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Allen, John Jay. La piedra Rosetta del teatro comercial europeo: El Teatro Cervantes de Alcala de Henares. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2015. 150 pp.This book is the latest contribution by John Jay Allen to our knowledge of the material conditions of Golden Age theater, a field in which he is the undisputed living expert and the importance of which it would be difficult to overestimate. Here Allen tells three stories. The first is about the discovery of a 1601 corral under the superimposed layers of an eighteenthcentury coliseum, a nineteenth-century romantic theater, and a twentiethcentury movie house, plus the effort by the three students who made the discovery to reconstruct it, with the assistance and direction of John Varey. The second is about the construction and structure of the corral, built by Francisco Sanchez, an illiterate carpenter, following the Corral de la Cruz, which he had seen in Madrid. The third reiterates Allen's previous work on the layout of corrales, with particular emphasis on their relationship to adjoining houses, and how this affected the staging of individual comedias such as La vida sueno and Fuenteovejuna.The first story is a saga with a sad ending. The struggles of the devoted students and John Varey, opposed or ignored by uncaring bureaucrats and ambitious politicians, were long and tortuous, in spite of the support of the international and national community of experts on Golden Age theater. After decades of disheartening failures the corral was restored, but not before the death of Varey, who never saw his labors come to fruition, nor was his personal library, which he had donated to the project, preserved at the site. The library ultimately was dispersed and lost, yet the theater is there, with its three incarnations restored, available for Spanish and foreign companies to stage classical and modern plays.Sanchez's construction of the corral is crucial, because this is the only remaining vestige of a historical Golden Age theater, and its rebuilding is a unique process on a European scale. Shakespeare's Globe in London burned down, as we know, so what we have is a replica built on the site following documents of the period. The stones on the patio of the corral in Alcala are the same ones on which Cervantes reports to have stood; hence, "Rosetta Stone" in the title of the book. The carpenter-whose illiteracy I question, for how could he have taken and preserved measurements?-followed the basic plan of the Madrid corrales, with the aposentos, cazuela, basic stage, bleachers on the side, patio for the mosqueteros, and, most importantly, ways to collect money from the spectators. …

The study of three Golden Age plays with an all-female group of undergraduate students led to class discussions about contemporary everyday violence against women. Those discussions prompted these reflections of the role of teaching and translating as performative and potentially transformative acts. In this respect, the university classroom is studied as the site for understanding how the subject matter of Spanish Golden Age plays lives and how we become its translators. Based on present-day stories of female and feminist experience, the essay explores questions of intellectual and ideological subjectivity in translation and the ways in which a feminist being-in-the-work might operate as the site from which the target text is approached and to which it might be drawn. Working with the consciousness of the mobilising of subject position with a historical context, the essay then explores the writing, in the past and present, of the female subject in La vengadora de las mujeres by Lope de Vega and Los empenos de una casa by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz.

