Honoring the Memory of Donald R. Larson (1935–2022)

Friends, colleagues, and students of Donald R. Larson were saddened to learn of his death at his home in Cincinnati, Ohio, on December 6, 2022, after a brief illness. Those who knew him best sent their tributes and memories, invariably recalling him as a good, kind, humble soul, a warm, generous colleague, an encouraging, welcoming teacher and mentor, and an excellent scholar whose enthusiastic love of Comedia and its performance touched so many of us.Born in International Falls, Minnesota, on May 20, 1935, Don received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees in Romance languages from Harvard University (1957, 1961, 1967, respectively), specializing in the theater of early-modern Spain, an interest that began early, as seen from his undergraduate honors thesis in which he studied the gracioso of Juan Ruiz de Alarcón. In his doctoral dissertation, he explored the development of the “Honor Plays” of Lope de Vega, which he later expanded into a book. The Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (Harvard UP, 1977) remains a fundamental resource.After various teaching positions while finishing his degree (instructor at Princeton University, 1963–1965; visiting assistant professor at University of California, Berkeley, 1965–1967), he was promoted to assistant professor at UC Berkeley (1967–1973). In 1973, Larson became an associate professor at The Ohio State University, where he taught until his retirement in 2010.Over the span of his career, Don’s talents and interests ranged from tragedy to comedy, from performance to proxemics, from translation and adaptation to music, especially opera and zarzuela. Besides his important work on Lope’s honor plays, he published articles on issues of adaptation, translation, ritualization, dress, dance, and musical comedies.In addition to contributing to scholarship in the field, Larson served on crucial committees of important professional organizations. A longtime member of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, his convivial presence was appreciated at the annual conference in El Paso. He served on the Board of Directors from 2001 to 2011, as the AHCT Recording Secretary from 2006 to 2010, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of Comedia Performance from 2004 to 2021. Beyond the AHCT, he served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Spanish 16th- and 17th-Century Drama Division of the Modern Language Association from 2006 to 2011.A congenial collaborator, we co-edited collections of essays (Religious and Secular Theater in Golden Age Spain. Essays in Honor of Donald T. Dietz. Peter Lang, 2018, and The Comedia in English. Performance and Translation. Tamesis, 2008) and special issues of journals related to early-modern theater in translation and performance (Comedia Performance and Bulletin of the Comediantes, both volumes published in 2015, dedicated to the Golden Age Season at Bath, 2013) and often collaborated in the organization of conferences in the United States and abroad (Bath, UK, 2013; Stratford, Ontario, 2008; Stratford-upon-Avon, UK, 2004; Almagro, Spain, 2000).His last project was perhaps his favorite, and I was delighted to collaborate with him once more. He had been working for a long time on a translation of Lope’s La discreta enamorada, which he had titled The Cleverest Girl in Madrid. His idea was to do a bilingual edition, with his translation and my critical edition on facing pages, preceded by a co-written introduction. Liverpool UP published the edition in 2022, and his translation won the 2019 AHCT translation prize.Former students recall Don as enthusiastic and inspiring in his wealth of knowledge. Colleagues remember him as kind and encouraging, especially to junior scholars. As a friend, Don was warm, generous, and steadfast. He loved to share his love of music, travel, good food, and wine. His genial conversation and infectious laugh will be missed.To honor Don Larson’s life and work, we have collected fifteen essays from friends and colleagues in this volume of Comedia Performance, arranged in four groups.The first, READING FOR PERFORMANCE, contains four essays. The first three offer insights that can help directors and actors comprehend a character; the fourth shows how an early modern, largely illiterate audience might have made sense of a complicated concept.In “El dramaturgo es quien construye el personaje: el duque de Gloucester de Shakespeare y el de Ferrara de Lope,” Isaac Benabu explores the problem of how to read the texts of classical plays from a point of view of performance. Benabu approaches two characters, one from Shakespeare and one from Lope, to test the criteria he proposes, which differ from many readings that have been made based on literary criticism.Manuel Delgado Morales’s “Metanoia y conversión en El Castigo sin venganza y en La vida es sueño” examines one of the most studied aspects in these plays: the conversion or moral virtue of their respective protagonists. Starting from a suggestion that the transformation of the Duke of Ferrara in Lope’s work and that of King Basilio in Calderón’s are parallel, Delgado compares and contrasts the Duke of Ferrara’s lack of metanoia or moral evolution with the presence of metanoia in Segismundo, and by extension in Basilio.In “El conde Alarcos: