concern for honor as «so Castilian, so castizo» (Mérimée and Morley 1930: 376). Moreover, therein lies his greatness: «His most lasting claim to glory», the authors argue, «is that he was in his time the most perfect representative of the race as the centuries had molded it, the preeminently Spanish poet» (Mérimée and Morley 1930: 382). The authors include a direct citation of Menéndez y Pelayo to support their claim, although no source is given: «Calderón is ancient Spain with all its crossings of light and shadow, of grandeur and defects» (Mérimée and Morley 1930: 382). As this claim attributed to the eminent Spanish philologist suggests, the construction of an exceptional Spain, for better or for worse, was not solely the work of foreigners or Black Legend propagandists: Spaniards themselves manipulated Spanish difference to their advantage.

Unlike Ticknor, who expressed his skepticism about whether the place of honor on the Spanish stage matched historical reality, Mérimée and Morley claim that «nowhere more than at this point did the theater draw directly from contemporary manners, and it is probably because he gave more faithful and energetic expression than anyone else to essentially national passions that Calderón has remained so popular» (Mérimée and Morley 1930: 377). Yet the authors soon reveal their debt to a textual tradition of Spanish stereotypes that has little to do with any specific historical moment, but instead reiterates what is always already known about Spain. Stressing the purported historical precision of Calderón, they claim: «Psychologically his characters scarcely exist; historically they are very exact, so exact that one could compose a commentary on much of his theater with nothing else than the travel notes of Mme. D’Aulnoy» (Mérimée and Morley 1930: 379). Though critics disagree on whether D’Aulnoy, the popular late seventeenth-century author of fairy tales, ever actually visited Spain, they concur that she provides a highly fanciful, literary account of the place. Yet her influential and hugely popular sketches, published in 1690 as Mémoires de la Cour d’Espagne and in 1691 as Relation du voyage d’Espagne align perfectly with a stereotypical conception of Spain that is also privileged in accounts of Spanish theater. Thus R. Foulché-Delbosc, in his introduction to D’Aulnoy, completes a perfect tautological circuit with Mérimée and Morley: «But whatever misstatements and alterations we may observe in Madame D’Aulnoy, the whole air of the Travels is that of the Spanish drama of the seventeenth century and more particularly of the drama of Calderón» (D’Aulnoy 1930: lxx).3

The Calderón-D’Aulnoy circularity reminds us that canonicity privileges and promotes plays that tell us what we have always known, or thought we knew, about Spain. In this sense, the hypercanonicity of Fuenteovejuna, El alcalde de Zalamea, and Calderon’s wife-murder plays, to take some of the most salient examples, confirms the stereotypical conception of a Spain consumed by pundonor, while occluding other versions of Spain that are abundantly present in the corpus, as even Ticknor, malgré lui, recognized. The question then becomes how one might dislodge that canonicity and complicate long-standing prejudices about Spain by promoting plays that present a very different set of concerns. I turn now to a contemporary initiative at UCLA that addresses precisely these goals.

II. Diversifying the classics, or, What Lies beyond Shakespeare?

Although it behooves us as critics to understand where our canons come from and how they are constructed, the transformation of a purely scholarly or textual canon would only get us so far in challenging anti-Spanish prejudices, in that these texts are not part of a broader, public conversation in an Anglo-American context. Conversely, performance might help to dislodge these by now venerable prejudices, and the canon of plays that ensues from them if, instead of rehearsing age-old stereotypes, it could present a more varied—if not completely alternative—vision of Spain.

My own thinking about performance was radically marked by my tenure from 2011 to 2016 as director of the Center for 17/18th-Century Studies and the Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. Located in West Adams, some twelve miles from the main campus, the Clark offers a valuable alternative location for reaching diverse audiences, and its multiple lawns, amphitheater, and marble outdoor reading room provide a wealth of spaces for performance. It became one of my first goals as Director to expand our performance offerings, through an initiative I called ‘Arts on the Grounds.’ This included ‘L.A. Escena,’ a series designed to introduce Los Angeles audiences to the Hispanic theatrical tradition.

The creation of L.A. Escena was inspired by a number of factors: one, Out of the Wings, the British online database of Spanish-language theater for scholars and practitioners that takes seriously the proposition that in order to change literary canons we need to change the canon in repertory; two, the general lack of Hispanic classical theater in LA, a city of over 4 million speakers of Spanish (the main festival of Hispanic classical theater in the US takes place on the US/Mexico border, at Chamizal, Texas, while LA has nothing of the sort), and, three, the trend by well-meaning theatrical companies in Los Angeles, specializing in educational outreach to disadvantaged communities, to hispanicize Shakespeare, with titles such as Romeo and Juliet—A Zoot Suit Musical, or Much Ado about Nothing—Mariachi Style, rather than exposing schoolchildren to the very rich traditions of Hispanic classical theater. As is the case across the U.S., cultural capital is so profoundly bound up in Shakespeare that the most proximate and arguably most appropriate texts through which to give students in Los Angeles, or indeed broader audiences, an appreciation for the arts are neglected. The project gradually matured into what we call ‘Diversifying the Classics,’ an initiative to introduce and promote Hispanic classical theater—in the original, in translation, or in adaptations—in the Los Angeles theater scene and beyond.

Diversifying the Classics is a broad and long-term project, which encompasses five initiatives:

1) the L.A. Escena Performance Series of Hispanic classical theater and adaptations for Los Angeles audiences;

2) a Library of Translated Hispanic Classical Plays, envisioned as a digital resource for theater practitioners;

3) 90 Monologues from Classical Spanish Theater, a bilingual anthology of monologues for actors;

4) Classics in the Classroom, a program to introduce Hispanic classical theater to students via adaptations, the compilation of supporting materials, and connections with K–12 arts educators; and

5) a future Performance Studies Database, listing scholars in the field prepared to guide theater professionals approaching new and underrepresented texts. All materials produced by Diversifying the Classics are open-access, made available on the project website, as they are completed.

At the heart of the project is the translation initiative, which hopes not only to broaden the set of texts available to theatrical practitioners but also productively to complexify the canon of Golden Age plays that we have inherited in an Anglo-American context. As was evident at the 2013 Association for Hispanic Classical Theater conference on «The Comedia in Translation and Performance» held in conjunction with Laurence Boswell’s season of Golden Age plays at the Theatre Royal in Bath, translation continues to play a crucial role in the dissemination of this theatrical tradition beyond Spain itself. At the conference, directors and translators complained about the paucity of available plays, with a few plays translated over and over again while others languish untranslated. The actors’ constant reference to their Shakespearean training as they discussed their experience of working on Lope de Vega or Tirso de Molina, moreover, underscored how deep and wide the familiarity with Shakespeare runs, from school through university through professional training, so that any effort to expand the theatrical canon beyond Shakespeare would have to consider these multiple arenas. In recent years, Spanish companies such as Rakatá, too, have recognized the essential role of contemporary, vernacular translations in promoting Hispanic classical theater in Anglo-American contexts.

In January 2014, stimulated by the great discussions in Bath, I decided to convene graduate students and theater professionals in a translation workshop. The result was the «Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance», which has met since then on a regular schedule during the academic year. It has included up to a dozen people, primarily graduate students from the UCLA department of Spanish and Portuguese, but also actors, writers, directors, and colleagues from other institutions. The initial goal was for the workshop to translate plays that had no published translation, with an eye to engaging theater groups in material that was fresh to them and deliberately crafted for performance. What does this mean, in practice? We decided early on that we would translate every line, every mythological reference, providing annotations as necessary and leaving it up to directors to decide where and what to cut. We aim for a language that is as accessible as possible, while avoiding anachronism. A great advantage of translation in this sense, of course, is that it makes the texts historical proximate, unless one is deliberately translating into ‘Shakespearese.’ (The translated corpus thus bypasses the problems of linguistic distance that seem to vex Shakespeare productions, leading one distinguished US venue, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, to commission translations and adaptations of Shakespeare plays into contemporary English [see link, consulted Oct. 30, 2015]).

Some plays are translated by the working group as a whole, with heavy doses of subsequent editing. Others are translated by individual members of the working group, or by members working in collaboration, and then workshopped by the larger group. When we need to translate an untranslatable pun, or render something that makes no sense in translation, we make a point of preserving the imagery that an actor would be able to work with, such as any clues to physical humor, or sexual innuendo. We decided early on against translating into verse, because while there are certainly some very successful examples, it seemed to us that it would be more difficult for actors in Los Angeles, and even across the US, to work with verse than with prose. It is also the case that the comedia’s highly flexible versification, with different forms for different registers, has no real equivalent in English.

More importantly, we decided early on that we would translate plays that challenged stereotypical understandings of Spain and its theatrical canon. Guided by these principles, the entire group has translated Guillén de Castro’s La fuerza de la costumbre (The Force of Habit) and Lope de Vega’s La noche toledana (A Wild Night in Toledo). I workshopped my translation of Lope’s Mujeres y criados (Women and Servants, Juan de la Cuesta, 2016), while Laura Muñoz and Veronica Wilson workshopped their version of Guillén de Castro’s Los malcasados de Valencia (Unhappily Married in Valencia). We anticipate that we will continue to translate at least one play a year.

