In The Triumphant Juan Rana, Peter E. Thompson examines the actor's sexuality both on and off the stage and demonstrates that his homosexuality was tolerated, even understood and applauded, by the public.

The Outrageous Juan Rana Entremeses translates a selection of Juan Rana's interludes for the first time, highlighting their literary complexity and providing historical context for the many double meanings and innuendos they contain.

Examines theater and portraiture as interrelated social practices in seventeenth-century Spain. Features visual images and cross-disciplinary readings of selected plays that employ the motif of the painted portrait to key dramatic and symbolic effect.

This anthology of plays from the Spanish Golden Age brings together the work of canonical writers, female writers who are rapidly achieving canonical status, and lesser-known writers who have recently gained critical attention. It contains the full text of fifteen plays; an introduction to each play with information about the author, the work, performance issues, and current criticism; and glosses with definitions of difficult words and concepts. The extensive bibliography provides opportunities for further research.

A sumptuous history of Golden Age Spain that explores the irresistible tension between heavenly and earthly realms. Incomparable Realms offers a vision of Spanish culture and society during the so-called Golden Age, the period from 1500 to 1700 when Spain unexpectedly rose to become the dominant European power. But in what ways was this a Golden Age, and for whom? The relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church shaped the period, with both constructing narratives to bind Spanish society together. Incomparable Realms unpicks the impact of these two historical forces on thought and culture and examines the people and perspectives such powerful projections sought to eradicate. The book shows that the tension between the heavenly and earthly realms, and in particular the struggle between the spiritual and the corporeal, defines Golden Age culture. In art and literature, mystical theology and moral polemic, ideology, doctrine, and everyday life, the problematic pull of the body and the material world is the unacknowledged force behind early modern Spain. Life is a dream, as the title of Calderón’s famous play of the period proclaimed, but there is always a body dreaming it.

A panoramic, state-of-the-art handbook destined to chart a course for future work in the field of early modern Hispanic theater studies. It begins in the closet with an essay on Celestina as closet drama and moves out into the court to explore intersections with courtly love. An essay on the comedia and the classics demonstrates this genre’s firm grounding in the classical tradition, despite Lope de Vega’s famous protestations to the contrary. Distinct but related genres such as the autos sacramentales and the entremeses also make an appearance. The traditional themes of honor and wife-murder share the stage with less familiar topics like the incorporation of animals into performance. This volume covers the urban space of the city in Spain and Portugal as well as uncharted territories in the New World and Japan. Essays on emblems and the picaresque round out this anthology, along with studies of theatrical representations of early modern innovations in science and technology. The book concludes with two different psychoanalytical approaches, focused on melancholy and Lacanian tragedy, respectively. This collection incorporates the work of younger scholars along with established names in the field to synthesize the most exciting recent work on the comedia and related forms of early modern Hispanic theatrical production. Contributors include: Ignacio Arellano, Frederick de Armas, Henry Sullivan, Edward Friedman, A. Robert Lauer, Manuel Delgado, Adrienne Martín, Enrique García Santo Tomás, Matthew Stroud, Teresa Scott Soufas, Enrique Fernández, María Mercedes Carrión, Robert Bayliss, Ted Bergman, Cory Reed, Maryrica Lottman, Christina Lee, and Enrique Duarte.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.