Stages of Desire: The Mythological Tradition in Classical and Contemporary Spanish Theater (review)

REVIEWS Kidd, Michael. Stages ofDesire: The Mythological Tradition in Classical and Contemporary Spanish Theater. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Cloth. 266 pp. This volume is a most welcome addition to the growing body of criticism on the mythological tradition in Hispanic letters . While the most recent contributions to this field focus on one period, Kidd carefully traces the tradition from Juan del Encina's Égloga de Plácida y Victoriano (1513), the first Spanish play to rewrite classical mythology, to Luis Riaza's Medea es un buen chico (1980), a play that transforms the heterosexual Greco-Roman tale into a contemporary queer myth. Kidd traces the myth's origins and identifies the changes made by Spanish playwrights in their own plays. Kidd's solid and cogent analyses are informed by current critical trends, principally René Girard's and, to a lesser extent, Jacques Lacan's ideas on desire. The result is a refreshingly jargon-free study that combines traditional and current ideologies. In a brief introduction , Kidd offers a working definition of myth (7) and summarizes Girard's and Lacan's theories on violence and desire . In each analysis, Kidd examines the development of numerous triangles of desire among the characters, with particular attention played to the three taboos of the "nutritive, erotic , and aggressive" (15). This Girardian prototype also often involves the sacrificing of an innocent victim in order to stop violent aggression. In chapter 2, Kidd examines three pieces that span the sixteenth century and pave the way for full exploitation of the mythological tradition in subsequent centuries. Juan del Encina 's Ègloga de Placida y Victoriano is pivotal because it sets 167 168BCom, Vol. 52, No. 2 (2000) the stage for the seventeenth-century comedia that will syncretize pagan and Christian traditions, without privileging one over the other. In his second analysis, Kidd explores myth's political potential and sees Juan Timoneda's Tragicomedia llamada Filomena as a protest to a law that had banned Encina 's Plácida y Victoriano (49). This assertion, perhaps a bit forced, is nonetheless inviting, because it establishes the precedent of using the mythological play as a vehicle for political dissent. Finally, Francisco de la Cueva y Suva's Tragedia de Narciso serves as prototype for the emplotment of desire that will flourish in seventeenth-century mythological plays and comedias de honor. Three comedias from the seventeenth century are the focus of chapter 3. Kidd suggests that the mythological setting of Dido y Eneas enabled Guillen de Castro to create triangles of mimetic desire that deal ironically with conflicts between honor and honra and honor and love. This ironic distance is carried one step further in Lope de Vega's El laberinto de Creta and Calderón's Los tres mayores prodigios in which the protagonists are decidedly unheroic. In El laberinto, this cowardly behavior, coupled with several metatheatrical elements, exposes the sacrosant themes of honor and its ensuing vengeance as dramatic convention. Lope molds the tragic potential of the myth into tragicomedy, the genre best suited to comedia values. Kidd suggests that Calderón intended to draw parallels between Los tres mayores and the historical context in which it was produced, namely the tarnished image of Felipe rVs court. In the last two chapters, Kidd moves to the twentieth century . In chapter 4, he examines Electro Fedro and El señor de Pigmalión, in which Galdós, Unamuno and Grau, respectively, used myth to comment on the mediocrity of the early twentieth -century Spanish stage. In particular, Galdós and Unamuno create triangles of desire that assault complacent bourgeois values concerning the taboos of incest and fetisichism. Grau designs several extreme triangles of desire that verge on fetisichism. Kidd asserts that the use of puppets in this play underscores the "absence of authentic desire on the contemporary stage" (166). The play culminates when the puppets Reviews1 69 rebel against their creator, Pigmalión, thereby simulating a comparable liberation of contemporary theater from middleclass ideology. In a theatrical milieu dominated by the crowdpleasing Echegaray and, later, Benavente, these three dramatists argue for placing artistic over economic considerations. The two plays analyzed in chapter 5, Buero's...