Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age by Anthony J. Cascardi (review)

Reviews Part three offers descriptions of exemplary courses and specific commentary on how to set up performance-based coursework by scholars such as Lois Potter. Elise Ann Earthmann has excellent suggestions about how to prepare students to read Shakespeare, and Cyndiia Lewis offers a detailed description ofhow her students financed and mounted a full production. Part four is particularly valuable for its incotporation ofa survey or film and electronic resources with suggestions about how to use excerpts ofvideos efficiently. Moreover, there are extensive definitions offilm terms and types ofelectronic and computer-accessed resources and how to locate them. This section does not condescend, but it also does not assume that teachers are aware ofhow rapidly on-line resources are expanding. Reading this section is a very useful review of what is available and in what format. Finally, there are sixty pages ofannotated guides to American acting companies, festivals with academic affiliations, classroom editions of Shakespeare, film and video resources and publishers' addresses. Teachers will find that there are professional theaters with frequent performances ofShakespeare not listed here which will also be helpful in teaching. For example, Wisconsin teachets take students to the Milwaukee Repertory Theatet, the Chicago Shakespeare Theatet, and the American Players Theatet in Spring Green. There is also the fun, although commercial and ahistofical, of Renaissance Faits that often excite students to continue their study ofthe early modern period. Riggio's collection is a splendid volume in both its scholarly depdi and encyclopedic range. It is especially effective in insisting that a holistic approach to Shakespeare in classroom performance will lead to students reading texts more closely and to fuller understanding ofdrama as a genre involving playwright, actots , and audience in which every performance can be seen as itselfresearch into the meaning ofthe play. Teachets can lead their students into deepet intellectual and theoretical engagement with the issue ofwhat constitutes a text and to active discovery of negotiated meaning in literature. %? AnthonyJ. Cascardi. Ideologies ofHistory in the Spanish GoldenAge. University Park: The Pennsylvania State Univetsity Press, 1997. 328p. A. Robert Lauer The University of Oklahoma This recent book by Anthony J. Cascatdi analyzes the formation of the modern subject in assorted literary genres ofearly modern Spain (here, basically, the Spanish Golden Age): drama (Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, Guillen de Castro's Las mocedades del Cid, Tirso de Molina's El burUdor de SevilU, and Pedro Calderón de FALL 2001 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 95 Ia Barcas La vida es sueño), poetry (Garcilaso de la Vega), and prose (Baltasar Gracián's OrácuU manualdeprudencia and Miguel de Cervantes's Los trabajos de PersiUsy Sigismundo). The author proposes that literature is a social force that, on the one hand, reflects rhe tension ofa nation's social structure and, on rhe other, offers solutions to its problems (1). The problems in this case are the two modes of social orientation: one traditional and inflexible (based on rank, blood, and "race"), the other modern and supposedly flexible (based on class, mind, and taste). Cascardi's text relies initially on the sociological works ofAmérico Castro andJosé Antonio Maravall, and, although it claims to appeal to contemporary Marxism to address questions ofclass excluded by the now dated Castro (15), its excursus into thinkers like Hobbes, Descartes, Kant, Weber, Freud, Benjamin, Lacan, Foucault, Gadamer, Bourdieu, Delueze, Kristeva, and others offers conflictive, yet ever so rich original readings of some of the most important works of Renaissance and Baroque Spain. As rhe author propounds: "I renounce the idea that there is a single critical method that can be privileged above all others for the interpretation of these literary texts__ [E]ach offers a distinct perspective on the historical conflicts at work in Golden Age Spain and ... together they reveal the plurality of 'ideologies' implicit in the historical orientations ofits texts" (15). In this reviewer's estimation, the chapters on Gracián (chapter 5), Garcilaso (chapter 9) and Cervantes' Persiles (chapter 10) are simply sterling. They also adhere quite closely to the underlying fundamental idea that these authors advance modern concepts ofsubject-formation based not on external, stratified, and hierarchical orderings but on individualistic, internal, and even moral modes oforientation . Hence, Gracián...