We began with La fuerza de la costumbre, which one of the students in the group, Kathryn Renton, had attempted to translate for an earlier research paper (I should note that Dr. Kathleen Jeffs of Gonzaga University has also recently translated and produced the play, although it has not been published). The rudiments of the play have long been known to English-speaking audiences, through Beaumont, Fletcher, and Massinger’s Love’s Cure (published 1647), which bases its plot on Guillén de Castro, yet is far from an actual translation. The fascination of this text for modern audiences, as, arguably, for its first audiences, lies in its incredibly self-aware presentation of the constructedness of gender. The question it poses most insistently is whether gender can be learned and unlearned. Thus Félix and Hipólita, two siblings born of a secret marriage and separated at birth, are brought up in the habits of the opposite gender. Kept close by his mother’s side, Félix is timid and sensitive. Hipólita, trained by her father on the battlefield in Flanders, is fiercely attached to her sword. This is no mere occasional cross-dressing, but a long-term experience of living as the «other» gender. When the family is reunited after twenty years, the father, Don Pedro, insists on making the siblings conform to traditional gender roles. Helped along the way by their respective love interests, the two gradually assume traditional positions, but their journeys expose the limitations of the gender system. One key scene shows the siblings’ discomfort with their newly imposed gender identities, as Hipólita enters teetering precariously on her chapines:

Hip. I swear I cannot manage
a single step.
She trips on her platform shoes and hurls them away.
Hip. How can one be even-headed
when teetering on something so flimsy?
How can a woman,
standing on this cork,
on the verge of falling at every moment,
keep herself from tumbling in the end?
I refuse to wear these shoes,
this dress and this hairpiece—
useless concerns
and to such dubious ends.
D. Pedro. What is it, Hipólita? What’s wrong?
You look very nice.
Hip. I appeal to you, sir.
Rid me of this dress,
of this hairpiece
that smothers my head.
The thinnest strand of it
is a noose around my neck…
(The Force of Habit: 22-23).

For the working group, this play was a revelation for its wry humor, its irony, its strong argument for the force of nurture over nature. It launched extensive discussions about how we came to have a canon of Hispanic classical theater that is earnestly concerned with honor, full of wife-murder and revenge. Clearly, within the enormous archive that is the comedia there are also plenty of plays that cast a skeptical eye on such pieties. Many of the questions that animate the first part of this essay thus emerged from our practice as translators, as we confronted the profound challenge that La fuerza de la costumbre (The Force of Habit) posed to our own habits of thought about the Hispanic classical canon.

Yet, from the moment we sent our translation into the world, via a staged reading at UCLA by our frequent collaborators, Chalk Repertory Theatre, we began to see how complex it might be to assume that the contestatory reading of such a finely balanced play would prevail with audiences. To begin with, Ruth McKee, who directed the staged reading, decided that the character of the father, Don Pedro, sounded bombastic, redundant, and rebarbative, so she decided to cut many of his lines. This intervention, plus the casting of a very appealing actor in the role, immediately made Don Pedro into a far less objectionable character. This threatened to make the play a story about the characters finding their gender destiny—a conservative, reactionary reading that always lurks in the wings, particularly for readers or audiences all too ready to take hetero-happy endings as the last word. For this play this kind of reading is particularly problematic, as it is some sexual business behind a tree between Hipólita and her suitor that finally brings about her transformation. As Hipólita describes it afterwards to her mother:

We wrestled for a while, both of us determined to win, but dew on grass is as slippery as soap… I slipped, stumbled, and fell down at my enemy’s feet. And that was nothing, but after I fell he—oh mother—he did what I could never have imagined. He shook my soul, transformed my entire being, and he said: «So that you can see that you’re a woman, for you are». Well can I believe it! And now all I can do is cry because he’s gone and I love him, and so, dear mother, I am indeed a woman (The Force of Habit: 130-131).

Is this a rape, or a first, consensual sexual experience narrated through the generic parameters of decorum? It is very difficult to say. But it makes the adaptation and broader circulation of this text especially challenging, particularly as we envision it reaching school audiences in future stages of the Diversifying the Classics project.

Most tellingly, the complexities of La fuerza de la costumbre underscore the intricacy of the larger project: it is not a simple matter of recuperating Spain, or of a white legend to replace a black one. Instead, the texts we are translating are complex and multivalent—they deserve their status as classics precisely because they offer themselves up for multiple and at times contradictory readings. As we expand our corpus of translations, the texts themselves refute any simplistic or stereotypical understandings of Spain, offering instead a vibrant and complex vision of gender and class relations and of the performativity of identity in urban spaces, as well as a generalized skepticism towards social pieties of all sorts. Making canons is no easy matter, of course, but our hope is at least to promote these texts as an alternative vision of Spain, one that may well appeal to modern theater practitioners given its degree of female agency and its remarkably self-aware sophistication.

Diversifying the Classics breaks down for all the scholars involved the lines between arts outreach, performance, and research, encouraging us to expand the theatrical canon that we study, teach, and continue to canonize. In addition to the patriotic Lope of the plays discussed elsewhere in the volume LA LEYENDA NEGRA EN EL CRISOL DE LA COMEDIA. El teatro del Siglo de Oro frente a los estereotipos antihispánicos (2016), we find the irreverent and wry Lope of Mujeres y criados or La noche toledana. The move beyond Lope to study, translate, and produce playwrights such as Guillén de Castro or even Tirso de Molina (so problematic for Rennert), who are relatively neglected, also promises do much to right our sense of the comedia’s true range and possibilities. As the project evolves, so does our critical sense of the transformation of texts through performance, and, crucially, of the limitations of established canons, theatrical and otherwise.

I am grateful to Laura Muñoz for her research assistance with this essay.

Works Cited

Aulnoy, Marie Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville d’, Travels into Spain, ed. R. Foulché-Delbosc, London, Routledge, 1930.
— Relation Du Voyage D’Espagne, ed. Maria S. Seguin, Paris, Desjonquères, 2005.

Castro, Guillén de, The Force of Habit, in <http://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu>.

Cheney, Sheldon, The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting and Stagecraft, New York, Longmans, Green and Co, 1929.

Darby, Trudi L. and Alexander Samson, «Cervantes on the Jacobean Stage», in The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, ed. by J. A. G. Ardila, London, Legenda, 2009, pp. 206-22.

Dibdin, Charles. A Complete History of the English Stage: Introduced by a … Review of the Asiatic, the Grecian, the Roman, the Spanish, the Italian, the Portuguese, the German, the French, and Other Theatres and … Biographical Tracts and Anecdotes, vol. I, London, 1800, Digital text: <http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001011978>.

Dryden, John, An Evening’s Love, Or, the Mock-Astrologer: Acted at the Theatre-Royal by His Majesties Servants, London, 1671, Digital text: <http://gateway.proquest.com/openurlctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:51131:3>.
— Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay, London, 1668.

Fuchs, Barbara, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

Hart, Thomas R. Jr., «George Ticknor’s History of Spanish Literature», in Richard Kagan, ed., Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2002, pp. 106-121.

Heide, Claudia, «Más ven cuatro ojos que dos: Gayangos and Anglo-
American Hispanism», in Pascual de Gayangos: A Nineteenth-Century Spanish Arabist, ed. by Cristina Alvarez Millán, Claudia Heide, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, 132-158.

Hillard, George S., Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 vols., Boston, James R. Osgood, 1876, pp. 2.253-54.

Jones, Richard Foster, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1953.

Lamson, Roy, and Hallett Smith, The Golden Hind: An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose and Poetry, New York, Norton, 1942.

Lewes, George Henry, The Spanish Drama: Lope de Vega and Calderón, London, C. Knight & Co., 1846, in <https://archive.org/ stream/spanishdramalope00leweuoft#page/n11/mode/2up>.

Loftis, John, The Spanish Plays of Neoclassical England, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973.

Mérimée, Ernest, and S. G. Morley, A History of Spanish Literature, New York, H. Holt and Co., 1930.

Rennert, Hugo, The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega, New York, 1909.

Samson, Alexander, «1623 and the Politics of Translation», in The Spanish Match: Prince Charles’s Journey to Madrid, 1623, ed. Alexander Samson, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, pp. 91-106.
— «“Last Thought upon a Windmill”?: Cervantes and Fletcher», in The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes
in Britain, London, Legenda, 2009, pp. 223-33.

Smith, Dawn L, «El teatro clásico español en Inglaterra», La puesta
en escena del teatro clásico, ed. José María Ruano de la Haza, Madrid, Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, 1992, Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 8, pp. 299-309.

Sullivan, Henry W., Calderón in the German Lands and Low Countries: His Reception and Influence, 1654-1980, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Taylor, Scott K., Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008.

Ticknor, George, History of Spanish Literature, London, John Murray, 1849.

Notes:

1. The effects of the Black Legend are felt in performance as well as in scholarly contexts. Although she does not elaborate, Dawn L. Smith claims, in a survey of the very recent turn to productions of the comedia in England, «La comedia del Siglo de Oro fue una víctima más de la tristemente famosa Leyenda Negra nacida en el siglo xvi, que tanto deformó el punto de vista británico sobre España» (1992: 300).↩

2. Even a broadly sympathetic critic such as George Henry Lewes recurs to the metaphor: «It is not enough to say that our own writers pillaged [Spanish sources] without scruple. To express the obligation truly, we must say that the European drama is saturated with Spanish influence» (Lewes 1846: 6).↩

3. In her edition, María Susana Seguin cites a similar circularity in Hyppolite Taine’s reception of D’Aulnoy: «d’ordinaire, on ne connaît l’Espagne que par son drame, ses romans picaresques et sa peinture. Quand sur de tels documents, on essaie de se figurer la vie réelle, on hésite et on n’ose conclure, des pareilles moeurs semblent fabuleuses. Après avoir lu cet ouvrage, on les voit, on les touche […]; ni les livres ni les tableaux n’avaient menti; les personnages de Lope, de Calderón, de Murillo et de Zurbaran couraient les rues» (D’Aulnoy 2005: 8).↩

«Entra el editor y dice»: ecdótica y acotaciones teatrales (siglos XVI y XVII)

Lectura online en pdf de «Entra el editor y dice»: ecdótica y acotaciones teatrales (siglos XVI y XVII)

La edición de las didascalias escénicas es uno de los pasos más delicados de la labor del crítico textual, sobre todo en el caso de las acotaciones del teatro de los siglos XVI y XVII, cuyos textos nos han llegado de manera azarosa en versiones manipuladas por compañías de actores. Este volumen aborda la ecdótica de las didascalias desde distintas perspectivas: la semiótica, la estemmática, la transmisión manuscrita e impresa, la evolución de la escritura dramatúrgica, la historia del teatro, la praxis editorial pasada y presente, la traducción y la mirada comparatista hacia textos del Siglo de Oro español y los teatros nacionales inglés, francés, portugués y holandés.

a cura di
Luigi Giuliani
Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italia
Victoria Pineda
Universidad de Extremadura, España

Copiado de la página web: http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/libri/978-88-6969-305-2/

Medalla de oro a la Red del Patrimonio Teatral Clásico Español (TC/12)

El proyecto de Investigación TC/12 (Red del Patrimonio Teatral Clásico Español), coordinado por el profesor Joan Oleza, recibirá la medalla de oro de la Academia de las Artes Escénicas. El acto de concesión de la medalla, que será organizado conjuntamente por la Academia, el Ayuntamiento de Murcia y la Universidad de Murcia, tendrá lugar el lunes 26 de febrero de 2018.

