Public Theater in Golden Age Madrid and Tudor-Stuart London: Class, Gender and Festive Community (review)

Dr Cañadas's purpose in this book is to study the cultural diversity that underlines the representation of social groups and hierarchies in the public theatre through a detailed analysis of a selected small number of English and Spanish plays. His chosen approach is sociological and interdisciplinary with a stress on performance and audience. He starts with a comparative study of the status and socially equivocal profession of the public players and public venues in the two capitals and their differing practices, in particular the use of female actors in Spain as opposed to the boy actors in England. His focus is on the relationship between plebeian and aristocratic communities and the incorporation of carnavalesque traditions in the plots. He lays great stress on the role of gender and androgyny and sees the underlying tensions in the plays as structured by homosocial ideas of rank and hierarchy that are challenged or undermined by sexual rivalry. He is not concerned to consider royal control of play writing and his discussion of censorship is therefore cursory. On England he draws from Andrew Gurr and not from the more recent work of Richard Dutton, Richard Burt and others; on Spain from Shergold.

Cañadas is concerned to locate his revisions, sometimes unconventional, of classical literary interpretations of plays in both cities in the context of recent ongoing literary critical debates and conflicting analysis. He starts, not surprisingly, with a brief look at some aspects of Lope de Vega's theoretical work the Arte Nuevo, published in 1609, taking the uncontroversial position that de Vega promotes ambivalence and controversy, seeks to please the vulgo, an undifferentiated audience, and is contemptuous of the pretensions of the Real Academia.

It is less clear why Cañadas confines his discussion of the English debate to the anti-theatre comments of Philip Stubbes, referring to Stephen Gosson only in passing and not at all to John Northbrooke, John Rainoldes, Henry Durham and George Whetstone. It may be because he wishes to distance his interpretations as far as possible from religion while all these antagonists, like Gosson, explain plays as the result of the reformation's threat to the devil's hold so that the 'sinful delights' of the play were 'the invention of the devil, the offerings of idolatry, the pomp of worldlings, the blossoms of vanity, the root of apostasy the food of iniquity, riot and adultery…' The basis on which their Spanish counterpart the Jesuit Juan de Mariana in his Tratado contra los juegos accused the theatre of corrupting morals was perhaps not so far removed from English concerns but Cañadas does not pursue this convergence very far.

Cañadas's analysis of his carefully chosen plays, principally Dekker's Shoemakers Holiday and Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, is confined to a primarily literary analysis of the themes on which he wants to focus, the presentation of community, especially the village community or the community of a guild, and the treatment of the lower class hero or heroine. The two main plays selected are particularly suited to concentration on the virtues of the plebeian class and the world of work, and ones in which the romantic element, since it involves marriage between different social groups, has an enhanced social significance.

Cañadas sees the Shoemaker's Holiday in general terms as a 'public commentary on the culture of the court' (p. 85) and the role of patronage in society. A historian might wonder about whether it is not in fact concerned with more specific aspects of contemporary issues. To name but one or two: Simon Eyre had indeed been Lord Mayor in the year that the Leather sellers got their first charter and permission to trade at Leadenhall. Monopoly, however, was under threat. The Cordwainers...