Spain's Golden Age, the seventeenth century, left the world one great legacy, the flower of its dramatic genius—the comedia. The work of the Golden Age playwrights represents the largest combined body of dramatic literature from a single historical period, comparable in magnitude to classical tragedy and comedy, to Elizabethan drama, and to French neoclassical theater. A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama is the first up-to-date survey of the history of the comedia, with special emphasis on critical approaches developed during the past ten years. A history of the comedia necessarily focuses on the work of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca, but Ziomek also gives full credit to the host of lesser dramatists who followed in the paths blazed by Lope and Calderon, and whose individual contributions to particular genres added to the richness of Spanish theater. He also examines the profound influence of the comedia on the literature of other cultures.

Early modern Spain's insistent rhetorics of nation and kingship, of a monolithic body of shared values and beliefs, especially in respect of racial and gender stereotypes, and of a centralized and ostensibly absolutist legislative apparatus did not map unproblematically onto the complex topography of everyday life. This volume explores the extent to which these rhetorics and the ideology they helped to construct or underpin reflected or failed to reflect the realities of social, economic, and cultural life. It sets against their typically exorbitant claims the lived, messy, and sometimes contradictory experience of Spaniards across a broad social spectrum, both at the centre and at the margins, not just of peninsular society, but of the Hispanic world overseas. Confronting ideology were questions of economic pragmatism, executive feasibility, jurisdictional competence, and, above all, the social and political complexity of the Spain of the period. Contributors: TREVOR J. DADSON, MARGARET RICH GREER, BARRY IFE, ALISTAIR MALCOLM, MELVEENA MCKENDRICK, RICHARD J. PYM, HELEN RAWLINGS, ALEXANDER SAMSON, JULES WHICKER RICHARD J. PYM is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Mars must be fed. His tools of war demand huge quantities of fodder, fuel, ammunition, and food. All these must be produced, transported, and distributed to contending forces in the field. No one can doubt the importance of feeding Mars in modern warfare, and it takes no great effort to recognize that it has always been a major aspect of large scal