Es una buena ocasión para hacer referencia nuevamente a algunos de los resultados del proyecto y de otros proyectos relacionados:

En recuerdo de Francisco Ruiz Ramón

Francisco Ruiz Ramón, 1930 Játiva (Valencia) – 2015 Tampa (Florida) 

Tomado de la Université du Québec à Trois-Rivière: Francisco Ruiz Ramón, cuya Historia del teatro español ha contribuido a la formación de generaciones de estudiosos, ha fallecido el 17-01-2015 en Tampa, Florida. Más allá del importante legado que constituye su obra, la elegancia, la inteligencia y la bondad que siempre rodearon sus intervenciones dejan en la comunidad del teatro clásico un enorme vacío, pero también un sentimiento inagotable de gratitud.

Su necrológica, publicada en El País el 16 de Febrero de 2015.

En recuerdo y homenaje al ilustre hispanista, a continuación pueden verse algunos enlaces a sus conferencias en la Fundación March:

Sociodramaturgia del teatro clásico español:  “Deseo y castigo: El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra”. 5/03/1991

Sociodramaturgia del teatro clásico español: “Historia y drama: Fuenteovejuna-1”. 7/03/1991

Sociodramaturgia del teatro clásico español: “Venganza, tormento, fiesta: Fuenteovejuna-2”. 12/03/1991

Sociodramaturgia del teatro clásico español: “Mitos del poder: La vida es sueño”. 14/03/1991

La tragedia calderoniana. Calderón. La vida es sueño I. 14/11/2000

La tragedia calderoniana. Calderón. La vida es sueño II: la confrontación. 28/11/2000

La tragedia calderoniana. Calderón. La vida es sueño III: El campo de batalla. 30/11/2000

La tragedia calderoniana. Calderón. La vida es sueño IV: Requiem por un bufón. 4/12/2000

La tragedia calderoniana. Calderón. La vida es sueño V: La vida es sueño: “Segismundo, rey” 5/12/2000

Otras conferencias de Francisco Ruiz Ramón en la Fundación March en este enlace.

Spanish Classical Theater in Britain and North America

Mis amigos de la Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), Ricardo Serrano y Alfredo Hermenegildo, grandes hispanistas, han llamado incansablemente la atención sobre  “la ignorancia casi total que del corpus teatral [del Siglo de Oro] hacen gala, consciente o inconscientemente, los repertorios, tratados y estudios teóricos sobre el fenómeno dramático de la llamada cultura occidental” (ver este enlace a un artículo sobre el tema de Alfredo Hermenegildo y este otro de Ricardo Serrano).

Gracias a su labor, parece que desde finales de los años 90, hay un cambio de tendencia, como veremos enseguida, que va haciendo que poco a poco los dramaturgos españoles vayan siendo cada vez más tenidos en cuenta a nivel internacional.

Reproduzco a continuación este gran artículo de José M. Ruano (University of Ottawa), en inglés, aparecido en Romance Quaterly, winter 2005, Vol. 52, Nº 1. Puede leerse también en español, como parte de las actas del Congreso Internacional sobre Proyección y Significados del Teatro Clásico Español, Homenaje a Alfredo Hermenegildo y Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Madrid, mayo de 2003, de muy recomendable lectura.

Spanish Classical Theater in Britain and North America

José María Ruano de la Haza, 2005

In his History of the Theatre in Europe, John Allen begins the five pages allotted to Spanish classical theater by declaring that “the Spanish people have not on the whole been distinguished for their contribution to European drama” (140). More recently, Oxford University Press pub-lished a four-volume history of the American theater from 1869 to 2000 (Bordman; Hischak), in which, as one would expect, Shakespeare’s presence is pervasive. The authors also mention with some frequency seventeenth-century French playwrights, especially Molière (thirty-seven occasions), and the Italian Goldoni (nine occasions). By contrast, there is not a single allusion in the 2,000-plus pages of the series to Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, or Calderón. The same pertains to Eric Bentley’s popular What Is Theater? Whatever theater may be, seventeenthcentury Spaniards do not seem to have contributed to it, for they do not appear in his book. Nor do they figure in Richard Southern’s The Seven Ages of the Theatre, which deals not only with English, French, and Italian drama, but also Tibetan, Chinese, and Indian. These are not isolated cases of theatrical history’s neglect of Spanish drama. Alfredo Hermenegildo remarks on “la ignorancia casi total que del corpus teatral [del Siglo de Oro] hacen gala, consciente o inconsciente, los repertorios, tratados y estudios teóricos sobre el fenómeno dramático de la llamada cultura occidental” (5). Harold Bloom, for example, excludes Spanish dramatists from his Western Canon. A canonical author is one whose influence in Western culture is incontestable; in Bloom’s perspective Spanish dramatists of the Golden Age are not influential.

In recent years, thanks mainly to the effort of some British hispanists, the drama of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón is receiving some recognition, at least in theater histories published in Britain. The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre, for example, contains a thirty-page article by Victor Dixon on Spanish classical theater, practically the same number of pages allotted in this collective volume to sixteenthand seventeenth-century French and Italian drama (Brown). The Cambridge Guide to Theatre mentions Spain’s “rich contribution to world drama” (Banham 911). But it is worth noting that the descriptive word is “contribution,” rather than “influential,” as the Italian Renaissance theater is considered to be, or “transcendent,” as the theater of Corneille, Racine, and Molière is deemed to be. The sad fact is, as Melveena McKendrick points out in her Theatre in Spain, that “the dramatic genius of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Spain is virtually unrecognized outside the circle of Hispanic studies” (270).1 This is especially true of North America. In the foreword to a collective volume entitled Comedias del Siglo de Oro and Shakespeare, Bruce Wardropper laments that “the extraordinary quantitative florescence of drama under the Spanish Habsburgs has indeed been strangely neglected by cultivated readers and theatergoers in the United States” (11). It is significant that the section devoted to British and North American scholarship on Spanish classical theater in the Actas de la I Conferencia Internacional “Hacia un Nuevo Humanismo” includes only articles on playhouses, theatrical companies, staging, and sources (Bernardo Ares 1289–1380) and none on the plays themselves.

Until recently Spanish classical theater has also been largely absent from British and North American playhouses. According to McKendrick, when Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea, translated by Adrian Mitchell, opened in London’s National Theatre in 1981 British theater critics “hailed the discovery of a remarkable ‘new’ dramatist” (270). After that date, which marked the third centenary of the “new” dramatist’s death, an increasing number of Spanish classical plays by Calderón and others were translated and performed in Britain and the United States. However, apart from the handful of pieces staged by the National Theatre of London and the Royal Shakespeare Company of Stratford-upon-Avon, most of the productions were performed at university theaters, small theaters, and at theater festivals, such as El Chamizal in Texas.2 Furthermore, most of the plays were adapted, since as Dawn Smith remarked, “para establecer contacto con sus respectivos públicos, los traductores y/o directores [. . .] utilizaron estrategias diferentes. Adrian Mitchell y Michael Bogdanov impusieron su propia ideología a los textos de Calderón” (309). One such ideological adaptation of a key play in the Spanish classical repertoire was produced in New York City in 2000. The New York Times critic D. J. R. Bruckner reviewed it: “[T]he audience is caught in the dream, in which a parade of bondage, rape, torture, mutilation, murder, treason and civil war, accompanied by the music and rhythms of flamenco, arouses the uneasy laughter of confusion” (n.p.). Specialists may have some difficulty in recognizing in this description Calderón’s La vida es sueño. Despite the flamenco, Bruckner’s verdict on Calderón was that he is

a superb poet with deep psychological insights, [who] explored astonishingly modern concerns: an intellectual elite manipulating nature, determinism undermining free will, child abuse producing criminality, men subjugating women. His play should translate easily into captivating present-day theater. (n.p.)

In the critic’s estimation, the New York production unfortunately left a great deal to be desired, since it seemed to have turned the play into a soap opera.

Another adaptation was produced by the Fundación Bilingüe para las Artes de Los Angeles. That group announced for its 2004 season a play entitled Los clásicos… enredos, which was advertised as an amalgam of four comedies, each by a different dramatist: Calderón’s La dama duende, Lope de Vega’s El anzuelo de Fenisa, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s Los empeños de una casa, and Ruiz de Alarcón’s La verdad sospechosa.3 The English equivalent would be, I suppose, a production based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

My article attempts to analyze the reasons behind Britain and North America’s general lack of interest in a theater that in its day rivaled, if not surpassed, in importance and influence the theater of Shakespeare and Molière. Is it a question of prejudice, a by-product of the Black Legend, a lack of understanding, or is it simply that the theater of Lope de Vega, Tirso, and Calderón does not measure up, according to present standards, to that of their English and French contemporaries?

