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Reviewed by:
  • Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage
  • Margaret R. Greer
Bruce R. Burningham . Radical Theatricality: Jongleuresque Performance on the Early Spanish Stage. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 39. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2007. xii + 260 pp. index. illus. bibl. $43.95. ISBN: 978–1–55753–441–5.

Radical Theatricality is a truly original and insightful work that takes the discussion of theater across boundaries of national traditions and literary periods. Transgressing those divisions artificially traced in the nineteenth century helps us to see how theater really worked and developed in early modern Europe, as theater troupes and developing performance modes traveled from country to country. Burningham's familiarity with Italian, French, and English performance traditions as well as those of Spain enables him to set the development of Golden Age theater on a wide and deep stage, so to speak. He makes of it an inquiry into critical bias in favor of theater based on written texts preserved in print, and brings it into dialogue as well with the early history of cinema in the twentieth century. [End Page 1340]

Burningham's study is an important contribution to the long-standing debate about the existence or absence of a significant corpus of medieval theater in Spain. He changes the nature of this debate by showing that a rich performance tradition need not rely on the preservation of written texts, religious or secular, that we can today recognize as drama as described by Aristotelian precepts. In so doing, he demonstrates just how the comedia that was the popular form of entertainment in seventeenth-century Spain could develop so quickly in the late sixteenth century. Furthermore, he puts the comedia in contact with the increasingly important field of performance studies. It is a major contribution to medieval and Golden Age literary studies in Spain and brings those traditions into productive dialogue with pan-European movements over the centuries.

Burningham proposes that the essence of theater is not a literary genre but a performative moment, originating with one jongleur (or mime) or acrobat, performing for an audience, a tradition that stretches from the Homeric rhapsode to Dario Fo's street performances. He challenges the universal validity of the Thespis myth that theater began when one member separated himself from the chorus in the ritual to Dionysus and initiated a dialogue, recapitulated in the emergence of European drama from medieval church ritual. The lack of written medieval texts should not be considered evidence of the absence of a medieval theatrical tradition, for the juglares who performed epics or ballads were performers of theater. Dialoguing with a wide range of theorists of drama and performance, Burningham argues that it is the mutual recognition in the reciprocal gaze between performer and spectator that establishes theater and clears the empty space that becomes the stage. He surveys evidence from Roman mimes and Teutonic singers of epics through medieval jongleurs to early modern and modern performers — Albert Lord's singers of tales in twentieth-century Yugoslavia, stage performance of the Spoon River Anthology, and contrasting modern performances of Juan del Encina songs — who performed on multiform stages, in which the theater comes to its audience rather than vice-versa, and performance was one part of a larger event, combining flexible texts, music, and other non-verbal performance aspects. As we recognize that modern European languages had their roots in a proto-Indo-European language whose nature we can approximate from their evolution, so we can reconstruct a proto-Indo-European performance tradition in which medieval religious drama would be the high end of a spectrum, coexisting with popular performance, as classical Latin coexisted with the developing romance languages.

Reading performance scenes across generic and national-linguistic traditions of early modern Europe, he demonstrates the techniques shared between the protagonists of picaresque novels and foundational players of theatrical traditions: sharers in an oral tradition of apprenticeship that still continues in modern theater. His analysis of the work and careers of Richard Tarlton (England), Flaminio Scala (Italy), and Lope de Rueda (Spain), ranging from strolling street tricksters to on-stage theater, manifests an almost ageless performance intertextuality equivalent to the much-considered literary intertextuality...

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