Proceedings of the Second Annual Golden Age Spanish Drama Symposium (review)

148BCom, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Summer 1985) this perspective to add another dimension to the Golden Age writer's artistic representation of reality. John G. Weiger University of Vermont Proceedings of the Second Annual Golden Age Spanish Drama Symposium . El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, March 8-10, 1982. Paper. 143 pp. The Golden Age Drama Symposium, held in conjunction with the Siglo de Oro Drama Festivals at the Chamizal Theater, unites the literary and the dramaturgic approaches to reviving comedia as living theater. The dght papers in this volume may be grouped around two major concerns: the delineation of characters, especially of women, in the comedia and the concrete considerations engaged in the modem staging of Golden Age plays. Ever since the Romantics discovered the individual, critics have faulted the earlier playwrights with indifference toward delineating the characterization of their protagonists. Two studies here address the psychological/literary elucidation of character types in the comedia: Everett Hesse's «The Mother Archetypes in the Comedia,» and Susan Fischer's «The Invisible Partner: A Junglan Approach to Calderón's La dama duende.» Both document the primal psychic matrix from which comedia characters were fabricated into determinate literary types. In«The Women Characters in Lope de Vega's La Discreta enamorada» Vern Williamsen interweaves attention to characterization and performance .challenging A.A. Parker's first principle when he reminds us of the potentialities of character revelation inherent in the actors' technique —a look, a gesture, an inflection can infuse meaning into the dullest line. Drama, he is right to insist, is a «hybrid literary genre... [and] reaches its full potential only in theatrical presentation rather than on the printed page...» Vicente Cantarino, in a provocative paper, «Las mujeres de Lope de Vega: La moza de cántaro, La discreta enamorada,» contends that the female protagonists of these and the other plays of Lope and his successors were woefully inadequate evocations of authentic women. The papers concerning the staging of Golden Age plays include Reviews149 William Oliver's instructive and witty «Lope de Who? A Director's Do's, Don't's, and Headaches,» which is a relation of the difficulties encountered in the translation and direction of La dama boba. The problems range from the coaching of amateur actors into a familiarity with the seventeenth century mind set, to the techniques of presentation, down to the transfer of meaning in translating. Francisco Ruiz Ramón insists in his «Sobre la adaptación del texto clásico: La hija del aire de Calderón» that the need for adaptation arises from the historical distance between the text and the actor/spectator—a distance which for maximum understanding must be suppressed and maintained. Two other papers, Susana Hemández-Aralco's «Texto y espectáculo en La hija del aire...» and Arturo Pérez-Pisonero's «La parodia como solución al conflicto dramático de El viejo celoso,» round out the volume. These studies reaffirm the time worn axiom that the comedia was, first and foremost, a medium ofpopular dramatic entertainment and that consequently the very comprehension of our literary texts depends on retaining a lively awareness of the entire context of their presentation as theater. Through the shifting vision of the generations and the different modes of interpretation there will always be profit in a steady recollection that the interrelationship of the «stage and the page» are deeply enmeshed and mutually enriching. The comedia as literature and as theater has been well served in this Symposium collection. Ruth Lundelius University of Georgia ZIOMEK, HENRYK. A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama. Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, 1984. 246 pp. $25.00 cloth, $10.00 paper. There are numerous pitfalls for the writer of a manual of literature. One can exhaust such terms as first, most, and best, and can carry reductionism to absurd lengths. Generalization, frowned upon in other circles, is a fact of life here. Last, and perhaps least, the author is at the mercy of critics poised to catch the questionable datum, the unqualified detail, the bibliographical omission. In the case of the comedia, the sheer bulk of the dramatic and critical corpus adds to the...