Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al. (review)

Reviewed by: Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater ed. by Erin Alice Cowling et al. Barbara Fuchs SOCIAL JUSTICE IN SPANISH GOLDEN AGE THEATER. Editors Erin Alice Cowling, Tania de Miguel Magro, Mina García Jordán and Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021; pp. 294. This collection is part of a welcome new trend that foregrounds the relevance of early modern texts to contemporary concerns, thereby reenergizing the study of the humanities. Beyond the growing corpus [End Page 248] of Shakespearean adaptations that deal with social and racial justice, recent examples in Hispanic studies include David Castillo and William Egginton's What Would Cervantes Say, and Castillo's broader attempts to engage Cervantes in combatting disinformation. If early modern prose can be reactivated to address the now, this is all the more so for theater, which continues to evolve via recreation and adaptation in performance. With this collection, the editors forcefully refute lingering prejudices about Hispanic comedia—born of the long shadow of Franquismo and its literary apologists—to showcase the manifold possibilities of a corpus still insufficiently known in the English-speaking world. Beyond Fuenteovejuna—Lope de Vega's hypercanonical exploration of collective action as a response to injustice—lie hundreds of plays of various ideological stripes, including many vibrant examples concerned with social justice. As this volume's editors connect Hispanic classical theater to contemporary concerns and expand the conversation to engage both critics and practitioners, they make the case for the enduring relevance of this material. Although the individual essays hew fairly close to their texts, collectively they demonstrate the corpus' larger import. The collection is organized into three sections: first, analyses of individual early modern texts by both familiar and lesser-known playwrights, foregrounding their concern with questions of gender, race, and class; second, performance studies approaches to contemporary adaptations and productions; and, third, interviews with practitioners working with Spanish Golden Age theater today. In the first section, Harrison Meadows examines a particularly interesting case, Vélez de Guevara's La serrana de la Vera, which features in Gila what we would now consider a non-binary or trans protagonist. Meadows argues that an ending that attempts to make of Gila a cautionary example fundamentally disorients an audience that has empathized with them throughout the play. While the essay focuses on the play's relationship to Aristotelian conceptions of tragedy, Meadows concludes with a survey of recent productions both in Spain and the US, including Wild Thing, the powerful version by Harley Erdman presented at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, thus foregrounding the enduring power of audience sympathy for a protagonist condemned by repressive conceptions of gender. Tania de Miguel Magro shows how the generic variety of Hispanic classical theater, beyond the standard three-act comedia, enabled remarkable ideological as well as formal experimentation. Thus, Salas Barbadillo's interlude El descasamentero ("the match-unmaker")—set within a larger frame narrative—uses the conventions of satire and Utopian literature to advocate for the social benefits of divorce. Although destined for readers rather than for the stage, El descasamentero offers a forceful response to comedias that foreground marriage as the guarantor of order. In her reading of Gaspar Aguilar's hagiographic El gran Patriarca don Juan de Ribera, Melissa Figueroa argues that a concern for social justice can be found in even the most orthodox of dramatic genres. In this case, praise for the titular character is combined with an unsparing assessment of economic inequality in early modern Valencia. Figueroa's contribution encourages us to take another look at the wide range of plays that we assume will be conservative because they were commissioned for religious occasions. Parts Two and Three of the volume will be most immediately engaging for readers of Theatre Journal, given their focus on performance and practice. Cowling explores Mexican company EFE TRES Teatro's 2013 version of a little-known Lope de Vega play, El príncipe inocente (1590). EFE TRES repurposes the play into a fable about the limits of justice in the face of class and political privilege, by adding a frame of two prisoners reenacting the comedia's somewhat bewildering romance plot within their cell...

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