La Comedia y sus intérpretes (review)

Reviews HESSE, EVERETT W. La Comedia y sus intérpretes. Madrid: Castalia, 1973. Paper. 227 pages. Everett Hesse's book, of so broad a scope as to make impossible an adequate description in a review as short as this, belongs among those volumes on the comedia that may be considered indispensable, whether for the advanced undergraduate and the graduate student who want to see Golden Age drama in the large, or for the established scholar as a review and an overview of the subject expressed by Hesse's title. The book is carefully organized ; the nine chapters (preceded by a Prefacio and followed by a Bibliografia selecta and an Indice de nombres ) have useful subheadings to help the reader follow the author's thought. Each chapter has a few paragraphs to introduce the matter at hand, whether on stylistics, characterization or interpretation ; these follow the ideas of well-known scholars on the subject, then usually an elucidation of Hesse's own convictions. Finally, one or more plays are analyzed to illustrate the matter at issue. Each reader will no doubt take special pleasure in the chapter that best elucidates his current interest. Chapter 7 will perhaps be for most readers the one of largest significance: "La comedia y su interpretación." It is here that three major commentators on the structure and meaning of the comedia are reviewed, A. A. Parker, Arnold Reichenberger, Eric Bentley. Parker's elucidation, as the reader may recall from that scholar's article in the Tulane Drama Review of September 1959, offers five principles that for him form the basis for the correct interpretation of the comedia; we have no space here for their repetition. Hesse is hesitant to accept Parker's proposals in their entirety. Nor is he able to agree with Reichenberger's ideas on the uniqueness of the comedia (H.R., 27 [1959]) just as he again rejects them in H.R., 38 (1970). Hesse finds more acceptable the ideas of Eric Bentley as these are expressed in the second of the H.R. issues just named, although he also finds details to criticize in Bentley 's exposition. Margaret Wilson Borland 's book on the comedia (Oxford, 1969) is on the whole unacceptable to Hesse, who (p. 144) finds the author 's attitude "demasiado severa y casi injusta." Presumably, he would consider Mrs. Borland's attitude "negative ," a point of view he deplores on his p. 138: "¡Lástima que los especialistas en la comedia tengan idea tan negativa de un género al que han dedicado la mayor parte de la vida profesional !" It may be that Hesse's reader will take special interest in chapters 5 and 6, where the comedia is considered first as tragedy, then as comedy. Since "tragedy " and "comedy" cannot as yet be defined with finality, the chapters will of course be taken as provisional — as indeed the whole book will be. Recently there has been increasing effort by scholars to explicate comedy more carefully than heretofore; the effort is especially pertinent because as a genre the comedia is nearly all comedy rather than tragedy( the terms are used here in their conventional meanings). The labeling of the comedia as popular and escapist (pp. 18 and 21) can hardly be impunged. It is on p. 12 that Hesse offers the four questions that drama must inspire as one probes beneath its surface: (1) What is the nature of man? (2) What is life's aim? (3) What is man's destiny? (4) What is the good 35 life? (Hesse does not define "good.") These questions enter the area of philosophy , as all ultimate questions about the meaning of life and its record we call literature must do. Hesse makes clear (p. 11 and elsewhere) his desire to interpret the comedia for our own time, although he does not deny the need to see it as the seventeenth-century playgoer and reader saw it, insofar as this may be possible for our twentieth -century eyes. The plays chosen by Hesse for analysis are well known, and have had previous comment by scholars. Those by Calderón, the dramatist he most admires, are used more often than others...