Margaret Rich Greer

The Play of Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderon de la Barca

Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600-1681), one of the great dramatists of Spains Golden Age, wrote a series of mythological spectacle plays for the Habsburg courts. Written when court spectacles were an instrument of monarchical absolutism, these later works by Calderon have often been dismissed by critics as servile flattery of the royalty or mere displays of dazzling showmanship. Margaret Rich Greer argues, however, that many of the playwrights court dramas not only explore human life and social organization, but also possess artistic unity and thematic complexity that make them landmarks in European dramatic history. Analyzing seven of these plays, she demonstrates Calderons mastery in the integration of music, dance, elaborate scenery, and stage machinery to enhance rather than overpower his poetic text. Greer shows that by envisioning each drama in the physical setting of its performance and in the political context of its time, readers can appreciate a complex relationship of texts: intertwined with the flattering image of the splendor of royal power are a discourse relevant to common spectators and another one that is subtly critical of the policies of the king and the court.

A Tale of Three Cities: The Place of the Theatre in Early Modern Madrid, Paris and London

(2000). A Tale of Three Cities: The Place of the Theatre in Early Modern Madrid, Paris and London. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies: Vol. 77, No. 1, pp. 391-419.

Calderón, Copyists, and the Problem of Endings

In the study of Spanish epic poetry and romances, we know that variants frequently occur at the end of the poem. When attempting to establish a definitive text of a Calderonian play, editors face a similar pattern of ending variation, as alterations of the texts appear with notable frequency in the final pages of the play as a whole, or of the individual acts therein. The changes fall into three major groups: 1) errors on the part of the copyist and/or printer, such as the two-step process which caused the loss of a substantial ending portion of La fiera, el rayo y la piedra; 2) alteration of the play for different sorts of productions, as occurred with the excision of a spectacular finale from Fortunas de Andrómeda y Perseo; and 3) rewriting of the text by Calderón and/or an autor de comedias, of which we find evidence in the majority of autograph or partially autograph manuscripts in the Biblioteca Nacional. The frequency with which he rewrote endings demonstrates that Calderón paid special heed to their construction; the complex pattern of ending variations that has resulted demands a corresponding attention on the part of his modern editors. (MRG)

An (in)convenient marriage?: justice and power in "La vida es sueño", "comedia" and "auto sacramental"

It is a pleasure to participate in this commemoration of A. A. Parker’s birth. I treasured him immeasurably as a professor and a friend, even if I honour him with an intertextural reading he would probably have rejected. I examine the double plot of Calderón’s La vida es sueño through the lens of Pascal’s reflections on the relationship between power and justice. Concentrating first on the comedia, I later look at the same question of the wedding of justice and power in the auto to show what light its different solution sheds, reflecting back, on the ending of the comedia. The question of justice has been extensively explored in relation to the rebel soldier, but my focus is the relationship between Segismundo and Rosaura, inasmuch as they encarnate the drive for power and for justice, respectively. Students reading this play almost always express disappointment, frustration of their sense of poetic justice, that Segismundo does not marry Rosaura. From their first encounter, the comedia awakens the hope of a ‘happy ending’ that will include a marriage of these two victims of the socio-political order. This is an ingenuously romantic reaction to a first reading, whose frustration we can explain with the traditional interpretation of its necessity as proof that the hero has learned to rule his passion with reason. And that Rosaura has never expressed love for Segismundo. But as it is clear that Calderón, with his incomparable mastery of dramatic construction, deliberately awakens that hope to negate it at the end, we should interrogate that strategy from a variety of philosophical perspectives. Justice and power are fundamental themes throughout Calderón’s career, as the title of the early play Amor, honor y poder, forecasts. At issue may be the illegitimate use of royal power, or paternal power; or frequently, as in La vida es sueño, of both instances at once. Justice is

From Copyist to Computer: Identification of Theatrical Scribes of the Siglo de Oro

