In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

REVIEWS Morrison, Robert R. Lope de Vega and the Comedias de santos. Ibérica 33. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. 420 pp. This volume is a revision of Robert R. Morrison's 1963 dissertation "Sainthood in the Theater of Lope de Vega." It consists of three parts: a discussion of the concept of sainthood, a review of the dramatic precursors of the comedia de santos, and very detailed summaries of twenty-five of Lope de Vega's comedias. Chapter 1 examines two prominent forces in seventeenth-century Spanish life: Religion and Lope de Vega. Religion, Morrison observes, permeated all aspects of life, while Lope's work captured the essential beliefs, concerns, and ideas of the age and exercised a powerful influence on the people of the Golden Age. Chapter 2 analyzes the popularity of the comedia de santos. Morrison attributes their popularity to the persistence of medieval elements in Spanish culture and sees the comedia de santos as a direct descendant ofmedieval sacred drama. Chapter 3 discusses sainthood from Early Christianity to modern popular devotion while touching on topics such as the veneration of the saints, the beatification and canonization processes, and the hierarchy of saints. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the dramatic and non-dramatic precursors of the Lope's comedias de santos, such as liturgical drama, early religious drama in the vernacular, the Bible, manuscripts, and narratives of the lives of saints. Chapter 6 examines Lope's conception of the saint by identifying different roles which saints portray in his plays. 155 156BCom, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002) The main body of the volume is Chapter 7. This chapter consists of detailed summaries of twenty-five of Lope's comedias de santos. Each lists the characters, summarizes the acts, and concludes with some observations on the identity and quality of the saint or saints portrayed in the play, its theology, miracles, and other aspects of the play. Each summary also cites recent critical works on the plays. Although this book represents an important contribution to the study of the comedia de santos, it is dated. The majority of the text comes directly from the 1963 dissertation, and, even though Morrison mentions recent works on the comedia de santos by authors such as Aparicio Maydeu, Bastianutti, Dassbach, and Sirera, he does not incorporate them into his analysis. Overall, I have reservations about what this book omits as well as what it discusses. Its major omission, which is common to many of the early works on the comedia de santos, is a clear definition of the comedia as a subgenre. Morrison considers all plays which contain saints or sacred characters, regardless of whether they are pious, allegorical, theological, or biblical, as examples of the comedia de santos. At the same time, this absence of a clear understanding of the comedia de santos as a subgenre, especially its relationship to contemporaneous works, its characteristic types of saints, and its conventions for demonstrating sainthood, leads Morrison to several incorrect conclusions . For example, Morrison criticizes comedias for "perpetuating a pattern of medieval thinking in Spain" (93). But this misconception rests on a failure to see that the comedia de santos has a greater affinity with the secular drama of the Golden Age than with the sacred drama of the Medieval period. Morrison also criticizes many plays because virtues are exaggerated to such a point that the saints appear to be "scarcely human" (92). In point of fact, this exaggeration ofvirtues, which is central to the overt display of sainthood in the course of the play, is a key convention of the genre. Elsewhere, he maintains that comedias are characterized by a lack of unity and plot, illogical situations and characters , implausibility, and gruesome elements, which again reflect his failure to understand the dramatic and religious conventions Reviews157 and typology of saints that rule this subgenre. The bibliography of this volume is fairly complete, containing references to almost all the important works on the comedia de santos. This volume is also a useful source for lists of characters, identities of saints, and plot summaries for twenty-five of Lope's plays. For these reasons, I would recommend it as a reference and a complement...

pdf

Share