"Reading La dama boba solely as literature seems to me to be an impossible chore; I simply cannot conceive of why one would do such a thing with this or any other good play. ..." (William I. Oliver, xx)Things aren't what they used to be in our field: not so many years ago, most comediantes had few opportunities to see the Comedia performed, and we tended to resist even the thought of tinkering with the original text. "Es de Lope" could not be read ironically, and in the critical imagination that tried and true phrase often vied with "Es mi Lope." It is now common to examine early modern plays in their contemporary7, adapted, translated, embodied form, mediated by theater practitioners who provide additional layers of artistic interpretation. Such approaches formed the heart of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater/Out of the Wings symposium, which included three nights of theater performances closely related to the activities of the conference, held in November 2013 at the Ustinov Studio in the historic Theatre Royal in Bath, England. The Ustinov's artistic policy7 "is to produce work that is new to British audiences, performed in seasons with a coherent unity, with an emphasis on international work" (Ustinov 4). The conference had been planned around the fifteen-week-long "Spanish Golden Age Season" curated by Laurence Boswell, the Ustinov Studio's artistic director, recently described as "British theatre's foremost contemporary evangelist for the dramas of the early7-seventeenth-century7 Spanish Golden Age" (Shuttleworth). The first theatrical event, directed by Boswell, was the production of Lope's A Lady of Little Sense, featuring a new translation by David Johnston, followed in subsequent nights by Punishment without Revenge and Don Gil of the Green Breeches, translated by7 Meredith Oakes and Sean O'Brien respectively. The overall experience combined nights of world-class theater with day's spent talking about why it was so good. The symposium provided the opportunity for British and American academics and theater professionals to interact directly, which led us to consider yet again the complicated, creative relationships between and among translations, adaptations, performances, and reception of the classics, especially for twenty-first-century, English-speaking audiences.The experience in Bath inspired this study, which considers six Englishlanguage versions of Lope's La dama boba (1613) that have been translated and/or adapted to English in the last fifty-plus years. Several have been staged as well as published, and the translators or adaptors have proffered valuable commentary'on their craft. In addition to Johnston's 2013 translation, used in the professional production in Bath,1 my essay explores the creative contributions and interpretative notes of Willis Knapp Jones (The Stupid Lady, 1962), Max Oppenheimer, Jr. (The Lady Simpleton, 1976), William I. Oliver (Lady Nitwit, 1998), John Farndon (Mad for Love, 1997), and Edward Friedman (Wit's End, first published in 2000, revised in 2013).2 This varied group of creative encounters with the same play' offers numerous points of comparison and contrast regarding the modern publication and performance histories of Lope's comic masterpiece, thereby allowing us to explore the key issues involved in translating and adapting the classics for contemporary audiences.Considerations of the Comedia in performance lie at the heart of discussions from both sides of the Atlantic on the roles of adaptation and translation for the modern stage. Both are creative, interpretative, and intertextual processes dealing with the transfer of linguistic and cultural material, and their study as disciplines can be used "to prompt reflection on cultural, historical, and political differences" (Welsh xii). In a real sense, translations adapt, just as adaptations translate, and each performance is also "inherently adaptive."3 Translations and adaptations of early modern theater run the gamut from more literal texts, whose stylized rhetorical style and vocabulary' attempt to capture the era in which the plays were written, to those whose modernized, natural-sounding language and themes update or even challenge the source texts. …

