Vidas paralelas. El teatro español y el teatro isabelino: 1580-1680
1994; Auburn University; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/boc.1994.0010
ISSN1944-0928
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
Resumo138BCom, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Summer 1994) took up the story-peripherally, according to Ratcliffe, in El cobarde más valiente ), Lope de Vega (Las almenas de Toro), Juan Bautista Diamante (El honrador de supadre and El cerco de Zamora), Gerónimo Cáncer y Velasco (Las travesuras del Cid), Juan de Matos Fragoso (El amor hace valientes y toma de Valenciapor el Cid), Fernando de Zarate y Castronovo (or Antonio Enrique [sic] Gómez) (El noble siempre es valiente), Francisco Bernardo de Quirós (El hermano de su hermana), and Francisco Polo (El honrador de sus hijas). The book, which has an extensive bibliography ofresearch onjust about anything related to the Cid, could have been more accurately titled to indicate this breadth. Its primary usefulness is as a compilation, with period-byperiod summaries, of works on this general topic. It would have benefitted greatly from the attention of a copy editor to correct problems with grammar and sentence structure. Anita K. Stoll Cleveland State University Stoll, Anita K., editor. Vidasparalelas. El teatro españoly el teatro isabelino : 1580-1680. London and Madrid: Tamesis Books, 1993. "Serie A. Monografías," 153. 141 pp. An astonishingly informative collection of essays has been fashioned from the poceedings ofthe 1991 Almagro Symposium. They show how the convergences and the divergences of the paths followed by the verse dramatists of Spain and England have importance for revealing an age. D. W. Cruickshank presents the most extensive paper, on the (few) English characters in Spanish plays as against the (many) Spaniards visible on the boards in London, in plays the texts of which survive. He sketches the political relations between Tudors, Stuarts and Habsburgs, almost always hostile except for the 1623 season of marriage plans, ofthe Prince ofWales to the Infanta. Between 1580 and 1680 there are 27 Spanish plays with English characters and/or scenarios, that is, those which survive out of a total of some 1,100 by the same specific authors. The Prince'sjourney to Madrid evoked Calderón's first known play, set in England but with a plot taken from Bandello. El sitio de Breda has a merely useful English (or Welsh) character, but more interest must center on La cisma de Ingalaterra. Here Cruickshank shows how skillfully Calderón distances himself from any account of Catholicism outraged, available for instance in Ribadeneyra, to Reviews139 adopt a reasonable understanding of Henry VIII's policy. "What actually happened" may very well have been the affair of a weak ruler managed by an ambitious valido and an unscrupulous woman. Coello's Conde de Sex (1633) is recorded as a novelesque play: Elizabeth is not seen as a heretical ruler so much as a character caught between the demands of love and queenly duty. In all 27 plays the English characters are never caricatured, as Moors and Frenchmen (but not Italians?) often are. Cruickshank sees this as a result of sheer unfamiliarity. So that Lope de Vega, though he may have sailed in the Armada, still imagined there were separate kings ofIreland. When the greatest English dramatist evokes Spain with a brilliant and accurate epithet, ". . . many a knight oftawny Spain, lost in the world's debate ," one would assume that Spanish characters might be interestingly studied in English plays, and in contrast to what has been pointed out above, there are many Spanish characters even in the surviving portion of the English drama. Shakespeare's two queens and Heywood's Philip II in If You Know Not Me You Know No Body are presented, according to Cruickshank , with reasonable biographical accuracy, but when characters are not royal they can be unstudied stereotypes. So many (all male) are arrogant, vengeful and double-dealing hidalgos, all in novelesque plays and, though Cruickshank does not mention it, usually not distinguished from Italians; the Prince of Arragon speaks lines just like those of the surrounding Venetians . There follows a useful remark, that people show toleration for, and omit to caricature, groups who are unimportant to them (as Englishmen seem to have been for the Spanish public!). In 1624, at a time ofsome political and dynastic rapprochement, came Middleton's A Game at Chesse. It probably reflects in...
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