Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid
Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid

Author: Jodi Campbell

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 1317094425

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In early modern Spain, theater reached the height of its popularity during the same decades in which Spanish monarchs were striving to consolidate their power. Jodi Campbell uses the dramatic production of seventeenth-century Madrid to understand how ordinary Spaniards perceived the political developments of this period. Through a study of thirty-three plays by four of the most popular playwrights of Madrid (Pedro Caldern de la Barca, Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla, Juan de Matos Fragoso, and Juan Bautista Diamante), Campbell analyzes portrayals of kingship during what is traditionally considered to be the age of absolutism and highlights the differences between the image of kingship cultivated by the monarchy and that presented on Spanish stages. A surprising number of plays performed and published in Madrid in the seventeenth century, Campbell shows, featured themes about kingship: debates over the qualities that make a good king, tests of a king's abilities, and stories about the conflicts that could arise between the personal interests of a king and the best interest of his subjects. Rather than supporting the absolutist and centralizing policies of the monarchy, popular theater is shown here to favor the idea of reciprocal obligations between subjects and monarch. This study contributes new evidence to the trend of recent scholarship that revises our views of early modern Spanish absolutism, arguing for the significance of the perspectives of ordinary people to the realm of politics.

Allegories of Kingship
Allegories of Kingship

Author: Stephen Rupp

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 0271039280

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This study examines issues in politics and political theory in selected works of Pedro Calder&ón de la Barca (1600&–1681), the major dramatist of the middle and later decades of the seventeenth century in Spain. By analyzing secular dramas (comedias) and religious plays (autos sacramentales), Stephen Rupp demonstrates Calder&ón's awareness of the ideas and institutions of power in Hapsburg Spain and explores the terms of his intervention in the long debate over the principles of Christian statecraft. Through references to Rivadeneira, Saavedra Fajardo, and Quevedo, Rupp describes the anti-Machiavellian theory of kingship that informs Calder&ón's political theater. Rupp's argument proceeds from abstract principles of political theory to particular institutions and events at the Hapsburg court. Discussion of two comedias (La vida es sue&ño and La cisma de Inglaterra) and five autos (La vida es sue&ño, A Dios por raz&ón de Estado, El maestrazgo del Tois&ón, El nuevo palacio del Retiro, and El lirio y la azucena) demonstrates Calder&ón's assimilation of true reason of state to providence, his attitudes concerning the conciliar system and the regime of the royal favorite or valido, and his allegorical treatment of significant state occasions.

Philip IV and the Government of Spain, 1621-1665
Philip IV and the Government of Spain, 1621-1665

Author: R. A. Stradling

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002-10-03

Total Pages: 424

ISBN-13: 9780521530552

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book concentrates on the political history of the reign of Philip IV, and the role of the king within it. Philip is kept near the forefront, and issues and events are often seen - if sometimes critically - from his viewpoint. It is, therefore, a work of revision and rehabilitation, representing an attempt (against all other extant accounts) to establish Philip IV as a positive figure, with an autonomous character and political identity. A secondary, supportive, intention is to demonstrate that after the fall of Olivares, the king ruled and governed without a favourite (valido). This is the central theme in the most detailed treatment of the second half of the reign available in any language. Reference is made throughout to Philip's own words and actions. At the same time, the Olivares period itself is approached from a new perspective, some issues being examined with the use of new material. Although not intended as a conventional biography, the book retains several characteristics of the form, in that it is a 'career-study', part thematic, part chronological. Philip IV is examined also in relation to the political writing of the age, and to his court and capital in Madrid.

Spain's Struggle For Europe, 1598-1668
Spain's Struggle For Europe, 1598-1668

Author: R. A. Stradling

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 1994-01-01

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9781852850890

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays contains an impressive body of the author's work on the history of Spain in the seventeenth century, which has focused particularly on the issues of high politics, international strategy and military infrastructure. The essays consistently illustrate R.A. Stradling's revisionist emphasis on aspects of the Spanish monarchy's 'survival', as opposed to orthodox treatments fixated upon 'decline'. The major questions about Spain in the period are all addressed: the quality of leadership, in particular that of Olivares and his master, Philip IV; the effect of war and the strains imposed by the demands of military provision; and the perception and reality of the 'decline'.Stimulating and immediate in style, the great majority of the essays are the result of sustained research work in the archives of Spain and other western European countries, as well as concentrated consideration of the broader contexts. They are all concerned to highlight interpretation and relevance in a way that enlivens the specific issues under review.

