Minutes of the Madison Meeting

BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES Published in the Spring and Fall by the Comediantes, an informal, international group of all those interested in the comedia. Editor Everett W. Hesse University of Wisconsin Madison 6, Wis. Assistant Editor John E. Keller University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, N. C. Subscription: $1 a year (about 1610-1660). Lope de Vega in particular seems to have taken it to heart. Unfortunately , the music for this Number One song on the aureosecular "Hit Parade" is not known to exist. 1ReV. hisp., XIV (1906), 607-10. 2 The dates of the plays mentioned are from Ruth Lee Kennedy, The Dramatic Art of Moreto\ H. W. Hilborn, A Chronology of the Plays of D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca; and, of course, Morley and Bruerton, The Chronology of Lope de Vega's Comedias. 3 "The Versification of the comedias of Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneyra," HR, XVII (1949), 312. * Baltasar Gracián, Oráculo manual, ed. M. Romera -Navarro (Madrid, 1954), p. 506, note 5, My thanks to Professor Robert R. Bishop for this item. Minutes of the Madison Meeting The annual meeting of the Comediantes was held on Tuesday, September 10, in the Memorial Union of the University of Wisconsin . Chairman Rozzell called the discussion meeting to order at 1 1 a.m. The topic was "The Concept of Tragedy in the Golden Age." Professor Webber opened the discussion with a brief review of the antecedents of Golden Age tragedy, in which he pointed out that the tragic elements and techniques of the Lopean theater were already present in the sixteenth century and were merely refined by Lope. Professor Webber's remarks, which«erved as a general introduction of the topic, were followed by short papers on the tragedies of Lope, Tirso, Calderón and Rojas Zorrilla by Professors Helen Sears, McCrary, Valbuena Briones and MacCurdy, respectively . McCrary was unable to attend and his paper was read for him by Miss Kaiser. The time remaining after the reading of the papers was given over to general discussion and commentary from the floor. In her paper on Lope Professor Sears asked the question, "What did Lope mean by 'tragedy'?" and pointed out that he seldom used the term tragedia in connection with his plays, and that in at least one instance he used tragicomedia and tragedia with apparent indifference. She suggested his adherence to the fortuna theme (which she considers to be little more than a convention in the seventeenth century) as a contributory factor in his failure to achieve authentic tragedy. Mr. McCrary's paper called attention to the negative heroic stature of Tirso's tragic protagonists, as exemplified by Don Juan of El burlador de Sevilla and as distinguished from the naïve, innocent lovers of the Celestina . Tirsian tragedy involves the fall of a giant (a tyrant, but not necessarily a villain) and the triumph of honor—human honor, despite the fact that it may be supported by divine intervention. Professor Valbuena enumerated several Aristotelian concepts in the tragedy of Calder ón. These include a definition of tragedy as a series of calamities whose course inspires awe and dismay but which does not necessarily end in death; the classical concept of destiny or fortune, fundamental not only in Calderón but throughout the seventeenth century and manifest, for one example , in the numerous próspera y adversa fortuna suites of that period (in Aristotle, Valbuena recognizes two distinct concepts 18 with regard to the fate of the tragic character : peripecia, or unexpected outcome, and reconocimiento, or unsuspected personality) ; even the element of spectacle, which was developed by Calderón, had its place in the Aristotelian formula. Professor MacCurdy began by recalling Rojas Zorrilla's predilection for tragedy but cautioned that quantity is no measure of quality. He referred to the dramatist's personal misfortunes and observed that for Rojas there is no resolution in religion. Rojas' characters tend to reject outside influence in order to follow their personal motivation . They refuse to bow to superior odds; they exhibit a tragic lack of perception and are led to their own destruction by their headstrong impulsiveness. For MacCurdy, Rojas is essentially Senecan and represents...