Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama: Reviving and Revising the Come by Laura Vidler (review)

In recent years, there has been quite a bit of enthusiasm and interest among scholars of early modern English and Spanish drama to embrace the performative aspects of seventeenth-century plays. Laura L. Vidler’s monograph, Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama: Reviving and Revising the Comedia, is a prominent example of recent trends in comedia studies to examine and analyze Golden Age theatrical works through the lens of performance studies. As Vidler indicates, portions of some of the chapters have been published previously as articles, but the material is further developed here.

Chapter One analyzes the debates concerning critical theory and theater generally and performance studies specifically, and insists on the necessity of interdisciplinarity to examine cogently the relationship between spectacle and spectator. Vidler notes that since the 1950s, comedia scholars have begun to compile a vast amount of historical and archival material (ledgers, bills of sale, contracts, notes and letters, repair orders, etc.) that has helped to develop a behind-the-scenes understanding of the stage practices of theatrical production.

Such archival research then provided a strong impetus to develop analyses that go beyond reliance on the written play text. Indeed, Vidler examines several modern critical approaches to the comedia and indicates that the combined subjective and objective interpretations offered today by performance theory seem to be the most promising for examining Golden Age theater. Throughout the chapters, she bases her analyses on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion habitus (“structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”) as outlined in his The Logic of Practice. Vidler then explains that a Golden Age play is both an individual and collective practice—like habitus—that develops through performance: “The relationship between the current circumstances that motivate the practice, and the historical milieu in which that habitus developed is realized, in Bourdieu’s own words, through its performance” (21). As a result, Vidler observes:

It is not enough, therefore, simply to deduce individual structures through historical, objectivist means, nor to analyze them solely through subjectivist, phenomenological interpretation. … [A] habitus of the corral stage may be articulated through an analysis of a performance of this interrelationship. Habitus is neither historical, nor ahistorical. It is a way of approaching the world that is both culturally determined and culturally determining.

(21)

For Vidler, habitus allows comedia scholars to take into account not only the structure of culture, but also the human capacity to later manipulate those structures for both individual and social expression (20). The application of habitus forms the basis for her individual interpretations in the subsequent chapters:

Chapter Two focuses on space and spatiality of the Golden Age stage. Vidler first concentrates on how the go-between figure of Fabia in El caballero de Olmedo was appropriated from the visual iconography from the woodcut prints in the early editions of the La Celestina (particularly the 1499 Burgos edition). While several critics already have noted the textual similarities between the two characters, Vidler instead concentrates on how the visual representation of Celestina in the woodcuts was so well known during the time that they can “approximate a visual staging of Fabia” (28). In the second half of this chapter, Vidler analyzes the various uses of the “reja” in Golden Age plays as a minimalist stage prop: a prison cell, a window grate, an instrument that divides the stage both vertically and horizontally, etc. This portion of the chapter is a catalogue of the different uses of the “reja” as stock set pieces in a variety of plays, including El caballero de Olmedo and La vida es sueño, which makes clear that “the reja is a scenic element structurally structured, not only the physical scenic space, but also scenic spatiality. The versatility of the corral reja is an excellent example of the dislocation of the Spanish baroque spatial habitus, a structured and structured structure that communicates dramatic meaning” (53-54).

In Chapter Three, the author examines the gestures and...