Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation (review)

Jodi Campbell describes this work as "a book about Spanish plays, the portrayal of kingship and how these fictional representations may be used to understand what real Spaniards thought about their own kings" (2). The key words here are "real Spaniards," for not only does Campbell use audience popularity as the basis for the plays selected but emphasizes that its themes reveal "an ongoing conversation" (26) between dramatist, public audience, and ruler, and that the comedia itself only declined when this dialogue stopped in the face of increasing court competition.

This conversation, as Campbell illustrates, was very often critical, and comedia object lessons often stood in stark contrast to their real-life counterparts, criticism actually being the norm, not the exception. Campbell's "real Spaniard" of the comedia audience respected the monarchy but saw the pivotal relationship "as one of reciprocal loyalties and obligations between king and subject" (131), hence the "negotiation" of the title. Such a perspective stands in direct opposition to the theories of critics, such as Jos Antonio Maravall, who view the comedia as "the creation and mouthpiece" (127) of an absolutist monarchy who manipulated it for purely propagandistic ends. Campbell also faults the critics of an earlier generation for ignoring the historical context of the comedia and "not understanding the cultural forces involved in its creation and its relationship to the power structure" (19).

Since the linchpin of Campbell's analysis is the role of the public in shaping the comedia's content, she must also choose to interpret the works of dramatists who were popular in the seventeenth century and not necessarily those who form part of the present-day commonly recognized Golden Age canon. In fact, Campbell dismisses the canon as being largely the work of nineteenth-century German scholars, many of whose selections would probably be unfamiliar to the Madrid audience whose tastes form the basis of her analysis. In addition to the focus on Madrid's court, audience, publishers, and dramatists, additional restrictions include the time frame 1630–80 (not good years for Spanish Hapsburgs), the main theme, of course, kingship, with a further division into the two main categories of comedias that feature the competition between rival candidates for the throne and those which revolve around a flawed ruler who mistakes personal interest for public good. These limitations allow Campbell to narrow the field to the twenty-six works of the four most popular Madrid dramatists as deduced from the data gathered from published collections and printings of individual works, the number of performances of a given work being almost impossible to ascertain. Using this methodology, the four most popular dramatists are Juan de Matos Fragoso (eight comedias analyzed), Juan Bautista Diamante (six), Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (five), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (seven).

There is irony in that although Campbell explicitly rejects the Golden Age canon for the purposes of this study, it is one of the pillars of this canon, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, whose work best mirrors her conclusions with its recurring emphasis on themes of kingship and obligation and personal responsibility — even to the extent that with his virtual abandonment of the public theater in order to concentrate on his extravagant court dramas, he himself can be seen as a culprit in the demise of the comedia. Calderón's inclusion also helps the reader evaluate the validity of the author's conclusions because, if truth be told, even many Golden Age specialists are not very familiar with the work of Matos Fragoso or Diamante. On the other hand, their extreme familiarity with Calderón can be a drawback because analyses of his critical representations of monarchs are not new and are very abundant, reams written on La vida es sueño alone. Therefore, Campbell really cannot use Calderón's work to bolster her argument that scholars have...