María Cristina Quintero

Dramatic Convention and Poetic Discourse: Dialogue, Monologue, and Aside in Luis de Góngora's Las firmezas de Isabela

Luis de Góngoras Las firmezas de Isabela represents an attempt to rival Lope de Vegas dramatic formula. Góngora adopts many of the characteristics of the comedia nueva, but subverts the language of a typical Golden Age play by introducing the difficulty of his own poetic diction into the conventionality of the comedia. Through the manipulation of dialogue, monologue, and aside, the poet dramatizes the tension between Gongorine discourse and the dramatic formulas of the comedia de enredo. As a result, the play becomes a conscious exploration of the ambivalent relationship between poetry and drama during the seventeenth century.

Garcilaso/Góngora: Imagining the Self, Imagining Empire

Abstract Separated by more than half a century, Garcilaso de la Vega and Luis de Góngora chose the lyric genre to interrogate systems of power and the political and cultural changes that occurred from the early sixteenth century to the beginnings of the seventeenth century. Garcilasos ‘new’ poetry and his conflictive engagement with the emerging Spanish empire made manifest the tensions between the epics externalized political function and the lyrical expression of emotional intimacy. Moreover, the analysis of several sonnets reveals the tensions between spiritual faith and intellectual reason that echoed the periods unorthodox theology and led him to lament imperial power. For his part, Góngora seemed to eschew overt poetic subjectivity, often using his lyric talents to cultivate Spains most powerful nobles. His involvement in the economics of patronage presented a challenge: how to bridge the tensions between the lyric, with its topoi of desire and the constitution of a poetic self, on the one hand; and on the other, with the epic mode, considered more appropriate for the ‘alabanza de los grandes.’ In addition its generic hybridity, Góngoras panegyric poetry reveals an at times jaundiced perspective on the mechanisms of power within a unique literary subjectivity.

MONARCHY AND THE LIMITS OF EXEMPLARITY IN THE TEATRO PALACIEGO OF FRANCISCO BANCES CANDAMO

, hroughout history, theater has provided a place &0 for structuring the vision of a particular community. Because theater implies the collective remembrance and construction of certain common Sstories or myths, it often becomes the site of a NV societys self-imagining. The comedia that flourished in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Spain was no exception. Whether invoking the protocols of courtship and honor or dramatizing the myth of Spains imperial destiny, Golden Age theater became a mirror of a particular system of values and the locus for forging a communal, if imagined, identity. With its dazzling pageantry and spectacle, the teatro palaciego of the Habsburg Court during the last part of the seventeenth century represents a peculiar manifestation of that societys self-fashioning. Although its immediate audience was an elite group, seemingly distant from the collective experience of the corrales, Court theater nevertheless became a politically charged manifestation of a societys assumptions about the structures that governed it. The confined space of the Court was, after all, a highly politicized community, one intensely self-conscious about the need to affirm its authority and control through the manipulation and preservation of certain symbols and myths of power. Theatrical spectacle provided the ideal vehicle for the ongoing process of constructing, mythifying, and mystifying absolutist power.