The Electronic \u3cem\u3eComedia\u3c/em\u3e

The rapid transmission of data in machine readable formats has for many years now been a staple of the business world. Now, in a number of fields, the same technology is being applied to scholarly subjects, including French and English literatures. The availability of primary texts ready to be read by one\u27s own computer is almost as great a revolution in textual dissemination as the invention of the printing press. Other disciplines, in which scholars can exchange texts either on diskette or by uploading and downloading to a network, are far ahead of Spanish literature, but there is both a nucleus of expertise within the profession and an extraordinary (and growing) demand for new computerized editions of Spanish texts. The prospect of making comedia texts available in computer- readable format is at once exciting and daunting. Existing data collections and retrieval formats point out both the opportunities and the problems that may arise in undertaking such an enterprise. In addition, in undertaking the massive project of making comedia texts available in machine-readable formats, one must confront questions relating to which comedia text among many, copyrights, and administrative issues. Under the auspices of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, Inc., and funded by the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain\u27s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities, a colloquium was held June 11 and 12, 1993, on the campus of Princeton University to discuss the future of machine-readable comedia texts. The participants were Margaret Rich Greer, Associate Professor of Spanish at Princeton; Sharon Voros, Professor of Spanish at the United States Naval Academy; Matthew D. Stroud, Professor of Spanish at Trinity University; Toby Paff, Humanities Specialist for Computer and Information Technology at Princeton; and Susan Hockey, Director of the Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities at Rutgers and Princeton

The Biblical Ruth as \u3cem\u3eDama Principal\u3c/em\u3e: Tirso’s \u3cem\u3eLa Mejor Espigadera\u3c/em\u3e

The comedia mined a variety of source texts for its plots—Italian novelle, Spanish history, Greek and Roman mythology, and, of course, the Bible—but always managed to adapt plot, setting, and characters to the conventions of the Spanish national theater. This process offered great benefits, such as audience familiarity, as well as challenges, including inherent and unavoidable limitations on artistic freedom. One of the more interesting adaptations is Tirso de Molina’s reworking of the Biblical story of Ruth in La mejor espigadera, primarily because of the lack of dramatic potential offered by the original: there are no villains, no obstacles that appear to be insurmountable, no internal conflicts that any of the principal characters must resolve. Indeed, the Biblical characters are for the most part rather one-dimensional and exceedingly virtuous. This study focuses on the central figure of Ruth and her transformation from young, simple Moabite to a leading lady with much in common with other damas principales. Tirso’s techniques—elevating Ruth to nobility, describing her in conventional poetic terms, creation of a love triangle, even recasting her as a strong-willed, intelligent, and competent woman who does not submit meekly to the wishes of others—not only provide the audience with a different interpretation of this righteous woman of the Hebrew Bible, but also reveal a great deal about seventeenth-century Spanish views of women and the art of comedia dramaturgy as well. In the end, Tirso does not just demonstrate the Baroque aspiration to imitate its models with the goal of surpassing them, he makes the case that the comedia as a genre should take second place to nothing, not even to the Holy Bible

Imperial Incentives and Individual Allegiances in Juan Antonio Correa’s \u3cem\u3eLa Pérdida y Restauración de Bahía de Todos los Santos\u3c/em\u3e

Juan Antonio Correa\u27s La pérdida y restauración de Bahía de Todos los Santos, written primarily to celebrate the successful recapture in 1625 of an important American colony from the Dutch and their allies, invites an investigation into why and how human beings can be motivated to support people and institutions that not only do not directly benefit them but may in fact operate in ways that are unfavourable to their own lives and causes. Informed by the political writings of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, this study explores the various reasons why the Portuguese, the Brazilian colonists, and even the voiceless ‘negros’ would choose to fight in support of the Spanish Empire, while, on the other hand, French and English, both Catholics and Protestants, would opt to aid the Dutch. By including two love triangles as subplots within the main action that dramatizes the loss and recovery of the Bahia, Brazil, Correa has produced not only an entertaining play but an insightful study into the ways that empires operate, employing direct military force as well as various personal incentives and societal inducements, in order to motivate the populations they have subjugated into acceptance of their subservient role and even into lending active support to the political powers that govern and control them

