Antigüedad y actualidad de Luis Vélez de Guevara: Estudios críticos (review)

Reviews21 1 that existed when God said let there be light and there was light, when the word was the thing), the signs lose their absolute concreteness. The authorizing figure, as we saw in Sieber's essay, that has substituted for God is often an all-too-human monarch. The signs become markers of the personal, of the eccentric as well as of the cultural, the societal, and the literary, even as they continue to show the trace of the absent referent. This brief synopsis and commentary on these essays cannot capture the subtlety of the arguments, the numerous examples adduced from Calderón's works as proof, nor the potential value they have for all those interested in Calderón. I said at the beginning that the book was difficult to obtain (it also has a number of typographical errors) but the effort expended in acquiring these essays is well worth the investment. William R. Blue University of Kansas C. GEORGE PEALE, editor. Antigüedad y actualidad de Luis Vêlez de Guevara: Estudios críticos. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1983. Hardback. 209 pp. This collection of nineteen critical studies on Luis Vêlez de Guevara originated out of the international symposium that was held to commemorate the birth of the Spanish playwright when the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference met in 1978. C. George Peale cites the explorative goals of this concise volume, whose able authors have applied the diverse approaches that are being used in the study of Golden Age literature to the dramatist from Ecija. The book's first article, with its extensive notes and bibliography, sets forth the criteria to be followed while studying Vêlez; the second reflects on his attitudes while serving as a court poet; and the last, in the form of an addendum, provides a useful critical bibliography. The remaining articles, most of which are paired in accordance to topics and works, address questions concerning Vêlez de Guevara in light of the newest scholarship in Spanish Golden Age literature. Among the topics considered are comparisons of Vélez's structural methods and his treatment of the honor theme with those of Lope de Vega and Calderón; Vélez's use of novelesque sources, chivalric devices, songs and lyrics, 212BCom, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter, 1984) symbolism, imagery, and stagecraft; his prolifically used, curious character type—the mujer varonil; and his incorporation of the farcical ingredients in the entremés. Two writers, in their thorough analyses of La Luna de la Siena, devote attention to how Vêlez transcended the highly conventionalized genre of the comedia by maintaining a delicate balance between convention and innovation. Another group of writers turn to Vêlez as a tragedian. William M. Whitby, while discussing three plays by Vêlez that he considers to be tragedies and pointing to the difference between melodrama and tragedy in terms of the concept of tragedy from the time of Plato and Aristotle, argues that Vêlez was a better tragedian than Lope. On the other hand, James A. Parr, rejecting the older schools of criticism that interpreted Spanish drama in terms of poetic justice and harmartia and heeding Northrop Frye's admonition to approach tragedy from a nonmoralistic viewpoint , grounds his orientation in the baroque aesthetic ideal to explore a theme artistically and to emphasize a protagonist's amoral strength of character, not his or her faults. Two of the later chapters consider some of the plays that Vêlez wrote in collaboration with other playwrights. Ann L. Mackenzie's analysis of the lesser-known También la afrenta es veneno interestingly compares the characters and plot with historical fact and Guillen de Castro's play on the same subject—Fernando Fs notorious passion for Doña Leonor de Meneses. Her study on the character differences and the presence or lack of unity in the play as each Act was passed to the next playwright reveals the freedom each writer had with which to develop his own ideas. In three of the book's last articles, the authors have found points of interest from Vélez's picaresque narrative, El Diablo Cojuelo. The first concentrates on...