Religious and Secular Theater in Golden Age Spain

Religious and Secular Theater
in Golden Age Spain

Essays in Honor of
Donald T. Dietz

EDITED BY

Susan Paun de García
and Donald R. Larson

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: De García, Susan Paun, editor.
Larson, Donald R., editor. | Dietz, Donald Thaddeus, honoree.
Title: Religious and secular theater in Golden Age Spain: essays in honor of
Donald T. Dietz / edited by Susan Paun de García and Donald R. Larson.
Description: New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2017. | In English and Spanish.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Series: Ibérica; vol. 47 | ISSN 1056-5000
Identifiers: LCCN 2017018108 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3640-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4331-3641-2 (ebook pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4207-9 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-4331-4454-7 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Spanish drama—Classical period, 1500–1700—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC e-sp--- | DDC 862/.309—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018108
DOI 10.3726/978-1-4331-3641-2

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover photograph by Theo Cote: Gilbert Molina as Segismundo
in Calderón’s Two Dreams at La MaMa in New York

Portrait photograph of Donald T. Dietz by Rebecca Ross

© 2017 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006

www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Printed in Germany

About the editors

Susan Paun de García, Professor Emerita of Spanish at Denison University, has
written on the seventeenth-century Comedia, and the post-baroque Comedia of the
early eighteenth century. With Donald R. Larson, she co-edited The Comedia in
English (2008) and, with Harley Erdman, she co-edited Remaking the Comedia
(2015).

Donald R. Larson is Emeritus Professor at the Ohio State University. In addition
to numerous articles dealing with Spanish theater, he is the author of The Honor
Plays of Lope de Vega (1978) and co-editor, with Susan Paun de García, of The
Comedia in English (2008).

About the book

The essays in this book honor the seminal contributions to the field of early modern Spanish drama of Donald T. Dietz, who has devoted his career to the promotion of classical theater, not just as dramatic poetry but as vibrant performance art. Written by a variety of respected scholars and never before published, the twenty-two essays, organized into six sections, present a wide variety of interests, approaches, and methodologies, including ideological and theological exegesis, poetic analysis, cultural studies, and semiotics of theater. The first section reviews Dietz’s impact on the field of Comedia studies, where he played a critical role in moving the discussion from page to stage. The next two sections explore facets of religious theater, including autos sacramentales and comedias de santos, as well as religious aspects of secular theater. Essays from the other sections explore questions of reading and of staging classical theater, in the original Spanish, in English translation, and in adaptation for the stage and for radio, as well as theoretical and practical approaches to the pedagogy of performance. Specialists and students within and across many disciplines—theater history, comparative performance studies, literary studies—will find this collection both useful and illuminating.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Table of Contents

Foreword: In the Beginning

David Gitlitz

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Susan Paun de García and Donald R. Larson

I. An Appreciation of Donald T. Dietz

Donald T. Dietz and the Transformation of Comedia Studies

Matthew D. Stroud

II. Auto Sacramental

Iluminación divina y luz natural de la razón en el auto y comedia de La vida es sueño

Manuel Delgado Morales

Manuscript Echoes

Margaret R. Greer

El uso de la silva en el auto sacramental de Calderón: El tesoro escondido

A. Robert Lauer

III. Aspects of Religion and Their Staging in Comedias

Allegories of Faith: Lope de Vega’s Two Extant Plays on Teresa de Ávila

Barbara Mujica

Metatheatricality and Conversion in Lope’s Lo fingido verdadero

Dakin Matthews←v | vi→

Staging Mysticism: Cañizares’s La más amada de Cristo, Santa Gertrudis la Magna

Susan Paun de García

Teoría y práctica sobre la construcción del héroe trágico en una comedia de asunto bíblico: Los cabellos de Absalón de Calderón

Isaac Benabu

Dissimilar Signs of Faith in Calderón’s Theater of Intrigue

David J. Hildner

Staging Allegory: The Four Virtues in María de San Alberto and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

Sharon D. Voros

IV. Other Aspects of Staging

The Dramatic Stagecraft of Calderón: Stage Movement and Proxemic Relations in El alcalde de Zalamea

Robert M. Johnston

Looking Back: Lope’s El marido más firme

William R. Blue

Staging the Pavane: Dance as Metaphor in El desdén, con el desdén

Donald R. Larson

V. Pedagogical Implications and Applications of Staging

Mentoring Spanish Theater Performance and Service Learning: The BYU Spanish Golden Age Theater Project’s Production of Guillén de Castro’s El Narciso en su opinión

Valerie Hegstrom and Dale J. Pratt

Performance as Discovery: Questioning Quevedo’s Entremeses and Zayas’s La traición en la amistad

Amy R. Williamsen

VI. Re-Reading, Re-Viewing, Re-Creating, Re-Writing

Redefining “Boundary Conditions” of Comedia Studies—If Not Now, When?: (Re)emergence of Close Reading and Digital Humanities

Susan L. Fischer

Calderón’s La aurora en Copacabana, a Scandalous Reading

Bradley J. Nelson←vi | vii→

Translating Hispanic Women Dramatists in the Twenty-First Century: Are We There Yet?

Catherine Larson

Dogville, Jazz Club Polonia, and the Ethics of Adaptation

Bruce R. Burningham

Abjection and Resistance in El retablo de las maravillas, Visiones de la muerte, and Las cortes de la muerte: Andrés Zambrano’s Tres obras cortas del Siglo de Oro (2011)

Christopher D. Gascón

Calderón on the BBC: Radio Translation, Adaptation, and Performance

Christopher B. Weimer

Changing for the Better, or Worse: Adapting Juan Ruiz de Alarcón

Edward H. Friedman

Contributors

Tabula Gratulatoria

Index ←vii | viii→

Foreword

In the Beginning

David Gitlitz

The idea was simple and profound: couple an academic symposium to Franklin Smith and Walker Reid’s Golden Age Theater Festival at the Chamizal; involve the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez (UACJ); bring together an international community of scholars; and hope for a marriage between traditional textual criticism and performance analysis.

My involvement with the Symposium/Academic Conference came late in its first year of operation when the Texas Committee on the Humanities asked me to evaluate the project. In those days, I chaired the language department at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and I had had some experience in program evaluation. In El Paso, I caught the energy of Don Dietz, Matt Stroud, and Vern Williamsen, and of course Walker and Franklin. Ev Hesse buttonholed me and told me to get to work, and that was that. For five days we binged on the mix of academic debate, production expertise, and insights from the popular audience, welded together with camaraderie. Back home, I reported to the Texas Committee and the US Department of the Interior that this was a gem that, while it would shine brighter with further institutional burnishing and financial support, must be preserved at all cost. Don, Matt, and Vern asked me to join the board, and I seized the gift.

With Don’s, Matt’s, and Vern’s leadership the marriage between festival and symposium took, and the family grew. The festival/symposium encouraged young scholars, helped bring a knowledge and love of the Comedia to the English-speaking world, abetted a number of publication programs, established a performance film←ix | x→ archive, launched a scholarship program, built a presence at the MLA, founded and developed the AHCT, and encouraged university and professional theater companies to add comedias to their repertoire. And, perhaps most remarkably, it fostered in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso a lay audience of school teachers, cab drivers, shopkeepers, and culture junkies who over the years have seen more Spanish Golden Age plays and know more about the Comedia than any other audience on earth.

←x | xi→

Acknowledgments