Uno de los tesoros que tenemos como estudiantes del teatro del Siglo de Oro es la abundancia de manuscritos de la época que se han conservado. Aunque muchos de los manuscritos autógrafos ya han sido publicados en ediciones modernas, hemos podido utilizar muy pocos de los centenares de mansucritos no-autógrafos, porque no sabemos las circunstancias de su creación. Este artículo es una descripción preliminar de un proyecto mecanizado para la identificación de copistas teatrales del Siglo de Oro, que aspira a la producción de un manual de las manos de los dramaturgos y copistas principales del teatro español desde 1580 hasta 1699, incluyendo muestras de las manos de cada uno, listas de sus manuscritos, e información biográfica sobre ellos que indicará su relación con los dramaturgos y las compañías teatrales, complementado por otra información sacada de varios archivos y bibliotecas que también puede servir a fechar y evaluar estos manuscritos. (MRG)

De sueños y palacios en el teatro dentro del teatro

Abstract: This article offers an exploration of the relationship between two metaphysical concepts of human existence that are encapsulated in the titles of the two most canonical plays of Pedro Calderon de la Barca: La vida es sueno and El gran teatro del mundo . How these concepts are dramatized by means of the combination of dreams and theater within theatre in Las fortunas de Andromeda y Perseo , Darlo todo y no dar nada, and the Mojiganga de las visiones de la muerte is studied, as are the ideological implications that we can identify in his use of these dramatic formulations. Resumen: En este trabajo, se explora la relacion entre los dos conceptos metafisicos de la existencia humana que encapsulan los titulos de las dos obras mas canonicas de Pedro Calderon de la Barca: La vida en sueno y El gran teatro del mundo. Se examina como se dramatizan por medio de la combinacion del sueno y el teatro dentro del teatro en Las fortunas de Andromeda y Perseo, Darlo todo y no dar nada y la Mojiganga de las visiones de la muerte. Y se considera las implicaciones ideologicas que podemos identificar en estas formulaciones dramaticas en el Barroco espanol.

Don W. Cruickshank, Don Pedro Calderón

Students and scholars of Spanish classical theater can be grateful that Don W. Cruickshank took on what he describes as the ‘‘daunting task’’ (xiii) of producing a biography of Pedro Calderón de la Barca; he has accomplished that task admirably. Calderón’s long life (1600–1681) and large output, along with the difficulties of securing reliable texts, have repeatedly frustrated the ambitions of his editors and biographers, from Don Juan de Vera Tassis and Cristóbal Pérez Pastor to the present, as Cruickshank observes. Pérez Pastor promised a second volume of his Documentos para la biografı́a de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Madrid: Fortanet, 1905), and Emilio Cotarelo y Mori planned to complement his Ensayo sobre la vida y obras de D. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Madrid: Tip. de la Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1924) with three more volumes, but neither of their important contributions to Calderón scholarship ever advanced beyond the first volume. Cruickshank dedicates his biography to his mentor, Edward Meryon Wilson, whose two-chapter typescript of a planned Calderón biography he inherited. Cruickshank, in contrast, clearly states the limits of his biography as centered on Calderón’s secular career to 1650, before he began his path to the priesthood. He does include attention to some autos, however, particularly those linked to current events or for which there is reliable dating. Cruickshank describes his study as ‘‘an old-fashioned, traditional biography’’ (xv), one that sets Calderón’s life and works in their political and cultural context, in chronological order. He also sets—and meets—the goal of giving readers a sense of what Calderón’s world and works looked like, with a generous set of illustrations that includes pictures of the Calderón ancestral home and coat of arms and of his house in Madrid, portraits of royalty and

Spain, Europe and the wider world, 1500–1800

Professor Sir John Elliott is surely the most distinguished Anglophone historian of early modern Spain and its empire; and his mastery of that topic has enabled him to make an equally distinguished contribution to our understanding of Europe as a whole between the 15th and 18th centuries. In this collection of some of his most recent articles, essays and lectures, Elliott continues to demonstrate the remarkable qualities which have underpinned that reputation.

