Hispanic Essays in Honor of Frank P. Casa (review)

Reviews1&3 work of scholars in English and French. As late arrivals, we have the advantage of avoiding certain pitfalls that our counterparts have already experienced. By posing questions appropriate to our own field, the future may rest in our ability to juxtapose queer theory with literary studies on race, class, and ethnicity. Rather than leading us to shun the concept of agency that many have done in other fields, queer theory can become an integral part of diverse, microhistorical approaches to the study of people's lives and the comedia. If we pursue this direction, then we might breathe new life into queer theory by naming it for ourselves. Sidney Donnell Lafayette College Hispanic Essays in Honor ofFrank P. Casa. Ed. A. Robert Lauer and Henry W. Sullivan. Ibérica. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 481 pp. This excellent volume is a cornucopia of information which touches on various aspects of Golden Age literature, principally theatre. With a range of topics from sexuality in the Amadis (Bruno Damiani) to the biblical theme of Joseph in the theatre (Michael McGaha), and including the New World as well as the Old, this collection makes for stimulating reading. The list of contributors is a Who's Who of Hispanists currently engaged in the study of the period, and the articles, as might be expected, are of uniformly high calibre, so much so, that to distinguish any individual articles from the total of 37 might give the wrong impression . Nevertheless, certain studies stand out for their novel approach, their breadth, or their subject matter. The volume begins with an editors' preface which is untypical in that it deals not with Frank Casa as Hispanist, but as a colleague , friend, and mentor. The body of the book is divided into six sections dealing with: Early Drama and Golden Age Prose, the Theatre of Lope de Vega (including three articles on Fuenteovejuna), Tirso de Molina (including three on El burlador de Sevilla), Calderón de la Barca, Other Dramatists, and ending 184BCom, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002) with a series of articles which fall outside the scope of these other sections, under the heading of General Studies on Drama. Here we find the bookend studies of Catherine Connor (Swietlicki) and Michael Ruggiero, "Toward a New Socio-cultural Theory of Baroque Theatre" and "Toward a Reader's Protocol for a More Comprehensive View of the Role of the Character in the Comedia," respectively. These two articles urge the reader of the comedia to look more deeply and broadly into the social and political message conveyed and into the relationship between motivation and action of the characters. Connor's study is, in her words, a "rethinking" of José Antonio Maravall's "baroque theory " which sees the seventeenth-century theatre as a form of propaganda , an attempt to control the chaos resulting from the upheaval in society. Connor admits a more complex use of theatre which is at once propagandistic and subversive, particularly in the characterisation of the gracioso and many female characters . For his part, Ruggerio explores the issues of superficiality and profundity in characterisation in the comedia as related to the directive enseñar y deleitar, concluding that the characters must be viewed in relationship to their role in the individual comedia and its structure, theme, and action. There are other articles which attract attention even in the excellent company they keep, and they do so independently of the "importance" or popularity of the subject matter treated. George Shipley's paper on Chapter 20, Part I of the Quijote, for example, takes up again a thread he has explored elsewhere and vividly communicates Cervantes's use of humour as he instructs his readers in the great lessons of life. Similarly intriguing is Charlotte Stern's article on the illustrations of Peter Breugel and early folk theatre and her suggestion that we might profitably use a study of carnival as a guide to deepening our understanding of the early dramatists' use of popular tradition. Two studies explore the boundaries of readership and audience reaction: Thomas O'Connor's study of Juan Guerrero Zamora's film version of Fuenteovejuna and Susan Fischer's article on the staging of The Merchant...