Initially, prejudice does not seem to be the cause of neglect, for it does not apply to other areas of Spanish culture. Is it possible to imagine a history of art without a mention of Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso? In 2003 The New York Times headlined an article on the Metropolitan Museum “Manet and Velázquez” exhibition with “The Masters of the French Masters Were Spanish.” Its author, Michael Kimmelman, considers Velázquez “the greatest painter who ever lived” and mentions that after seeing his paintings, Manet allegedly said that “he didn’t know why anyone even bothered to paint” (n.p.). Cervantes, who is placed by Bloom at the center of the Western canon with Shakespeare, occupies a similar position in the British and North American intellectual world, as attested by the two recent translations of Don Quixote (Rutherford; Grossman).

Perhaps the best way to begin the search for an answer is with the book Spanish Influence on English Literature, published in London in 1905. Its author, Martin Hume, was a corresponding member of the Spanish Royal Academy and the Royal Academy of History as well as extension lecturer in Spanish at the University of London. In his last two chapters, which deal with Spanish influence on English dramatists, Hume alludes to “the vivid dramatic instinct of the Spanish race,” which he is able to detect even in the surviving fragment of the Auto de los Reyes Magos (246). For Hume, Elizabethan and Spanish drama were similar in that they both “broke with the classical tradition, and adopted a modern and more colloquial presentation”; however, “in most other points they were dissimilar, because the national character is dissimilar”:

Reverie and speculation, cogitation with oneself, musing on things seen, are the natural bent of the English nature. An Englishman wants to get at the springs that turn the human wheels of life round; he wants to understand the works, to sound the reasons for action. The Spaniards, like most semi-Latin peoples, care little for that. They wish to see and participate in the movement itself; to talk, to enjoy the surface of things whilst they may: in short, to follow the story, to weep with the afflicted heroine, to see themselves reflected in the unselfish bravery of the hero, to laugh at the buffoon, and to curse the villain. (254–55)

Today, we would dismiss Hume’s racial arguments without a second thought. But critics appear to generally acknowledge that he was to some extent right in believing Shakespeare’s theater to be somehow more profound than, for example, Lope de Vega’s. What precisely makes it more profound? Most commentators immediately point to the complexity and humanity of Shakespeare’s characters. Bloom, for example, argues that Shakespeare’s characters are individualized: “no other writer, before or since, gives us a stronger illusion that each character speaks with a different voice from the others”; furthermore, “Shakespeare so opens his characters to multiple perspectives that they become analytical instruments for judging you” (Western Canon 60). In a later book on Shakespeare, Bloom attributes to him “the invention of the human.” In a section titled “Shakespeare’s Universalism,” he claims that in his book, “Shakespeare’s originality in the representation of character will be demonstrated throughout, as will the extent to which we all of us were, to a shocking degree, pragmatically reinvented by Shakespeare” (Shakespeare 17).

Bloom is not alone in emphasizing the importance of characterization in Shakespeare’s theater; he is the last in a long and illustrious line of Shakespearean scholars that reaches back to John Dryden. Recently, Leslie O’Dell published a book titled Shakespearean Characterization: A Guide for Actors and Students. I do not believe it will be possible to find a similar title in the extensive bibliography on Spanish Golden Age drama. Why? Because for the great majority of specialists in the field—and I include in this category actors and theater directors inand outside Spain—characters in Spanish classical drama are stereotypes, abstractions, and personified qualities, rather than true, rounded dramatic figures. This belief goes back at least 150 years to 1855, when George Ticknor, first professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, proclaimed that one of the fundamental principles in the theater of Lope de Vega,

which may be considered as running through the whole of his full-length plays [is] that of making all other interests subordinate to the interest of the story. Thus, the characters are a matter evidently of inferior moment with him; so that the idea of exhibiting a single passion giving a consistent direction to all the energies of a strong will, as in the case of Richard the Third, or, as in the case of Macbeth [. . .] does not occur in the whole range of his dramas. (222–23)

His categorical assertion seems to have been based on his reading of at most a dozen plays, one of which, La estrella de Sevilla, we now know not to have been written by Lope de Vega. Ticknor does not mention, and appears not to have read, masterpieces like El perro del hortelano, Peribáñez, and El caballero de Olmedo.

Exactly half a century later, in 1905, Hume further fueled the myth that the characters in Spanish classical plays are stereotypes. He wrote that the characters in La estrella de Sevilla (also wrongly attributed by him to Lope de Vega) “are ticketed unmistakably with their characteristics the moment they appear on the stage, and they are invariable throughout” (259). Spanish classical characters, according to Hume, do not develop because “this needs introspection, patient thought and study on the part of the author, which neither Lope nor Calderón [. . .] could give, or indeed their public desired” (260). The same applies to the graciosos: “There is no differentiation of them. They are all turned out of the same mould, and from the beginning of the play to the end, whatever happens, they never change” (263). What a difference in characterization, laments the former professor of the University of London, when compared to Shakespeare’s comic figures, let alone his Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello!

A third and far more damaging contribution to this myth of characterization was made half a century later, when Alexander Parker published The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age in 1957. The distinguished hispanist and former professor of the Universities of London, Pittsburgh, Austin (Texas), West Indies, and Edinburgh read Spanish Golden Age plays far better than did his predecessors, but he also relegated the playwrights’ character-drawing to the lowest rung of the dramatic ladder by subordinating it to action, theme, unity, and moral purpose. The nearly universal adoption of Parker’s “approach” by a generation of British and North American students in the sixties and early seventies contributed to the perpetuation of the myth. With some notable exceptions (Dixon, Lope de Vega, Characterization; Evans), Parker’s ideas on the Spanish Golden Age’s relative lack of emphasis on dramatic characterization are still general currency among hispanists and theater professionals. For example, in a recently published Diccionario de la comedia del Siglo de Oro, one of its editors, Frank Casa, concludes in “Caracterización” that “el personaje autónomo es un concepto caro a la literatura moderna pero de poca utilidad dramática para el teatro clásico” (40). Why? Because the all-important theme of the play demands that the dramatic character “cumpla la función que la obra le exija y las características que exhibe no pueden alejarle del papel que le corresponde en ella” (40). But if an actor is assigned a role even before rehearsals begin, that character cannot surprise the audience with its individuality, humanity, or originality. He or she will be subordinate to the exigencies of the plot, to the illustration of some aspect of the theme, to the fate assigned by dramatic convention, and will fail to give the spectators the illusion that they are seeing a real person on stage. If Casa is right, then Spanish classical drama is indeed a theater of puppets, of actors wearing invisible masks, of abstractions speaking in verse. In short, it is not real theater, and its irrelevance in today’s world should surprise no one.

It should be evident by now that if critics as well as actors and theater directors are convinced of the impossibility of extracting an ounce of humanity out of Spanish classical characters, the plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón will become a theater of ideas, of intellectualisms—a religious sermon or a circus performance. The plays will have to be adapted, modernized, altered, pruned, or transformed, and they will appear strange, grotesque, and/or an extension of the tourist’s Spain: Segismundo as a bullfighter, Peribáñez as a flamenco singer, Marta la piadosa in gypsy dress. Why should Spanish classical theater be given such treatment? A possible explanation is that Ticknor, Hume, and Parker are right; that is to say, that there are not, aside perhaps from Don Juan, true characters in Spanish seventeenth-century drama. One may even argue that the reason for this anomaly lies in the fact that, unlike Shakespeare and Molière, no Spanish playwright, with the exception of Andrés de Claramonte, was an actor or a director of his own company. But is it plausible that such a creative, diverse, and popular theater could have succeeded in attracting audiences for well over four centuries without lifelike characters? Are not characters the essence of drama? Or put another way, is it possible to communicate emotions of fear, pain, shame, pride, honor, revenge, love, and despair through puppetlike characters?

