Alegorías del Poder: Crisis Imperial y Comedia Nueva (1598-1659). by Carreño-Rodríguez, Antonio (review)

Though the extent of Spain’s decline during the seventeenth century has been contested in works such as Henry Kamen’s Imagining Spain: Historical Myth and National Identity (Yale UP, 2008) or Christopher Storrs’s The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy 1665-1700 (Oxford UP, 2006), it is undeniable that the first half of the seventeenth century in Spain was fraught with political instability and punctuated by military conflict. Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez’s Alegorías del poder: crisis imperial y comedia nueva (1598-1659) takes pains to contextualize the emergence of the comedia nueva, both historically and textually, in this highly conflictive period.

Comfortably placed in a tradition of sociopolitical scholarship that has in the last few decades tried to disentangle the tensions and negotiations between hegemonic power and cultural production in early modern Spain, it may be said that Carreño-Rodríguez’s monograph is a detailed and nuanced intertextual study of an aspect of the rhetoric of dissent through the use of theatrical allegory. The commentary meticulously justifies playwrights’ need for rhetorical indirection when aiming for satire, by accounting for the contemporary dialogue that ensues among extant moralizing texts, heraldic literature, political treatises, and alarmist projections on the part of arbitristas. Disregarding competing cultural discourses on the crisis of power regularly dismissed by the monarchy, the author’s analysis hinges instead on the works of Juan de Mariana and Pedro de Rivadeneira. The author’s expressed purpose is “leer los dramas desde su concepción literaria, estableciendo múltiples referencias entre el léxico, las imágenes poéticas, el espacio y el tiempo histórico en el que se sitúan y representan” (30). Thus, at the center of Carreño-Rodriguez’s analysis is the interplay between comedia and allegory as the central form of articulation of criticism and pronouncements on political power. In his perceptive analysis of the functions of this rhetorical figure in the comedia, Carreño-Rodríguez recognizes the tension between its uses as instrument of universal conformity or moralization and as the chief weapon of satire. Given the wide range of dramatic texts in the first half of the seventeenth century that explore thematically the crisis and morality of power, the author opts for selecting plays by canonical authors—Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca—dedicating a chapter to each and recognizing that the exercise would be equally productive in the study of other authors (Guillén de Castro, Mira de Amescua, and Bances Candamo) or even other genres and traditions (from film to Brecht) (226). Carreño-Rodríguez’s analysis of the chosen texts challenges reductive readings of the kind historically adopted in debates—the Calderón casticista, the Lope monárquico, the Tirso moralizante—by showing how these authors create opportunities for censure, criticism, satire, or dissent through their use of allegory.

According to Carreño-Rodríguez, the sense of spatial and temporal dislocation inherent in allegory provided early modern dramatic authors with the desired distance from which to launch moralizing condemnations as well as satirical attacks. As the author concludes, “Tal corpus, pues, es la expresión dramática de una época en crisis cuyos ingenios buscan poner freno al desorden que advierten en muchos aspectos de la vida española de esta época” (226). While such assertion may seem far from revolutionary or perhaps modest as a premise, given the wealth of studies and projects that currently deal with representations of power in early modern theatre—María Luisa Lobato’s grupo PROTEO or the 2012 GRISO congress are current examples—Carreño-Rodríguez’s study offers the reader an unflinching attention to text and a meticulous and extensive corpus of critical documentation. This takes issue with “incomplete and questionable” methodological approaches that focus on speculation about authorial perspectives drawn from the dramatic text rather than...