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Reviewed by:
  • The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain
  • Leigh K. Mercer
Keywords

Spain, Nineteenth Century, Theater, Copyright, Authorship, Lisa Surwillo, The Stages of Property, Leigh K. Mercer, The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain, the Middle Class

Lisa Surwillo. The Stages of Property: Copyrighting Theatre in Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2007.

Scholars have long argued that the entanglements presented on the stages of nineteenth-century Spanish theaters revealed the concerns and anxieties of a burgeoning middle class. In her recent book, Lisa Surwillo offers a unique departure from questions of stage and performance to address another set of bourgeois concerns—those behind-the-scenes legal and economic interests that altered the course of Spanish theater. Surwillo charts the development of literary property in Spain, arguing that there are three distinct stages of copyright for Spanish theater. Drawing on vast archival research of newspapers from contemporary Madrid, government archives, and original play editions, Surwillo outlines the evolution of the theater from an institution grounded in spectacle to one built on publication and reading, thereby explaining the birth of the modern Spanish author.

Surwillo’s premise is that the history of printing Spanish plays and the publication standards associated with this practice speak volumes on the state of the nation. Particularly, she distinguishes the establishment of the derecho de autor from that of copyright in the Anglo Saxon tradition to stress the importance of the personality of the poet in Spain above and beyond the value of the text and control of its reproduction. On numerous occasions, Surwillo returns to a particular incident, that of the premiere of El trovador in 1836, when the anonymous [End Page 249] playwright Antonio García Gutiérrez became the first author to be called to the stage after a performance and recognized with a standing ovation. For Surwillo, this sea change signals the beginning of a first period of literary property in Spain, as it begat a public campaign for copyright law in the public sphere and eventually led the monarchy to enact a first copyright decree in 1837. Surwillo deftly ties this shift to a parallel one occurring in the political economy, that of Mendizabal’s order to disentail the property of the Catholic Church and the land reforms that resulted from this process.

Building upon the foundational moment of literary property law, Surwillo examines the new literary marketplace fostered by copyright throughout the remainder of the century. Chronicling the newfound conception of authorship as an alienable good, the altered relationship between dramatic poets and their publishers, the rise of the figure of the editor as literary baron, and the implications of new forms of publication, particularly the Galerías dramáticas, allows Surwillo ample opportunity to examine the formation of a national culture through theater. Furthermore, some of Surwillo’s greatest insights are offered when tracing the connections between the development of literary property in Spain and other cultural revelations of the nineteenth-century. Her suggestion that the creation of the art gallery and the redesign of the commercial shop window are parallel developments to that of the literary marketplace both broadens the scope of the book and highlights how in the nineteenth century modernizing processes regularly crossed or transcended traditional boundaries. Finally, Surwillo even returns to questions of performance to show how ideas of authorship and the concept of copyright came full circle and began to alter how Spanish plays were performed, as directors and actors were forced to increasingly respect the primacy of the fixed text in the latter half of the century.

Overall, The Stages of Property is clearly written and very well organized. Eight pages of illustrated documentation and a meticulously crafted appendix containing petitions and royal decrees on literary property accompany Surwillo’s text. While the book’s main focus is on the processes of commercialization and industrialization that affected nineteenth-century Spanish theater, and therefore the bulk of Surwillo’s documentation is drawn from press clippings and the historical archive, the inclusion of more material from plays of the day would have served to strengthen her argument. Plays from the Romantic period particularly, including El trovador but also Don Juan Tenorio and...

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