Looking at the Comedia in the Year of the Quincentennial. Proceedings of the 1992 Symposium on Golden Age Drama at the University of Texas, El Paso, March 18-21 (review)

138BCom, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Summer 1995) under the editor's rather than the playwright's name or the play's title. Lastly , collaborative authorship of editions or articles is listed under the works of the first author's name rather than as a separate entry following his/her works. This mixing of entries may initially lead readers to overlook some works, but cross-checking should rectify this problem. In annotating the entries, the compilers indicate that the length ofthe entry serves as a relative guide to its importance (2.8). Yet they also point out that the absence of a commentary does not necessarily mean that the work is of no importance. Rather, it may indicate an article or book which they were unable to obtain. This situation is most acute in the case ofnineteenthcentury German doctoral theses and in some articles which appeared in Latin American journals (2.9). While inclusion ofthese elusive texts bespeaks a thoroughness ofapproach, it also raises other questions. Are these works, in fact, available at all? If they are, are they worth the effort to search for them? In the avowed admission that length of commentary indicates importance of a work, how is one to interpret no commentary at all? Finally, in the absence of other published articles and books which demonstrably are available but not listed in this bibliography, what is the researcher to surmise? Cursory comparison of this bibliography with the annual compilation by the Bulletin of the Comediantes reveals other lacunae in works on the auto sacramental. Does their absence from Cilveti and Arellano's work indicate lack of importance, oversight, or inappropriateness to the overall intent ofthe bibliography? While these are legitimate questions to raise, they should in no way detract from the excellent work done in this publication. It is a very useful reference for those undertaking both the preparation of critical editions of Calderón's autos sacramentales and those researching the subject for the first time. Elizabeth Teresa Howe Tufts University Looking at the Comedia in the Year ofthe Quincentennial. Proceedings of the 1992 Symposium on Golden Age Drama at the University of Texas , El Paso, March 18-21. Barbara Mujica, Sharon D. Voros, editors; Matthew D. Stroud, assistant editor. Lanham, MD: University Press ofAmerica, 1993. Paper. 261 pp. Appropriately, five studies on "Spain and the New World" begin this Reviews139 volume. Thomas Benedetti focuses on two plays treating Cortés and the modification of sources therein, while Thomas E. Case points out parallels between the portrayal of el indio and el moro as "the Other" in the Comedia . Two studies share in common the analysis of discourses. Viviana Diaz Balsera presents a fine theoretical approach to the discourse of the colonized as opposed to the discourse ofthe colonizer in Ercilla's La Araucana and Lope's Arauco domado. Maria E. Moux argues that in the Entremés del Platillo thepicaro, although a marginalized figure, serves the dominant discourse of aristocratic Spain by mocking the ambitions of the indiano, who holds bourgeois values and attempts to rise in society through New World means. Finally, R. Shannon studies the stage machinery used in Lope's El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón and Calderón's La aurora en Copacabana. A second section treats "Staging the Comedia: Then and Now." Margaret Hicks argues that the limited staging in early Lope required recourse to the imagination and was due to "the physical limitations ofthe corral stage and the restricted size of the acting companies" (p. 69). She identifies dialogue , visual cues and offstage sound effects as techniques used in early Lope to support the presence of an invisible world (p. 74). Dawn Smith, focusing on the work of Adrian Mitchell and in particular Mitchell's translation of La vida es sueño, considers the art of translating the Comedia into English. Among the four essays on "Feminist and Gender Studies," notable are Brenda Krebs' on the metaphor of gambling in terms of seventeenth-century sociology in Tirso's La villana de Vallecas, Sara A. Taddeo's insightful essay on gender issues in Pérez de Montalbán's La monja alférez, and Sharon D. Voros...