Contextualising and Contesting José Antonio Maravall’s Theories of Baroque Culture from the Perspective of Modern-Day Performance

All statements about early modern Spain (including our own) are implicated in wider social and cultural formations even as they constitute the object of study called the Golden Age” (Mariscal, “An Introduction” 19).¹ José Antonio Maravall’s studies of baroque culture rank amongst the most accomplished and influential to emerge in the twentieth century. There is, however, a latent irony in the fact that this self-proclaimed scholar of “la historia social de las mentalidades” often fails (Maravall, La cultura 12), as does much of his readership, to take sufficient account of the specific sociohistorical context from which he wrote and the constitutive influence it had on the way he viewed the past. This article effectively seeks to undertake a Maravallian-style analysis of his work on Golden Age drama that will place specific emphasis on the relationship between his theories and their legacy with the performance and reception of the comedia in Spain during both the dictatorship and the democratic period. I will question whether a greater understanding of the context from which his major works on baroque culture emerged can and/or should be used as a form of contestation and propose some strategies for engaging with his legacy in a constructive manner.

Golden Age Drama as Propaganda Machine

The central tenets of Maravall’s thesis that Spanish baroque drama was a privileged instrument of state orchestrated ideology are sufficiently well known that there is no need to discuss them here in great detail. Broadly speaking, Maravall argues that the comedia sought to universalise the interests of a particular class so that they appeared to be to everyone’s advantage:

Cada uno acepta y es feliz en su puesto: por lo menos así se da a entender en el teatro. Sólo quedan explosiones episódicas y ejemplarizantes, de carácter justiciero, contra el que se ha salido de las obligaciones de su papel. (Tales explosiones, lejos de quebrantar el sistema, son un apoyo, en la medida en que prometen a todos que cualquier desorden encontrará su castigo y la restitución consiguiente.) Todo esto en el teatro, claro está, precisamente porque en la sociedad amenazaba otra cosa.

(Teatro 114)

According to Maravall, there was a premeditated and monolithic correlative to this narrative pattern: “[S]e trata de una creación literaria que nace y se desarrolla con muy definidas finalidades sociales.” It is this which characterises the age from which it emerges:

[E]l Barroco no es sino el conjunto de medios culturales de muy variada clase reunidos y articulados para operar adecuadamente con los hombres, tal como son entendidos ellos y sus grupos en la época cuyos límites hemos acotado, a fin de acertar prácticamente a conducirlos y a mantenerlos integrados en el sistema social.

(La cultura 132)

Furthermore there was, in his mind, no doubting the fact that this propaganda exercise, which he elsewhere characterises as “el ‘programa social’ de Lope” (Poder 91), was on the whole successful:

Y cabe pensar si, por lo menos en España, donde la violencia de las protestas si prendió en determinadas áreas—Andalucía, Cataluña, muy tarde ya en Valencia—y amenazó gravemente en otros—Aragón— los resultados de inmovilización que en otras regiones se impusieron fueron, en gran parte, debidas al éxito público, o mejor, colectivo, de la comedia.

(Teatro 110)

Academic critics may be surprised to learn that many of the central tenets of Maravall’s argument were already common currency in progressive theatre and cultural journals around the time of his writing. Hence, for example, Domingo Pérez Minik, in an article published in Primer Acto in 1964, refers disparagingly to Golden Age playwrights as “testigos de nuestras virtudes épicas y buenos servidores de los intereses de la monarquía y de la política de Trento” (20). The critic singles out Lope, whom he compares to a compliant journalist or filmmaker in modern-day totalitarian regimes, as a particularly nefarious influence:

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