Rural Revisions of Golden Age Drama: Performance of History, Production of Space by Elena García-Martín (review)

IN THIS UNIQUE STUDY, ELENA GARCíA-MARTíN proposes to chart new territory within Golden Age drama studies by focusing on play festivals in four small Spanish communities that provide the settings of famous comedias: Fuente Obejuna, Zalamea, Calahorra, and Garray. The four central chapters of the book discuss these locales and their relation to, respectively, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna, Pedro Calderón de la Barca's El alcalde de Zalamea, Francisco de Rojas Zorilla and Antonio Coello's Los tres blasones de España, and Miguel de Cervantes's Numancia.

García-Martín focuses on "rural, peripheral, and nonacademic communities as interpreters of the Golden Age tradition" (ix) and "the role of Early Modern cultural heritage in the construction of contemporary sociopolitical identities" (x). She is particularly interested in those festivals that "boast of popular participation and emphasize theater as a means to the cultural empowerment of local residents" rather than those that are "generated by official initiatives, bent on attracting academic or professional attention" (x). The author asserts that these towns "largely continue to be believed literary creations in the popular imaginary" and that their residents thus feel a certain "cultural marginalization" due to "their erasure from history and space" (xv). She sets out to demonstrate that the festivals "represent for the localities involved a process of resistance against spatial erasure and a positive creation of place" (xv) and concludes that "the study of past performances indicates that the power of classical plays to fashion and express collective memory, or to shape cultural or historical understanding, is rarely efficiently harnessed through top-down initiatives bent on the diffusion of ideological agendas rather than on the articulation of popular experience" (xii).

Chapter 2 of the study, which examines Calderón's El alcalde de Zalamea, presents the most successful model of a community asserting local identity through performance. García-Martín maintains that the 2003 Zalamean production of the play shows "the subordination of authorial intent to readers' interpretations and the increased proximity of the text to the realm of local lived experience" (65). She describes popular elements added by director Miguel Nieto to the performances she attended: residents are empowered by the inclusion of their horses, donkeys, doves, and sheep in the play. The animals symbolize not only the humility of the villagers but also their stubborn defiance in the face of the arrogance and might of the occupying soldiers. Before performances, cast members recreate a 1580s market in the square, where residents portray their own ancestors as vendors selling hay, dough, and embroidery, musicians playing ballads, and jesters clowning to entertain the crowd. A regional troupe dances the jota extremeña to frame the performance and plays and sings throughout the action. The author additionally highlights certain moments in the performance in which an identification between local actor, audience, and the collective protagonist of the play takes place. These details evince how "the social character of the festival and the experience of the participants take precedence over the celebration of the text as part of the national literary tradition" (67).

In Garray, site of the ruins of Numancia, a team of archaeologists from Madrid provides local residents with information on what really happened at the historic siege. García-Martín concludes that "residents in Garray are content with admitting the naiveté of local knowledge and adopting the official academic discourse" on the historical reality of Numancia. The author offers anecdotes of locals enlightened and empowered by this knowledge as evidence of a "degree of internalization of the past on the part of the locals" (159). García-Martín maintains that the performances demonstrate a "local reappropriation of a historical truth" (158); however, it is unclear how the productions demonstrate this, since she does not include a detailed description or analysis of actual performances.

The other communities featured in the book do not...