Reviewed by:

• La puesta en escena del teatro áureo: Ayer, hoy y mañana by Duncan Wheeler
• Rob Bayliss

SINCE THE PUBLICATION of his first monograph, Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen (U of Wales P, 2012), Duncan Wheeler has established himself as a leading critical voice among anglophone Hispanists interested in the Golden Age comedia and its modern reception, including the relatively understudied phenomenon of comedias adapted to film. For readers familiar with Wheeler’s scholarship on the praxis of early modern Hispanic theater in our contemporary world, La puesta en escena del teatro áureo will serve more as a retrospective sampling than as a fresh installation of new material. The book’s eight chapters are Spanish-language translations of articles or book chapters previously published in English between 2007–18, with the exception of chapter 1, a new study of early modern Seville. Beyond the convenience of packaging disparate articles into a single tome (a “Wheeler Reader,” so to speak), the importance of this volume is the access to his work it affords to scholars in the hispanophone world, including those in Spanish institutions whose more philological approaches may be less familiar with the perspective of cultural studies in the United Kingdom.

A brief prologue explains the selection and organization of the chapters, which are not arranged in the chronological order of their original publication, but rather by the chronology of what is studied, beginning with the cultural environment of the seventeenth century and ending with theatrical performances of comedias in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. What unifies the chapters, Wheeler explains, are “las mutuas relaciones que se establecen entre teatro y sociedad” (vii): in other words, the spectator’s dual role as a member of society and witness of theatrical spectacle. Put together in this way, the volume can be seen as a kind of reception history of the comedia in which the spectator–spectacle relationship grows increasingly complex as the audience’s historical distance from the early modern period increases.

Chapter 1, “La escenificación de Sevilla en la época de Velázquez,” is the only part of the book published here for the first time. It teases out the [End Page 147] interdependence of the visual and performing arts in the cultural milieu of early modern Seville in keeping with Wheeler’s intention (as stated in the prologue) of decentering Madrid from comedia studies in order to account for the diverse array of performance contexts throughout early modern Spain. This change in focus proves to be less about early modern performance contexts than about Seville’s unique cultural climate and how it impacted the developing theatrical industry in Madrid. During the new capital city’s rapid expansion as the new seat of the Castilian court, migration from other Iberian regions brought more than just people to the capital: it also brought cultural practices and modes of expression that helped shape cultural life, including the theater scene, in the new metropolis. Seville’s “carácter eminentemente teatral” (3) is therefore seen as a source for the theatrical boom that Madrid would experience in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Wheeler attributes Seville’s theatrical character to the city’s history as a multicultural center of international trade and to the interconnectedness of the arts in the city, especially between the public theater industry and Francisco Pacheco’s school of painting. The arrival of Velázquez, a pupil of Pacheco, to Madrid was therefore part of a much wider cultural exchange between the two cities, and one intricately tied to the development of what we now call Spanish Golden Age theater.

Chapter 2, “Más allá de la leyenda negra de los dramas de honor de Calderón: conflictos amorosos, violencia y la comedia nueva,” is the book’s most methodologically traditional chapter, but its premise is transgressive nonetheless: facilitated by evidence of the plays’ performance histories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Wheeler reads Calderón’s wife-murder...