The King's Living Image
The King's Living Image

Author: Alejandro Caneque

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-04-15

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 113594508X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

To rule their vast new American territories, the Spanish monarchs appointed viceroys in an attempt to reproduce the monarchical system of government prevailing at the time in Europe. But despite the political significance of the figure of the viceroy, little is known about the mechanisms of viceregal power and its relation to ideas of kingship. Examining this figure, The King's Living Image challenges long-held perspectives on the political nature of Spanish colonialism, recovering, at the same time, the complexity of the political discourses and practices of Spanish rule. It does so by studying the viceregal political culture that developed in New Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the mechanisms, both formal and informal, of viceregal rule. In so doing, The King's Living Image questions the very existence of a "colonial state" and contends that imperial power was constituted in ritual ceremonies. It also emphasizes the viceroys' significance in carrying out the civilizing mission of the Spanish monarchy with regard to the indigenous population. The King's Living Image will redefine the ways in which scholars have traditionally looked at the viceregal administration in colonial Mexico.

Hercules and the King of Portugal
Hercules and the King of Portugal

Author: Dian Fox-Hindley

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1496212150

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hercules and the King of Portugal investigates how representations of masculinity figure in the fashioning of Spanish national identity, scrutinizing ways that gender performances of two early modern male icons--Hercules and King Sebastian--are structured to express enduring nationhood. The classical hero Hercules features prominently in Hispanic foundational fictions and became intimately associated with the Hapsburg monarchy in the early sixteenth century. King Sebastian of Portugal (1554-78), both during his lifetime and after his violent death, has been inserted into his own land's charter myth, even as competing interests have adapted his narratives to promote Spanish power. The hybrid oral and written genre of poetic Spanish theater, as purveyor and shaper of myth, was well situated to stage and resolve dilemmas relating both to lineage determined by birth and performance of masculinity, in ways that would ideally uphold hierarchy. Dian Fox's ideological analysis exposes how the two icons are subject to political manipulations in seventeenth-century Spanish theater and other media. Fox finds that officially sanctioned and sometimes popularly produced narratives are undercut by dynamic social and gendered processes: "Hercules" and "Sebastian" slip outside normative discourses and spaces to enact nonnormative behaviors and unreproductive masculinities.

Gendering the Crown in the Spanish Baroque Comedia
Gendering the Crown in the Spanish Baroque Comedia

Author: María Cristina Quintero

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1317129601

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Baroque Spanish stage is populated with virile queens and feminized kings. This study examines the diverse ways in which seventeenth-century comedias engage with the discourse of power and rulership and how it relates to gender. A privileged place for ideological negotiation, the comedia provided negative and positive reflections of kingship at a time when there was a perceived crisis of monarchical authority in the Habsburg court. Author María Cristina Quintero explores how playwrights such as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Antonio Coello, and Francisco Bances Candamo--taking inspiration from legend, myth, and history--repeatedly staged fantasies of feminine rule, at a time when there was a concerted effort to contain women's visibility and agency in the public sphere. The comedia's preoccupation with kingship together with its obsession with the representation of women (and women's bodies) renders the question of royal subjectivity inseparable from issues surrounding masculinity and femininity. Taking into account theories of performance and performativity within a historical context, this study investigates how the themes, imagery, and language in plays by Calderón and his contemporaries reveal a richly paradoxical presentation of gendered monarchical power.

Spain and Portugal
Spain and Portugal

Author: Julia Ortiz Griffin

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0816074763

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Serves as a reference guide for any student interested in the modern history of Spain and Portugal. This work contains a concise narrative history, a chronology, and an A-to-Z encyclopedia covering significant people, places, events, and issues in Spanish and Portuguese history.

The Criminal Baroque
The Criminal Baroque

Author: Ted Lars Lennard Bergman

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1855663392

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

TEMPORARY Bergman looks at the representation of criminals in early modern Spanish theatre and the connection between criminality, the portrayal of criminal heroes on stage, and public displays of law enforcement within and outside the playhouse. His main purpose is to see to how Baroque spectacle (a term of art in theatre that refers to a particular event, often in expressions of popular culture) appears either to align itself, work against, or be independent of the social means of control of the day. His main argument is that that the propaganda power of early modern Spanish spectacle has been vastly overstated. Ted L. L. Bergman is a Lecturer in Spanish, University of St Andrews.