Infallible Texts and Righteous Interpretations: \u3cem\u3eDon Quijote\u3c/em\u3e and Religious Fundamentalism

Religion in Don Quijote has been a frequent subject of inquiry over the past century. As a vehicle for religious expression, to use Ziolkowski\u27s terminology (1), Cervantes\u27s masterpiece has been studied as an analogy of the relationship between religious faith and the world around it (Ziolkowski 8), as a manifestation of the historic clash between the secularization of the modern era and the waning medieval domination by religious institutions and symbols (Ziolkowski 9, citing Berger 107), as a vessel of both the spirit and the letter of selected pronouncements of the Council of Trent (Descouzis 479), as a text that fell under the scrutiny of the Inquisition (Castro, Cervantes 427; Boruchoff 40-49), proof of Cervantes\u27s own religious orthodoxy or lack thereof (Spitzer 61; Castro, El pensamiento 240-320), and a study of the nature of belief and its relationship to truth: truth is always a function of belief (Forcione 109). Special attention, of course, has been paid to the scrutiny of Don Quijote\u27s library by the priest, Pero Pérez, in Part 1, Chapter 5 (Eisenberg, Ziolkowski 28), Quijote\u27s encounter with Ricote (Ramírez-Araujo, Boruchoff 53), and the more than 160 quotations from and allusions to passages from the Bible (Monroy 79-173), as well as minor irreverences and occasional jibes seen throughout (Ziolkowski 27-28). This brief overview is, of course, only a taste of the scholarship available on the subject, but it will suffice here to establish the scope and breadth of previous discussion of religion in the Quijote

Tirso\u27s Wife-Murder Play: La Vida y Muerte de Herodes

Tirso\u27s La vida y muerte de Herodes is a curious play for a number of reasons. Dating most likely from 1620-21, it is one of several plays based on Herod\u27s life both in Biblical accounts and in Josephus\u27 Antiquities. Lodovico Dolce was the first Renaissance playwright to take advantage of the historical but very dramatic subject matter in his Marianna of 1565, and, closer to Tirso\u27s era, Alexandre Hardy and Tristan l\u27Hermite created French versions; Hardy\u27s dates from the period 1625 to 1632 and Tristan\u27s was published in 1637. Of course, Calderón published in 1637 the version best known to Hispanists, El mayor monstruo los celos. Tirso\u27s play is also-extraordinarily long (3935 lines), and remarkably poorly structured, never quite succeeding in combining the three dramatic elements in Herod\u27s life: his political maneuvering between Augustus and Mark Anthony; his relationship with his wife Mariadnes and her unfortunate demise; and the Christmas tale of Herod\u27s order to kill all male children under the age of two, including his own. Perhaps because of the limitations and defects of the dramatic qualities of the play, it has not been the subject of a great deal of criticism. More curious, however, is the fact that it has almost never been mentioned among the wife-murder plays that have been the subject of so much investigation. This study will consider the play as part of a tradition of wife-murder plays, with some speculation concerning its omission from the usual discussions of those plays

The Comedia as Potboiler: Juan de Cabeza’s Matar por zelos su dama

Of the hundreds of existing comedias, only a very small percentage has actually received critical attention. Those few that have been studied in greatest depth, such as La vida es sueño, El burlador de Sevilla, Fuenteovejuna, and the like, might be said to represent the most interesting, if not the best, plays in the entire body of comedias.1 Nevertheless, for every famous comedia, there are literally scores of lesser known and never read plays. Perhaps their lack of attention is mute testimony to their mediocrity, but they are nonetheless comedias and are of critical interest for two reasons. First, they are artistic creations and, as such, deserve to be studied on philosophical grounds as much as any other creation. Second, they are comedias, and any sweeping generalization about the nature of the comedia should apply to them as well as to any others

