Lope's use of self-reverential devices in Lo fingido verdadero and La buena guarda serves to highlight the illusory nature of life and the relationship between lo verdadero and lo divino which lie at the heart of the theocentric world view of seventeenth-century Spain. The conflicting imperatives of human and divine love and the issue of identity are features of all of the plays. Furthermore, it is illustrated that the interplay between illusion and reality and the relationship between playwright and audience are crucial to Lope's dramatic output."--Jacket.

An assessment of the life, work and reputation of Spain's leading Golden Age dramatist

This book explores the cultural conditions that led to the emergence and proliferation of Saint Hermenegildo as a stage character in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It considers how this saint became a theatrical trope enabling the Society of Jesus to address religious and secular concerns of the post-Tridentine Church, and to discuss political issues such as the supremacy of the pope over the monarch and the legitimacy of regicide. The book goes on to explain how the Hermenegildo narrative developed outside of Jesuit colleges, through works by professional dramatist Lope de Vega and Mexican nun Juana Inés de la Cruz. Stefano Muneroni takes a global approach to the staging of Hermenegildo, tracing the character’s journey from Europe to the Americas, from male to female authors, and from a sacrificial to a sacramental paradigm where the emphasis shifts from bloodletting to spiritual salvation. Given its interdisciplinary approach, this book is geared toward scholars and students of theatre history, religion and drama, early modern theology, cultural studies, romance languages and literature, and the history of the Society of Jesus..

This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.

In this volume, Kathleen Jeffs draws on first-hand experience of the Royal Shakespeare Company's rehearsal room for the 2004-05 Spanish Golden Age season to put forth a collaborative model for translating, rehearsing, and performing Spanish Golden Age drama. Building on the RSC season, the volume offers methodologies for translation and communication that can feed the creative processes of actors and directors, while maintaining an ethos of fidelity with regards to the original texts. It argues that collaboration between academics and theatre practitioners was instrumental in the success of the season and that the work carried out has repercussions for critical debate of Comedia. The volume posits a model for future productions of the Comedia in English, one that recognizes the need for the languages of the scholar and the theatre artist to be made mutually intelligible by the use of collaborative strategies, mediated by a consultant or dramaturg proficient in both tongues. This model applies more generally to theatrical collaborations involving a translator, writer and director, and will be useful for translation and performance processes in any language.

The Signifying Self: Cervantine Drama as Counter-Perspective Aesthetic offers a comprehensive analysis of all eight of Cervantes's Ocho comedias (published 1615), moving beyond conventional anti-Lope approaches to Cervantine dramatic practise in order to identify what, indeed, his theatre promotes. Considered on its own aesthetic terms, but also taking into account ontological and socio-cultural concerns, this study compels a re-assessment of Cervantes's drama and conflates any monolithic interpretations which do not allow for the textual interplay of contradictory and conflicting discourses which inform it. Cervantes's complex and polyvalent representation of freedom underpins such an approach; a concept which is considered to be a leitmotif of Cervantes's work but which has received scant attention with regards to his theatre. Investigation of this topic reveals not only Cervantes's rejection of established theatrical convention, but his preoccupation with the difficult relationship between the individual and the early modern Spanish world. Cervantes's comedias emerge as a counter-perspective to dominant contemporary Spanish ideologies and more orthodox artistic imaginings. Ultimately, The Signifying Self seeks to recuperate the Ocho comedias as a significant part of the Cervantine, and Golden-Age, canon and will be of interest and benefit to those scholars who work on Cervantes and indeed on early modern Spanish theatre in general.

This book presents a historical overview of colonial Mexico City and the important role it played in the creation of the early modern Hispanic world.