Honor, Excess, and the King,” A. Robert Lauer offers an actantial model of analysis to show how dramatic characters like el Conde Alarcos and the Infanta are not victims of fate or “a cosmic infringement of moral law” but rather are architects of their own destiny. Lauer exposes the actions of supplementary forces that intervene to establish an equilibrium between the contending forces of love and honor.Barbara Mujica explores the use of easily recognizable visual signifiers to explain complex issues of grace and free will in “What Price Salvation?: Visual Signifiers in Calderón’s El gran mercado del mundo.” She explains how the playwright’s use of “talent” (both as a coin and as an aptitude) and “rose” (as a symbol of grace) illustrate “how a person can profit from or squander the gift of God’s grace.”The second group of essays, WOMEN TROUBLE, offers four views of female characters, their agency, their defense of their honor, and their rivalry, seen from a contemporary viewpoint.In “Valor, agravio y mujeres al borde,” Bruce Burningham explores the connection between Pedro Almodóvar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios and the Don Juan narrative, examining the ways in which Mujeres al borde can be read as an adaptation of El burlador and its successors, particularly Valor, agravio y mujer, with crucial differences in the final solution.Susan L. Fischer’s “Women’s Agency in El burlador de Sevilla: Xavier Albertí’s Mise en Scène (2022) in the Wake of #MeToo” examines how a radical co-production of El burlador de Sevilla by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC) and Grec 2022 Festival de Barcelona, in the context of the 2017 resurgence of the #MeToo movement, foregrounded the agency of the female characters and their choices.Issues of rape and sexual harassment are the subject of Valerie Hegstrom’s “Staging Gender Norms, Sexual Harassment and Assault, and the Mujer Varonil.” Hegstrom explores three plays by Lope, Tirso, and Vélez de Guevera to show how even “virile” women succumb to and internalize culturally constructed gender norms.In “Dog Eat Dog: Staging Female Rivalry in David Johnston’s Translation of Lope’s The Dog in the Manger,” Sharon Voros discusses elements of female rivalry in Lope’s El perro del hortelano and how David Johnston’s translation unravels the comedic complications with contemporary language.The third group, MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE, offers three studies dealing with music, from royal participation in a seventeenth-century opera performance to the performative function of music inserted in plays and implications for contemporary performance.Chad M. Gasta studies the effects of the active participation of the monarch in “The King on Stage: Philip IV and the Projection of Power in Lope de Vega’s opera La selva sin amor,” and illustrates how it collapses the distance between the stage and the audience, effectively amplifying a symbolic projection of authority.In “Mira de Amescua’s Voces del Cielo Speak, Vélez de Guevara’s Sing Dramatic Ballads—Critical Notes,” C. George Peale contrasts the two playwrights’ use of “heaven’s voices,” illustrating how Vélez’s use of songs heightened the theatrical impact of the moment and accentuated their lyrical qualities.In “Contextualizing Extant Music for Song-texts in Selected Plays by Lope de Vega,” J. Yuri Porras contextualizes song-texts that are linked to some of Lope de Vega’s plays, highlighting potential performative aspects and showing not only the significance of music on the early-modern stage but how the songs might contribute to modern productions.The fourth and final group, TRANSLATING AND RE-WRITING SOURCES, brings to the reader four essays dealing with translation and adaptation.In “No Laughing Matter: Translating the Ludic Imagination in Lope de Vega,” David Johnston honors Don Larson’s playful nature as well as his “deep-rooted interest in processes of extension and transformation” by examining the implications and challenges involved in translating Lope de Vega’s “ludic imagination.”Jonathan Thacker’s “‘ . . . a ninguno imitó; nació para maestro, y no discípulo’: Calderón’s Early Debt to Lope de Vega and Others” analyzes how in Cómo se comunican dos estrellas contrarias Calderón used the same epic material as Lope’s Las almenas de Toro and what this reveals about Calderón’s dependence on and independence from the model.In “Authorship and Aesthetic Experience in the Comedia: The Genesis of Calderón’s A secreto agravio, secreta venganza,” Robert Johnston investigates the genealogy of the work, from possible early influences of Lope and Tirso to an established oral tradition of pan-European motifs, showing how Calderón’s selected and manipulated material, combined with his use of dramatic irony and distance, intimate a modern concept of authorship.Finally, Elizabeth B. Davis compares episodes of storms at sea and shipwrecks in epic sources and their use in Renaissance and Baroque novels, from a classical rhetorical capacity to a mode of transition from one part of the text to another, suggesting a needed adjustment in how critics understand the relationship between literary genres of the period.All of these contributions are offered by colleagues in memory of and in tribute to Donald R. Larson.

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