Abstract

Tragedy was born in Greece and was subsequently claimed and defended in Europe during the Renaissance and Baroque but, this being a gender as orthodox as changeable, it will be necessary to resort to a new reading of its components in order to adapt them to the reality of the Golden Age. Humanism promotes this recovery of the classical world and generates a significant literature on drama precepts that will not develop the same way in all European countries. While Italy and France opt for the acceptance and conversion of the ideas of Aristotle and Horace into style rules, Spain and England cannot fail to point out the dramatic dissonance between stage theory and practice, and, the aim of pleasing the public, will prevail as a benchmark of success over fidelity to the classical precepts. However, despite theoretical differences, the French drama as the English and the Spanish drama will be committed to the development of tragedy. We will discuss some ideas about drama rules in France and England and their connection with what is represented on stage, as well as the nature and intensity of the government’s support to the theatre, in order to contextualize and show the differences with respect to the Spanish Baroque tragedy.

Abstract

Theater is constituted by a double and correlative tension between auditory and visual elements, on one hand, and verbal and factual components, on the other. Due to restrictions in staging or to aesthetic preference, in the Spanish Golden Age Comedia there is an initial preference for auditory constituents over visual elements. However, this partiality does not entail, as could be expected from the double binary, a supremacy of the verbal over the factual, but rather requires an equivalence between both dimensions. Given the original diminished role of visual action, in the Spanish Comedia the word becomes the action; both are one and the same. From this hypothesis, I propose an analytical model wherein the play’s plot appears as set of verbal incidents that could be reduced to four: utterance of a statement, silence, correct and incorrect interpretation of an utterance. To prove or test the validity and the critical fruits of this theorization of the Comedia and the analytical method derived from it, the essay reviews (or better, rehears) a corpus of representative plays: El médico de su honra, El desdén con el desdén, El condenado por desconfiado, and Entre bobos anda el juego.