The essays in this collection provide new material to enable the continuing recuperation of the complex social ambiance that both created and was reflected in the literature of Spain's Golden Age.

Despite the increasing popularity of queer scholarship, no major work in English thus far has explored the evidence of male homosexual behaviour found in the inquisitorial court records of early modern Spain. This absence seems all the more glaring considering the wealth of available archival material. Sexual Hierarchies, Public Status aims to fill this gap by comprehensively examining the Aragonese Inquisition's sodomy trials. Using court records, Cristian Berco provides an analysis of male sexuality and its connection to public social structures and processes. His study illustrates how male homosexual behaviour existed within a widespread gendered system that extolled the penetrative act as the masculine pursuit of an emasculated passive partner. This sexual hierarchy based on masculinity constantly intersected in a potentially subversive manner with notions of public hierarchy and posed a threat to local sexual economies. Yet, Berco demonstrates how the views of private denouncers and magistrates in the sodomy trials produced divergent sexual economies that rendered persecution unstable and diffuse. By focusing on how hierarchies were created both within sexual relationships and in the public eye, this investigation traces the significance of homosexual desire in the context of daily social relations informed by status, ethnic, religious, and national differences.

The Baroque Spanish stage is populated with virile queens and feminized kings. This study examines the diverse ways in which seventeenth-century comedias engage with the discourse of power and rulership and how it relates to gender. A privileged place for ideological negotiation, the comedia provided negative and positive reflections of kingship at a time when there was a perceived crisis of monarchical authority in the Habsburg court. Author María Cristina Quintero explores how playwrights such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Antonio Coello, and Francisco Bances Candamo--taking inspiration from legend, myth, and history--repeatedly staged fantasies of feminine rule, at a time when there was a concerted effort to contain women's visibility and agency in the public sphere. The comedia's preoccupation with kingship together with its obsession with the representation of women (and women's bodies) renders the question of royal subjectivity inseparable from issues surrounding masculinity and femininity. Taking into account theories of performance and performativity within a historical context, this study investigates how the themes, imagery, and language in plays by Calderón and his contemporaries reveal a richly paradoxical presentation of gendered monarchical power.

In early modern Spain, theater reached the height of its popularity during the same decades in which Spanish monarchs were striving to consolidate their power. Jodi Campbell uses the dramatic production of seventeenth-century Madrid to understand how ordinary Spaniards perceived the political developments of this period. Through a study of thirty-three plays by four of the most popular playwrights of Madrid (Pedro Caldern de la Barca, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, and Juan Bautista Diamante), Campbell analyzes portrayals of kingship during what is traditionally considered to be the age of absolutism and highlights the differences between the image of kingship cultivated by the monarchy and that presented on Spanish stages. A surprising number of plays performed and published in Madrid in the seventeenth century, Campbell shows, featured themes about kingship: debates over the qualities that make a good king, tests of a king's abilities, and stories about the conflicts that could arise between the personal interests of a king and the best interest of his subjects. Rather than supporting the absolutist and centralizing policies of the monarchy, popular theater is shown here to favor the idea of reciprocal obligations between subjects and monarch. This study contributes new evidence to the trend of recent scholarship that revises our views of early modern Spanish absolutism, arguing for the significance of the perspectives of ordinary people to the realm of politics.

"The bringing of Spanish seventeenth-century verse plays to the contemporary English-speaking stage involves a number of fundamental questions. Are verse translations preferable to prose, and if so, what kind of verse? To what degree should translations aim to be 'faithful'? Which kinds of plays 'work', and which do not? Which values and customs of the past present no difficulties for contemporary audiences, and which need to be decoded in performance?Which kinds of staging are suitable, and which are not? To what degree, if any, should one aim for 'authenticity' in staging? In this volume, a group of translators, directors, and scholars explores these and related questions."--Jacket

In 1991, Laura Slatkin published The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad, in which she argued that Homer knowingly situated the storyworld of the Iliad against the backdrop of an older world of mythos by which the events in the Iliad are explained and given traction. Slatkin’s focus was on Achilles’ mother, Thetis: an ostensibly marginal and powerless goddess, Thetis nevertheless drives the plot of the Iliad, being allusively credited with the power to uphold or challenge the rule of Zeus. Now, almost thirty years after Slatkin’s publication, this timely volume re-examines depictions and receptions of this ambiguous goddess, in works ranging from archaic Greek poetry to twenty-first century cinema. Twenty authors build upon Slatkin’s readings to explore Thetis and multiple roles she played in Western literature, art, material culture, religion, and myth. Ever the shapeshifter, Thetis has been and continues to be reconceptualised: supporter or opponent of Zeus’ regime, model bride or unwilling victim of Peleus’ rape, good mother or child-murderess, figure of comedy or monstrous witch. Hers is an enduring power of transformation, resonating within art and literature.

Spanish Golden Age drama has resurfaced in recent years, however scholarly analysis has not kept pace with its popularity. This book problematizes and analyzes the approaches to staging reconstruction taken over the past few decades, including historical, semiotic, anthropological, cultural, structural, cognitive and phenomenological methods.