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{ 264 } Book Reviews sentence descriptions are readily available on Wikipedia. Along similar lines, some judicious pruning of the articles would have ameliorated the book’s turgidity (do we really need, for instance, a description of George C. Scott’s ­ living room?). Finally, Senelick reports that Edith Isaacs, one of the journal’s editors, dedicated “the August 1942 issue of Theatre Arts to ‘the Negro in Ameri­ can theatre’” (xvi). This important issue was later expanded into a book published by Theatre Arts in 1947. Why, then, were none of the comments about African Ameri­ can acting made in the 1942 issue reprinted in this collection? Other than Young’s essay on Mei Lan-­ Fang, the anthology lacks contributions beyond the white establishment. Despite misgivings, the significance of this collection is evident, and Laurence Senelick has done a great service to the scholarly and professional community. David Krasner — Emerson College \ \ Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. By Scott K. Taylor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $55.00 cloth. Scott K. Taylor’s Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain offers a fresh approach to understanding the Spanish concept of honor and its prominence in the cultural landscape of seventeenth-­ century Spain. Although Taylor is an early mod­ ern historian, his work is interdisciplinary in its breadth of scholarship as it touches on literary criticism, cultural anthropology, legal studies, and theatre history. In this book, he challenges the dominant theory that Spanish honor was a rigid social code based on shame and cultural anxieties as depicted in early modern Spanish drama and literature. In contrast to the strict “code of honor” traditionally ascribed to Spanish culture, Taylor introduces his concept of the “rhetoric of honor,” which he defines as “the conscious use of phrases, gestures, and actions—including elements of the duel—to convey information about the issues in contention while simultaneously advancing a violent confrontation”(21).Finding the term“code” too limiting in its implication of a formal process, Taylor’s “rhetoric” creates a loose template of action that establishes an accretion of shame which can then rise to violent confrontations—a fluid and performative approach to honor as a construct in early modern society and literature. Taylor presents his theory in juxtaposition to the previously published { 265 } Book Reviews theories of social anthropologists Julian Pitt-­ Rivers, J. G. Peristiany, and Jane Schneider, who have explained honor as a strict code that supported a family-­ centered morality, acting in and influenced by a larger sense of community. Taylor asserts that their concept of honor developed in part by using the“honor plays” of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca and discussions of dueling in fencing manuals as examples of actual behavior. Taylor contends, however , that social interactions involving violence in dueling manuals, law books, and “honor plays” of the period do not accurately depict Spanish behavior. For him, these printed accounts of violence depict Spanish life in an imagined or idealized form where two wronged parties duel in accordance to a strict code of actions. He therefore places de Vega, Calderón, and other Spanish playwrights in the ranks of early modern moralists and an “elite culture” of Spanish authors . Rather then relying solely on dramatic and other literary representations, such as novels or dueling manuals, to illuminate the workings of “honor” and “violence” during the era, Taylor focuses on legal documentation of actual historical events. He does employ the plays, however, as tools for an intellectual discourse of honor contrasted with the factual events documented in legal records , by introducing each chapter with a dramatic scene treating the chapter’s topic, followed by an explication of the topic gleaned from his research into the courts. Through this methodology he deconstructs the romanticized anthropological and artistic concepts of honor by comparing them with descriptions of real-­ life confrontations involving civil matters of “honor” in early modern Spain. For example, in chapter 4, titled “Men,” which explores the anxieties of masculine honor and its dependency on the behavior of others, Taylor pre­ sents the opening scene of Calderón’s El pintor de su deshonra (The Painter of His Dishonor). He then contrasts the...

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