For Maureen Mary Murphy (alias Sister Jude Marie)1Jornada I.House of Desires or The Trials of a Noble House: Encloistered Tour de Farce and the Interrogation of an Endinghe inspiration for the first jornada of this essay comes from the "Shakespeare Found in Translation" diaspora project at London's Globe Theatre in the spring of 2012, which mapped the journey of Shakespeare in translation, but not without representing things Hispanic in the "Read Not Dead" section. The project kicked off with a reading of Life's a Dream (5 February 2012), and it included a Mexican staging of Henry IV, Part 1 as part of the Globe to Globe festival (14 May 2012).Sor Juana's El festejo de los empenos de una casa (1683) was in some sense a prequel to the 2012 Globe to Globe festival, for it had been staged- albeit without the accompanying loa, letras, sainetes, and sarao that arguably "elevate it to the level of musical court spectacle" (Hernandez Araico 328)-in Catherine Boyle's eminently playable translation (House of Desires or The Trials of a Noble House) under the direction of Nancy Meckler (30 June-1 October 2004).2 As part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) 2004 Spanish Golden Age Season, this baroque literary figure of Mexico found herself on the boards of the bard with a play originally penned, not for the public stage, but for the viceregal court and aristocratic palaces. Even more importantly, perhaps, she found herself in the illustrious company of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Cervantes, whose works were part of that season's Spanish repertoire.3As the lights went down in Stratford-upon-Avon's Swan Theatre with its meter high thrust stage surrounded on three sides by spectators, the public was immediately confronted with a set covered in shimmering polished brass. A wall of brass rising at the rear of the stage held up a pseudoaltar with glimmering candles and a clutter of iconic and ornamental objects-a sacred space that may have evoked an inner world of memory. As two novices polished the brass floor to the sound of Church music, a figure in a nun's habit sat at a desk in front of the altar, quill in hand, undoubtedly penning the play we were about to see: a baroque festival about "the trials of being in love" (HD 2.5,60), with its intrigue, deceit, mistaken identities, jealousy, dishonor, unrequited desire, loss of mutual love, search for correspondence. Or, perhaps, as the production's translator posited-evoking another of the meanings of empenos-Sor Juana was moving her characters into place as "pawns in her imagination, [...] foregrounding the sense of the lack of real agency of the characters, who are puppets to abstracted codes that will guide them to an inevitable end: reconciliation with the codes that dictate their destiny" (Boyle, "Loss" 179). In effect, the passing from creative process to stage reality, from convent to palatial home of Don Pedro (William Buckhurst), occurred as two icons were taken from the sacred altar space and set center stage, at the same time that their comedia alter egos, Dona Ana (Claire Cox) and her maid Celia (Katherine Kelly), were animated by Ben Ormerod's distinctive lighting. The resurrection of Sor Juana (Rebecca Johnson) as a stage presence had been bom of the director's decision to use the play's myriad references to the dramatist as nun-images of convents, sanctuary, and being locked away-in order to create a "complicity" with a modem audience similar to that which an original audience might have experienced (Daley).The nun stopped writing and, as if hearing voices in her head, listened intently to Dona Ana as she told Celia (who sat polishing a candlestick) of her brother Pedro's plan to abduct his beloved Dona Leonor de Castro (Rebecca Johnson) as she eloped with her lover Don Carlos de Olmedo Qoseph Millson) and to have her "cloistered in [the] safe haven" of his house in the care of his sister (HD 1.1, 23). Sor Juana continued to observe the "pawns" of her imagination as Celia revealed, in an aside, the hidden presence of Dona Ana's lover Donjuan (Oscar Pearce). …

