El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead ed. by Valerie Hegstrom, and: The Golden Age of Spanish Drama ed. by Barbara Fuchs (review)

There has been renewed interest in Spanish Golden Age performance studies with an increasing focus on presenting renowned dramaturgs and their works to Anglophone audiences. Edited and translated works by Valerie Hegstrom, Catherine Larson, and Barbara Fuchs and G. J. Racz complement the rich tradition of early modern Spanish performance studies and expand this scholarly area reaching out to more readers and viewers not necessarily familiar with Peninsular Spanish studies. El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead and The Golden Age of Spanish Drama invite any reader—particularly those with no prior experience or expertise in the area of Spanish drama—to delve into the world of performances and traditions of the sixteen and seventeenth-century Iberian Peninsula. While Hegstrom’s edition focuses on a single play written by Ângela de Azevedo, Fuchs’s edition presents an overview of the Golden Age Spanish drama. Both editions provide the reader with thorough and essential information about the evolution of performances, dating from the oral tradition to the making of a comedia. Hegstrom includes information about the Spanish drama and its influences—both historical and literary—in Portugal and presents the reader with Spanish and English versions of Azevedo’s El muerto disimulado. The edition by Fuchs focuses on several seminal plays of the era and their significance in cultural, literary, and performance studies. Both editions would be valuable in literature in translation courses, as well as in theater studies. Fuchs’s edition could even be used as a textbook for a course on Spanish Golden Age drama taught in English. As Fuchs and Racz mention in their introduction, “While this volume is aimed primarily at readers—scholars, students, and anyone interested in the comedia as text—our hope is that the encounter with these texts, and the rich documentary and critical contexts that surround them, will also inspire them to support, attend, and perhaps even perform or direct the plays” (xvii). Keeping this interest in mind, it suits to look at each volume separately as, although similar in intent, the books focus on different dramaturgs of the Golden Age Era.

Valerie Hegstrom’s edition of Ângela de Azevedo’s El muerto disimulado/Presumed Dead is a singular work shedding light on less studied women dramaturgs’ works of early modern period. Hegstrom and Larson’s research on Ângela de Azevedo provides a thorough insight into her life, connections between early modern Portugal and Spain, as well as Azevedo’s brilliant play, one of the few ones known and preserved. Given that only five “women playwrights found their way into print in the seventeenth century,” Hegstrom and Larson’s edition and translation of Ângela de Azevedo is vital for understanding women dramaturgs of the Golden Age residing and writing in the Iberian Peninsula (3). Thus, unlike The Golden Age, which concentrates on a more comprehensive yet generally known by the scholars information about the world of performance of the early modern era, El muerto disimulado aims to increase representation of women and less studied writers in the canonical theatrical (and literary) tradition of the Golden Age (71).

El muerto disimulado’s Introduction includes an overview of theater in early modern Spain, women playwrights, and information about Azevedo’s little known life. Following the Introduction is a contextual and textual analysis of El muerto disimulado succeeded by different practices of staging the play then and now. After that, the reader is provided with the Metrical Scheme of Azevedo’s work followed by Editor and Translator’s Notes. The play closes the book with Spanish and English versions presented on the same open page (Spanish on the left and English on the right side).

Azevedo, born in Portugal, was one of several authors known to write and publish in Spanish. In the Introduction, Hegstrom and...