This is the first book to examine the rise of Spain's extraordinary national theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all its aspects - the commercial theatre, the court drama and the Corpus autos, the organisation of theatrical life, the playhouses themselves and their public, the literary and moral controversies, and the plays as literary texts. The book has been written for students of drama as well as Hispanists: Spanish theatre is set in its national and international context; Spanish titles and theatrical terms are translated. Considerable space has been devoted to the experimental drama of the sixteenth century before Lope de Vega. At the core of the book is a highly distinctive, successful national theatre which mirrored the energies, beliefs and anxieties of a great nation in crisis, yet at the same time granted full expression to the individual genius of its greatest exponents - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderon de la Barca.
A reappraisal of Lope's literary career, bringing out the complexities of his dramatic texts. This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Lope's theatre, which will affect the way in which the comedia in general is read. It spans Lope's literary career, discussing (pseudo-)historical, tragic and peasant plays in order to show Lope's texts as complex negotiations between author and public, between conservatism and subversion, between representations of the ideal of kingship and its political reality, in a period of social and political change. Drawing on contemporary Spanish political philosophy, McKendrick shows that far from glorifying monarchy and advocating absolutism (the orthodox view in the Hispanic world), Lope's political plays constitute an informed critiqueof kingship; she also challenges the received wisdom that the comedia was an instrument of stage and that its playwrights were the conscious propagandists of an aristocratic elite. With the help of insights and models provided by the speech act theory, the stratagems and techniques utilised by Lope to follow the path of prudence between the acceptable and the unacceptable in political commentary in the commercial theatre are scrutinised, illustrating how richly nuanced texts produce not an ideologically monolithic and complacent drama but one which is at once politically anxious and probing. MELVEENA MCKENDRICK is Professor of Spanish Literature, Culture and Societyat the University of Cambridge.
Best known and loved for DON QUIXOTE,the ground-breaking comic precursor of the modern novel,Cervantes led an extraordinary life every bit as colourful as his works.Born the son of a poor medical practioner,maimed by gunshot as a soldier, held to ransom by Algerian corsairs,and eventually drifting into a literary career,Cervantes could draw upon a range of experience with which to spice up his writings.Written as diversionary pieces to be performed between the main acts of a play,Cervantes's eight interludes included in this anthology are comic gems in their own right.As a genre,'interludes'were generally disliked by the authorities because of their subversive potential,and those by Cervantes are no exception.Crude,rude robust and anarchically refreshing,EIGHT INTERLUDES reveals that even as a playwright Cervantes was ahead of his times.
Written by Benito Perez Galdos, one of Spain's best kept literary secrets and arguably the greatest Spanish author since Cervantes, THAT BRINGAS WOMAN(1884)is part of Galdos's panoramic series of novels about Madrid social life and is alsoindirectly, a novel about the revolotion in Spain.Focusing upon the Bringas household in a manner reminiscent of, and probably influenced by, Zola, it offers a shrewd and none too flattering analysis of feminine psychology and an intimateportrait of marriage.However, unlike Flaubert, Tolstoy and Alas, the other great novelists of adultery of his day, Galdos's view of the subject and its, consequences is both hard headed and humorous rather th
An insightful portrait of the life and times of the man who created one of literature's best-known characters focuses equally on Cervantes's troubled early life and his later period of great literary productivity
There are two surviving versions of Calderon's play on the Faust theme, El magico prodigioso. The first, preserved in an incomplete autograph manuscript, was written for performance in the town of Yepes on the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1637, with staging appropriate for the traditional Corpus mystery play, the auto sacramental. The second, first published in 1663, is an adaptation for performance in the playhouses of Madrid. The circumstances of the play's textual identity are uniquein the seventeenth-century Spanish theatre and the purpose of this composite edition, which uses different founts for the two versions, is to reveal in action not only the dramatist's developing vision but the imperatives of a remarkable commercial theatre and its symbiotic relationship with the religious order of the day. At the same time the opportunity has been taken to provide a study of the play and its two versions, its sources and its context; a lengthy introduction, extensive notes and a full textual apparatus accompany the composite text.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain are most often remembered for the epochal voyage of Christopher Columbus. But the historic landfall of October 1492 was only a secondary event of the year. The preceding January, they had accepted the surrender of Muslim Granada, ending centuries of Islamic rule in their peninsula. And later that year, they had ordered the expulsion or forced baptism of Spain's Jewish minority, a cruel crusade undertaken in an excess of zeal for their Catholic faith. Europe, in the century of Ferdinand and Isabella, was also awakening to the glories of a new age, the Renaissance, and the Spain of the "Catholic Kings" - as Ferdinand and Isabella came to be known - was not untouched by this brilliant revival of learning. Here, from the noted historian Melveena McKendrick, is their remarkable story.
Out of the division and strife of the Middle Ages, Spain emerged from behind the Pyrenees to straddle the stage of European politics like some new colossus. Discoverer of a New World, it became the greatest power on earth and created a Golden Age of culture breathtaking in its quality and achievement. Within 150 years, Spain was in a state of decay and fast being left behind by more progressive European nations. Here, from award-winning historian Melveena McKendrick, is the dramatic story of the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire.
A reappraisal of Lope's literary career, bringing out the complexities of his dramatic texts. This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Lope's theatre, which will affect the way in which the comedia in general is read. It spans Lope's literary career, discussing (pseudo-)historical, tragic and peasant plays in order to show Lope's texts as complex negotiations between author and public, between conservatism and subversion, between representations of the ideal of kingship and its political reality, in a period of social and political change. Drawing on contemporary Spanish political philosophy, McKendrick shows that far from glorifying monarchy and advocating absolutism (the orthodox view in the Hispanic world), Lope's political plays constitute an informed critiqueof kingship; she also challenges the received wisdom that the comedia was an instrument of stage and that its playwrights were the conscious propagandists of an aristocratic elite. With the help of insights and models provided by the speech act theory, the stratagems and techniques utilised by Lope to follow the path of prudence between the acceptable and the unacceptable in political commentary in the commercial theatre are scrutinised, illustrating how richly nuanced texts produce not an ideologically monolithic and complacent drama but one which is at once politically anxious and probing. MELVEENA MCKENDRICK is Professor of Spanish Literature, Culture and Societyat the University of Cambridge.
This is the first book to examine the rise of Spain's extraordinary national theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all its aspects - the commercial theatre, the court drama and the Corpus autos, the organisation of theatrical life, the playhouses themselves and their public, the literary and moral controversies, and the plays as literary texts. The book has been written for students of drama as well as Hispanists: Spanish theatre is set in its national and international context; Spanish titles and theatrical terms are translated. Considerable space has been devoted to the experimental drama of the sixteenth century before Lope de Vega. At the core of the book is a highly distinctive, successful national theatre which mirrored the energies, beliefs and anxieties of a great nation in crisis, yet at the same time granted full expression to the individual genius of its greatest exponents - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderon de la Barca.
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