Lope and Tirso Translated to the Boards of Bath's Ustinov StudioPresented by the Ustinov Studio, the Theatre Royal Bath, the Areola Theatre, and the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry', England. Curated by Laurence Boswell. Set and Costumes designed by Mark Bailey. Lighting designed by Ben Ormerod. Sound designed and composed by Jon Nicholls. Choreography and Movement directed by Lucy Cullingford. Fights directed by Terry' King.Punishment without Revenge [El castigo sin venganza] by Lope de Vega. 26 September-21 December 2013 (Ustinov Studio). Translated by Meredith Oakes. Directed by Laurence Boswell. With Chris Andrew Mellon (Ricardo/Rutillio), Jim Bywater (Febo), William Hoyland (Duke), Hedydd Dylan (Cintia), Nick Barber (Federico), Simon Scardifield (Batin), Frances McNamee (Cassandra), Annie Hemingway (Lucrecia), Doug Rao (Carlos, Marquis of Mantua), Katie Lightfoot (Aurora).A Lady of Little Sense [La dama boba] by Lope de Vega. 12 September-21 December 2013 (Ustinov Studio). Translated by David Johnston. Directed by Laurence Boswell. With Simon Scardifield (Liseo), Chris Andrew Mellon (Turin/Duardo), Doug Rao (Leandro/Feniso/Pedro), William Hoyland (Otavio), Jim By water (Miseno/Rufino/Dance Master), Katie Lightfoot (Nise), Annie Hemingway' (Celia), Frances McNamee (Finea), Hedy'dd Dy lan (Clara), Nick Barber (Laurencio).Don Gil of the Green Breeches [Don Gil de las calzas verdes] by Tirso de Molina. 19 September-20 December 2013 (Ustinov Studio). Translated by Sean O'Brien. Directed by Mehmet Ergen. With Hedydd Dy lan (Donna Juana), Doug Rao (Don Martin), Katie Lightfoot (Donna Ines), William Hoyland (Don Pedro), Annie Hemingway (Donna Clara), Simon Scardifield (Don Juan), Chris Andrew Mellon (Quintana), Jim Bywater (Caramanchel/Don Diego), Nick Barber (Ossorio/Bailiff), Frances McNamee (Celia/Valdiviesa/Aguilara).How different can Spanish theatre be, I thought as we set out for this, part of the Spanish Golden Age Season playing at the Theatre Royal's smaller sister. [...] How naive of me, for it turns out that just as world music takes the notes and instruments you are familiar with and creates something you've never heard before, so this magnificent production gives you a completely different view of drama. (Alison Phillips)Thus spake one critic of Laurence Boswell's production of Punishment without Revenge in Meredith Oakes's "pithy and pointed new translation" (Taylor), which stayed rather close to the original. It is not surprising that connoisseurs and devotees of Shakespeare, or of classical French theatre, might have perceived Spanish Golden Age plays to be "different," not least because Punishment qua tragedy is built around the "inhumanity of the code's inexorable laws and the vicious lengths to which people will go in order, technically, to save face" in comparison with "the easy-going, pragmatic manner of Falstaff ('What is honour? A word')" (Taylor); and because "Federico's anecdotal manservant brightly demonstrates that Lope's tragedy has a lighter side you certainly don't find in Racine" (Billington, "Punishment"). If Michael Billington was "inevitably reminded of Euripides's Hippolytus and Racine's Phedre, " he also thought that, "in its moral intricacy, Lope's play is the equal of its twin rivals-and indeed, in some ways, far better."Critics also perceived affinities between A Lady of Little Sense and a professed Shakespearean counterpart: "[Wjhile it festively celebrates love and marriage, it leaves a faintly acrid aftertaste. I was often reminded of The Taming of the Shrew" (Billington, "Lady"). And Mehmet Ergen's production of Don Gil of the Green Breeches in the translation of poet Sean O'Brien, which sounded not only "authentic and accurate" but also "notably well-phrased" (Coveney), evoked "a distinct mirroring of some of the style of As You Like It and Twelfth Night, if not the poetry or the darker side of the Bard" (Mottram). Boswell and team were to be applauded for having striven "to test [the] patriotic complacency al maximo" of die-hard bardologists (Cavendish). …

Friendship is one of the most basic of all social interactions. Classical theorists, especially Aristotle and Cicero, wrote treatises praising true friendship, enumerating the qualities of a friend, and describing the obligations friends have toward one another. Renaissance theorists carried on this tradition, echoing the sentiments found in the works of antiquity. Friendship was also an important theme for the creative process, and nearly every playwright of the Spanish Golden Age wrote at least one play that portrayed friendship. Tirso de Molina was no exception; in fact, he wrote several such works. One of his most interesting is Como han de ser los amigos , a play set in the time of Alfonso VIII (1155-1214). Don Manrique and Don Gaston are portrayed as friends in the classical mold, but their friendship faces destruction because of the deception of a woman. In this work, Tirso pits love, kingship, and honor against friendship. In the end friendship triumphs over every other social bond, and Tirso demonstrates the radical importance of friends and friendship to every other human relationship.

In recent years, a considerable amount of scholarship has been produced on the function of music in the drama of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca. But songs, dances, instruments, and other music references abound in the works of other important Spanish Golden Age dramatists. Because of the significant role music plays in many of his plays, special attention should be devoted to the repertoire of the preeminent dramatists Agustin Moreto. This essay focuses on the relationship between music and text in Yo por vos y vos por otro (1676), and particularly on how music is utilized during critical junctures as a way to underscore, on the one hand, the work's references to period notions of lovesickness, and on the other, to support the work's dramatic structure and technique. The function of music in this play is an example of the need for further study and reevaluation of a significant portion of Moreto's repertoire.