Symbols, Referents, and Theatrical Semantics: The Use of Hands in the Comedia

One of the most important products of the application of New Criticism to the comedia was the discovery of the functions of clusters of images to the dramatic and theatrical themes within a play. Among the most pervasive and subtle images and symbols are those involving hands and, by extension, arms, rings, gloves, and daggers. A quick, impressionistic overview of the connotations of hands reveals a number of different and often contradictory meanings: trust and treachery, power and submission, salvation and damnation, to mention only a few. So ubiquitous are hands, and so necessary are they to the plot complications in a number of plays that I would posit that only eyes are used more frequently to connect the poetic, theatrical, and symbolic threads that make up the fabric of a comedia

Supersession, the \u3cem\u3eComedia Nueva\u3c/em\u3e, and Tirso\u27s \u3cem\u3eLa Mejor Espigadera\u3c/em\u3e

Given Spain\u27s self-identification with the Roman Catholic Church under the Hapsburgs, what is one to make of the great number of comedias that take as their protagonists figures from the Hebrew Bible, individuals revered by Jews as righteous ancestors, models of behavior, and illustrious examples of the triumphs of the Hebrew people faced with endless persecution and oppression? Most of these plays focus on the actions of men (e.g., King David in Tirso’s La venganza de Tamar, and Joseph and Jacob in Mira’s El más feliz cautiverio), but a number of them focus on righteous Hebrew women such as the title characters in Lope’s La hermosa Ester and El robo de Dina, as well as Ruth in the play that interests us here, Tirso de Molina’s La mejor espigadera. According to John Beusterien (357), the comedia in general demonstrates considerable ambivalence toward the Jews, but ambivalence alone may not be sufficient to explain the appearance of such plots, and the questions that arise are numerous. How did Jewish characters end up as protagonists and models for behavior in so many plays written during a time of overt hostility towards the Jews? This was, after all, the nation that not only forced the Jews to leave Spain or convert in 1492, but tirelessly and brutally persecuted their descendents who were never considered quite as good, quite as deserving of the same consideration accorded other human beings, or quite as legitimately Spanish as other citizens, who were always suspected of continuing to practice their religion in secret, and who were deemed so dangerous their mere presence in the society could not be tolerated. Is there some additional process at work in those plays in which the protagonist is a Jewish woman

Gender and the Gaze: Sor Juana, Lacan, and Spanish Baroque Poetry

There are few motifs more ubiquitous in Renaissance and Baroque poetry than those that link falling in love to the eyes. Based at least in part on Theophrastus, as Halstead has pointed out (113-20), this notion of love describes a process by which one is captivated by looking at the object of desire, prompting an exchange of humors or spirits. If the love is returned, both lovers feel complete and satisfied, but if the object of desire does not reciprocate, one feels empty because one has given one’s soul to another while receiving nothing in return

The Closest Reading: Creating Annotated Editions

Teaching old literature of any kind to undergraduates is a challenge. The language is difficult, the themes often lack resonance for today\u27s students, and the cultural references are abstruse. When one adds to the mix that the works are in an archaic version of Spanish, not the native language of most students in the United States, and that the plays are written in florid, baroque poetry, the task of helping students to appreciate the Spanish comedia for its literary value is made considerably more demanding. A great many students simply do not understand what is going on with the plots and characters when they read a play. One sign of their lack of engagement with the text is the fact that rarely do undergraduates make marginal notes in their editions. It appears they read the texts blankly, waiting for the professor or someone else to tell them what they were supposed to think about them. In class, the students rarely ask questions on their own and do not usually give anything but the most rudimentary answers to questions regarding the basic themes, much less more esoteric topics such as baroque prosody. Faced with fifty minutes of silence, the professor breaks down and lectures, giving the students the information that he or she thinks they need. The overall experience of a class run in this fashion is abysmal for both the students and the professor. The problem is not that students are uninterested in the topics of the comedia. Once they understand what the plays are about—sex, honor, intrigue—students are forthcoming with their opinions and insights