The Play of Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderón de la Barca (review)

158BCom, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Summer 1993) Greer, Margaret Rich. The Play ofPower: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderón de la Barca. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Hardbound , xii + 256 pp. 3 plates. 19 figures. $39.50. In the attempt to rescue Calderón's court dramas from academic marginalization and interpretative blindness, scholars and critics began, starting with Valbuena Prat and Chapman, a serious reexamination of basic assumptions and prejudgments which are, in fact, the preeminent metacritical theme. Greer's contribution to this now generally accepted revisionist position lies in two areas. By stressing Calderón's "coherent use of the newest dramatic techniques" (4), she places these works in their proper historical and European context and thereby guides our understanding and appreciation of the Baroque spectacle as a collaborative artistic endeavor involving dramatist, scenographer, and composer. Moreover, her particular approach complements Amadei-Pulice's study in Calderón y el Barroco of Italian influences on the Spanish adaptation of recitative and perspective scenery. Greer dedicates the major portion of her study to the analysis "of a complex discourse of power that combined celebration of the monarch with a tactful critique of his policy" (4). Her claim that these two aspects constitute "Calderón's greatest achievements in these spectaculars" (4), however, is open to debate. Underlying Greer's critical discourse one discovers a tension between the "determinate" meanings these texts are claimed to have had within their historical context and what is generally accepted as their signifying function, one not hostage to a particular place or time. For historical critics and criticism ground their hermeneutical task upon a transcendental signified that yields concrete, verifiable knowledge. I will give one example of the practical consequences of this tension. On analyzing Fieras afemina Amor, she states: "Read as a self-enclosed text, the play seems a strange work at best; it becomes comprehensible, however, when read in reference to the political situation of its day" (168-69). This statement reveals the critical framework of the study, and the resultant methodology consciously attempts to constrain the signifying function. Although Greer opens to inspection some of the codes inscribed in the court spectacular , thereby initiating a fruitful critical discourse, she claims to "go beyond [the prior] mediated reading of the myth plays" (6). By accepting "the hermeneutical practices traditionally applied to classical myth" (6; emphasis added), she appears, at the beginning, to free herself of historicism 's absolutes, but in fact Greer only admits the products of "a her- Reviews159 meneutic tradition of bounded pluralism" (123; emphasis added). What constitutes this "bounded pluralism"? In the study of La estatua de Prometeo, she illustrates three basic texts of the court spectacular: 1) the text of royal power, 2) the political text, and 3) a particular text. The first deals fundamentally with the display of dynastic and monarchic power and wealth and attempts to validate the privileges and responsibilities conferred on the ruler by divine providence. The second addresses the contemporary relevance of a play to the political events of the day. And the third flows from the "deliberately created polysémie structure" (123). However, since Greer denies that Calderón "intended to write an 'open' text in the twentieth-century sense oftotal relativism" (123), we are left to wonder whether "bounded pluralism" is really another term for historically justified and verifiable interpretations. The prejudicial terms applied to the dramatic worlds possible in the particular text reveal Greer's preference for the "determinate meanings" of her first two texts and suspicion of what cannot be traced to a transcendental signified, in other words, the historicists' absolutes. By not dealing satisfactorily, in her mind, with the mythic resonances of her own "particular" text, Greer creates a counter discourse, stating that the ending of Prometeo is "inorganic" and "rather violently unsatisfying " (227:n28). This issue leads me to ask: What is the ultimate ground of the political text? Is it not that significance which each spectator or reader discovers and is then able to apply to a variety of circumstances, social, political , and personal? In the last analysis, the human value and reference of a dramatic text do not ultimately depend on its unique historical context or...