Innovation and conflict have always characterized early modern Spanish theater. The dramatic text, transformed and reincarnated with each interpretation onstage, was in a constant state of flux in the Golden Age and a number of dramatic poets of the day wrote both for the stage and about the changes it was undergoing. Furthermore, as a result of the commercialization of theater during the last half of the sixteenth century, the production and the representation of plays began to diverge from the earlier secular contexts of courtly entertainment and from the didactic scope of religious dramas. The Comedia, a new, mixed-genre form, still entertained nobles and taught a moralizing lesson, but as the public and theatrical spaces changed, so did the dramatic landscape of early modern Spain, and a more heterogeneous public went to see plays in the newly constructed and permanent corrales de comedias . The formation of this theater-going public presented challenges for the dramatic poet, who was forced to face the new and changing needs and expectations ofthe audience. Most Spanish Golden Age playwrights met this challenge head on, changing with the times; among the many great dramatists of the era, Felix Lope de Vega Carpio stands out as he embraced the existing—and evolving—dramatic tradition and molded it into what we know as the Comedia, successfully establishing it as the prominent theatrical form of seventeenth-century Spain. Lope has sparked abundant critical commentary and study since the seventeenth century. The evolution of critical and theoretical approaches has led a number of critics to reexamine Lope's dramatic texts and their guiding principles. Influential studies in the areas of metatheater, audience reception, and performance have further generated the possibility of new interpretations of the Comedia, opening vistas that expand our understanding of the dramatic form. In this essay I examine Lope's Arte nuevo and discuss its dramatization in the coetaneous play Lo fingido verdadero to illustrate Lope's interest in performance and reception as seen in both types of works, as well as his desire to disseminate non-traditional techniques and ideas to a wide audience. (AJG)

The publication of Teresa Soufas's anthology Women's Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain's Golden Age (1997) and her seminal work Dramas of Distinction (1997) have brought the works of five early modern women playwrights into the mainstream of Spanish Golden Age studies. This study focuses specifically on the Portuguese-born Angela de Azevedo's El muerto disimulado , written between 1621 and 1644, during the author's period of court service to Queen Isabela de Borbon. Her comedia affords Hispanists the opportunity to explore the construction and function of counter-discourses that clearly challenge the socio-cultural views of seventeenth-century Spain. My analysis examines the unique ways in which Azevedo creates what has been called "symbolic inversion." Azevedo constructs symbolic inversions in order to respond to the dominant discourses on womanhood, honor, vengeance, and marriage present in the dramatic works of her contemporaries by refiguring traditional comedia types while positioning them on familiar thematic ground. El muerto disimulado follows the traditional structure and content of plays penned by Azevedo's literary forefathers. In addition, typical comedia types are represented in this work, as well as the controversial cross-dressed male character. It is my contention that Azevedo breaks through the silence imposed on women writers by rearticulating gender specific roles and inverting social stereotypes in order to voice her ideological position, which simultaneously breaks with audience and reader expectations and comedia conventions. (DM-G)

Relatively little critical attention has been paid to the conventions that govern the ways that Spanish Golden Age plays begin. This study defines a set of conventions for these play beginnings and offers some theoretical precepts that helped to shape the conventions. After reviewing the comments on play openings found in contemporary theoretical treatises of the period, this study offers some observations on play openings for Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina. Factors considered include the number of characters onstage, the use of vertical space, sound effects, machinery and other special effects, and beginnings of (apparent) harmony vs. beginnings of crisis. The play openings of Calderon de la Barca are then studied at some length. Finally, this article seeks to show how Golden Age play beginnings were at least in part shaped by external considerations of representation and circumstance, such as the theatrical troupe for which a given play was composed. (JTC)

