Language and the Comedia: Theory and Practice (review)

Reviews271 What the editors call a curious symbiosis (32) was that of the theatre and its its controllers, the priostes and comisarios of the Cofradía Sacramental de la Parroquia de Santa María la Mayor. They acquired the left half of the corral in 1611 and the whole in 1746, and could select the plays they approved of from the autores' lists. On the other hand they seem to have paid ungrudgingly for repeated structural repairs and transformations, and can have made little profit. The editors delineate the stages of restoration — to the earliest attainable model — engaged in since 1980. There are 44 full-page illustrations of plans and the present state, also reproductions of several nineteenth- and twentiethcentury posters found adhering to the walls. There is a useful thesaurus of constructional terms, and an index nominum of autores. Thanks to the abandonment of Alcalá, then, we have vestiges of a corralas old as Almagro's, a coliseo earlier than the one other survivor (El Escorial), and probably the earliest teatro romántico. 387 years of evolution have produced the only example in Europe of three superimposed types of theatrical structure. Alan Soons State University of New York at Buffalo Larson, Catherine. Language and the Comedia: Theory and Practice. Lewisburg : Bucknell UP, 1991. 181 pp. It has been nearly twenty years since James A. Parr issued a challenge to Golden Age critics by asserting that comedia studies were lacking in concrete applications of methods suggested by recent advances in critical theory ("An Essay on Critical Method, Applied to the Comedia," Hispania 57 [1974] 434-44). This situation has clearly changed with the appearance of several book-length studies that employ a variety of post-structuralist critical approaches . Catherine Larson's is among the best of this new breed: it is a balanced, suggestive, and illuminating application of contemporary critical theory to Golden Age drama. In the Introduction, the author explains that her principal goal is to show how a focus on the specifics of language and communication—an orientation explicitly emphasized by recent theoretical trends—can point the way to new readings of old texts; a brief enumeration of these critical orientations is offered . Chapter 1 uses speech act theory to highlight the self-consciously metalin- 272BCom, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter 1992) guistic aspect of Lope's La dama boba: how language can create and manipulate reality. The process by which the two female protagonists are educated, both linguistically and emotionally, is shown to be an important subtext that reinforces many of the more traditional approaches to this play. In chapter 2, Grice's system of implicit communicative rules is used to describe social and linguistic "deviance" in Rojas Zorrilla's Entre bobos anda el juego. Such deviance is shown to be essential to comedy, whose "central concerns ... are often the points at which communication breaks down and conflicts are defined" (42). Dramatic conflict derives in this play from language 's paradoxical nature: both clarifying and confusing, it has nearly unlimited potential to undo itself. Chapter 3 deals with Ruiz de Alarcón's La verdad sospechosa, focusing specifically on acts of reference and naming. The protagonist's repeated creation and change of identity by way of "self-baptism" serve to undercut his authority, making it difficult for his audience(s) to believe him and finally making him a victim of his own discursive deviance. In this way, the drama provides an explicit criticlue of various social institutions, she honor code in particular. The theoretical basis of chapter 4, on Lope's El caballero de Olmedo, is provided by Wittgenstein's notion of the "language game." The metaphor of the language game is particularly apt for analyzing drama because, like speech act theory, it emphasizes language as discursive action within a specific dialogic context, serving at the same time to highlight the drama's pervasive metalinguistic tendencies, its various forms of "play." In chapter 5, Larson uses a feminist approach in conjunction with a linguistic one to show how Calderón's La dama duende "both upholds and subverts " (95) the literary and cultural traditions which permitted only conventionalized representations and expressions of womanhood. This is accomplished through...