El teatro barroco como campo de juego. Estudios sobre Lope de Vega y Tirso de Molina by Wolfram Nitsch (review)

the german original of wolfram nitsch's recently published study appeared in the year 2000. This new version is the most profound and far-ranging account known to me of the classical Spanish theater in relation to play, conceived of as drama within the drama, role-playing within the play, disguise, adoption of another's costume, other species of impersonation, games, betting, cheating, gambling at cards, playing chess, and so on. In the preface to the translation of 2018 (ix–xiii), the author details the particular difficulty of getting the work from German into Spanish. Unlike French (e.g., Le jeu de Saint Nicolas) or German (e.g., der Spiel, denoting play; Lustspiel, comedy; Trauerspiel, tragedy; Fronleichnamsspiel, the Eucharistic allegories for Corpus Christi), Spanish lacks a word that embraces both play (or game) in its widest sense and play in its more specific sense of a work for the stage. The overlap in English between theater, games, and sport is clear, for example, in Jaques's famous lines from As You Like It: "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players" (2.7). But the very able translator Elvira Gómez was constantly faced with two major translation cruxes. On the one hand, she had to render the theater-related terms, such as drama, obra teatral, or comedia, appropriately. On the other hand, she confronted the broader and purely playful dimensions of game, such as juego, juegos, lúdico, and so forth. Still further issues arise with specific types of play, such as gaming or gambling (juego de azar). Having confronted these difficulties, she provides a truly beautiful translation; my only reservation concerns the Spanish title and the phrase "como campo de juego." This is Gómez's equivalent for the German als Spielraum ("as space of play" or "as space for play"). Having finished the book, I still feel that the formula "como espacio de juego" would have been more comprehensive, especially since scholarly discourse on the theater in Spanish regularly speaks of "espacios teatrales" in both a literal and a figurative sense.

Nitsch divides his study into two halves: (1) an opening theoretical section in four subsections entitled "Conceptos del juego," and (2) an application of these theories to a reading of eight plays by Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina entitled "Casuística del juego," which is further divided into three subsections. The whole is prefaced by a prologue devoted principally to Cervantes's comedia Pedro de Urdemalas (1–9). The author shows how the title character undergoes a series of chameleonlike transformations until he becomes an authentic actor in life and an autor de comedias. Nitsch draws a comparison here with Cervantes's entremés El retablo de las maravillas, which depends heavily on pretense and role-playing, as well as with the episode of Maese Pedro's larger than life puppet show in Don Quixote, part 2. Throughout, Nitsch cleverly develops the motif of Cervantes's narratological legerdemain in these three thematically interrelated works.

The first subsection begins with a lengthy essay on "Teoría antropológica del juego" (11–39) that minutely surveys numerous modern-day authorities on the subject such as Jacques Henriot, Johan Huizinga, Hans-Jost Frey, Émile Benveniste, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Clifford Geertz, FrederikJ. J. Buitendijk, Friedrich Schiller, and Denis Diderot—particularly his Paradoxe sur le comedien—as well as Nietzsche and others. The second subsection deals with "La crítica del juego en el Siglo de Oro" (40–64) and moralists' condemnation of idleness, gambling houses, and—most pertinently in the context—playhouses. Nitsch goes back to Plato's criticisms of mimesis, actors, and rhapsodists in his Republic, to Tertullian's De spectaculis, as well as the writings of Saint Augustine and the Jesuit Juan de Mariana. Here he...