La comedia española y el teatro europeo del siglo XVII (review)

162BCom, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002) La comedia española y el teatro europeo del siglo XVII. Ed. Henry W. Sullivan, Raúl A. Galoppe, and Mahlon Stouz. London: Tamesis, 1999. 193 pp. This volume, appropriately dedicated to John E. Varey, has as its purpose the dissemination and influence of comedia beyond the Iberian peninsula to the rest of Europe—France, Italy, Holland, Germany, and Poland—during its heyday in the seventeenth century. The collection is broadly useful on two counts. First, it amasses in a single tome new material along with some previously published pieces (in some cases, translated and/or reworked) which, in viewing Calderón's theater as a form of cultural production, makes our reading an act of contextualizing, of historicizing, the playwright, his contemporaries, and latter-day commentators in relation to other social and cultural (i.e., European) formations. Secondly, the essays in some instances cross-reference one another, thereby forging an internal coherence and a sense of the book as an organic whole. In "La comedia española en Italia," Nancy L. D'Antuono deals with the adaptation of comedia within the repertory of commedia dell'arte from the appearance of Lope's works in the 1620s and onto the popularizing of Golden Age drama in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Italian actors. An appendix codifies "los scenari de fuente española." Three adaptations are treated in detail: Italian plays based on Moreto's JVo puede ser (No può ser), Calderón's Mejor está que estaba (Di bene in meglio), and El médico de su honra (U Medico di Suo Honore). Interestingly, Il medico suppressed references to the motif of médico/honra and concentrated instead on the theme ofjealousy: Gutierre is condemned to death but then reprieved only to be executed after the King sees proof of Mencia's innocence. If Italian culture could tolerate a crime passionnel associated with adultery , it could not do so in the case of an innocent woman. Alejandro Cioranescu's seminal article of 1954, "Calderón y el teatro francés," reprinted here, explores the material conditions which gave rise to the imitation of Calderón's works in classical French theatre. Given that public taste determined which plays were selected and how translations were executed (43), Reviews1 63 Cioranescu's essay functions as a veritible companion piece to postmodern theories of reception aesthetics. Noteworthy is the way that Calderón paradoxically became "el poeta dramático más despreciado y más copiado de la época clásica" (43). If, for example , Voltaire disparaged "las imaginaciones extravagantes de Calderón" (42), he was at the same time inspired by En esta vida todo es verdad y todo mentira for his Héraclius. Calderón's influence was most strongly felt in the sphere of comedy, although his characters were deemed as "intercambiables" as those of the Italian mask (49). Nevertheless, a mere ten of his cloak and sword plays produced twenty-two translations or imitations , mostly between 1639 and 1660 (a point reiterated by Frederick A. de Armas below [85]). Although the high point of Calderón in France corresponds to the creation of "la comedia sentimental" (74), the Spanish playwright was considered not so much a dramatic poet as a technician ofvaudeville because of his ability to complicate and resolve plot situations. If comedia revealed a complex system of intrigue upon which the hero had to depend in his amorous conquests, French theater was concerned more with the psychological development of character and the affective side of human relationships, because the freer structure of society made the only obstacle to love reside within the individual and not in external circumstances (77). The Calderonian model was ultimately found in the works of Marivaux and Beaumarchais in the eighteenth century, when the influence of comedia had virtually ceased to exist (81). In '"¿Es dama o es torbellino?': La dama duende en Francia de D'Ouvüle a Hauteroche," de Armas takes up the pivotal role of Calderón's play in initiating "la utilización de comedias de capa y espada en el teatro francés," which began with Antoine Le M...