Cervantès dramaturge: Un théâtre à naître (review)

REVIEWS JEAN CANAVAGGIO. Cervantes dramaturge: Un théâtre à naître. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977. 507 pp. The goal of Canavaggio's study is to elaborate what he considers the intrinsic coherence of the Cervantine theater. The process is made extremely difficult by the apparent loss of most of the dramatic works of the first period and by the problematic chronology of the extant plays. In general terms, Canavaggio approaches the plays as two-dimensional and then as three-dimensional objects; he views the linear patterns and the system of conventions operating within the works, and proceeds to define the formal and conceptual elements which give depth to the structure. Cervantes' consciousness of literary tradition and the impact of the comedia nueva help to shape a theater which never conforms to a rigid model and which thus allows for continuous experimentation, for a dynamic conception of literature. A case in point is the interaction of history and poetry. La Numancia, El rufián dichoso, and the plays on captivity represent a fusion of the real and the imaginary, of Torres Naharro's comedia a noticia and comedia afantasia, so that history becomes stylized and poetry becomes historically rooted. In the Argel plays, the relationship achieves a special importance because the creator of fiction has lived the historical situation. In other works, tradition merges with history as the text projects an ever present pre-text; literary and social myths provide, respectively, intertextual and contextual points of reference. The plot of La entretenida, for example, plays against Lope's dramatic canon and contemporary urban society. In Pedro de Urdemalas , a major innovation is the attribution of a past to the hero. While Pedro abandons the past for the present, the protean pattern of the past continues to manifest itself in the present, culminating in the decision to become an actor. The truth of Pedro de Urdemalas-his validity in the present-stems from a validation of his mythic past. The operative term, for the full-length plays and for the entremeses, is recreation, a literary act in which external reality and literature itselfbecome mediating factors. Implicit in Canavaggio's argument is a distinction between Lope, as a playwright who has developed a uniform yet flexible structure, and Cervantes , whose search for new forms and variations of old forms implies a denial of reductive systems. What has been termed disparity in the Cervantine theater is rather a reflection of its experimental nature, marked by trans145 146Bulletin ofthe Comediantes formations and shifts in emphasis. Working toward a typology of the plays, Canavaggio defines Cervantes' method of opening dramatic space. The linear progression of the double love intrigue in Los tratos de Argel finds a counterpoint in the episodic sequences, and the linear-essentially closedspace of Cipión's plan in La Numancia is opened through focus on individual Numantians and the creation of figurative characters. Of the Ocho comedias , El rufián dichoso has the clearest pattern of coherence, based on juxtaposition of the spiritual with the profane, while other works present a forwardmoving convergence of actions (El laberinto de amor, El gallardo español, La gran sultana) and a playing-off of parallelism (La casa de los celos, Los baños de Argel, La entretenida). In Pedro de Urdemalas, Cervantes finds a synthetic structure in which the events relating to Pedro and those relating to Bélica are simultaneously autonomous and complementary. The systems of correspondence do not affect the singularity of actions, so that unity is achieved while diversity is preserved. The linguistic level of the plays confirms their experimental nature. Los tratos de Argel manifests the tension between the rhetorical and the quotidian which illustrates the creative process. In the case ofLa Numancia, the rhetorical stylization of tradition loses its purely ornamental value to be invested with a precise function. Traditional rhetorical features are used in a new way as the linguistic shifts in the play reflect and intensify the conceptual conflict. In La casa de los celos, on the other hand, the eclectic nature of the work allows for a clear analysis of the adaptation of language to situation, to the creation of a plurality of linguistic devices. A...