Los teatros comerciales del siglo XVII y la escenificación de la comedia (review)

Reviews71 to the end of the century, with the shift from corral to palace and the increasing emphasis on spectacle and machinery to the detriment of the actor 's locution and the author's social message. Marc Vitse's review of recent work on aesthetics laments the absence of a complete taxonomy of texts. Cotarelo's Bibliografia and the incomplete Preceptiva dramática espa ñola need to be reformulated and incorporated into a new corpus of all the pertinent material. Finally, César Oliva addresses the problematic nature ofmodern scenography and urges scholars and teachers to work together to ensure that today's public can appreciate better the comedia as a unique, irreplaceable , idiosyncratic dramatic experience valid in itself. Attempts to "modernize" the plays for today's expectations or to "archeologize" them as reproductions of a seventeenth-century performance only denigrate the valuable uniqueness of the geme. Today's artistic directors should emphasize the comedid's brilliant ability to purvey a culture that still percolates in Spain's collective consciousness, plus the comedia'?, strange, often shocking peculiarities as an art form unlike any other in existence today, which thereby allows it to express human insights not accessible to other artistic media. This volume thus covers a wide range of comedia themes and topics far beyond the limits of standard literary criticism, because it gives equal weight to non-textual matters such as the physical conditions of the representation , aesthetics, ideology, and adaptation for the modem audience. In all these areas it opens the way for further research by establishing the present conditions and criteria for a proper appreciation ofthe material. David H. Darst Florida State University Ruano de la Haza, J. M. and John J. Allen. Los teatros comerciales del siglo XVII y la escenificación de la comedia. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1994. "Nueva Biblioteca de Erudición y Critica" 8. 624 pp. Books about the comedia have been almost always about what audiences heard from the stage, or what could later be derived from the texts ofplays, so that the authors ofLos teatros comerciales propose a necessity for an account ofwhat the audiences saw, and also of what they experienced by way of significant sound. John J. Allen's half of the book describes the Corral del Principe and the Corral de la Cruz, with some comparisons with theatres outside Madrid and 72BCom, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Summer 1996) with theatrical practice in London. He analyses what few texts we have from the period — Armona's Memorias of what was demolished to make way for a coliseo, and Riccoboni's account — while warning us against reading much into Sepúlveda's Corral de la Pacheca (1888) and its much reproduced engraving (43). The two corrales are contrasted, as to structural details and furnishings, though taburetes, corredorcilios, gradas, alojeros and the rest may not be as easy to visualize as Allen assumes, and a glossary , perhaps illustrated, might have been a help. The account of the cazuela is informative, even amusing (96), as Allen details the circumstances leading to its transfer from women to clergymen. He follows up the question of how all was lighted, how sol y sombra variations were avoided among the mosqueteros, and how a view from a distance was assisted (141). Next is the tum of the several onstage corridors and openings, and the uses they were apparently put to. It is amusing to read of an equivocal phrase from the Romancero viejo applied to a new door to the women's dressing-room: postigo viejo — digo nuevo (164). Allen reminds us by the way that the renovated Corral de Almagro is no guide to what the Corral del Principe must have been like (143). Theatrical people are introduced: the autor, beginning with the key figure of Gaspar de Torres, who established an equitable regime among actors from 1591, anda who published Lope's Doce comedias (1614), with its important prologue; the arrendador (180) and elpúblico. Among the latter, el vulgo could exert pressure through a commercial transaction on autores, arrendadores and hence on the dramatist (188). Allen suggests that it may be pointless to ask what governed prices, and what the hospitals' share in...