The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain


Book Description

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.




Modern Spanish Dramatists


Book Description

Contains entries on thirty-three dramatists who wrote from 1700 to 1999.







New Plays from Spain


Book Description

A selection of plays representing the most innovative and respected voices working in contemporary Spanish theater.







Chief Contemporary Dramatists


Book Description

"Chief Contemporary Dramatists" (second series) features 18 plays from England, Ireland, America, France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Russia, and Scandinavia, selected and edited by Thomas H. Dickinson. Facsimile reprint, 1921 edition.




English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain


Book Description

The specter of Spain rarely figures in our discussions of the drama that is often regarded as the crowning achievement of the English literary Renaissance. Yet dramatists such as Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare are exactly contemporary with England's protracted conflict with the Spanish Empire, a traditional ally turned archetypical adversary. Were these playwrights really so mute with respect to their nation's Spanish troubles? Or have we failed—for reasons cultural and institutional—to hear the Hispanophobic crosstalk that permeated the drama no less than England's other public discourses? Imagining an early modern public sphere in which dramatists cross pens with proto-imperialists, Protestant polemicists, recusant apologists, and a Machiavellian network of propagandists that included high government officials as well as journeyman printers, Eric Griffin uncovers the rhetorical strategies through which the Hispanophobic perspectives that shaped the so-called Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty were written into English cultural memory. At the same time, he demonstrates that the English were as ready to invoke Spain in the spirit of envious emulation as to demonize the Spanish other as an ethnic agent of intolerance and oppression. Interrogating the Whiggish orientation that has continued to view the English Renaissance through a haze of Anglo-American triumphalism, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain recovers the voices of key Spanish participants and the "Hispanized" Catholic resistance, revealing how England and Spain continued to draw upon shared traditions and cultural resources, even during the moments of their most storied confrontation.




Spanish Dramatists of the Golden Age


Book Description

The Golden Age of Spanish drama extends from the close of the 15th century to the death of Calderón in 1681. During that time, the humanists, as dramatists, followed Italy's artistic awakening direction, and imitated Classical drama. With originality and dreams of greatness, they subverted the nature of tragedy; modified the approach of Comedy and invented the New Play, the Comedia Nueva. In it the poet-dramatists introduced important modificaitons of realism, included imagined reality, Christian symbolism and theatricality, as artistic truth. They elaborate all kinds of syntheses. For this reason, the Spanish Golden Age theater can be viewed as part of a tradition that includes the Greco-Roman comedy and tragedy, Christian tragedy, and the authentic national literary and dramatic tendencies. The entries in this reference book explore the fascinating history of the Golden Age of Spanish drama. The volume begins with an introductory overview of the literary, cultural, and historical contexts that shaped dramatic writing of the period. The book then presents alphabetically arranged essays for nineteen significant Spanish dramatists of the Golden Age. Each essay is written by an expert contributor and includes biographical information, an analysis and evaluation of major works, a discussion of critical response to the plays, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The volume closes with a selected general bibliography of central critical studies of Golden Age Spanish drama.




Three Spanish Golden Age Plays


Book Description

Three classic Spanish plays, made famous by Shakespeare and Webster Two of the most famous and successful playwrights of Spain's Golden Age of playwriting were Lope de Vega (1562-1635) and Rojas Zorrilla (1607-48). From their prodigious output, the three plays in this volume, based on similar sources to Shakespeare's and Webster's versions, provide a fascinating comparison with their Jacobean counterparts. Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, in contrast to Webster's play, focuses on the nobility of love, with characters who are complex and appealing. His Romeo-and-Juliet story, The Capulets and Montagues, is a fast-moving mixture of serious and comic, with an ending that will surprise and entertain. Rojas' treatment of Cleopatra, with its rich imagery, emphasises the love theme, held within a knot of jealous relationships. A full introduction by Gwynne Edwards sets the plays in context and provides a thorough study of the individual works.