Calipso eclipsada: El teatro de Cervantes más allá del siglo de oro by Jesús G. Maestro (review)

In his 1925 landmark book, El pensamiento de Cervantes, Américo Castro set the tone for our contemporary assessment of Cervantes’s theatrical production: “La comedia que acabamos de analizar en nota revela cómo luchó Cervantes por salirse de los moldes usuales, y cómo fracasó. El teatro cervantino, dejando fuera los entremeses, es duro de leer en la actualidad, salvando algún que otro pasaje aislado” (51).¹ This apparent dismissal of Cervantes’s drama is only bolstered by Cervantes’s own words in the prologue to the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos, nunca representados. As Jesús G. Maestro notes, citing Cervantes’s own passage, “quiero decir que no hallé [...] autor que me la pidiese, puesto que sabían que las tenía, y así las arrinconé en un cofre y las consagré y condené al perpetuo silencio. En esta sazón me dijo un librero que él me las comprara si un autor de título no le hubiera dicho que de mi prosa se podía esperar mucho, pero que del verso nada” (272). It would appear that this place in the shadow of Cervantes’s monumental prose has been his theater’s lot in life for quite some time.

Perhaps the most important of the many contributions that Jesús G. Maestro’s most recent monograph makes to the field is a theoretical framework through which Cervantes’s under-appreciated drama can be assessed as an important part of his literary oeuvre and, furthermore, Cervantes can be viewed as an innovative ancestor to many modern dramaturges. Unlike the Calypso so aptly mentioned in the title, it can now remain un-eclipsed by its heroic consorts. As a result, Maestro has opened up a whole new avenue of inquiry through which Cervantes’s indelible mark on the modern/postmodern world can be traced out more legibly.

Maestro’s project hinges on a rigorous analysis of tragedy and its dramatic manifestations throughout history. By crafting a genealogy of that dramatic style, beginning with classical theater and reaching deep into the 20th century, Maestro fortifies another of his primary assertions. In order to best understand Cervantes’s drama, Maestro argues, one cannot consider him solely among his contemporaries, but rather in light of the authors who came later and whose works exhibit the paradigm shift that Maestro identifies within the tragedies of Cervantes, most specifically La Numancia.

According to Maestro, this “new contemporary tragedy” coexisted with the aesthetic of classic tragedy during the Spanish Golden Age, but Cervantes was the true innovator whose tragic dramas helped launch a profound renovation of the genre by reevaluating the true source of tragedy itself. As Maestro writes, “La nueva ‘tragedia contemporánea’ [...] será completamente diferente en sus formas estéticas de la tragedia clásica, que había nacido en una comunidad de individuos terriblemente inquietos por reflexionar sobre el sentido y la justificación de un mundo trascendente y numinoso dentro del terrenal mundo del hombre. La nueva ‘tragedia contemporánea’ cifrará el sentido de lo trágico precisamente en la ausencia de referentes trascendentes en el seno de la experiencia vital humana” (167).

The tragic situation of human existence is no longer a punishment imposed at the will of gods, but rather the sad state of being of modern man. This is best evidenced by Maestro’s detailed reading of La Numancia. The self-immolation of an entire besieged Celtiberian settlement in the face of the Roman forces of Scipio Africanus is not a result of an Olympian decree or any other numinous agents. It is not a socially sanctioned and compulsory act of Seppuku en masse. It is, instead, a truly modern expression of nihilistic liberty that wrests the agency of the victim of tragedy from metaphysical influences and, in part, imposed military and political power. The self-imposed suffering of the...