Imperial Stagings: Empire and Ideology in Transatlantic Theater of Early Modern Spain and the New World by Chad M. Gasta (review)

Chad Gasta offers clear and persuasive political readings of four seventeenth-century plays: Lope de Vegas’s Fuenteovejuna, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s El dueño de las estrellas, the 1660 overture to Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s opera La púrpura de la rosa, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s El divino Narciso (with considerable attention to the loa of this auto sacramental). Gasta shows how three of these works perform a dual function of supporting the overall ruling order on the one hand and criticizing specific aspects of royal policy on the other. The exception is Calderón’s loa, which Gasta analyzes mostly as an effective instrument of propaganda that promotes the official view of the Treaty of the Pyrenees and the marriage of María Teresa and Louis XIV.

In his introduction, Gasta discusses the important role of early modern theater in shaping the ideology of Spain and its empire. While acknowledging that Spaniards did not typically consider their transoceanic monarchy to be an “empire,” he justifies our modern use of the term in this case. Here his focus is on an empire in decline, but one in which theater flourished in spite of state control, and in which playwrights were adept at using historical or mythological plots to comment on contemporary economic, political, and religious controversies.

Gasta begins with the case of Fuenteovejuna (1610-14), where he concentrates precisely on the economic forms of oppression that critics typically consider to be downplayed in the work. Although the question of honor lends itself more readily to dramatic conflict and appeals to an audience’s emotions more than such grievances as the burning of crops or unjust agrarian policies, Gasta shows how Lope connects these themes in unexpected ways. For example, Laurencia’s idealization of country life in Act I develops into an idealization of food, which she describes in an abundance that was beyond the reach of real Spanish peasants. The peasant revolt of 1476 was removed enough in time so that no current noble figure would feel targeted by Lope’s portrayal, but close enough in time for the play to address agrarian problems still relevant to Philip III’s Spain, and to suggest that a similar revolt could recur. With Gasta’s reading we can see how Lope uses this distance to treat pressing agrarian issues and identify economic policies, such as the favoring of the wool trade over crop production, that fueled the empire but also spread discontent among many of its subjects.

Gasta examines references to specific contemporary figures in Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s El dueño de las estrellas (1620-25), which uses the story of Lycurgus to comment on the proper role of a king’s chief minister. The legendary lawgiver compares favorably to the corrupt Duke of Lerma and serves as a model for the Count-Duke of Olivares. The play also comments on specific contemporary laws, according to Gasta, who sees in Licurgo’s proposal to eliminate the sale of public offices a critique of the practice in Spain and a reference to Olivares’s efforts to curb the corruption that resulted from that practice. He acknowledges the ambivalence of Licurgo’s suicide at the end of the play but maintains that, in putting an end to his life, the king’s favorite puts the interests of the state ahead of his own, even if the cause of the self-sacrifice is the king’s abuse of power. While Gasta draws numerous parallels between Licurgo and Olivares, he is less inclined to see analogies between the play’s Rey de Creta and Philip IV.

As a court dramatist in the late stages of his career, Calderón was writing under more tightly controlled circumstances than Lope or Ruiz de Alarcón, especially when called...