Bulletin of the Comediantes

THIS OUTSTANDING MONOGRAPH by one of Italy’s leading scholars and translators of Golden Age drama deserves a truly global readership, and therefore merits translation into at least Spanish and English. Fausta Antonucci’s Calderón de la Barca is a recent and highly welcome addition to the distinguished series of studies dedicated to single authors—among them Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso—published by Salerno Editrice and favoring an emphasis on matters of literary career and production. Thus, Antonucci skillfully satisfies a primary objective familiar to her Italian readership, but one that remains relatively rare in the international field of Calderón studies. In this and other respects, hers is an accessible, rigorous, and critically refined as well as up-to-date introduction to the life and especially the works of the playwright that coherently privileges the criteria of genre and innovation over those of themes and zeitgeist.

By organizing her book according to the major but also the minor genres and subgenres into which Calderón’s output can be grouped, Antonucci aptly emphasizes this supremely professional theater poet’s extraordinary versatility and convincingly demonstrates his readiness to experiment with dramatic forms. While admirably holistic and scrupulously detailed, the presentation is neither exhaustive nor exhausting to follow, as a critical through line does emerge: one becomes aware of Calderón’s capacity to adapt his work to the form and pressure of his seventeenth-century milieu and to satisfy the tastes of his diverse patrons at the Court and the corrales, at church and in the plazas; at the same time, however, he manages to interrogate the conventional values of Spanish political, social, and religious life, often posing challenges to his audiences (this affinity for provocation comes across even before his plays begin, in their often dialectical, paradoxical, and even riddling titles). For example, Antonucci affirms Calderón’s long-recognized status as a loyal servant of the absolutist monarchy and a faithful supporter of Counter-Reformation doctrine whose final three decades of work were primarily devoted to writing court entertainments and autos sacramentales, yet she also accentuates how several important plays invite royal spectators to contemplate dramatized abuses of power and to practice the virtues of wise, morally exemplary Christian princes. This pattern certainly applies to La vida es sueño, but it also pertains to other dramas concerning tyranny and [End Page 79] unjust government, like Los cabellos de Absalón and En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira. Without any recourse to the fallacy of authorial intentionalism, Antonucci persuasively teases out Calderón’s slightly antiauthoritarian and even “anticonformist” tendencies (32). In this portrait, he is more than Lope de Vega’s successor as court playwright and Madrid’s leading writer of comedias, but also crucially akin to Cervantes. Like the author of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda and the entremés “El retablo de las maravillas,” Calderón did not shy from deriding oppressive bigotry and denouncing racist prejudices: as Antonucci states, concluding her astute close reading of Amar después de la muerte, the play’s tragic recognition also prompts audiences to recognize “an equality of sentiment between nobles of Christian and of Moorish blood” and serves “to create a contrast between those who believe that ethnic diversity causes unbridgeable gaps between two peoples, and those who instead believe—and the playwright himself seems to believe this—that what truly matters is nobility of sentiment” (169). Without a heavy-handed or presentist treatment, Antonucci thus identifies significant links between critical voices and tensions in Calderón’s scripts and troubling twentieth-and twenty-first-century sociopolitical and ideological phenomena, among them racism, xenophobia, femicide, sectarian violence, and authoritarian suppression of justice and human rights. This is a principal reason why his plays matter today, more than ever.

Acute sensitivity to diverse public backgrounds and viewpoints is indeed a key facet of Calderon’s successful career, and Antonucci appropriately begins her study with a part 1 entitled “The Playwright and His Patrons,” which first provides a concise overview...