Comedia and the Art of Construction

COMEDIA AND THE ART OF CONSTRUCTION WILLIAM R. BLUE Pennsylvania State University I will begin this talk with references and all due homage to John Barth, Marjorie Garber, Elizabeth Kirkland, and Joseph Papp, from whom I have borrowed.1 There is, I would like to imagine, a small brown bird that lives in the woodlands of central Pennsylvania. And while this bird looks like many other small brown birds, it has a special talent when it comes to nest building. Like all members of its species, it constructs its nest of twigs, vines, and leaves, but unlike all others, it weaves into its nest's very fabric bits and pieces ofthe world around it. That bird, you see, may live near the forest's edge by cities, towns, villages, and developments like mine. So, into its construction it braids pieces of newspapers or discarded novels , histories, comic books, slivers of broken CDs, shreds of clothing, food wrappers, old computer chips, stray dollar bills, ads, perhaps even snippets of this year's MLA Program. And yet, the nest does not resemble the random piles ofajunk yard or trash heaps in a city dump, but quite the contrary, for the bird instinctively chooses the best materials and turns its nest into a wondrous sculpture that seems to express the bird's very being, its interests, its moment, its true nature, as the bird artistically integrates the beauty and squalor ofwhere it happens to abide into its home, its work, and its creative life (see Barth, Chimera 1 8). That bird, even ifit does not exist in reality, now exists as my metaphor for Golden Age dramatists. I like to think of Lope and Calderón walking through Madrid observing the bustling city life, seeing the buildings, sites, people, markets, smelling the smells, tasting the food and drink, 149 150BCom, Vol. 56, No. 1 (2004) catching snippets of conversation on their way home (see Papp and Kirkland 152-63). And under one arm, they might be carrying a memorial , a crónica, a copy ofOvid, or the Bible, a history entitled Cómo Eduardo Tercero, Rey de Inglaterra, se enamoró de la Condesa de Salveric,2 an astrological work, like La esfera del universo by Ginés Rocamora, Lagrimas de Angelica, a poem by Barahona de Soto, a chivalric novel or perhaps Don Quijote, Plinio's Historia natural, something by Bocaccio, or perhaps something by Virgil or Luis de León or Luis Vives, or even a comedia written by someone else. At home, they would read, say, a memorial or crónica, but not read as a historian, rather read looking for an interesting event or situation, or for a fascinating or revolting person, or for an interesting turn of phrase. Seeking something that would jog their artistic sensibility, their dramatic interest, and they would think, "Ah, here's something I can use, something I can build with." The dramatists, I imagine, read everything and anything in search for usable theatrical material; they observed everything with their dramatist's eye, and into their plays, whether historical, religious, mythological, or purely invented, they wove themselves and those around them, living and dead; they wove their personal problems, concerns, and thoughts with history, philosophy, novel, poetry, drama, and the daily life they were an active part of. They wove their world and all it held. And so, just as we are liable to find about anything in that little brown bird's nest, so too can we find whatever it might be that we seek in the plays we read. Yet how far can we go in saying that the little brown bird's nest offers an accurate picture of the moment in history and the place where I live, and how far can we go in saying that a play offers an accurate portrayal ofthe people, the society, oflife and history in seventeenthcentury Madrid? How far? Well, that depends, doesn't it? Infrequently, literature studies have become a discipline to be admired and emulated. Some time ago, Hayden White, an historian, saw written history as if it had been structured as literature, and about a decade or so ago, other historians were talking...