Two years ago, in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, Jonathan Thacker dreamt of the day when “Lope, Calderón and Tirso are mentioned in the same breath with Shakespeare, Racine, Molière, Chekhov, Brecht, Ibsen, or the other acknowledged giants of European theatre;” but he cautioned that “it will take the sustained testing of their works on European stages for this to come about” (5). Thacker suggests a number of reasons for the neglect suffered by the Spanish classical theater, among them the sheer volume of plays written during the period and the fact that Golden Age dramatists “became associated with the forces of conservatism in twentieth-century Spain” (6). But I believe that there is another, perhaps more powerful, reason: the scarce attention that both hispanists and theater professionals have paid to characterization. It is true that, as Stephen Orgel says, characters “are not people, they are elements of a linguistic structure, lines in a drama, and more basically, words on a page” (8). Yet, audiences continue to identify with many of them. Hamlet, Othello, Don Juan, and Molière’s misanthrope are true dramatic characters in the sense that audiences recognize their own humanity in them. Until Segismundo, Peribáñez, Pedro Crespo, and Doña ángela are perceived in a similar way, it will be impossible for Spanish classical theater to transcend the narrow confines of university classrooms. Yet, in the last twenty years, the great majority of academic articles, doctoral dissertations, and books on Spanish Golden Age drama published in English—the only publications that may succeed in attracting the attention of North American and British theater professionals—has shaken off the Parkerian shackles only to follow the tenets of poststructuralism, psychoanalysm, postmodernism, Marxism, deconstructionism, and other “isms.” These theories often use (and abuse) the text as a pretext to address issues that, although possibly of great import to the contemporary world, have little to contribute to Bloom’s invention of the human. Spanish classical theater has become for many not an object of study, but a means to analyze, often anachronistically, today’s world. I would say that the scholarship of Spanish Golden Age drama has jumped from the scholasticism of the thematicstructural approach—an approach that believes that reason alone can explain all without resorting to observation and experimentation, that is to say, to the staging of plays—to the mannerism and baroquism of poststructuralist and post-modernist approaches. In the process, it has skipped the humanism of the Renaissance, an important stage during which scholars perhaps might have succeeded in placing the characters created by Lope, Tirso, and Calderón where they belong, at the center of the dramatic universe, next to those created by Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and Chekhov. Golden Age drama is not likely to be appreciated, or staged, because of its “scholastic” or “baroque” features; its significance, if any, will be found in its humanity, which is afterall what brings audiences to playhouses. English literature specialists may now analyze the baroque aspects of Shakespeare’s theater because others already have established its human values. They now may suggest controversially that Caliban is a new Spartacus who rebels against Prospero’s colonial tyranny because there exists a long and distinguished critical tradition—from Dryden and Dr. Johnson to Auden, Browning, and others—that studied him as an authentic dramatic character—half a wild man, half a sea beast, but one with, as Bloom argues, legitimate pathos (Shakespeare 665). Shakespeare’s drama, already established as significant, can withstand such assault, but Spain’s classical drama, which is still in search of credentials in the British and North American theater world, runs the risk of becoming a mere jumble of words and images poorly understood and badly acted on a stage. Golden Age characters have been transmogrified into abstractions, signs, and aberrations before they were given the opportunity to inform us of their humanity. Segismundo, critics say, is a New Man, a bourgeois individualist, a Christian prince, a Machiavellian prince, a politician that institutes universal suffrage, an abstraction, a myth (Ruano, “Introducción” 69); but he never seems to be an authentic dramatic character. But is it credible that a culture that has given the world Celestina, Lazarillo, and Don Quixote, and paintings as realistic as those of Velázquez, Zurbarán, Murillo, and Ribera, could deprive the characters of its most popular artistic manifestation of their humanity? Does Spanish art offer realism and humanism in all except the theater?

Fortunately, it is now possible to explode the myth of Spanish classical theater. Jesús Puente’s bravura performance as Pedro Crespo in José Luis Alonso’s 1988 production of El alcalde de Zalamea, Carlos Hipólito’s Don García in Pilar Miró’s La verdad sospechosa (1991), and Emma Suárez as Diana and Carmelo Gómez as Teodoro in Pilar Miró’s 1995 film version of El perro del hortelano—to mention but four memorable performances in the last two decades—should suffice to show that at least some of Spain’s classical characters (and there are many more) can be infused by the right actors with enough psychological depth and complexity to take their place alongside some of the greatest creations in world drama.4 What do these performances have in common? The fact that actors as well as directors approached the text believing in the truth of the characters and therefore managed to portray them as genuine human beings. In general, however, the lack of serious study generates not rounded characters, but stereotypes and circus performers, as attested by the tendency of so many modern actors to execute a pirouette, or to leap, fall down, crawl, stand on their heads, sing flamenco, laugh or scream while reciting the verses of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón, to the increasing confusion of an audience who cannot believe what it sees on stage because it clearly does not correspond to what it hears.

To what do we owe this method of acting? Probably to the widespread belief, encouraged by some scholars both in Spain and outside Spain, that Golden Age drama is more interested in themes, religion, kingship, and ideology than in human nature; that it is a theater of ideas rather than characters. As these performers do not really understand what the text says nor what motivates the characters, they resort to the hackneyed tricks of an actor, often a poor imitation of commedia dell’arte “business.”

It is not, nor should it be, the critic’s job to tell an actor or a theater director how to create a character. But this does not imply that the critic has nothing to contribute. As Francisco Ruiz Ramón points out, actors as well as directors often complain, and with reason, that scholars do not deal with matters that are truly of interest to them:

¿Cómo funciona realmente el texto en la escena? ¿Cómo solucionar física, materialmente los problemas del texto? ¿Cómo conciliar el texto clásico y las convenciones actorales del siglo XVII [. . .] con la tradición (o falta de tradición) actoral actual? [. . .] ¿Qué hacer o cómo hacer con el verso?” (144)

These are essential questions to which I would add: How many valid interpretations are there of what a particular character says and does? Are there dramatically interesting ways to play characters on stage without falling into anachronisms or betraying the text? What should one look for in the text so as to be able to get under the skin of a character? How can one make a modern audience understand and identify with a seventeenth-century character?

Through a close analysis of the text, and with the help of linguistic, historical, ideological, literary, and theatrical knowledge, scholars will be able to offer actors and directors a whole gamut of interpretations, meanings, possibilities, contexts, potentialities, and perspectives, not all of them readily apparent to the nonspecialist.5 Bloom does not hesitate to give more or less controversial interpretations of the whole Shakespearean gallery of characters, to criticize Ralph Fiennes’s recent Hamlet, or to applaud his all-time favorite, John Gielguld’s. He does not shy away from writing pages and pages about Hamlet and Falstaff, his favorite characters, whom he considers not just real people, but characters more real than average human beings. Shakespeare is important, says Bloom, because he teaches us to understand human nature, and he does this through his characters, for “the representation of human character and personality remains always the supreme literary value, whether in drama, lyric, or narrative” (Shakespeare 413). If this supreme literary value is denied to Spanish classical characters, the plays in which they appear will inevitably have little or no impact in contemporary Western culture.

University of Ottawa 

NOTES
 

1. Checking with http://www.amazon.com, I found that the bestseller among Spanish plays is Calderón’s Life Is a Dream, ranked 1,234,865 overall. Compare this with Shakespeare’s bestseller, Hamlet, ranked 5,541, or more significantly, since it is also a translation, with Molière’s Misanthrope, ranked 54,605.

2. Among the most important productions over the last twenty years are the following plays: (by Calderón) Life Is a Dream, translated and adapted by Adrian Mitchell and John Barton, and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1983; The Great Theater of the World, also translated by Mitchell and performed in 1984; The Painter of His Dishonour, translated by David Johnston and Laurence Boswell and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, in July 1995; and The Phantom Lady, English version by Matthew Stroud, performed in 2000 at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas; (by Lope de Vega) The Dog in the Manger, translated by Victor Dixon and performed in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1986; The Knight from Olmedo, translated and adapted by David Johnston and performed at Gate Theater in 1991; In Love but Discreet, translated by Vern Williamsen and performed at El Chamizal, Texas, in 1986; Fuenteovejuna, translated and adapted by Mitchell and performed at the Royal National Theatre, London, in 1989; and The Incomparable Doña Ana (La gallarda toledana), translated by Harvey Erdman and performed at El Chamizal Festival in 1991; (by Tirso de Molina) The Balconies of Madrid, translated by Kenneth Stackhouse and performed at El Chamizal in 1994; The Joker of Seville, translated and adapted by Derek Walcott and performed in Toronto by students in 1984; The Last Days of Don Juan, another version of El burlador de Sevilla, translated and adapted by Nick Dear and performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1990; Damned for Despair, translated and adapted by Laurence Boswell and Jonathan Thacker and performed at the Gate Theatre in London in 1991; Don Gil of the Green Breeches, translated and adapted by Laurence Boswell, Jonathan Thacker, and Deirdre McKenna and performed at the Gate Theatre in London in 1990; The Rape of Tamar, translated by Paul Whitworth and performed in London in 1992 as well as in the Santa Cruz Shakespeare Festival, California, in 1994; The Outcast in Court (El vergonzoso en palacio), translated by Harley Erdman and performed at El Chamizal in 1993. North American audiences also were able to see Mira de Amescua’s Gambler’s House, translated by Vern Williamsen and performed at the Chamizal Festival in 1990; and Ruiz de Alarcón’s Love’s True Lies (La verdad sospechosa), translated by Kenneth Stackhouse and performed at El Chamizal in 1995. See the Web page of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (http://www.wordpress.comedias.org) and Smith 299–309.

3. See its Web site: http://www.bfatheater.org/pages/calendar.htm (broken kink)

4. Unfortunately, only the film of El perro del hortelano (The Dog in the Manger), with subtitles from the English translation by Victor Dixon, has reached British and North American audiences.

