Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage

Introduction

1 Introduction The hero of this book—if a scholarly work can be said to have a central protagonist—is an actor; or, better yet, a series of actors . But this collective hero does not represent a particular group of known individuals. This book is neither a biography nor a history per se, despite the fact that a number of historical figures will make an appearance. At the same time, this serial hero cannot really be called a “collective” protagonist either. Although one of the things I will certainly examine throughout the course of this book is what scholars commonly refer to as the oral tradition, and although I will engage many of the performance texts associated with this tradition, I have very little use for the notion of folklore and even less for the ideologies of the Volksgeist. I will make no attempt to generalize about what might be called the “Spanish temperament,” nor will I privilege a romanticized version of the underclass in order to comment on its discursive resistance to the aristocracy. Instead, the hero of this book is the street performer—a protean figure I will generically call the jongleur—whose multifaceted work can be traced across time and space, and whose performance has always entailed a great deal more than just the recitation of oral poetry. Of course, the hero of the early Spanish stage has not always been the performer.1 During most of its venerable history , traditional comedia scholarship has assigned the lead role not to the theatrical comediante—whom it has tended to relegate to the status of bit player—but to the literary playwright. For critics in the mold of Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Dámaso Alonso, Américo Castro, Alexander Parker, and Bruce Wardropper, what makes the comedia worthy of study is the intricacy of its poetry, the profundity of its theology, and the 2 Introduction subtlety of its psychological representation of the Spanish national character. For traditional critics, the story of the early Spanish stage begins with the experimental literary works of Juan del Encina, Gil Vicente, and Bartolomé de Torres Naharro; proceeds through the establishment of the mature comedia form by Lope de Vega and his school of like-minded dramatists ; and culminates in the refined philosophical and theological plays of Calderón de la Barca (after which time Spanish theater is said to fall into a steep decline from which it has never fully recovered). For traditional scholars, the history of the early Spanish stage is really the account of a particular type of Iberian literary genius best revealed in the pages of carefully edited critical editions. And within this literary trajectory, the contribution of the actor (if noted at all) is more likely than not to involve a discussion of the ways in which real-world theatrical production tends to detract from—rather than add to—a full realization of the artistic potential inscribed within the pages of Golden Age drama. The past four decades, however, have seen the rise of two significant changes in the study of the early Spanish theater, both of which have served to move the actor from the theatrical periphery to center stage. First, beginning in the 1960s a new generation of theater practitioners and critics—informed by a keen interdisciplinary spirit and following in the footsteps of Constantin Stanislavski, Bertolt Brecht, and Antonin Artaud—began to create a field that has come to be known as performance theory. Borrowing tools from anthropology, sociology , and linguistics (including speech-act theory), writers such as Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Marvin Carlson, and Judith Butler have not only diminished the importance of the literary text in the study of theater, but have also shifted the entire focus of study away from the traditional stage itself and toward a much more expansive view of performance, one that includes everything from shamanistic ritual to political protest movements.2 Second , paralleling the establishment of Golden Age theater festivals at El Chamizal National Memorial in El Paso, Texas, in 1975 and in Almagro, Spain, in 1978, a new generation of Hispanists has also turned its attention away from the literary text, focusing instead on the material culture that surrounded 3 Introduction and sustained the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century corral stage. Scholars as diverse as Andrés Amorós, José María Díez Borque, Catherine Larson, Rogelio Miñana...