El teatro alegórico de Miguel (Daniel Leví) de Barrios (review)

Reviews371 lar, and totalizing types— derived from a study of Lope's historical comedias . Louise Fothergill-Payne takes advantage of the opportunities offered by the annual Festival of Spanish Classical Theatre at Chamizal to compare the text of Alarcón's El examen de maridos with the play's performance by an all-female cast in 1987, a performance that, in her view, converted the play into farce, to the detriment of the original text. Victor Dixon studies how versification can aid in interpreting the comedia through a close examination ofLope's use ofpolymetry in several ofthe dramatist's most famous plays. The volume concludes with a comprehensive index—an extremely welcome, and all-too-rare, accompaniment to such essay collections. As a whole, this very fine volume, by bringing together such a variety of theoretical approaches and analyses, has performed a real service to comedia scholarship. It should prove as stimulating to future discussion and work as its editors hope. Barbara E. Kurtz Illinois State University Julia Rebollo Lieberman. El teatro alegórico de Miguel (Daniel Levi) de Barrios. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1996. Paper, xix + 234 pp. $17.00. This book, a revision of the author's 1990 Yale Ph.D. dissertation, is a critical study and edition of five allegorical autos by Miguel de Barrios (1635-1701). Born in Montilla and educated as a Catholic, Barrios left his homeland around 1660 —after a relative had been executed by the Inquisition — and spent most of his adult life as a practicing Jew in Amsterdam, where he became well known for his poetry, plays, essays, and historical writings. The first part of the book contains a concise and well documented overview ofthe history of Amsterdam's Sephardic community, the life and works of Barrios, the literary and religious academies of seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and a critical analysis of the ideology and characters of the five autos edited in its second part. The section on the academies is important , because all five of the autos bear the names (in Hebrew) of different academies, and at least three of them were performed at sessions of the academies by the members. These academies were a curious hybrid of the literary academies that proliferated in Renaissance Italy and Spain and the age-old Jewish institutions of religious learning known as yeshivot. Barrios 's autos themselves are a fascinating example of the religious and cui- 372BCom, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Winter 1996) rural syncretism of the Sephardic Jews. The Calderonian auto sacramental would seem to be a quintessentially Catholic genre, yet Barrios adapts it as an instrument ofJewish propaganda. Calderón had often used his autos as a forum for anti-Jewish polemics; Barrios takes this very instrument honed to perfection by Calderón and uses it to defend Judaism and attack Catholicism as idolatrous. In doing so, however, he not only adopts the form perfected by his Catholic adversary, but retains some of his alien, AristotelianScholastic philosophical underpinnings (such as the concept ofnatural law) as well. Lieberman has performed an important service by editing these autos, none of which was hitherto available in a modern edition. The autos are sure to be of interest to scholars of Spanish Golden Age theater and historians of Jewish thought and culture. It is therefore especially disappointing that her edition is flawed in several respects. The notes in the edition consist principally ofthe biblical verses cited by Barrios in marginal annotations to the original text. Lieberman cites these verses from a 1602 edition of Cipriano de Valera's translation, which she argues is the translation Barrios himself used. However, she retains the archaic spelling and punctuation of the 1602 edition, which makes the passages unnecessarily difficult to read. Many passages in Barrios's text which readers who lack detailed knowledge ofthe Bible or of Judaism would find obscure receive no explanation. For example, verses 44 and 45 ofthe auto Jonen Daum read: Al arma, al combate, al aljaba al cañón que apunta de Jehudá, y Joseph, la unión (112). The author annotates the fact that in modern-day Spanish aljaba is feminine , while Barrios treats it as masculine. She does not...