Entremeses nuevos (1643) edited by Juan C. González Mata (review)

An awning of paradox covers Spanish comediastudies. Scholars and critics seek to understand this patrimony through ever-larger bodies of documentation and hermeneutics. Every year more classics are revived and staged as two-act plays in proscenium venues before spectators who are usually seated, at the least, several yards away from the action. For the most part, scholarship and performances, however plausible, persuasive, moving, and even brilliant, assume epistemologies and empirical realities that have little to do with comediaperfomance in the seventeenth century. The fact remains that there is a great deal that we do not know about theatrical productions in the 1600s. Like the scholars and philosophers described by Plato in Phaedo99-100, we contemplate past existences through the medium of thought, but see them only through a glass darkly. Even an entire genre remains unrecognized by and large in scholarship and in performance: the entremés. Despite a century that has given us Emilio Cotarelo’s monumental Colección de entremeses, loas, bailes, jácaras y mojigangas(1911), the masterful projects of Hannah Bergman (1965, 1968, 1970) and Eugenio Asensio (1971), excellent editions by Rodríguez and Tordera (1982), Lobato (1989), Madroñal (1996), Huerta Calvo (1999), Arellano, Escudero and Madroñal (2001), Buezo (2005), García Valdés (2005), and innumerable commentaries on Cervantes’s short plays, the entremésas genre and as cultural practice remains an open field. On both counts, González Maya’s (hereafter, GM) edition of Entremeses nuevos de diferentes autores (1643)lays a solid foundation and points to directions for future enquiry.

The volume’s prologue and opening chapters deftly establish the entremésas a literary canon: forty-three collections of one-act plays between 1640 and 1742, some of which enjoyed two or three printings, plus nineteen miscellanies containing short works. In chapter 3, GM enumerates the authors whose works constituted the 1643 anthology: Quiñones de Benavente (12 titles), Calderón and Quevedo (3 titles each), Antonio de Solís and Juan Navarro de Espinosa (1 title each). The last-named author surprised this reviewer, because he was the censor who between 1638 and 1656 inficted his orthodoxy and editorial judgments on three generations of playwrights. In chapter 4, GM discusses the art and technique of parody and, with admirable clarity, outlines an ars poeticaof the entremés, organized around its parodic situations, characters, and language:

Plot situations—a) picaresque episodes; b) generational conflicts between parents and their offspring; c) marital (and extramarital) tensions; d) strategies and tactics in the war of the sexes; e) the never-ending skirmishes between masters and their servants; f) the ruses that quacks foist upon their patients; g) parades of dandies, fops, and fools; and h) the comedy of street life: vendors, sticky-fingered cops, politicians, prostitutes.

Comic premises—a) ridiculous stories, songs, plays on words, sayings, and proverbs that are used to artfully fleece, swindle, or pick a victim’s pocket; b) physical humor, bawdy tales, practical jokes, and other pranks; c) ever-escalating battles of words, insults, and name-calling; d) hilarious use of props, costume, choreography, and visual effects, usually indicated in stage directions; e) use of disguise, male—seldom female—transvestism, and buffoonish costuming for doctors, barbers, sextons, and ghosts—again, for male characters, seldom for actresses.

Stock character types—a) Females: mothers, daughters, gossipy neighbors, deceived wives, deceiving wives, accomplices, tricksters, manics, old women, Celestinas, prostitutes, barbers; b) Males: students, Portuguese, dandies, tricksters, boys; c) Caricatures: bullfighters, misers, boasters, old men, ghosts, blind men; d) Couples: parents-children, husbands-wives, masters-servants, prostitutes-clients, gallants-damsels, two men, two women; e) Professions: street vendors, prostitutes, mayors, barbers, druggists, priests, shopkeepers, sacristans, musicians; f) Literary characters: characters from the Romancero, proverbial characters, Moors, Juan Rana—all conceived superficially as caricatures with no psychological motives or nuances.

GM regards burlesque language to be the dramatic marrow of the entremés. Because of the...