El escritor y la escena IV: Estudios sobre teatro español de los Siglos de Oro. Homenaje a Alfredo Hermenegildo (review)

380BCom, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Winter 1996) crisis and conclusion, all of which contribute both to the clarity and unity of his work. The first half ofthis melodramatic tragedy is somewhat labored reading, but after that the interest picks up with the action. This edition gives the student a taste of what a baroque attempt at classical tragedy was like, one in which pagan fate controls human destiny. Valbuena-Briones concludes his work with a helpful index. All in all, this is a worthy edition for use by instructors who want to expose their students to Calderón's work beyond La vida es sueño, albeit on a lower philosophical plane. John Lihani Emeritus, University ofKentucky El escritory la escena IV: Estudios sobre teatro español de los Siglos de Oro. Homenaje a Alfredo Hermenegildo. Actas del IV Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Teatro Español y Novohispano de los Siglos de Oro (8-11 de marzo de 1995, Ciudad Juárez). Ed. YsIa Campbell. Ciudad Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1996. Paper. 146 pp. This slim volume opens with seven goodhumored tributes to the scholarly accomplishments and personality of Alfredo Hermenegildo of the University of Montreal, the Hispanist specially honored in 1995 at the Fourth Congress of AITENSO. Thirteen papers read at the Congress are printed here. Appropriately, the first paper is by Hermenegildo himself, "Iconos, símbolos y reyes: de Cueva a Lasso de la Vega." His semiotic analysis identifies the signs —i.e., icons, symbols, and indexes, according to Charles Peirce's classification— employed by these two dramatists to form the image of the maximum power figure, the monarch. El mercader amante (a title which might sound oxymoronic to some seventeenth-century ears), by the Valencian Gaspar de Aguilar, is the subject of two studies: YsIa Campbell, "El mercader amante de Gaspar de Aguilar: la imagen dramática del cambio," and Frank P. Casa, "Amor, riqueza y lealtad en El mercader amante." The two critics stress different aspects of the play and the social climate in which it was produced, though both agree that the hero, Belisario, demonstrates exceptional personal merit. Campbell suggests that the attitudes of a commercially pros- Reviews381 perous Valencian society made it possible to present a rich bourgeois merchant, rather than a traditional nobleman, as a hero. A. Robert Lauer ("Lorenzo García y el teatro valenciano del barroco tardío") observes that, if at the end of the sixteenth century Valencia had developed the basic formulas of Lope's comedia nueva (48), the late baroque Valencian theater chose plots about Catholic monarchs, princes, and noblemen, spectacular scenery and rhetoric, characters who observe decorum in their conduct, and morally edifying conclusions. All these elements are present in the play here analysed, Hados y lados hacen dichosos y desdichados, presented in Valencia in 1678 by Lorenzo García, a Valencian actor and producer ofplays, which deals with the usurpation ofthe Russian throne by a tyrant, who himself is killed by a group of nobles at the end. Borislav Primorac's amusing essay ("Progne y Filomena de Guillen de Castro—o la destrucción de un mito") works with an early play (perhaps written before 1600) of Castro's, considerably below the level of his other dramas, in which the first two acts develop the basic outlines of this horrifying tragic myth. In the third act, however, which takes place eighteen years after the second, the play turns into a comedy as the antagonists are all reconciled and two young lovers are married. Some critics see in this hybrid dramatic form the influence, in the comic conclusion , of Lope's comedia nueva (61). Ricardo Serrano Deza ("De la tragedia renacentista a la tragedia barroca : las Semíramis de Virués y Calderón") considers first the reasons for a dramatist's choice of a mythical plot—primarily to escape the social conventions of his own day and to create a "teatro, más que desnudo , desollado" (70) which can serve as a mirror of itself. In Calderón's La hija del aire Semíramis is predestined from the beginning, as the audience knows, to do what she...