Manos Teatrales: Cyber-Paleography and Early Modern Spanish Theater

Both before and after Gutenberg, the history of artistic, social, and political events has often been recorded in handwritten documents: historical chronicles, literary texts, musical scores, religious and philosophical treatises, ambassadorial and military reports, and the correspondence of authors, scientists, and political figures with the world around them. Literary scholars, historians, archaeologists, and others spend endless hours locating, deciphering, and evaluating these manuscripts. While access to these manuscripts was once difficult, digital technology is making increasing numbers of such documents available; but it has yet to make them easy to read and to evaluate for all but a tiny minority of specialists.The Manos Teatrales project, directed by the authors of this note, employs cyber-paleography techniques to open up and analyze the surviving wealth of manuscripts from Spanish Golden Age theater and related archival records that link that theater to the surrounding society. The procedures we use and describe below could be extended to other manuscript collections. The results of our research are constructed as a live, layered virtual world on the Web, centered on a searchable database, and this information is accessible to librarians, scholars, students, and interested individuals anywhere at www.manosteatrales.org. Our processes have been developed with support from a Duke University Provosts Common Fund grant, from National Endowment for the Humanities and American Council of Learned Societies digital initiative grants (2009-2010), and from further work on automatic writer identification with researchers at the Universidad Complutense of Madrid (2011-2013).Theater in Golden Age Spain, as in Elizabethan England and classical Greece, flourished as a central cultural institution. From the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries, drama was the most popular form of entertainment throughout the Spanish empire. Fast-moving three-act dramas were performed in public theaters, on palace stages, and even aboard ships to America; and autos sacramentales-allegorical religious drama-was performed on carts in town and city streets. Great playwrights-Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon de la Barca-and dozens of other writers penned thousands of dramas to meet the insatiable demand. In contrast to the case of England, however, a treasure trove that awaits students of Golden Age Spanish plays is the existence of hundreds of autographed, partially autograph and unsigned manuscripts of the plays. Many of the manuscripts left by the great dramatists have served as copy-texts for good modern editions, but relatively little has been done with the hundreds of unsigned manuscripts that survived in collections in Spain, other European countries, and America. In the Biblioteca Nacional Espanola (BNE) and the Theater Institute of Barcelona alone, they number well over fifteen hundred. Identifying their copyists yields information valuable not only for the evaluation of the manuscripts in question but also for understanding the organization and operation of the theatrical working community. These manuscripts show that some copyists worked closely with dramatists, making clean copies of their drafts, while other manuscripts reflect the work of a theater company owner who modified the text to suit his companys capabilities and his sense of audience preferences. Others made copies for specific actors, or for sale, and a few, anticipating todays movie pirates who use hand-held cameras, made their copies from memory after seeing a performance.Significant progress in the field of handwriting recognition has enabled practical applications in constrained modern domains, such as the recognition of postal codes. Although the challenges posed by writer identification in old manuscripts are greater than those that pertain to modern forensic uses, the goal is the same. Manos Teatrales originated in Margaret Greers evaluation of a manuscript of Pedro Calderon de la Barcas court spectacle drama La estatua de Prometeo that she found in the Biblioteca Historica Municipal of Madrid in 1980 and edited. …

The Weight of Law in Calderón

From La vida es sueño to El postrer duelo de España and El pintor de su deshonra, Calderón repeatedly explores the weight of law on the individual, dramatizing the conflict between desire and law on both sides of the sexual divide. Law, invoked in its multiple variants—divine, natural and human—collides with the honour code, love, loyalty to friends, to family and to the king and institutions of the state and of power frequently abuse concepts of justice. The fact that Calderón never wrote the promised second part of his only two dramas with eponymous titles, Judas Macabeo and Luis Pérez el gallego, suggests that the dramatist never found a satisfactory resolution to the fundamental human dilemma therein, that of finding a perfect individual balance between desire and the many faces of law.