Studies in Honor of Robert ter Horst by Eleanor ter Horst, Edward Friedman, and Ali Shehzad Zaidi (review)

THE ELEVEN ESSAYS COLLECTED IN THIS FESTSCHRIFT pay tribute to the career, scholarship, and character of Professor Robert ter Horst, echoing what Edward H. Friedman calls his "indisputably baroque sensibility" (3), evidenced in ter Horst's profound erudition, eloquent expression, and inimitable style. Eleanor ter Horst opens the collection with a poignant personal portrait of a life dedicated to literature and passed from father to daughter, one well lived and devoted "to the twin vices of reading and writing" (2). Two other brief personal tributes by Friedman and Ali Shehzad Zaidi corroborate appreciatively ter Horst's legacy as colleague and mentor, venerated teacher, and friend. The essays range over a variety of topics, literatures, and genres—prose, poetry, film, and especially drama—that reflect ter Horst's varied comparative interests and published work.

Those focusing on drama begin with William R. Blue's "On the Road: Traveling in the Comedia," which explores the material reality, symbolic worth, and character building effects of travel in a series of plays by dramatists such as Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Rojas Zorilla. Blue contextualizes these plays in writings by contemporary commentators who recounted the material challenges faced by travelers in early modern Spain. He concludes that such "road plays" portray the characters in transition, in a dynamic space that allows them to explore their options, identities, and values.

Focusing perceptively on the performative aspects of drama, Patricia Kenworthy's "La dama duende and the 'Reversible' Corral Stage" examines space and staging conventions in Calderón's play. By addressing various critical determinations regarding the central prop—the perplexing alacena—as well as the positioning and timing of exits and entrances, Kenworthy points to the critical need for greater editorial rigor in analyzing dramatists' directions and staging patterns in order to enhance our appreciation of their virtuosity. To do so will fill the analytical blanks left by studies that do not take performance into consideration when evaluating drama.

Randolph D. Pope also examines Calderón in "The Mute Testimony of Portraits in Pedro Calderón de la Barca's and Miguel de Unamuno's Work." He expands sensitively on the theme of ter Horst's article "The Second Self: Painting and Sculpture in the Plays of Calderón" (in Calderón de la Barca at the Tercentenary: Comparative Views, edited by Wendell M. Aycock and Sydney P. Cravens, Texas Tech UP, 1982, pp. 175–92), central within the large body of work our colleague dedicates to Calderón, which maintains that the playwright's attention to painting and sculpture is a manifestation of his aesthetic appreciation of art. Pope analyzes in detail the presence of portraits and their function in Unamuno's Niebla and Abel Sánchez: una historia de pasión as well as in Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, putting these works into philosophical and aesthetic dialogue with Calderón. By analyzing the "mute testimony" (107) such portraits provide in their differing "languages of silence," this article scrutinizes those writers' commentary on the problematic disparities between model versus portrait, original versus copy, life versus dream, and, ultimately, life versus art.

Eleanor ter Horst's "The Conjugations of Don Juan" also engages productively with a previous article by ter Horst, "Epic Decent: The Filiations of Don Juan" (MLN, vol.111, 1996, pp. 255–75), in which he finds male rivalry to be a structuring element of both Tirso de Molina's El burlador de Sevilla and José Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio. Eleanor ter Horst expands on this idea of competition (between father and son, understood broadly) and the interplay between similarity and difference in her examination of two other versions of Don Juan—Mozart's opera Don Giovanni and E. T. A. Hoffman's novella Don Juan—and Goethe's Faust, focusing on "the indeterminacy of relationships between texts, between music and language, between various spoken languages, between men...