Espectáculo, texto y fiesta. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y el teatro de su tiempo (review)

Reviews165 Brooks' bibliography of primary and secondary sources is particularly impressive ; she has combed the Archivo de la Catedral and Archivo Municipal de Sevilla, Biblioteca Colombina y Capitular, Biblioteca Nacional; "Other Golden Age Sources" include chronicles, memoirs, texts, and manuals. Among scholarly publications she cites works of general history, dance history, histories of music, theater, and public celebrations, also theoretical and methodological treatises, encyclopedias and dictionaries. Finally, the volume contains twenty-eight tables and illustrations including reproductions of the seises, tarasca, gigantes, and savages, also drawings of traditional musical instruments. Only one fault detracts from this otherwise impeccable piece of scholarship . The volume is riddled with printing errors, some of them so serious as to impair reader comprehension: p. 5 "und" for "and"; 6 "proginal", "original"; 23 "envolving", "evolving"; "importand", "imported"; 24 "gesting", "jesting"; 28 "particulary", "particularly"; 49 "Apostels", "Apostles"; 50 "spectaculary", "spectacularly"; "volved", "evolved"; 52 "inindated", "inundated"; "Carthedral", Cathedral"; 55 "became", "came", etc. Brooks' monograph is an indispensable tool for students of Golden Age theater as well as for general theater historians. It shows what can be done if one searches the archives. What is needed now are comparable studies for other Spanish cities where we know religious feasts attracted similar though somewhat less glittering celebrations. Charlotte Stern Randolph-Macon Woman's College Espectáculo, texto y fiesta. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón y el teatro de su tiempo. Edited by José Amezcua and Serafín González. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, 1990. Paper. 172 pp. This collection of thirteen essays constitutes a selection of the papers read by a number of Mexican scholars at a colloquium on the theater of the Golden Age held at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Iztapalapa, on the fourth through the eighth of September, 1989, dates chosen to call attention to the three-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the death of Juan Ruiz de Alarc ón. The book is divided into three sections, the first containing four essays on Alarcón. The first (José Antonio Muciño Ruiz, "De la escena al texto ...") 166BCom, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Summer 1992) presents an original if debatable interpretation of La verdad sospechosa. It is stated that Alarcón's contemporaries would have seen the play in accord with the ethos of absolutist Spain: i.e., they would have focused on the relation of individuals to power, which in this case produces antagonism between the son Garcia (who lies to maintain his freedom and individuality) and the authoritative father, who expects his son to uphold the social obligations incumbent upon the mayorazgo of a noble family. This interpretation asks us to view and applaud Garcia as a kind of rebel against an oppressive social code. The second essay (Josefina Iturralde, "Juan Ruiz de Alarcón: un punto de vista critico ") makes a strong case for Alarcón as a social critic in a way his fellow dramatists were not. She calls attention to his unfavorable presentation of high and titled noblemen who treat women with ugly violence; his sympathy for women and advocacy of their right to defend themselves and choose their course in life; and the triumph, finally, so often in his dramas of the personal virtue of a simple hidalgo over the arrogance of the upper aristocracy. Helena Beristáin in "Un personaje alarconiano ..." employs Greimas's terminology and mode of analysis to demonstrate how the Marqués don Fadrique in Ganar amigos ultimately plays a central role in the tangled minor intrigues set in motion by other characters. Raymundo Ramos ("¿De quién es Juan Ruiz de Alarcón ...?") reviews once again the question of whether Alarcón is just Spanish or peculiarly Mexican, arriving at the conclusion that he was a "noble criollo" (an essay marred by occasional outright errors and the use of some outdated sources). For a number of readers the second section, "Manifestaciones teatrales en la Nueva España," will be of special interest because it offers some new information about dramas and fiestas in New Spain. Margo Glantz in "Las finezas de Sor Juana: Loa para El Divino Narciso" studies Sor Juana's elaborate comparison in the loa of the ancient Indian sacrifice of seeds...