The number of studies related to Spanish Golden Age playhouses has increased significantly since the 1950s when John Varey and Norman D. Shergold began to conduct research in the archives of Madrid. Together with those in Madrid, documents from the archives of Tudela, Alcala de Henares, and Cordoba have served as the foundation for groundbreaking studies of the playhouses in these cities. The research initiated by Varey and Shergold, and later continued by John J. Allen and Maria Teresa Pascual Bonis, among others, inspired me to search for information related to Segovia's Hospital de la Misericordia playhouse in this city's Archivo Municipal and Archivo Historico Provincial. Although the performance contracts and repair contracts upon which my article is based are not as numerous as those found in other cities, they do provide ample information to produce the most complete recreation of the Hospital de la Misericordia playhouse to date. (MM)

The physical appearance and placement of the stage decor used to represent mountains for performances in Golden Age corrales has puzzled modern comedia scholars. Their analyses of textual evidence of the period (stage directions, repair documents, account books) have resulted in a series of hypothetical models of the monte . This essay introduces graphic evidence against which these hypotheses can be tested: a drawing by Lope de Vega in the autograph manuscript of El cardenal de Belen (signed 27 August 1610) which illustrates a stage direction that calls for two montes . This marginal sketch is the only known seventeenth-century illustration of the intended appearance of a corral stage during a performance and deserves the same prominence that has been accorded to illustrations of the staging of court performances in histories of the Spanish Golden Age theater.

This article studies some of the ways in which the Popular Renaissance vogue of emblem literature affected Spanish Golden Age theater. Specifically, Calderon's El medico de su honra is examined in three areas. After reviewing previous criticism on emblematics in the play, the article identifies other emblems that Calderon seems to have incorporated into the dialogue of the play. The second section considers the ways in which Calderon availed himself of emblematics in the staging of the play. The final part of the study explores Calderon's use of emblematic language in El medico de su honra .

Fischer, Susan L. Reading Performance: Spanish Golden-Age Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, U.K., 2009. 368 pp.Through the collection of essays Reading Performance: Spanish GoldenAge Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage, Susan L. Fisher offers a comprehensive overview of early modern plays in performance. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Lope de Vega are the key playwrights analyzed in this book, as well as the theatrical adaptations of Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina and appropriations of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in Spain and France. As Fischer makes clear, the study of performance "energizes potentials that have remained obscure or dormant in the original text" (220). The book makes the argument for theoretical inquiry into performances as nonstatic cultural events.Reading Performance is composed of revised versions of Fischer's alreadypublished articles across three main areas: productions of comedias done by Madrid's Compania Nacional de Teatro Clasico (CNTC) between 1986 and 2005, comedias translated into English and performed in the U.S. and U.K, and productions of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega in translation on the French and Spanish stage. Although each essay stands alone, this collection inspires consideration of the critical overlaps between the plays in performance. Fischer utilizes theoretical perspectives from a variety of authors, including Patrice Pavis, Peter Brook, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, and brings into conversation the often-estranged academic critic and theater practitioner. In Fischer's words, "contemporary theory, then, can prompt the critic of the text and performance to recall that all readings have ideological implications, to examine the extent to which interpretation and ideology are intertwined, and to create a framework for deciphering the operations governing the production of new readings that arise from such culturally determined constructs" (20).One of the most significant contributions of this book is that it offers a detailed record of CNTC's comedia productions over nearly two decades, comprising such canonical works as El medico de su honra, Fuenteovejuna, El burlador de Sevilla, El castigo sin venganza, and La vida es sueno. Special attention is paid to the influence of the late director of the company, Adolfo Marsillach, and his particular interest in learning from CNTC performances in order to benefit future productions. Although Fischer acknowledges that the experience of participating in theater as an event is almost always subjective, as a critic she attempts to offer an analytical description of performance by following a meticulous approach to reading performance. She views productions multiple times from different locations in the theater and rigorously studies the play's script in order to detect spontaneous or intentional additions or omissions. …

