Early modern Spain has long been viewed as having a culture obsessed with honor, where a man resorted to violence when his or his wife's honor was threatened, especially through sexual disgrace. This book--the first to closely examine honor and interpersonal violence in the era--overturns this idea, arguing that the way Spanish men and women actually behaved was very different from the behavior depicted in dueling manuals, law books, and honor plays of the period. Drawing on criminal and other records to assess the character of violence among non-elite Spaniards, historian Scott K. Taylor finds that appealing to honor was a rhetorical strategy, and that insults, gestures, and violence were all part of a varied repertoire that allowed both men and women to decide how to dispute issues of truth and reputation.

Some writers present her as a representative of the symbolic order: invested with sacred powers and ultimate authority, she rebukes transgressors and negotiates their return to God's grace and lawful society."--Jacket.

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.

This is the first monograph on the performance and reception of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century national drama in contemporary Spain, which attempts to remedy the traditional absence of performance-based approaches in Golden Age studies. The book contextualises the socio-historical background to the modern-day performance of the country’s three major Spanish baroque playwrights (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.

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.

In reinterpreting two of Lope de Vega's plays, Forcione places his texts in the context of political and institutional history philosophy, theology, and art history. In doing so he shows how Spanish theatre anticipated the decisive changes in human consciousness that characterized the ascendence of the absolutist state.