Women's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain's Golden Age, and: Dramas of Distinction: Plays by Golden Age Women (review)

110BCom, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Summer 1998) manner that gives the reader a solid notion of these matters before reading the play. The completeness of the introductory material, notes and bibliography, the elegant presentation ofa modernized text and the accessibility of a book published in neighboring Mexico rather than Spain should make King's edition the top choice for teachers ofthe comedia. As the promotional statement on the back page boasts, "de las no pocas ediciones que se han hecho de El desdén, es ésta, sin duda alguna, la mejor, la más esmerada." David H. Darst Florida State University Soufas, Teresa Scott, ed. Women 's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain's Golden Age. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1997. Hardcover and paperback. 326 pp. Soufas, Teresa Scott. Dramas ofDistinction: Plays by Golden Age Women. Studies in Romance Languages, 42. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1997. Hardcover. 201 pp. Teresa Soufas's Women's Acts, an anthology of nine works composed by five women dramatists, is a most welcome addition to the newly emerging canon of literature by women writers of the Spanish Golden Age. A timely companion to recent editions of women's poetic production, such as Julián Olivares and Elizabeth Boyce's Tras el espejo la musa escribe: Líricafemenina de los Siglos de Oro (Siglo XXI, 1993) and Amy Katz Kaminsky 's Water Lilies: An Anthology ofSpanish Women Writersfrom the Fifteenth through the Nineteenth Century (U of Minnesota P, 1996), the anthology comprises both a stimulating collection of playtexts—some published for the first time—and a new perspective on gender relations as they were staged in Spanish Renaissance theater. Soufas's feminist reading, set forth in her general introduction and conceptualized more explicitly in her complementary study, Dramas ofDistinction, argues that, by focusing at least as much on the disorderly male characters as on the transgressive women protagonists, these plays fall within Renaissance conceptions of feminism that nevertheless support conventional gender order. Even so, like their authors, the central figures in all these dramas are women, and it is this "women-centeredness," as Soufas calls it, that invites us to celebrate the collection's publication. Anthologized in the collection are Angela de Azevedo's Dicha y des- Reviews111 dicha del juego y devoción de la Virgen, La margarita del Tajo que dio nombre a Santarén, and El muerto disimulado; Ana Caro Malien y Soto's El conde Partinuplés and Valor, agravioy mujer; Leonor de la Cueva y Suva 's La firmeza en la ausencia; Feliciana Enriquez de Guzman's Segunda parte de losjardines y campos sábeos and Entreactos de la Segunda parte; and María de Zayas y Sotomayor's La traición en la amistad. Each playwright is assigned an introduction and a selected bibliography; for all but one ofthe plays, the editor chose the oldest extant version. For Enriquez de Guzman's Segunda parte de la Tragicomedia de losjardines y campos sábeos , Soufas preferred the more complete later edition, which contains the playwright's corrections. The scarcity of extant versions discloses the inattention given the plays by contemporary and modern students ofthe comedia, a scholarly disregard that Soufas's anthology seeks to redress. Her own collection does not intend a critical edition; it also falls a bit short of offering pedagogical editions of these plays, since the limited notes aim primarily to clarify obscure words, names, or place names. Spelling and punctuation are modernized, however, and speakers' names and line indentations have been standardized throughout , thus facilitating the texts' use in the classroom. These formal aspects, the glossary of mythological figures and terms included in the collection, and the critical commentary written in English, seem to target American university students as the anthology's primary audience. One serious oversight is the absence of any discussion on the plays' poetic discourses. This is unfortunate in a collection that strives to achieve recognition ofthe plays' literary worth, since scansion, along with content analysis and mythological source study, is an ideal means of evaluating not solely a playwright's verbal display and knowledge of poetics, but her dramatic control. The varied poetic forms and complex rhyme schemes wielded...