Velez de Guevara, Luis. Si el caballo vos han muerto, y Blason de los Mendozas. Ed. William R. Manson and C. George Peale. Introd. Javier Gonzalez and Valerie F. Endres. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2007. l67 pp.In a concerted effort to bring forth more attention to the works of Spanish Golden Age dramatist Velez de Guevara (1578-1644), William R. Manson and C. George Peale have edited and published rarely studied plays since 1997, including their latest, Si el caballo vos han muerto, y Blason de los Mendozas, dated between 1625-1630, with introductions by Javier Gonzalez and Valerie F. Endres. This ambitious project stems from the fact that, as in the case of many of his contemporaries, not only are there significant research gaps in the vast majority of Velez de Guevara's extant plays (approximately seventy-five), but the number of modern editions of his works is limited. The authors continue their series by offering this particular edition because "los mejores dramas de Luis Velez de Guevara son los que se basan en la historia nacional ... y el mas destacado de todos ellos es Si el caballo vos han muerto" (13).Based on a popular romance published in Flores del Parnaso, Octava parte (Toledo, 1596), which pays homage to historical figures Don Pedro de Gonzalez de Mendoza (1340-1385) and his son Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (1367-1404), Velez de Guevara contextualizes the glossed events in characteristic "fabla antigua." The play dramatizes the relationship between Don Pedro, his son, and the king, culminating in Pedro's heroic actions in the Battle of Aljubarrota (1385), in which Pedro gave his horse to the king so that he could flee to safety, and, with no way to escape, Pedro falls in battle. Due in large part to this valiant and noble act, the Mendoza family continued on a path to greatness in power and wealth.In conjunction with Velez de Guevara's mastery of dramatic ambiance, dialogues, and recycling of legendary episodes well known to the public, Javier J. Gonzalez maintains that the dramatist's ingenuity in his creation of a theatrical world that makes the action in the romance come to life not only sets this historical play apart from many others in the genre, but it is an excellent example of the fame, popularity, and direct influence that traditional romances had on the Comedia Nueva during the first decades of the seventeenth century, particularly with regard to action and themes. Si el caballo is unique in that "fue compuesta, y seguro representada, cuando estaba en auge el culteranismo que desterro por completo la recurrencia al romancero tradicional" (15).Although Manson and Peale are the primary authors of the play's annotations (135-62), manuscript variants, versification analysis (31-39), and bibliographical information (41-47), Gonzalez and Endres share a surprisingly thin introduction to the work (sixteen pages total). …

In his excellent book on The Reconstruction of a Spanish Golden Age Playhouse , J.J. Allen concludes that the top floor of the facade building of the Corral del Principe was roughly divided into two halves; on the right-hand side, facing the stage, was the tertulia and on the left-hand side, divided from the tertulia by a thin partition, was the cazuela alta . Allen's solution is a compromise designed to resolve an apparent contradiction in the documentary evidence available to him. On the one hand, the Armona sketch (1730) shows that this space was occupied exclusively by the tertulia , on the other hand, dozens of seventeenth-century documents mention the existence of a cazuela baja and a cazuela alta in the facade building. This article proposes another solution, based on a document dated 15 July 1695 and signed by Juan Suarez de Somoza, one of the two lessees of the corrales for the period 1695-1699. (JMRDLH)

During the Spanish Golden Age, comets were perceived as ominous and puzzling phenomena in an ordered cosmos. They were signs of sudden change and disaster, particularly in the political and social arena, bringing sudden death to princes, and famine or plague to the people. Towards the close of the sixteenth century an astronomical curiosity to observe and determine the causes and nature of the phenomenon began to balance out the traditional astrological view. Lope de Vega began his literary career shortly after the visitation of the 1577 comet. He was reaching the peak of his creative powers when the 1607 comet, later labeled Halley's, made its appearance. As a result, it is not surprising then to find numerous references to comets in his comedias . This paper studies the presence of comets in a number of Lope's plays, concentrating on El maestro de danzar .