This book offers a radical re-evaluation of Lope's theatre, which will affect the way in which the comedia in general is read. It spans Lope's literary career, discussing (pseudo-)historical, tragic a
Golden-Age Spanish drama shows a constant concern with the woman who will not simply accept marriage as her natural role. This was all the more striking in a male-dominant Mediterranean society in an age of rigid social codes. Dr McKendrick's book takes this large theme and analyses it. She shows the identifiable types of mujer varonil portrayed, and the kinds of motivation which the dramatists imagined for them. She traces the literary ancestry of the interest back beyond Lope - though Lope is the principal figure in her account; and she very neatly and convincingly shows the balance of literary convention and human interest involved. The book gives a historic dimension to an interest we think of wrongly as modern, and gives an insight into Spanish social history as well as the drama.
This is the first book to examine the rise of Spain's extraordinary national theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all its aspects - the commercial theatre, the court drama and the Corpus autos, the organisation of theatrical life, the playhouses themselves and their public, the literary and moral controversies, and the plays as literary texts. The book has been written for students of drama as well as Hispanists: Spanish theatre is set in its national and international context; Spanish titles and theatrical terms are translated. Considerable space has been devoted to the experimental drama of the sixteenth century before Lope de Vega. At the core of the book is a highly distinctive, successful national theatre which mirrored the energies, beliefs and anxieties of a great nation in crisis, yet at the same time granted full expression to the individual genius of its greatest exponents - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderon de la Barca.
