Calderón y el Barroco: Exaltación y engaño de los sentidos (review)

Reviews167 who appear in the records of viceregal courts — and Inquisition trials — who made their way throughout New Spain and in some cases to Spanish possessions in the Orient. The third section is devoted to "Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina y la Comedia nueva." The first essay (Serafín González, "Honor y matrimonio en El caballero de Olmedo") visits once again the conflict in the play between the worlds of passionate love outside of marriage and of lawful marriage without consideration for love. Alonso reconciles the conflict in himself: he will marry for love. Rosa Spada Suárez ("El travestismo femenino en Don Gil de las calzas verdes") provides an intelligent reading of the play as an attack of some seriousness by Tirso — within a play which on the surface is nothing but comic gaiety — against the hierarchical patriarchal society. The final two essays (Juan Manuel Ramírez Ibáñez, "Apuntes sobre el espacio en El castigo sin venganza," and José Amezcua, "Hacia el centro ...") draw attention to the symbolic value of scenic movement in the comedia from outside to inside, from the periphery to the center. Both essays should be of special interest to those engaged in staging Golden Age plays. The essays of Espectáculo, texto y fiesta cover a wide range of subjects and employ diverse methods of analysis. Some are clearly more original and thoughtful than others, but the collection as a whole is pleasing in its variety. Willard King Bryn Mawr College Maria Alicia Amadei-Pulice. Calderón y el Barroco: Exaltación y engaño de los sentidos. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990. Hardcover . 221 pp. In this well-written book, Amadei-Pulice employs critical sophistication and depth of knowledge about important issues concerning Spanish Golden Age drama and its evolution from the comedia nueva of Lope de Vega to the baroque theatre of Calderón de la Barca. In this undertaking, she has achieved a difficult feat, for her study is a significant contribution to this field of scholarship and not a mere repetition of already accepted ideas or a forced rereading that sacrifices coherence for uniqueness. Instead, what Calderón y el Barroco provides is an opportunity to study Calderonian dramaturgy in the larger theoretical context of representation rather than in terms of written text. Eschewing the Saussurian model and its basis in textual analysis, AmadeiPulice adds her critical voice to those of scholars such as Patrice Pavis, 168BCom, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Summer 1992) Umberto Eco, Michael Issacharoff, Tadeusz Kowzan, Keir Elam, Roland Barthes , Roman Jakobson, and Dámaso Alonso—some of whom are represented in her listed references—in consideration of the theatrical sign system of visual and auditory codes. Beginning with an initial chapter entitled "Comedia y comedia de teatro, '' the author provides a literary critical and historical background of the shift from the dramatic precepts of Renaissance playwrights, among whom she includes Lope de Vega, to the polyvalent theatrical system of Calderón who, she argues, embraced the si/Ve rappresentativo and made use of imported theatrical elements such as the Florentine melodramma. The author traces this shift from the logocentric tendencies of Lope to the Calderonian appreciation of admiratio and a new dramatic spectacle that depended on sight and sound rather than the efficacy of poetry for its power of communication. This chapter leads systematically into chapter II, "Efectos sonoros del sr/7e rappresentativo " where Amadei-Pulice examines the auditory components of baroque drama as practiced by Calderón. Music is of primary importance in this section . It is here that she explicates fully her understanding of the "comedia de teatro calderoniano" as drama which "pone directamente delante del espectador los signos representativos—iconos, emblemas, estatuas, canto, coro, perspectivas , retratos—aceptando ya éste la sustitución de una cosa en concepto de otra" (99). Insisting thus on the integration of "la parte visual y la parte auditiva" (44), the author comments upon "el matrimonio de estos dos aspectos generales del teatro . . . hasta ahora mantenidos en celdas separadas por la crítica' ' (45). Scrutinizing passages and references to sensory perception, AmadeiPulice develops her arguments about the musicological components of the comedia de teatro, that is, recitative...