CHAPTER SUMMARIES

Part I: Origins

Celestina as Closet Drama Enrique Fernández In spite of the title of comedia—later tragicomedia—and of being written in dialogue, Celestina was never intended to be performed on stage. It belongs to a genre that was not cultivated often in Spain at the time: the closet drama, namely, dramatic pieces written to be read aloud, individu- ally or by a small group of friends. Celestina belongs to a dramatic tradi- tion that emphasizes didactic content through the careful use of rhetoric in the dialogue. Its model was the comedia humanistica, a variety of closet drama written in Latin by scholars during the 15th century in Italy. Only in later centuries, when the conventions of dramatic representations became more lax, could Celestina be performed on stage. Adaptations made for the stage meant that important aspects of the original disappeared, and what we can see on stage or in cinematic versions today is quite different from what the author intended.

Courtly Love and the Comedia Robert Bayliss This chapter explores the utility of analyzing the popular comedies of early modern Spain in terms of their engagement with the tropes and dis- course of the European courtly love tradition. After clarifying that my use of the term courtly love is primarily discursive, rather than a reference to a set of explicit rules or ethical guidelines for the would-be courtly lover, I apply this revised notion of courtly discourse to an analysis of El burlador de Sevilla as a case study. The goal is to demonstrate the insights of such an analysis for our understanding of the ways in which the dynamics of gender and class are negotiated on the early modern stage. The discourse of courtly love allows for a variety of subject positions to be strategi- cally articulated in the comedia, and critical attention to it promises new insights into the gendered voices of both male and female playwrights. 338 chapter summaries

The Comedia and the Classics Frederick A. de Armas “Let us lock up the ancient precepts and banish the great classical writers such as Seneca and Terence,” Lope proclaimed in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias. The ancients, he claimed, are not useful in the creation of mod- ern plays. And yet this very poem where the 17th-century Spanish play- wright attempted to foreground the originality of his art is deeply invested in the ancients. This essay will explore how early modern Spanish theater was forever conflicted in dealing with the classics. On the one hand, it strove for innovation—it strove to foreground “Leonardo’s heresy”; on the other, it was buttressed by theories of tragedy and techniques of comedy that derived from the antique. And the very language of the plays was con- sistently adorned with allusions to classical mythology. While seemingly ornamental, some of these citations would reveal the mythical substruc- ture of the comedia. In order to understand this constant conflict between the uses of the ancients and the desire for the new, this essay will focus on four distinct questions. An introductory section will discuss the ambigui- ties embedded in Lope’s Arte nuevo, while a second section will explore how tragedy survived in this period. The third part of the essay will focus on Terence and how his techniques were utilized in comedies and tragi- comedies. The last section will turn to mythological allusions.

Spanish Sacramental Plays: A Study of Their Evolution J. Enrique Duarte The sacramental play is one of the most characteristic genres of the Spanish Baroque. It is impossible to understand the Spanish mentality of those days without realizing the importance of the sacramental play in the artistic expressions of Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. We can- not find this genre in other European literatures. It can be described as a genre that supposes a mixture of different kinds of theater (popular and aristocratic), but with a certain complexity. Sacramental plays are formed by the combination of two different theaters: the popular, enhanced by Lope de Vega in his representations at the corrales de comedia, and another one, more aristocratic, based on representations that took place at the court. This synthesis can be found in aspects such as allegory, the use of theological arguments and sources, and complicated stage scenery, because the plays were performed upon mobile carts. The stage design is reminiscent of solutions favored at the court theater. In fact, the his- tory of sacramental plays can be analyzed according to increasing formal