The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain by Laura R. Bass (review) (original) (raw)
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The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain (review)
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2009
The first thought that comes to mind when one picks up The Drama of the Portrait by Laura R. Bass is how attractive it is: beautifully bound in red cloth and protected by a lovely dust jacket, the book does not automatically look like a critical study of early modern Spanish drama. And, indeed, with 67 illustrations, nearly all in glossy color, one might mistake it for an art book. From these first impressions through the final pages, The Pennsylvania State University Press and its author are to be commended for giving us such a fine book. If the appearance of the book could lead one to think it examines early modern Spanish art, the title and the theatrical works chosen for critical examination might, too. But, that's just the point. Bass compares Spanish Golden Age comedias alongside other visual cultural forms of the period-portraiture, miniatures, etchings, drawings, sculpture, and other art pieces-to demonstrate a complex interconnectedness and interdependence. In Bass' analyses, painting and drama are complex cultural and ideological practices that often circulate within the same socio-political and cultural realm: sometimes art and artists drive the plot of a play, at times there is an offstage reciprocity between particular artists and dramas (or dramatists and art works), and occasionally dramatists and painters are amazingly similar in their goals-not just in the works they create but also in their search for royal commendation for their professional practice (both Lope de Vega and Diego Velázquez were successful in achieving royal status). Examined within the context of the political history of early modern Spain, The Drama of the Portrait provokes intriguing questions about visual culture of the period, and provides ample discussion on the interplay of art and drama that reveals multifaceted power structures and complex socio-cultural expectations.
Theatre in Spain, 1490-1700, by Melveena McKendrick, Symposium 45.2 (1991): 157-59.
Reviews SYMPOSIUM •·.157 espeeialmente en elcaso de .Lorea. . Soufas ofrece sin embargo un modo valiosode acerearse a estes autores como verdaderosprofesionales •del 'arte, y como tal, implicados en su quehacer en su totaIidadexistencial, entendida esta como.actitud•personal, .social.ypolitica. It.veces .las leeturas resultan un tanto repetitlvasypredeclbles, .y que elpoema concreto tiende a perdersu singularidadalamoldarse.al paradigma entice .adoptado. Nopor ellopierde valerelacercamieatoqueen sumayoria producesutileslecturas, asien elcasode tostresultimosautores. Yaseaproducto de una voluntad Intelectual, ya de unas vocesInterioresimpesibles de discemir totalmente, estos antares sobresalen por su afande crear un arte superior que, comoaficazmente presenta Soufas, seemplazadentro del marco delmodernismo, mas alla de los limitadores parametres de generacion.
2016
This new monograph is a valuable contribution to the study of the staging practices of Spanish Golden Age theater. According to Vidler, scholars have not paid enough attention to these praxes. Since the late 1950s, only a few academicssuch as Varey, Shergold, Allen, and Ruano de la Hazahave illustrated and imagined the modus operandi of authors and theatrical companies in early modern Spain. Even on these occasions, their work has been limited to the gathering and recollection of historical documentssuch as contracts and lease agreementsthat provide evidence of the architecture of the corrales, the division of space on the stage, and so forth. Indeed, little 781 REVIEWS
Drama of a Nation Crisis: Public Theater and the Effeminized Early Modern Spanish State
Gestos, 2015
The great paradox of early modern Spain is the coincidence of imperial decline and a "Golden Age" of cultural production. As the visual and literary arts flourished, secular and religious institutions struggled to maintain their authority over a rapidly changing social, religious, economic, and geopolitical landscape. At the end of the 1580s, for instance, the hitherto "invincible" Spanish Armada suffered a humiliating defeat abroad to the British, while at home the legalization of female actresses ushered in of one of Europe's earliest and most prolific urban theater industries. The next hundred years witnessed an intense expansion of theatrical activity and attendance, including the establishment of permanent public performance venues that allowed for professional productions during most of the calendar year. At the same time, a religious crisis that inspired the Counter-Reformation and an expanded role for the Inquisition, persistent military failures, and a sustained economic collapse spiraled together into a crisis of national identity. This essay examines how both secular and religious voices implicated the public theater in this crisis while grounding their diagnosis in terms of the precarious condition of the national character's masculinity. 1 Arguments for the prohibition or reform of the professional theater industry deployed the discursive authority of such classical and Church sources as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine, whose shared ambivalence towards the aesthetic experience of art in general and the reception of theatrical spectacle in particular provided an ideological template, discursively grounded in gender, for the regulation of early modern popular theater and its effects on the national audience. Early modern Spanish opponents of the theater drew upon such authoritative voices to voice a fear of the theater's "feminizing" effect on Spanish masculinity that would continue to be echoed well beyond the seventeenth-century. Military prowess, industrial production, and moral rigor were all threatened by a climate 1 The anxiety surrounding early modern Spanish masculinity has been examined recently, although without focusing on the public theater's role as the object of blame for the crisis, by Elizabeth Lehfeldt. José R. Cartagena-Calderón's Masculinidades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial reads a number of plays from the period as a function of this anxiety.
Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama: Reviving and Revising the Comedia
2014
Taking into account the ephemeral nature of performance, this book develops innovative approaches to the reconstruction of historical staging practices through the lens of Spanish classical theater. While poststructuralism and other theories problematize previous studies in performance historiography, this book argues that an interdisciplinary approach to staging reconstruction can produce illuminating conclusions. In this study, Vidler emphasizes the need to take into account, not only structures of culture, but also the human capacity to manipulate those structures for both individual and group expression. Through a detailed analysis of approaches to space, the body, the stage object and the spectator, it is possible to discern analyzable artifacts that permit us to reconstruct significant aspects of early modern stagings. Furthermore, because it actively engages and intertwines both objective and subjective modes of interpretation, Vidler argues that performance theory itself will be the locus of the next breakthroughs in interpretive studies.
Calderón's Theater of the New World: Historical Mimesis in La aurora en Copacabana
Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2017
Lope de Vega, who perfectioned the Spanish late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history play, famously pondered historical drama as a highly effectful means of "rekindling famous deeds and words in the memory of the people". Due to its eminent ability to make history come alive before the eyes of the audience, the emerging historical drama was certainly the most popular instance of what may be termed the contemporary obsession with history and thus – as critics have not failed to notice – the most important aesthetic vehicle of collective memory and cultural identity formation during this crucial period of nascent European nation states. However, besides its lucid visualization of the past, its 'enargeia', and ensuing hold on the collective imagination, both rather well-researched, could there be other, as yet undescribed features particular to the historical drama? Does it have a specific enunciatory mode or special take on history – vis-à-vis historiography strictu sensu, for example? Which aesthetic and performative elements support its specific way of dealing with the past, if indeed we may speak of such? Guided by these research questions, the present essay proposes a novel approach to Pedro Calderón de la Barca's somewhat misread seventeenth-century play about the Spanish-Catholic military and religious conquest of Inca Peru, introducing the concept of "historical mimesis" to describe the universal or philosophical, plausible but not veristic, creative and performative staging of history found in La aurora en Copacabana.