Calderón y la comedia nueva (review)

REVIEWS VALBUENA BRIONES, ANGEL, Calderón y la comedia nueva. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1977. (Colección Austral, 1626.) 268 pp. A good part of the material contained in this volume has been available previously. New insights have nonetheless been incorporated, thus enriching these perceptive studies on structural, thematic and emblematic elements which pervade Calderón's dramatic art. Some essays have been rearranged to provide a more measured progression of the interpretive analyses; others reveal the benefit of Valbuena's reconsiderations. Such re-elaborations are not necessarily mere expansions. For instance, in his essay, «Senequismo,» published a dozen years earlier in his well known Perspectiva crítica de los dramas de Calderón, Valbuena concluded: «Nuestros comentarios han conducido a establecer una substanciosa y redonda conclusión: Calderón recurrió repetidamente a la filosofía y dramaturgia del escritor latino para orientar su estro, y no hubiera podido formular su teatro sin el apoyo evidente de los textos del genial clásico. » In the volume under consideration here, the corresponding essay is titled «Los tópicos de Séneca en el teatro de Calderón» and the earlier generalization with respect to Seneca's centrality no longer appears, a refinement reflected as well in the evolution ofthis essay's title. Reworkings may cause incidental flaws when the evident evolution of the author's thinking does not correspond to the order of the placement of the material. For example, recent scholarship has shown that the comedia, though given its definitive stamp by Lope de Vega, assuredly was not created by him singlehandedly. It is surprising, therefore, to find in the concluding section of Valbuena's book an unequivocal reference to the «comedia nueva introducida por Lope de Vega y su escuela ...» (p. 255). Yet this is evidently not Valbuena's opinion today, as the opening chapter confirms: «Lope de Vega y su escuela lograban el florecimiento de la comedia nueva» (p. 15; emphasis mine). Valbuena accurately supports his carefully chosen words (which emphasize evolution rather than spontaneity as he continues: «En el caso de la comedia nueva, puede señalarse que fue en la década de los ochenta en el siglo XVI cuando se había forjado este tipo dramático ...» (p. 15); the Valencian dramatists «fomentaron el cultivo de lo que llegaría a ser la comedia nueva» (p. 25); Lope de Vega was «el genial poeta que supo elaborar y divulgar la nueva fórmula ...» (p. 26). The comedia nueva as an art form, not merely an investigation of individual plays, is the nucleus around which Valbuena lucidly constructs his analysis of Calderón's dramatic approach. Following upon the presentation of the comedia as an evolving genre and an examination of the essence of 73 74Bulletin ofthe Comediantes Lope's Arte nuevo, Calderón's place in the formulation of the comedias subsequent character leads us to the heart of the matters analyzed by Valbuena . And «formulation» it is indeed, for as Valbuena emphasizes, despite the individualized stamp of each poet, the characteristics of the dramatic art of the writers became formulas for their respective approaches. This is why we may speak of «schools» centering around the giants while concurrently producing works which betray singular sensibilities. The development of the comedia may accordingly be described best not in terms of a unidirectional linear trajectory but as a series of concentric circles, each grouping of circles corresponding to a school or, better still, a ciclo, the groupings in turn overlapping and maintaining circular relationships. This vision of the comedia's gestation and evolution is, in my opinion, a felicitous resolution of a perennial problem. Valbuena's penetration of the historical puzzle permits us to see the comedia from a larger perspective than that ofthe partisan attempt to describe this enormous national productivity as the immediate result of this or that region, group or individual. Valbuena 's breakthrough may be ascribed in part to his view of the matter from a Calderonian rather than a Lopean viewpoint. Such a perspective reduces to academic detail the question of the comedia 's creation in a purely chronological sense and allows us to view the achievement of the Golden Age drama in...