Teatros y comedias en Madrid: 1699-1719. Estudios y documentos (review)

Reviews295 give predominance to the values of the capital, the establishment of this system was of too recent a date to bring about social hegemony. Spanish society at the time was still quite dispersed. Finally, the values that the Comedia normally proposes are fidelity to love, valor, obedience to a liege lord, observance of the Christian faith, all of them aspirations that were widespread throughout Western society. Is it possible to affirm that these values were so inimical to the public in general and to writers such as the noble Calderón that these felt the need to undermine them as completely as the author suggests? In the case of Calderón, it seems that rather than presupposing a total disenchantment with dominant values (". . .el dramaturgo trasciende o se desidentifica de los valores dominantes que la tradición culta cifra en el protagonista," p. 75) that it is more likely that he, like all conservatives in every society, sought not to reject traditional values but to return them to what he considered a previous uncorrupted condition. Finally, is it not possible to posit that the co-existence of what we call aristocratic values with the needs of the lower classes within the same work, represents not an implicit rejection of the former but an acceptance of the inescapable duality of life: the recognition of the basic needs of man and the desire to transcend these very necessities with higher aspirations? FRANK P. CASA The University of Michigan N.D. SHERGOLD y J.E. VAREY, con la colaboración de Charles Davis. Teatros y comedias en Madrid: 1699-1719. Estudios y documentos . ("Fuentes para la historia del teatro en España', XI) London: Támesis Books, 1985. 222 pp. The admirable series continues, with the compilation of extracts from documents held at the Archivo Municipal da Madrid, comprising those of the Archivo de la Secretaría. The recent work of Donald Curtis Buck (Ann Arbor, 1984) dealt with the "software"' the drama produced at this time; here we may read all that pertains to the operation of the two corrales, La Cruz and El Principe. The same preoccupations are here that we met in the immediately previous installments of "Fuentes": theater-leasings, restorations and adaptations of buildings, the actor's precarious living,.... The documents show convincingly how the Madrid theaters were affected by the introduction of Italian companies at the instance of Felipe V and his court; and by the calamities and warfare of these two decades. One result was the 296BCom, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Winter 1987) decay of the whole system of arrendadores who had of course come to depend on their claims to compensation when corrales were closed or badly attended (cf. "Fuentes", V). In the volume this collapse is observed in process (omitting the actual transcriptions of account-books) . We read of a misjudged venture, the construction and subsequent failure of a third corral, Los Caños del Peral, intended as a home for an Italian company patronized by Count Alberoni, the brother of Felipe Vs chief minister. A persistent difficulty lay in the decreed prices of admission and exemptions from payment, of which there were enough for those hospitals which had a partinterest in revenues to fear for losses (30) . But all aspects of theatrical life seem to have been hazardous, and there is a vignette eloquent of all this in the documents relating to María de Navas, an actress of some standing and an autora. Since, we are told, the Madrid actress Ana Hipólita is proving to be no favorite of the public, and since she has walked out on her responsibilities (66-67) , the king is being petitioned for a grant-in-aid to have María de Navas brought from Valencia, in time of war, and when she herself is living on borrowed funds (cf. her coquettish-pathetic letter, 56). Later we read of her acting in Madrid, in Calderón's El pleito matrimonial, but by 1712 once again she is to be sent for, this time from Zaragoza. Another collapse to record is that of the custom of selecting acting companies with the object of presenting the year's...