Charlotte Stern

Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries: His Reception and Influence (review)

This monograph reflects years of diligent research in the archives of Europe. It is a thorough piece of scholarship, as detailed as it is panoramic, in which Sullivan covers just about every translation, imitation, adaptation, and performance of Calderóns plays in German lands. Moreover, Sullivan reaches beyond positivism to analyze Calderóns influence from the perspective of Hans Robert Jausss Rezeptionsästhetik as he traces the changing image of the playwright over the last three and a quarter centuries. Thus he establishes the protean and universal character of Calderóns theater. Calderón proves to be especially fruitful terrain for Rezeptionsästhetik because he has known every kind of encounter an author might experience beyond his own borders. His plays were performed in Castilian in Amsterdam, for the Sephardic Jews, and in Vienna between 1668 and 1673 for Maria Margarita, the Spanish wife of the Habsburg emperor, Leopold I (94-9). Elsewhere, however, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the German public saw the plays enacted, first by Dutch traveling groups, then by the German Wandertruppen, in German translations, derived from the Spanish through French, Dutch, Italian or English intermediaries. Not until the Romantic period did German theatergoers enjoy more faithful and artistic renditions. August Wilhelm von Schlegels German versions of La devoción de ¡a cruz, El mayor encanto amor, La banda y la flor (Berlin, 1803) , and El principe constante and La puente de Mantible (1809) reflected Schlegels thorough grounding in Spanish as they also replicated exactly the rich polymetry of the originals (174-5). So great was Schlegels success that he inspired a host of other translators including Johann Dietrich Gries, Fr. H. von Einsiedel and Wilhelmine Schmidt. Armed with these new versions, Johann Wolfgang von

A Nativity Play for the Catholic Monarchs

On Christmas Eve, 1487, in the church of San Salvador, Zaragoza, a Nativity play was performed before an audience that included Ferdinand and Isabella and their children. To date the play has aroused only scant interest, mainly because information about it is limited to a string of bookkeeping entries recorded in the church ledger. Yet these entries enable us to reconstruct a skeletal outline of the play, which can then be elaborated by appealing to other fifteenth-century Christmas celebrations. What emerges is a full-blown opera that goes beyond the traditional scene of Mary, Joseph and the Christ Child to include the shepherds, the prophets of antiquity and the hierarchy of angels who, by means of revolving wheels perform the mystic ring dance as God the Father looks on. Unlike Encinas plays, the Zaragoza piece re-creates the biblical moment as the contemporary, historical, and spiritual worlds render homage to the Son of God. Apparently the play is no amateur production but the creation of a seasoned director and an accomplished scriptwriter, both supported by professional actors and musicians. Its language may well have been Castilian; whereupon it emerges also as a fitting tribute to the Queen of Castile. (CS)

Some New Thoughts on the Early Spanish Drama

Almost forty-five years of study and research have passed since Bonilla y San Martín published his Bacantes o del origen del teatro español and thirty years since Crawford revised his Spanish Drama before Lope de Vega. Consequently, a general re-examination of the early Spanish drama seems appropriate. Furthermore, this task should directly concern specialists in the Golden Age comedia since early dramatic tradition in a traditionally-minded country like Spain undoubtedly had some bearing on the direction given later to the drama by Lope and his contemporaries.

The Nahuatization of Paul in La conversión de san Pablo

The Nahuatl text of the Conversion of Paul preserved in a sixteenth-century manuscript from colonial Mexico offers a privileged view of the evangelistic theater in its formative stages. This essay reviews the different treatments of Pauls conversion in extant Latin, Italian, English, Castilian, and Catalan plays of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries before examining the even more independent Nahuatl text. While the European plays elaborate the canonical account recorded in Acts 9, 22 and 26, the Nahuatl text relies on passages from Acts 13:9, II Corinthians 12, the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul as well as medieval lore concerning St. Sebastian, all of which are manipulated to produce a highly original script. Paul, Sebastian, the ancient Jews, and early Christians are refashioned to fit comfortably into the Amerindian world, into the here and now of the writer and his intended audience of Nahua nobility. The Nahuas likely proved more receptive to Christian teachings when they believed that they were included in Gods plan for humankind. Despite the early date of the Nahuatl text (1530?), we cannot infer from it the existence of a medieval Castilian play on this theme because the Nahuatl text has no features in common even with those late sixteenth-century Spanish conversion plays that have survived. (CS)