From page to stage: Print journalism, commercial theater and the birth of modern spectatorship in Madrid

Bibliography of Publications on the Comedia

In recent years the two most important schools of literary criticism have moved in opposite directions, but converge in their neglect of the artist as creator and of the work of art as a unique creation. One school, embracing the Russian formalists, French structuralists, American New Critics, and now the Tel Quel group (Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard), inhabits an increasingly complex and abstract world in which the critic is locked inside the text. The text appears as an autonomous, self-contained entity, isolated from its author, its social context, and its public' On the other hand, the sociological approach, focusing as it must on groups, assigns the author to a socioeconomic class, his work to a cultural group, and then attempts to discover the relationship between the two. Consequently, both schools have the effect of diminishing and ultimately eliminating the writer. These approaches have piqued the interest of critics of Golden Age drama. The generic name comedia, which tends to minimize differences, and the inordinate number and seeming homogeneity of the plays would appear to validate the search for universal structures. 2 Likewise the anonymity of many plays, confusion over authorship, frequency of collaboration, reworking of earlier plays, and, most important, the comedia' s mass appeal invite sociological analysis. The following pages explore the sociological approach as it concerns Lope de Vega.

Lope de Vega, Propagandist?

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 .

José Amor y Vázquez

Papers

Homenaje a William L. Fichter

Actas del VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas: 22-27 agosto 1983

Ramon del Valle-Inclan