5. I have attempted something of the sort in several articles: see Ruano “Teoría,” “Pedro Crespo,” and “Tirso a escena.”

WORKS CITED

Allen, John. A History of the Theatre in Europe. London: Heinemann, 1983.
Banham, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
Bentley, Eric. What Is Theater? A Query in Chronicle Form. London: Dobson, 1957.
Bernardo Ares, José Manuel, ed. El hispanismo anglonorteamericano: aportaciones, problemas y perspectivas sobre Historia, Arte y Literatura españolas (siglos XVI–XVIII). Actas de la I Conferencia Internacional “Hacia un Nuevo Humanismo.”Córdoba: Publicaciones Caja Sur, 2001.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare. The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998.
—. The Western Canon. The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead, 1994. Bordman, Gerald. American Theater: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869–1914. New York: Oxford UP, 1994.
—. American Theater: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1914–1930. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
—. American Theater: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930–1969. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Brown, John Russell, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
Bruckner, D. J. R. “When Life is Not a Dream but an Unending Nightmare.” The New York Times 14 Oct. 1999.
Casa, Frank. “Caracterización.” Diccionario de la comedia del Siglo de Oro. Ed. F. Casa, L. García Lorenzo, and G. Vega García-Luengos. Madrid: Castalia, 2002. 39–40.
Dixon, Victor. “Un actor se prepara: Un comediante del Siglo de Oro ante un texto (El castigo sin venganza).” Actor y técnica de representación del teatro clásico español. Ed. J. M. Díez Borque. London: Tamesis, 1989. 55–74.
—. Characterization in the Comedia of Seventeenth-Century Spain. Manchester: Department of Spanish and Portuguese, 1994.
—. “Spanish Renaissance Theatre.” The Oxford Illustrated History of Theatre. Ed. J. R. Brown. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. 142–72.
—, trans. Lope de Vega. The Dog in the Manger (El perro del hortelano). Ottawa: Dove- house, 1990.
Evans, Peter. “Peribáñez and Ways of Looking at Golden-Age Dramatic Characters.” Romanic Review 74 (1983): 136–51.
Grossman, Edith, trans. Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.
Hermenegildo, Alfredo. “Capricho español: ¿dónde están los ‘innumerables dramaturgos’?” Lazarillo. Revista literaria y cultural 2 (1992): 5–8.
Hischak, Thomas S. American Theater: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1969–2000. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
Hume, Martin. Spanish Influence on English Literature. London: Eveleigh Nash, 1905.
Kimmelman, Michael. “The Masters of the French Masters Were Spanish.” The New York Times 7 Mar. 2003.
McKendrick, Melveena. Theatre in Spain: 1490–1700. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1989.
O’Dell, Leslie. Shakespearean Characterization: A Guide for Actors and Students. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.
Orgel, Stephen. The Authentic Shakespeare. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Parker, Alexander. The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age. London: Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Councils, 1957.
Ruano de la Haza, José María. “Introducción bibliográfica y crítica.” Pedro Calderón de la Barca. La vida es sueño. Madrid: Castalia, 2000. 7–73.
—. “Pedro Crespo.” Calderón en la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. Ed. J. M. Díez Borque. Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 15 (2001): 217–30.
—. “Teoría y praxis del personaje teatral áureo: Pedro Crespo, Peribáñez y Rosaura.” El escritor y la escena V. Ed. Y. Campbell. Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1997. 19–35.
—. “Tirso a escena: la construcción del personaje de Don Melchor en La celosa de sí misma.” Tirso de Molina en la Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. Ed. Ignacio Arellano. Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 18 (2004): 175–91.
Ruiz Ramón, Francisco. “Sobre la construcción del personaje teatral clásico: del texto a la escena.” Actor y técnica de representación del teatro clásico español. Ed. José María Díez Borque. London: Tamesis, 1989. 143–53.
Rutherford. John, trans. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. London: Penguin, 2000.
Smith, Dawn. “El teatro clásico español en Inglaterra en los últimos quince años.” La puesta en escena del teatro clásico. Ed. J. Ruano de la Haza. Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 8 (1995): 299–309.
Southern, Richard. The Seven Ages of the Theatre. London: Faber and Faber, 1962.
Thacker, Jonathan. “Glory of a Theatre without Rules.” The Times Literary Supplement 12 July 2002: 5–6.
Ticknor, George. History of Spanish Literature. New Edition. London: John Murray, 1855. Wardropper, Bruce. “Foreword.” Comedias del Siglo de Oro and Shakespeare. Ed. S. L. Fischer. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP. 11–15.

Biblioteca Digital Artelope: leer online a Lope de Vega

El proyecto Artelope, dirigido por el profesor Joan Oleza, de la Universidad de Valencia, y en el que interviene un conjunto de 20 investigadores, procedentes de diversas universidades europeas, hispanoamericanas y españolas, persigue la creación de un corpus fundamental del patrimonio literario español: el teatro de Lope de Vega.


El objetivo principal es la sistematización en un formato electrónico de base de datos capaz de suministrar a los estudiosos y profesionales del teatro el inmenso conjunto de las obras de Lope (o atribuidas) en un formato manejable para la investigación y para la consulta.

Uno de los resultados de mayor interés, por lo que supone de hacer disponible en Internet esta parte del patrimonio cultural en español, es la Biblioteca Digital Artelope.

El proyecto lleva desarrollándose a lo largo de muchos años. En la actualidad, la colección cuenta con 98 ediciones digitales disponibles, con incorporaciones paulatinas a medida que los investigadores van publicando nuevas obras.

Esta es la lista de obras disponibles a fecha 26 de junio de 2013 y sus enlaces para leer online:

ADONIS Y VENUSAL PASAR DEL ARROYO

AMAR, SERVIR Y ESPERAR

DE AMAR SIN SABER A QUIÉN

EL AMOR ENAMORADO

AMOR, PLEITO Y DESAFÍO

EL ANIMAL DE HUNGRÍA

EL ANTECRISTO

ARAUCO DOMADO POR EL EXCELENTÍSIMO SEÑOR DON GARCÍA HURTADO DE MENDOZA

EL ARENAL DE SEVILLA

EL ASALTO DE MASTRIQUE, POR EL PRINCIPE DE PARMA

¡AY, VERDADES, QUE EN AMOR…!

LOS BANDOS DE SENA

BARLAÁN Y JOSAFAT

LAS BATUECAS DEL DUQUE DE ALBA

LA BELLA AURORA

LA BELLA MALMARIDADA

LAS BIZARRÍAS DE BELISA

LA BUENA GUARDA

EL CABALLERO DE OLMEDO

CASTELVINES Y MONTESES

EL CASTIGO SIN VENGANZA

LOS CAUTIVOS DE ARGEL

CONTRA VALOR NO HAY DESDICHA

LA CORONA DERRIBADA Y VARA DE MOISÉS

LAS CUENTAS DEL GRAN CAPITÁN

LA DAMA BOBA

EL DESPRECIO AGRADECIDO

LA DEVOCIÓN DEL ROSARIO

LOS EMBUSTES DE CELAURO

LOS EMBUSTES DE FABIA

LA ESCLAVA DE SU GALÁN

EL ESCLAVO DE ROMA

LAS FAMOSAS ASTURIANAS

LA FIANZA SATISFECHA

LA FIRMEZA EN LA DESDICHA

FUENTE OVEJUNA

LA GALLARDA TOLEDANA

EL GRAN DUQUE DE MOSCOVIA Y EMPERADOR PERSEGUIDO

LAS GRANDEZAS DE ALEJANDRO

EL HAMETE DE TOLEDO

LA HERMOSA ESTER

LA HISTORIA DE TOBÍAS

LA IMPERIAL DE OTÓN

EL JUEZ EN SU CAUSA

EL LABERINTO DE CRETA

EL LABRADOR VENTUROSO

LA LIMPIEZA NO MANCHADA

LO QUE HA DE SER

LA MADRE DE LA MEJOR

LA BIENAVENTURADA MADRE SANTA TERESA DE JESÚS

EL MARIDO MÁS FIRME

EL MARQUÉS DE MANTUA

EL MAYOR IMPOSIBLE

LA MAYOR VICTORIA

EL MEJOR ALCALDE EL REY

LA MOZA DE CÁNTARO

MÁS PUEDEN CELOS QUE AMOR

EL NACIMIENTO DE CRISTO

NADIE SE CONOCE

LA NECEDAD DEL DISCRETO

LA NIÑA DE PLATA

LA NIÑEZ DEL PADRE ROJAS

NO SON TODOS RUISEÑORES

LA NOCHE DE SAN JUAN

PEDRO CARBONERO

PERIBAÑEZ Y EL COMENDADOR DE OCAÑA

EL PERRO DEL HORTELANO

EL PIADOSO ARAGONÉS

POR LA PUENTE, JUANA

PORFIAR HASTA MORIR

EL POSTRER GODO DE ESPAÑA

LOS PRADOS DE LEÓN

EL PREMIO DEL BIEN HABLAR

EL PRÍNCIPE INOCENTE

EL PRÍNCIPE PERFECTO (versión 1)

EL PRÍNCIPE PERFECTO (versión 2)

QUIEN TODO LO QUIERE

EL ROBO DE DINA

ROMA ABRASADA

SAN ISIDRO LABRADOR DE MADRID

LA SANTA LIGA

LOS TELLOS DE MENESES

LOS TERCEROS DE SAN FRANCISCO

LOS TRABAJOS DE JACOB. SUEÑOS HAY QUE VERDAD SON

EL VALOR DE LAS MUJERES

VALOR, FORTUNA Y LEALTAD DE LOS TELLOS DE MENESES

LA VENGADORA DE LAS MUJERES

EL VERDADERO AMANTE

LA VIDA DE SAN PEDRO NOLASCO

LA VILLANA DE GETAFE

Enhorabuena a todos los investigadores de Artelope y muchos ánimos para continuar con esta gran labor que permite aumentar la presencia de contenidos culturales en español en Internet y facilita el desarrollo de herramientas de estudio para profesionales y aficionados al teatro de los siglos de oro.

Tragicomedia de don Duardos, de Gil Vicente. Ed. Alfredo Hermenegildo

Tragicomedia de don Duardos, de Gil Vicente. Ed. Alfredo Hermenegildo

La unidad cultural ibérica, entre Portugal y España, que José Saramago ha subrayado y defendido repetidamente, es de vieja raigambre y puede revelarse a poco que se rastreen los meandros históricos del Tormes y del Corneja, es decir los límites de la Castilla abulense con Extremadura, allá por las tierras del Duque de Alba, cuya corte rural fue unión de lenguas y reunión de artistas de ambos lados.

