Spanish Golden Age Drama. An Annotated Bibliography of United States Doctoral Dissertations, 1899-1992, with a Supplement of Non-United States Dissertations (review)

226BCom, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2000) Creo que estos casos muestran el interés del traductor por mantener de forma continua la comprensibAidad de la obra. Me he referido repetidamente al espectador en lugar de al lector, porque éste es un producto claramente destinado a la puesta en escena. Posiblemente el lector especiafista en la comedia no se sienta del todo conforme con la traducción y la falta de notas expUcativas, pero no es ésta la Aitención de WAUam OUver. Si tenemos en cuenta las dAicultades que presenta para el púbüco nativo la comprensión de una obra de teatro de esta época—especialmente para espectadores no acostumbrados ya al verso—la mejor opción es la de OUver, especialmente si se quiere avivar el interés por la comedia entre el púb üco anglòfono. David Gómez Torres Univiversiry ofWisconsin, Oshkosh Reynolds, John J., and Szüvia E. Szmuk. Spanish Golden Age Drama An Annotated Bûoliography of United States Doctoral Dissertations, 1899-1992, wüh a Supplement ofNonUnited States Dissertations. New York: MLA, 1998. Hardcover . 573 pp. Rare is the academic book that both deUghts and instructs, as Cervantes might have said had he Uved in our time. John J. Reynolds and SzAVia E. Szmuk have produced one such volume in their informative and fascAiating bibUography of U.S. dissertations on the comedia a book that wAl prove to be of considerable value to the research community in our field and reveals the need to undertake simüar projects in others. The book is, first and foremost, a detaAed and comprehensive Usting of 853 dissertations on or related to Golden Age Drama written in the United States between 1899 and 1992 (many Ustings actuaUy are as recent as 1997), plus a supplement of 616 dissertations from Canada and Western Europe from 1817 to 1992. FoUowAig the precise and user-friendly Reviews227 bibUographical format the authors have estabUshed as an industry standard Ai the acclaimed Bulletin of the Comediantes annual bibUography, the present volume is carefuUy organized by category, begAining with broader studies about the Golden Age as a period, on theatre and drama in general, and then alphabeticaUy by dramatist, Aicluding a few thematic categories that transcend AidMdual playwrights, such as the Don Juan theme, Catalan theatre, and others. (A note of disclaimer: the reader should be advised that I coUaborate with Dr. Szmuk on the BCom bibUography and have personal knowledge of her exacting standards of detaA and thoroughness, which, naturaUy , apply to this volume as weU). The book is also a gold mine of academic genealogy, revealAig an intricate web of scholarly relationships quite befitting its "whodunit" advertising campaign, as seen in this journal, among others. WhAe each entry identifies the usual suspects (author, title, number of pages, institution, date of degree, and so on), the authors also include the director, the reference source that led them to the dissertation, a citation of pubUshed versions of the study, an abstract, and a very helpful Ust of resultant pubücations. Regarding this last category, it is worth noting that the Ust includes notjust those works deriving directly from the dissertation but also subsequent studies on the same or related topics pubUshed through 1992. AU of this information aUows the reader to trace interesting academic genealogies, beginning with any AidMdual and foUowing a branch of scholarship through a veritable famAy tree of preceding mentors, which can estabUsh a legacy of critical methodology and often reveals what the authors have caUed "important centers and periods of scholarly pursuit" (1). Some of these Unes are rather impressive, indeed, and extend through five or six generations. To name one example, I easAy foUowed a direct Une beginning with Hugo Rennert along five successive generations of scholarly progeny, Aicluding James P. W. Crawford (whose 1907 dissertation is among the earUest included in the book), Otis Green, Bruce Wardropper, and then 228BCom, Vol. 52, No. 1 (2000) from either Douglas M. Carey to Anita StoU or Dian Fox to Mary Hivnor. In many cases, however, these genealogies are limited by the simple fact that many dissertation directors are Golden Age scholars who wrote their own theses on...