Comedias del siglo de oro and Shakespeare (review)

276BCom, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter 1992) homenaje a la labor de los Reichenberger en diversas artes y culturas. La utilidad de esta valiosa colección de una gran variedad de ensayos hubiera aumentado con un índice final. Algunos de los estudios se podrían haber relacionado explícitamente con las láminas que los dividen. La molestia leve de algunas erratas en los artículos redactados en español e italiano, produce a veces cierta confusión en los que están escritos en inglés. En su totalidad, sin duda alguna, el tomo constituye una aportación impresionante a las letras áureas. Susana Hernández Araico California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Fischer, Susan L., editor. Comedias del siglo de oro and Shakespeare. Lewisburg : Bucknell UP, 1989. Comedias del siglo de oro and Shakespeare, an issue of the Bucknell Review , contains six essays comparing plays of Shakespeare with those by Lope, Tirso, Calderón, and Rojas Zorrilla, a discussion of the problems of translating Golden Age drama by Kenneth Muir, a Foreword by Bruce Wardropper and an Afterword by Walter Cohen. A puzzle for the reviewer of this collection is to figure out who is its intended reader. Professor Wardropper seems to anticipate one unacquainted with Spanish Golden Age drama. He explains what the comedia is and who Lope, Tirso and Calderón are, and declares a hope that this volume "piques readers' curiosity about Spanish Baroque drama." At least part of Cohen's Afterword, however, is explicitly directed at "students of the comedia," and many of the Spanish plays discussed in the volume would be completely unknown to non-Spanish readers and some unavailable in English translation. A criticism of this collection related to the question of its intended reader is that it is not a truly comparative study, or, more precisely, it is a very unbalanced one. As Cohen observes, "The [book's] discussions of Shakespeare reveal themselves less as ends than means." Indeed it is fair to say that in this volume almost nothing both original and significant is said about Shakespeare . Commentary on his works often amounts to summaries of selected English and American critics (one contributor quotes fourteen in two and half pages and makes reference to others), with a fairly consistent bias towards modern ones. Moreover, some parallels contributors discover between Shakespeare and Golden Age plays are inaccurate, like Fischer's between the forest of Avero in El vergonzoso en palacio and Arden in As You Like it, or forced like Bruce Golden's between the condition of Hamlet and Calderón's Don Reviews277 Gutierre. Fischer reasons that since neither Avero nor Arden is a pastoral paradise, they share some basic likeness. The fact is, however, that a Shakesperean "green world" like Arden is not so much a place as a morally rejuvenating spiritual process; Avero has no comparable function. Golden squeezes drama's most massive character into the relatively small and ill-fitting costume of an honor hero when he asserts that the problems which (in Golden's view) plague Don Gutierre—the need to "maintain his masculine ego" a fear that the code which demands he commit murder is "barbaric," and an impulse to "rationalize" an "irrational anger"—are also at the core of Hamlet's agonized soul. This volume is obviously and directly influenced by recent trends in criticism . In Cohen's words, it seems to be a "settling of accounts with the prior generation of critics of the comedia." Some contributors focus on the linguistic tensions in plays which, they claim, expose rents in the seventeenth century social and philosophical fabric. William Blue argues that, in the comedies of Calderón and Shakespeare, order is undercut by the estrangement of language from the ideas it is supposed to communicate. Denise Dipuccio continues in a similar vein, asserting that these two dramatists "lay bare examples of the arbitrary nature of language and its effects on comprehension of cosmic harmony .' ' Lope's El ganso de oro and As You Like It, according to Frederick de Armas, challenge traditions "questioning classical examples," "breaking boundaries" in order "to lead the audience to more readily accept the mythification of theatrical space. An especially...