La Tragicomedia de don Duardos, de Gil Vicente, es uno de los textos teatrales de la época que muestra en sí mismo la integración de ambas lenguas (las acotaciones en portugués, el texto en español) al tiempo que une un aire festivo y desenfadado a un lirismo intimista que, a pesar de la distancia del tiempo, cala hondo todavía hoy en el lector cuando las grandes luminarias desaparecen de escena y, al crepúsculo, don Duardos se trasforma en un simple hortelano que sueña y espera. Casi puede percibirse entonces el olor y la humedad de las noches de la sierra, el silencio, preludio de la cena que recrea y enamora.
Alfredo Hermenegildo –autor de El tirado en escena, El teatro del siglo XVI y otros muchos volúmenes o artículos que permiten hoy comprender la importancia capital del teatro “primitivo” español en la aparición de la Comedia Nueva de Lope– nos introduce a ese mundo mágico de Don Duardos, una historia de amor que tiene detrás toda la tradición del amor caballeresco.
A partir del texto original de 1562, que se reproduce en facsímil, sólo la puntuación (con respeto de los apóstrofos de la época) y la ortografía que no falsee la dicción han sido actualizadas, lo que permite una incursión auténtica en un universo jocoso y lírico al mismo tiempo, hijo de François Rabelais y de Juan de la Cruz. 
La introducción y notas del profesor Alfredo Hermenegildo ayudan a enmarcar la lectura de esta obra y entender mejor este clásico texto teatral.
Si alguno de los improbables lectores de este blog tiene interés en el libro, lo podrá encontrar completo en la Apple iBookstore, para su descarga, por el módico precio de 2,99 euros. 
Este es el enlace:
También se puede descargar gratuitamente una versión preliminar de la obra.
Como siempre, cualquier comentario será bienvenido.

La Aldehuela, Lope de Vega

La Aldehuela, Lope de Vega 
Presentamos un libro clásico en formato EPUB interactivo, fixed-layout. Se trata de la edición del profesor Ricardo Serrano Deza de la comedia de Lope de Vega titulada ‘La Aldehuela’.
En ‘La Aldehuela’, Lope de Vega nos presenta, con brillantez, un episodio de la España de finales del siglo XVI en clave de comedia: los amoríos del Duque de Alba y una aldeana de La Aldehuela, en Ávila, desarrollados en el atractivo marco de la España Imperial.

Américo Castro en ‘De la edad conflictiva’ dice: “El español del siglo XVI se sintió lanzado de golpe a una vida en escala mayor, y brincó desde su estrechez aldeana hasta los últimos límites del “teatro del mundo”. Al éxito seductor se arribaba por vía del merecimiento personal o de la proeza súbita, no por la mutación despaciosa de las cosas y de las ideas, sin conexión directa con las virtudes de la persona. Se solicitaban mercedes de Dios, del rey o del gran señor. El ámbito de lo merecible y la conciencia de ser merecedor iban dilatándose a medida que avanzaba el siglo XVI.”
En ‘La Aldehuela’, Lope muestra que el éxito no tenía conexión directa con las virtudes de la persona, sino con la cuna o las decisiones del gran señor, otorgando mercedes o quitando haciendas a su antojo.
La introducción y notas del profesor Ricardo Serrano Deza hacen que la lectura de esta obra sea una experiencia amena y divertida, además de muy enriquecedora para toda persona que le guste el teatro clásico español.

En este enlace os podéis descargar una versión preliminar de la misma donde podréis apreciar alguna función interactiva sobre EPUB que he incorporado para acceder a las notas mediante ventanas emergentes (popups).

Si alguno de los improbables lectores de este blog tiene interés en el libro, lo podrá encontrar completo en la Apple iBookstore, para su descarga, por el módico precio de 0,99 euros. 
Como siempre, cualquier comentario será bienvenido.

Entender las Comedias

¿Por qué nos gustan las comedias?¿qué tiene el teatro que nos atrae tanto?.
A lo largo del tiempo, estas preguntas siempre han rondado nuestras cabezas y, una vez iniciada la reflexión, se van transformando en preguntas más profundas, como: ¿el teatro debe solamente entretener o también tiene que educar?, ¿qué es más importante la trama o los personajes?, ¿creatividad imaginativa o reglas y verosimilitud?, ¿dónde está la realidad y qué la diferencia de la ficción teatral?.
Muchas reflexiones me han surgido leyendo al genial Jose Luis Alonso de Santos (Valladolid, 1942): dramaturgo, director escénico, guionista, narrador y profesor de escritura dramática en la Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático de Madrid… un gran hombre de teatro.
Su conocido libro, La escritura dramática, Madrid, 1998, es una referencia obligada para todo aquel interesado en el arte dramático. El libro repasa todo el proceso de creación del texto teatral: el proceso imaginativo, el proceso técnico y el proceso filosófico. Algunas de sus ideas, muy resumidas, pueden verse en el texto transcrito a continuación (ver http://www.uclm.es/centro/ialmagro/publicaciones/pdf/CorralComedias/8_1997/3.pdf) que nos pueden ayudar a entender mejor el arte de las comedias: 
“Toda obra de teatro se podría resumir así: dos fuerzas (dos personajes) se encuentran por un incidente, y se origina un conflicto que desencadena una incertidumbre en los personajes -y en el espectador- sobre cómo se va a desarrollar su vida escénica de ahí en adelante. La peculiaridad de la comedia -y la comedia de enredo especialmente- es que ese incidente tiene que ser lo suficientemente importante para que nos interese, pero el conflicto que origine ha de desarrollarse con un estudiado equilibrio entre los elementos emocionales en pugna (las dificultades que tienen los personajes para alcanzar sus metas), y el optimismo y la vitalidad que presiden el género. Es decir, los personajes han de luchar por conseguir sus fines con intensidad, fuerza y deseo, pero sin dramatismo ni tragedia.
(…) Muchas comedias rozan la tragicomedia y el drama, o queda claro que los rozarían si la acción siguiera un minuto más tras la caída del telón. La diferencia estriba, sobre todo, en que la comedia cuida de no romper el delicado equilibrio que su género impone. Las armas básicas del autor son, en ella, el regocijo y la diversión. A partir de estar armas se establece una corriente comunicativa con el espectador que va a permitirle hacer con él un discurso más o menos oculto acerca de sus verdaderas intenciones que, paradójicamente, aunque se realizan a través de la alegría, tienen siempre que ver con el sufrimiento, punto de partida aceptado por autor y espectador: la vida es muy difícil, pero podemos convertirla en comedia con nuestra actitud. Esa es la primera de las muchas complicidades establecidas, pues la comedia no puede ser “disfrutada” de una forma no participativa por el espectador, que tiene que aceptar su finalidad, sus convenciones, su tradición, y una dimensión no heroica, ni trágica, ni siquiera dramática, de la existencia. Es decir: no se puede disfrutar de una comedia sin estar predispuesto de alguna forma a darle a la vida, en esos momentos, una dimensión cómica.
El autor teatral trata de comunicar en sus comedias una euforia ante el mero hecho de vivir que se traduce en una defensa de la existencia. Toda buena comedia siempre nos dice: “La vida a pesar de todas las dificultades que hemos visto en el escenario, y a pesar de todas las dificultades que sabemos que pueden venir (y que vendrán después); merece la pena vivirse”.
La comedia toma la fragilidad humana como punto de partida, y trata de superarla después, en un acto de venganza y dominio de esa misma fragilidad. Pero, al mismo tiempo, tiene una aguda conciencia de los grandes obstáculos que se van a interponer en el camino del personaje -y del ser humano- hacia sus metas.
Esa es una convención básica: un acuerdo con el espectador para que los conflictos vitales y esenciales se aplacen, y veamos nada más los primeros actos de esa tragedia que vendría después del final, si se prolongara la comedia.
(…) otro de esos grandes debates que nos llegan desde Horacio: si las comedias tiene otra finalidad además de la de entretener; si son un juego en sí mismas o hay algo detrás; si son para enseñar o para educar; una escuela del sentido común, una escuela para el propio conocimiento, el “nacimiento” del sentido del ridículo (para que no hagamos lo que hacen algunos personajes en el escenario), etc. Yo creo que ningún autor jamás en la historia del teatro se ha puesto a escribir ninguna comedia -ni ninguna obra de teatro de cualquier género- sólo para “entretener” en el sentido más vulgar del término, sino para aportar, de algún modo, su punto de vista sobre cuestiones que nos afectan en nuestra existencia.
Estos debate sobre si la vida merece la pena, si el amor puede solucionar otros problemas esenciales, si los jóvenes pueden vivir en un mundo construido por los viejos (que es básico en todas las comedias), si es posible burlarse y transgredir las normas, si es posible luchar contra las prohibiciones y alcanzar cierta felicidad, etc., todos estos debates están presentes en las sociedades de todos los tiempos, y los dramaturgos, aunque escriban la más liviana, más ingenua, más vodevilesca y más sencilla de las comedias, los conocen, y escriben impregnados de ellos.
Los escritores sabemos que los seres humanos nos comportamos de modo semejante a la célebre paloma Kantiana, que “sueña, al notar la resistencia del aire en las alas, que volaría mejor en el vacío”. La paloma no podría volar en el vacío, pero ella sueña que lo haría. Lo mismo nos sucede a los seres vivos, y a los personajes de nuestras obras. Los seres humanos nacemos, crecemos, nos desarrollamos, y morimos, rodeados de conflictos, problemas y prohibiciones. La vida es condenadamente complicada. Afortunadamente y gracias a ello, gracias a los problemas y las dificultades de la vida, los escritores escribimos obras (dramáticas y cómicas). la comedia es, pues, un modo de afrontar las dificultades que la lucha por la vida provoca en sus protagonistas, en la escena y en el mundo. Y trata de enfrentarse a estas dificultades con su mejor arma: riéndose de ellas. Es decir, enfrentándose a la realidad por los caminos indirectos que el ingenio y la burla facilitan. Por ello, los temas de la comedia son casi siempre el crimen, la caída, y la muerte. En general, esta burla o engaño de la comedia va a restituir un equilibrio destruido previamente, que el protagonista -y con él el autor y el espectador- desea ver restituido.
Pero la buena comedia no sólo va a condenar el mal social, la mentira impuesta, y las limitaciones y desdichas que el individuo padece en la vida, sino que va a tratar de adentrarse también en el propio individuo, y va a ridiculizar la falta de conocimiento que los personajes -y los espectadores reflejados en ellos. tienen de sí mismos. Así, una de las grandes aportaciones de la comedia es que nos enseña a vernos a nosotros mismos, a pesar de los prejuicios que sobre nosotros mismos tenemos.
(…) uno de los elementos clave de la comedia es encontrar la medida adecuada a la densidad, la profundidad y la importancia del conflicto. Si éste es muy ligero, la comedia se vuelve insustancial, y si es muy denso y muy importante, se vuelve tan dramático que deja de ser comedia. Una de las claves es, pues, encontrar la dimensión justa del conflicto. Y otra de las grandes dificultades del autor de comedias de todos los tiempos es trabajar con las reglas de la verosimilitud y las creencias de su tiempo. La verosimilitud marca las leyes del género en esa estudiada ligereza, y en unas convenciones estilísticas que, lógicamente, van variando a lo largo de la historia del teatro, según varían las relaciones comunicativas espectáculo-público.
Uno de los grandes temas del Siglo de Oro es el enfrentamiento entre el deseo de pecado y el deseo de salvación (ese gran debate humano no sería posible en una sociedad de no creyentes, por ejemplo). Las creencias marcan las reglas filosóficas de comunicación entre lo que sucede en el escenario y lo que sucede en el patio de butacas. Evidentemente, a una sociedad que no tenga unas creencias determinadas, una obra que esté hablando de esas creencias le resultaría inverosímil, porque la verosimilitud de cada época está basada en la construcción tradicional, en la ideología y las creencias, y en la filosofía y conocimientos de su tiempo (no tendría sentido plantear, por ejemplo, el conflicto cristianismo-moralidad en el mundo musulmán).
Las reglas de las convenciones teatrales, como vemos, van modificándose. El teatro es un acuerdo entre la realidad y la convención. El Siglo de Oro es el siglo del verso, porque los demás elementos del hecho teatral (luz, escenario, vestuario. etc.) eran menos convencionales que en la actualidad; en el verso descansaba la originalidad, la creación y el juego de cada uno de los poetas.
El sentido de la verosimilitud en la historia del arte, y concretamente en la historia del teatro, siempre ha tenido mucho que ver con el sentido del imaginario y de lo real: ¿Qué es real y qué pertenece al imaginario?¿Qué está aceptado por una sociedad?¿Qué podemos entender y asimilar?¿Qué podemos disfrutar y qué no podemos disfrutar?
Hay tres grandes reglas en el teatro desde su nacimiento hasta hoy; son las reglas del espacio, el tiempo y la causalidad. El espacio teatral es un espacio reducido, convencionalmente reducido, y no sólo porque lo sea al representarse una obra, sino que ya lo es en el imaginario del autor. La obra original no es la del texto. La obra original se construye en la imaginación del escritor, y cuando la construye lo hace ya en un espacio reducido.
(…) El autor imagina, por tanto, sus criaturas (sus personajes) y sus situaciones en una síntesis de espacio. Y también en una síntesis de tiempo. La vida de un personaje dramático se reduce a una cuantas intervenciones: nace, crece, se desarrolla y muere en veinte o treinta frases. Si contamos, en términos de tiempo, las palabras que dice Hamlet (o cualquier otro de los grandes personajes del teatro) su vida escénica no pasa de los tres cuartos de hora.
Estas dos síntesis (de espacio y tiempo) obligan a una tercera: la síntesis causal. Lo que sucede en nuestra vida está originado por la expectativa de muchos espacios, muchos tiempos y mucha vida. (…) en la vida real no hay una relación causal directa. Un ejemplo: algunas personas guardan un arma en su casa, y eso no significa que alguien vaya a pegarse un tiro forzosamente. Pero en el teatro, “si en el primer acto hay un arma colgada en la pared, es necesario que se dispare antes de que acabe la obra”, porque si no, ¿qué pinta en el escenario?. Así pues, mientras que las relaciones en la vida son “casuales”, en el teatro son “causales”, y toda frase, toda pausa, toda entrada de un personaje, toda acción y toda emoción, están hechos para construir una cadena de acontecimientos causales que lleven por esos raíles del espacio y del tiempo, el tren de la obra desde su comienzo hasta su final. Si se estudia detenidamente ese desarrollo causal, se ve que hay una situación previa, un incidente, un conflicto, un protagonista y un antagonista, unos desarrollos, una serie de variables, etc. (…)
El arte de la comedia es, en conclusión, un arte desengañador, desenmascarador de nuestra personalidad, de nuestra sociedad, de nuestras ideologías, nuestras mentiras y nuestros esquemas. Es un arte que intenta ayudarnos a que nos liberemos de algunas de las ideas erróneas que tenemos sobre la realidad, el mundo, y sobre nosotros mismos. No se trata, pues, aquí del concepto trágico o heroico de obligar al individuo a aceptar y enfrentarse a los obstáculos que la vida ha puesto en su camino. Por el contrario, en la comedia se permite al personaje -y al público identificado con él- rehuir y eludir al enemigo en lugar de salir a su encuentro. Está, pues, la comedia muchos más al servicio de la supervivencia que de la moral; más al servicio del pequeño personaje que somos todos cada día frente al espejo, que al de las grandes ideas. Por eso son tradicionalmente hostiles a la comedia los moralistas de todos los tiempos. Y cuenta con el favor del público con menos prejuicios culturales, ideológicos y morales.
La comedia está mucho más cerca de la biología que de la religión, lo que es para el espectador sumamente agradable, pues le libera de muchas de sus pulsiones y le sirve de válvula de escape a la presión ideológica que ha de soportar diariamente en su existencia, en choque constante contra la realidad. De una forma indirecta, la comedia se entiende con muchos de sus reprimidos deseos y les da la razón, lo que produce, lógicamente, en la carnalidad del espectador una cierta euforia.
Por eso a la buena comedia nunca le ha faltado ni le ha de faltar público, ya que éste la necesita como elemento de compensación y de venganza frente a sus muchas opresiones sufridas en la vida.”

