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REVIEWS Forcione, Alban K., Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. HB. x + 286 pp. ISBN: 978-0-300-13440-7. In this study, Forcione analyzes in great detail and depth two plays that “disrobe” the king, anatomizing regal identity in its inescapable doubleness and thereby testifying to a countercurrent in the political and literary culture of the age of absolutism. The two central plays are Lope de Vega’s El villano en su rincón, and El rey don Pedro en Madrid o el infanzón de Illescas, which has been variously attributed, most convincingly to Lope or to Andrés de Claramonte y Corroy. Diverging from earlier critics from Karl Vossler through Arnold Reichenberger, who viewed Lope as the dramatist of conformity, ever celebrating an ideal king as the heart of a mythologized national history, and from Maravall’s depiction of Golden Age drama as part of a propaganda machine of Spanish absolutism, Forcione follows the path of Melveena McKendrick and other recent critics who find a more complex view of monarchy in that corpus and a demystifying representation of kings in Lope’s theatre. With Forcione’s interpretive brilliance, wide-ranging erudition and complementary readings of many other works by Lope, other dramatists, medieval, and early modern political theorists and historians, this book is a richly detailed addition to literaryphilosophical criticism of the Spanish comedia. Forcione prefaces his study with engaging evidence of a similar current of “unkinging” (2) in Velázquez’s famous painting Las Meninas and a comic sonnet by Cervantes. Velázquez draws the spectator into the apparent intimacy of a living, everyday scene in the private chamber of Philip IV, the king whose portrait Velázquez is supposedly painting. Yet the king and queen are present only in a faded, ghostly image in a mirror, and the ceremonial space of other portraits is unbound. Forcione concludes that it is a scene of the “ungraspable inwardness of individuality” (4) that reveals the nothingness on which majesty rests. The Cervantes sonnet plus estrambote on the simulacrum built in the CALÍOPE Vol. 17, No. 1, 2011: pages 219-246 220 REVIEWS cathedral of Seville of Philip II’s tomb in El Escorial deflates the regalia of majesty and political transubstantiation intended by the extravagant symbols of majesty in that tomb by means of a Lucianesque, satirical dialogue between spectators that disrupts the ritual of mourning, writing a burlesque epitaph that shows the hollowness behind inflating regal ceremony. Forcione’s thesis is that El villano and El rey don Pedro explore the “unkinging” of the monarch in pursuit of restoring a “humanness” (1) that was lost or seriously threatened by the rise of the modern state and the construction of the fear-provoking, theatrical spectacle of majesty and the empowered bureaucratic mechanisms of the baroque absolutist regimes. Both plays accomplish this through the complex interaction between the king and a challenging outlier to his regime who functions as a double. Although he speaks of the “politicalphilosophical ” (60) thread in these plays, Forcione is primarily interested in philosophical traditions rather than specific political junctures or sociological, economic, political, ideological or new historical explanations, which he considers limiting or reductive (21718 ). He takes the long view of Stoicism/Neo-Stoicism and other philosophical traditions, of speculum principis treatises and of historical circumstances that influenced the concept of monarchy in Spain, tracing them from the MiddleAges through the seventeenth century. Forcione’s analysis of the two plays plus a concluding glimpse at Calderón’s La vida es sueño and El príncipe constante trace out a decline from the effective “humanness” and optimistic humanism of the Renaissance prince-state through the machine-state of Baroque majesty to the king’s eclipse by Counter-Reformation theocentrism and pessimism (187-88). He acknowledges rather dismissively Bataillón’s “hypothetical” linking of El villano to the 1612 double French-Spanish marriages of Louis XIII and Philip III to Ana de Austria and Isabel de Borbón and accords endnote credit to Carol Kirby’s dating of El rey don Pedro between 162126 but gives no dates...

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