The Golden Age Comedia: Text, Theory, and Performance (review)

Reviews369 ages ofminority groups is important for its contributions to our understanding not only of baroque Spain, but also of the USA in the 1990s, when a book like The Bell Curve can receive serious consideration as a scholarly treatise. Barbara Simerka University ofTexas-San Antonio Ganelin, Charles, and Howard Mancing, editors. The Golden Age Comedia: Text, Theory, and Performance. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1994. 422 pp. The present volume brings together twenty-six essays to honor the multifarious contributions ofVern Williamsen to comedia studies. The essays accomplish that task with a distinction worthy of Prof. Williamsen himself; the volume thus admirably fulfills its stated purposes: to present a "compendium of the state of the art in comedia studies" (2) as well as "to suggest further directions" in comedia scholarship (3). The "Introduction," by Ganelin and Mancing, briefly summarizes WiIliamsen 's career, which (in an interesting editorial twist), the editors take to be a mirror of the evolution of comedia scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s and analogue in its varied focus to the essays that follow. The contributions are divided into two broad sections, "Textual studies" and "Theory and Performance studies." The textual studies, each dedicated for the most part to a single play, offer a banquet of possible approaches to the comedia. The authors' various apparatuses embrace René Girard's theorization of violence (Matthew D. Stroud's "Rivalry and Violence in Lope's El castigo sin venganza"); Derrida 's notion of the pharmakon (Frederick A. de Armas's "Baltahasar's Doom: Letters That Heal/Kill in Claramonte's El secreto en la mujer"; economic theorization (William R. Blue's "The Diverse Economy ??Entre bobos anda eljuego"); sociohistorical analysis (Margaret Rich Greer's "The (Self Representation of Control in La dama duende" and Susana Hernández Araico's "Official Genesis and Political Subversion ofEl mayor encanto amor"); and feminist reading (Teresa F. Soufas's "Maria de Zayas's (Un)Conventional Play, La traición en la amistad'). In addition, Dian Fox adduces a ballad on Don Alvaro de Luna as a possible, previously-unidentified source for Lope's El caballero de Olmedo and its implicit linkage ofits 370BCom, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Winter 1996) tragic protagonist to the doomed Don Alvaro. The "theatricalization of consciousness " (24) in Alfonso, protagonist ofLope's Laspaces de los reyes, is the subject of Susan Niehoff McCrary's contribution. Constance Rose analyzes self-deception in Tirso's Tisbea on the basis of the character's soliloquy in El burlador de Sevilla. Daniel L. Heiple argues that Calderón's two autos sacramentales on San Fernando probably had their first incarnation as comedias de santos. In an interesting approach to the vexed question of Calderonian honor, Thomas O'Connor studies the playwright's conception offineza in Fineza contrafineza. Michael McGaha argues that the converso writer Antonio Enriquez Gómez pseudonymously composed the plays heretofore attributed to Francisco de Villegas. And Nancy D'Antuono's comparison ofBastardo Mudarra with two Italian imitations aims at a better assessment ofLope's impact on seventeenth-century Italian theater. Part Two ofthe volume, the section devoted to "theory and performance studies," comprises essays that deal with general issues of theory and performance . Catherine Larson traces the "past, present, and future" of metatheater as the concept has informed comedia scholarship and as it might be used in future work. Henry Sullivan, applying Lacanian theory, proposes a "psychoanalytic poetics" of the comedia, based on the dialectic of law and desire. Canon and genre are the focus of James Parr's "Partial Perspectives on Kinds, Canons, and the Culture Question." Dawn Smith uses aspects of reception theory to analyze the interaction of actors and audience in Cervantes 's El retablo de las maravillas. The recent conjunction in literary theory of questions of power and conflict informs Catherine Connor's (Swietlicki ) contrastive study ofLope and Shakespeare. Emilie Bergmann utilizes speech act theory, semiotics, and feminist theory to argue that, in Lope's La Estrella de Sevilla and La dama boba, women are inscribed in "systems of exchange in economic and symbolic terms" (27). Seventeenth-century refundiciones serve as the basis of Carol Bingham Kirby's proposed statistical methodology for comparing reworked texts...