Arqueología del texto

Se denomina ecdótica o crítica textual a la ciencia que tiene por cometido editar textos de la forma más fiel posible al original o a la voluntad del autor. Para ello se vale de ciencias auxiliares como la codicología, la paleografía y la filología. Las ediciones que se realizan con criterios ecdóticos se denominan ediciones críticas o ediciones filológicas.
La ecdótica es de singular importancia para la edición de textos transmitidos de manera fragmentaria o incompleta, cuyo original puede haber desparecido, y de los que sólo poseemos copias que a menudo difieren entre sí. Se aplica a la reconstrucción de textos que han sido deturpados por el paso del tiempo, la tradición manuscrita, la pérdida de originales, la ausencia de copias fiables, etc. Desde este punto de vista, la ecdótica puede considerarse la arqueología del texto.
He aquí un ejemplo que aparece en un artículo titulado: ‘EDITAR EL TEATRO DEL FÉNIX DE LOS INGENIOS’ de Maria Grazia Profeti, de la Università degli Studi di Firenze, en el IV Congreso Internacional Lope de Vega: El Lope “de senectute” (2002), organizado por el Grupo de Investigación Prolope.
En la Dama boba, Liseo llega a la casa de Otavio para conocer a su prometida Finea; asistimos a un intercambio de cumplidos entre el viejo padre y el pretendiente:
          Otavio       ¿Cómo venís del camino?
          Liseo         Con los deseos enoja;
                           que siempre le hacen más largo                  (vv. 935-37)
Esta es la lectura, basada en el ms. autógrafo, que todas las ediciones modernas repiten. 
Nota: en el manuscrito de Lope de Vega, el texto mencionado aparece así:

Ya resulta evidente cómo los editores han interpretado el fragmento: el camino parece más largo, y “enoja”, “aburre”, cuando se tienen deseos de llegar. De la primera oración a la segunda el sujeto cambia: el de la primera es “camino” (el camino enoja con los deseos), derivado de la interrogación anterior; el de la segunda es “deseos” (los deseos hacen más largo el camino); existen dos verbos distintos, “enojar” y “hacer”; el “que” tiene valor causal: “pues los deseos hacen siempre el camino más largo”. Con esto Liseo aparece como un novio impaciente. 
Pero en el texto que nos transmite la Parte IX de Lope el fragmento reza:
          Otavio        ¿Cómo venís del camino?
          Liseo          Con los deseos en hoja,
                            que siempre le hacen más largo.

Y el significado cambia radicalmente: los deseos que están naciendo (es decir, que no han llegado a su cumbre, que no han florecido, ni han dado fruto) hacen el camino más largo. El “que” es ahora relativo; la puntuación tendrá por lo tanto que cambiar, y bastará una coma para separar la relativa de la oración principal, que se tendrá que interpretar como regida por un verbo implícito, consiguiente del verso anterior y de la pregunta de Otavio: “Yo vengo con los deseos en hoja”. Con esta afirmación el prometido se muestra bastante tibio hacia Finea; y en efecto le vemos arrepentido de su pacto matrimonial desde que se entera, en los vv. 117-184, de que se trata de una dama muy poco inteligente. Así, bajo una fórmula de cumplido y con una evidente dilogía, Liseo sugiere lo que había afirmado rotundamente en los vv. 175-176: “Que me ha de matar, sospecho / si es necia”. No hace falta que subraye que esta segunda lectura, la más refinada desde un punto de vista interpretativo, desde el ecdótico tiene carácter de difficilior.

Hasta aquí el ejemplo de la profesora Profeti. Desde luego si este es el trabajo de edición ecdótica, lo menos difficilior es el nombre.
Pero me parece un trabajo divertido, enfin.