Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation (review)

The popular appeal of Spanish theater in the seventeenth century fomented one of the first modern forms of mass entertainment. A seemingly insatiable appetite for new plays among urban audiences and two generations of talented, prolific playwrights yielded a vast corpus of dramatic works. Though many playtexts are now lost, several thousand comediassurvive, including over three hundred written by Lope de Vega, the most popular and prolific playwright of the first three decades of the century; Calderón, the dominant playwright of the next generation, left behind approximately eighty comediasand one hundred and eighty autos sacramentales. These are but two of a large number of active professional playwrights. One unfortunate but understandable consequence of this vast corpus is that about two dozen works have attracted careful and sustained scholarly scrutiny, while thousands more remain little known, even to seasoned specialists. This book reports on one scholar's ambitious effort to widen the focus of theater studies. In particular, Campbell combines the empirical analysis of a social scientist with the contextual analysis of a humanities scholar in an effort to cast light on popular attitudes toward kingship and draw attention to a host of lesser known works.

Chapter 1 describes an empirical study of published plays that laid the groundwork for this study. Campbell reports that she began with an examination of all the playtexts published in anthologies during the seventeenth century. From this large sample, she selects four Madrid-based playwrights for closer study: Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (1607–48), Juan de Matos Fragoso (1610–92), and Juan Bautista Diamante (1622–87). After reading the 232 plays by these four Madrid-based playwrights, the author selected twenty-six works to anchor a closer study of political sensibilities. This smaller selection of plays, in turn, anchors her discussions of popular attitudes toward kingship in the body of the book.

Chapter 2, "The World of the Stage," traces the evolution of Spain's public theaters in a manner intended to be accessible to a wide range of theater scholars. Setting out with this general survey of theater history, Campbell defines the mainstay of the Spanish stage, the comedia, somewhat narrowly: "The comediacast was fairly small, averaging eight to ten characters: these always included a galánor young male protagonist; one or more damasor leading ladies; the viejo, an older, more powerful man (a king, captain, or father figure); occasionally a peasant or other representative of rural life; and always a gracioso, or comic figure, usually the servant of the galán" (34). The author would have done well here to indicate that this definition holds for cloak-and-dagger comedias ( comedias de capa y espada), though later in her study, Campbell does acknowledge the variety of styles of plays that fit under the label comedia(for example, p. 147). Indeed, under the rubric of comedia, we would also find plays based on popular hagiographies published in the Flores Sanctorum, history plays, and mythological plays. Such works would have casts of characters very different from what the author describes in her definition. Moreover, the figure of the graciosowould more accurately be described as a pivotal character for the evolution of what Spaniards in the early seventeenth century called the comedia nueva. Above, Campbell presents the comic sidekick as a constant presence in the casts of characters. The most interesting discussions in chapter 2 address the relationship between Crown and municipal authorities, as they pertained to the regulation of public entertainment. Here, the author joins scholars such as Melveena McKendrick in the effort to undo the paradigm of "conformity" through which the highly influential social historian José Antonio Maravall and his disciples depicted Spanish playwrights as the willing agents of repression and propaganda.

In Chapter 3, "Kings in Theory: Competing Ideals of Kingship," the author initiates her discussion of attitudes toward kingship as depicted in a host of plays. For each...