The Political Theater of Early Seventeenth-Century Spain with Special Reference to Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (review)

450BCom, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Winter 1998) 67, 126). They are probably explained by a tendency ofEnglish-speakers to say, "If A is true, B will occur in the play." An example is, "El espectador de entonces esperaba un cierto decoro . . . por lo que se evitará la muerte degradante en escena. . ." (67, ?, 29). Not only does the future seem inappropriate for such a distant past, but, because it is in Spanish, the reader is left to wonder whether it was meant to convey probability rather than futurity . All in all, Dassbach's book offers a valuable treatment ofa long-neglected kind of Siglo de Oro drama. The author's goal, to bring greater focus to the study ofthe comedia de santos, has been more than adequately met. The Ibérica series is under the general editorship ofA. Robert Lauer. Robert R. Morrison Presbyterian College (emeritus) Halpern, Cynthia Leone. The Political Theater ofEarly Seventeenth-Century Spain with Special Reference to Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. 179 pp. Cynthia Halpern's work asks the right questions to initiate an analysis of Alarcón's political plays and to comment on similar works by Lope, Tirso, and Quevedo. She proposes to focus on Alarcón to determine, in the light of seventeenth-century political theory, the Mexican dramatist's concept ofthe nature of the monarchy, the role of the privado, the need for economic reforms during the reign of Philip IV, the function of law and, in general terms, the theater as a positive moral force in Spanish society. She begins her study with a clear and useful exposition of the political thought of Jean Bodin, whose work La République (1577) was translated into Spanish in 1590 as Los seis libros de la república and whose concession ofunrestricted authority to the monarch, whom Bodin considered divinely instituted, contrasts significantly with the principle of royal power deriving from the consent of the governed as found in the book De rege et regis institutione (1599) by Juan de Mariana, S. J. She follows her discussion ofthe polarities in the theories of the monarchy with a basic discussion in her second chapter ofthe development of the privado as a political institution, placing emphasis on the Count-Duke Olivares's service to Philip IV with occasional references to the previous king's valido, the Duke of Lerma. Halpern, in keeping with traditional historical accounts, attributes the rise in power of the king's favorite to the two monarchs' lack of confidence in their own Reviews451 ability to govern. Her third chapter entitled "A Nation's Decline" is, because ofits succinctness, a very useful summary of the economic problems besetting Spain at the moment the comedia ofAlarcón was gaining in popularity among Spanish courtly audiences. Halpern condenses J. H. Elliott's observations on the problems of declining agricultural production and migration of farm labor to urban centers and his description of foreign threats to Hapsburg hegemony in Europe and Asia. She proceeds to list Pérez de Herrera's reform measures as elaborated in his Proverbios morales (1618) and Discurso de amparo (1519) as they were adopted by the Junta de Reformaci ón instituted by the Count-Duke Olivares in 1623. The first three chapters on the theories of the monarchy, the rise of the privado, and progressive economic stagnation and international threats to Spanish hegemony are clearly written and extremely useful to all students of Golden Age literature, particularly those who are studying the comedia. In her fourth chapter, Professor Halpern dismisses the theory of Diez Borque and José Antonio Maravall that the comedia was written merely to gamer popular support for an ineffectual political structure and chooses to follow Ruth Lee Kennedy's and Blanca de los Ríos's thesis that through the comedia, the dramatists risked professional disaster by criticizing unwise royal policy, particularly the danger to the monarchy in allowing too much power and responsibility to reside in the hands oftheprivado. Nevertheless, she echoes Diez Borque's and Maravall's evaluation of Lope de Vega as a mere flatterer of royalty without examining in detail any of Lope's plays. She does, however, study Tirso...