Reading Performance: Spanish Golden-Age Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage

Susan L. Fischer

• Publisher: Tamesis Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9781855661813
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781846157547
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Oscar Wilde once observed that `it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors'. This thought is borne out in this volume, which brings together two different and often mutually exclusive constituencies: the academic critic and the theatre practitioner. In looking at the ways in which theatre is a barometer of society, the essays in this book form part of a larger theoretical inquiry into performance as interpretation, contingent upon the cultural context. Engaging with theoretical approaches to culture, and theoreticians from Elam to Brook, and from Derrida to Bakhtin, the author analyzes in detail productions of plays by Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca, as well as an adaptation of Rojas' Celestina, on the Spanish, or French, or Anglo-American stage. Two chapters deal with appropriations of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in translation on the Spanish and French boards. As they read performance in (trans)national productions, these essays are not only at the cutting-edge of theatre studies on the `foreign' stage, but they also bring Spanish Golden-Age plays, long neglected by professional directors of the classics because of the lack of a continuous performance tradition, closer to assuming their rightful place amongst `the great theatre of the world'. SUSAN L. FISCHER is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Bucknell University.

Table of contents

• FRONTCOVER
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• FOREWORD
• AKNOWLEDEMENTS
• LIST OF PRODUCTIONS
• Part I Comedia on the Spanish stage
• 1 Calderón and semiological self-exorcism: El médico de su honra (The Physician of his Honor)
• 2 Calderón and “L’illusion cinématographique” subverted: Antes que todo es mi dama (Above All She’s My Lady)
• 3 Rojas and the interrogation of textual author(ity): La Celestina (The Spanish Bawd)
• 4 Calderón and the ideology of egalitarianism “más bien dado”: El alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of Zalamea)
• 5 Tirso de Molina and “deadly” theatre: El vergonzoso en palacio (The Shy Man at Court)
• 6 Lope’s carnivalesque theatre of terror: Fuenteovejuna (The Sheepwell)
• 7 Tirso and the restaging of eschatology: El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest)
• 8 Lope’s aspectuality and performativity: El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Revenge)
• Part II Comedia on the Anglo-American stage
• 9 Calderón and the “Warrant of Womanhood”: Life’s a Dream (La vida es sueño)
• 10 Calderón and the contingency of radical tragedy: The Painter of Dishonour (El pintor de su deshonra)
• 11 Lope and the problem of an ending: Peribanez (Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña)
• 12 Lope and the politics of truth: The Dog in the Manger (El perro del hortelano)
• Part III French and Shakespearean stage connections
• 13 Lope and the masks of reality: Pedro et le Commandeur (Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña)
• 14 Spanish appropriations of Shakespeare: El mercader de Venecia (The Merchant of Venice)
• 15 French appropriation of Shakespeare: Le Marchand de Venise (The Merchant of Venice)
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX