Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation by Jodi Campbell (review)

100 Reviews D D D D D example of the irrationality and blindness displayed by lovers who follow the Petrarchan model” (206). Periandros-Persiles’ internal mental potrait of the “true” Sigismunda is shown, on the other hand, to represent the “reciprocal and matrimonial” love espoused by the Council of Trent (213). While overall the article could have benefited from closer proofreading, it nonetheless represents a well-thoughtout study. Frederick de Armas concludes the volume with a look at ekphrasis in Cervantes’s interlude, El retablo de las maravillas. Beginning with a discussion of the Renaissance theater of memory, he explores the vivid images incorporated into the performance and shows how “Chirinos and Chanfalla use the ‘magic’ of the art of memory to deceive” and to “mock the mystical theater of memory” (219). De Armas then analyzes the parallels between the array of images in the interlude and the art collectionism that was so important in Spain. The critic dedicates the majority of subsequent analysis to the interlude’s image of Salome, comparing it to two paintings of the Biblical figure by Titian. In an imaginative approach that invites further inquiry into some of the issues that emerge, De Armas discusses questions of authorship, perspective, and religious purity as they play out in both play and painting. Overall, this excellent volume will prove useful to those interested in the fields of early modern literature and/or visual art. The variety of perspectives presented, as well as the range of material analyzed, will provide a great deal of resources and food for thought for others engaged in studies of the relationship between the verbal and the visual. JuliaL.Farmer University of West Georgia Campbell,Jodi. Monarchy,PoliticalCulture,andDramainSeventeenthCentury Madrid: Theater of Negotiation. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. HB. 176 pp. ISBN 9780754654186. On one level, Jodi Campbell’s book offers readers a sweeping history of Golden Age theater, one that acknowledges the comedia’s “mixed heritage in both popular and elite cultural traditions” (31) and that traces an arc from the earliest religious dramas of the sixteenth century to the “demise” of the comedia at the end of the seventeenth century (148). On another level, however, Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid is an extremely focused treatise, one that examines a delimited corpus of texts written Reseñas 101 D D D D D by just four playwrights—Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, and Juan Bautista Diamante— and that challenges what Campbell characterizes as the prevailing but erroneous notion that the comedia largely functioned as “a form of propaganda to stabilize and reinforce the existing [social and political] order” (9). Countering the work of critics like José Antonio Maravall, Campbell contends that “the public theater was not used by the monarchy as part of its campaign of self-representation” and that “other sectors of society did have an interest in generating and considering alternative (though not necessarily opposing) representations of royalty” (65). Through an analysis of the way in which the most popular plays of the fifty-year period between 1630 and 1680 problematize the exercise of kingly power, Campbell argues that these plays reveal “a concern about potential abuses of royal authority and the possible (if limited) solutions available to subjects whose rights and liberties were threatened by the increasing power of the monarchy” (140). For Campbell, Spanish monarchs (at least on stage) “possessed absolute power only as long as everyone agreed that they possessed absolute power” (7). Indeed, she even makes the Jeffersonian—or at least proto-Jeffersonian—claim that “the solution of the comedia is to underline the argument that kings have authority only because it is given to them by their subjects” (140). Hence, she ultimately sees these mid-seventeenth-century comedias not as royal propaganda but as cautionary tales against the social dangers of monarchical tyranny (99, 107). Campbell constructs her arguments around three intersecting lines of inquiry spread across five chapters. The best—and most extended—of these is her historical overview of early modern Spanish political culture. This is to be expected, of course, given her formal training as a historian. Campbell’s socio-political...