“Staging Muhammad: A Subversion of the Hagiographic Genre in Vida y muerte del falso Profeta Mahoma.” (original) (raw)
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European Medieval Drama, 23 : 31-70, 2019
This essay deals with the performances of the staged combat against Islam, its Iberian origins and medieval records, its spread around the world (America, Africa, Asia) and the distinctive manifestations of its present-day survival, particularly in Mexico and Ilha do Príncipe. My analysis focuses on the salient spectacular aspects of two traditional festivals: Los doce pares de Francia, which I witnessed in 2013 in Tlalnepantla (Morelos, Mexico), and the Auto Floripes de Santo António (São Tomé and Príncipe), which Alexandra Gouvêa Dumas studied in 2009. I explore the genetic link between the aspects in question and the type of drama that originated and flourished in the Iberian Peninsula in the late Middle Ages. My discussion evolves into a two-pronged argumentation: stage direction and acting, costumes and props. It delves into the issues that have to do with authorship, text, audience, and social context. I intend to identify in the two festivals in question the significant common theatrical features that characterize popular dramaturgy and stagecraft.
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Journal of Contemporary Poetics, 2022
This article investigates the convention of Elizabethan Orientalism vis-à-vis historical, political, and cultural context of the period. Anglo-Islamic contact during the age of discovery is at the heart of this study. Since Queen Elizabeth consolidated strong economic and diplomatic alliance with the Muslim empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, her subjects exhibited special interest in the Orient. Two chief dramatists of the age, Shakespeare and Marlowe, staged their plays saturated with Islamic themes and characters. This study capitalises on the negative image of the Orient in the works of these writers. It is further argued that Elizabethan (mis) representations of the Orient were fraught with ambiguities. It witnesses that the Orients were always depicted as barbaric and uncivilised, the antipode of civilised Europe. Shakespeare and Marlowe, in their portrayal of Muslim characters, deviated from real historical facts and depicted them in a very despicable manner. ...
Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2023
in this exhaustive study, Catherine Infante explores a topic sometimes overlooked in studies about the relationship between Christians and Muslims in early modern Spain. Following on the steps of Felipe Pereda's book on image worship among religious minorities in his Images of Discord: Poetics and Politics of the Sacred Image in Fifteenth-Century Spain (trans. by Consuelo Lopez-Morillas, Harvey Miller Publishers, 2019), Infante draws on portrayals of religious icons in fictional narratives, poetry, theater, and nonfictional sources such as historical chronicles, religious treatises, Inquisition cases, travel accounts, and testimonies of Christian captives. She bases her analysis on sources written in Spanish, Arabic, and Aljamiado. The book also highlights paintings and engravings, as well as relics and effigies that accompanied depictions of Christians and Muslims' encounters. Drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell's concept of "vernacular visuality," she explores how daily-life encounters with devotional images and objects shaped the ways in which Christians understood both Moriscos and Muslims, and vice versa. One of the ultimate goals of The Arts of Encounter is to shed light on visual images as they expressed the intricacies of interreligious connections and the fluidity of religious identities. Infante's most sustained focus throughout is Christian iconography, especially images of the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary, and Christ. She studies their role in literary works by writers like Lope de Vega and Miguel de Cervantes, as well as in chronicles written by the apologists of the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 or in texts that depict Mediterranean sites of contact where devotional icons worked as mediators in the context of warfare resulting from Christian-Muslim rivalries. The first three chapters focus on Moriscos and their conflictive relationship with Old Christians in Spain during the years before and immediately after their expulsion. The final three chapters consider the confrontations between Christian and Muslims in the Mediterranean, mainly in North Africa. Chapter 1, "Moriscos between Cross and Crescent," opens with the decree of expulsion of Moriscos, exploring how the apologists of the edict justified the
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Lope de Vega’s El último godo stages the legend of the 8th century invasion of Gothic Spain by Muslim armies. The play follows a messianic structure where the lascivious gothic king, Don Rodrigo, is a condition of possibility for the coming of the chaste initiator of the re-conquest, Pelayo. This binarism present in other versions of the legend, situates the play within a chain of texts creating a cultural memory of the Reconquista. This article problematizes both messianism and cultural memory as recognizable structures in the staging of historical plays. In doing so, it also defines spectatorship as a political collective proposing a critique of Spanish historian Antonio Maravall’s theory of Spanish Golden Age as a directed culture.
This article focuses on three English plays, The Renegado, or the Gentleman of Venice (1624) by Philip Massinger, The Tragedy of Mustapha, Son of Solyman the Magnificent (1665) by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, and The Siege of Constantinople (1675) by Henry Neville Payne, which were written at a time when the ill-defined entity generally known as “the West” today was not in the ascendant and apprehensions of the expansionist Ottoman Empire and its dependencies in North Africa played an important role in European social and political life. The plays are approached from a historicist perspective as attention focuses on anxieties aroused by the early modern European perception of Islam as an alien religion that nevertheless attracted Christians and incited them to convert. Representations of religious conversion are also analysed in terms of gender differences. In addition, each of the plays is read as a response to a particular set of social and political problems, which troubled early modern England and were re-imagined through dramatized stories of encounters between Muslims and Christians. Keywords: Christianity, Islam, conversion, gender, drama, early modern England, Europe, Ottoman Empire.