Political Themes In The Plays Of Juan Ruiz De Alarcon

Arising from neo-stoic interpretations of prudence, Alarcon's identification of the successful manipulation of illusion as a moral art serves as a defence of the comedia and offers an alternative to the supposed moral irresponsibility of Lope de Vega."--Jacket.

In early modern Spain, theater reached the height of its popularity during the same decades in which Spanish monarchs were striving to consolidate their power. Jodi Campbell uses the dramatic production of seventeenth-century Madrid to understand how ordinary Spaniards perceived the political developments of this period. Through a study of thirty-three plays by four of the most popular playwrights of Madrid (Pedro Caldern de la Barca, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, and Juan Bautista Diamante), Campbell analyzes portrayals of kingship during what is traditionally considered to be the age of absolutism and highlights the differences between the image of kingship cultivated by the monarchy and that presented on Spanish stages. A surprising number of plays performed and published in Madrid in the seventeenth century, Campbell shows, featured themes about kingship: debates over the qualities that make a good king, tests of a king's abilities, and stories about the conflicts that could arise between the personal interests of a king and the best interest of his subjects. Rather than supporting the absolutist and centralizing policies of the monarchy, popular theater is shown here to favor the idea of reciprocal obligations between subjects and monarch. This study contributes new evidence to the trend of recent scholarship that revises our views of early modern Spanish absolutism, arguing for the significance of the perspectives of ordinary people to the realm of politics.

Essays on key aspects of cultural, religious, and intellectual life in early modern Spain.

Shakespearean Tragedy brings together fifteen major contemporary essays on individual plays and the genre as a whole. Each piece has been carefully chosen as a key intervention in its own right and as a representative of an influential critical approach to the genre. The collection as a whole, therefore, provides both a guide and explanation to the various ways in which contemporary criticism has determined our understanding of the tragedies, and the opportunity for assessing the wider issues such criticism raises. The collection begins by considering the impact of social semiotics on approaches to the tragedies, before moving on to deal, in turn, with the various forms of Marxist criticism, New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Poststructuralism.