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

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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.

The Musical Iconography of Power in Seventeenth-Century Spain and Her Territories
The Musical Iconography of Power in Seventeenth-Century Spain and Her Territories

Author: Sara Gonzalez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1317319923

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As Spain encountered economic and political crises in the seventeenth century, the imagery of musical performance was invoked by the state to represent the power of the monarch and to denote harmony throughout the kingdom. Based on contemporary sources, Gonzalez is able to unravel the complex iconography of Spanish politics.

Listen to This
Listen to This

Author: Alex Ross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2010-09-28

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1429977612

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One of The Telegraph's Best Music Books 2011 Alex Ross's award-winning international bestseller, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing Ross as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians. Listen to This, which takes its title from a beloved 2004 essay in which Ross describes his late-blooming discovery of pop music, showcases the best of his writing from more than a decade at The New Yorker. These pieces, dedicated to classical and popular artists alike, are at once erudite and lively. In a previously unpublished essay, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history—from Renaissance dances to Led Zeppelin—through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament. He vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi, and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews with modern pop masters such as Björk and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross shows how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. Witty, passionate, and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us how to listen more closely.

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: 261

ISBN-13: 131712961X

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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.

The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth-century Spanish Theater
The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth-century Spanish Theater

Author: Robert Elliott Bayliss

Publisher: Associated University Presse

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780838757147

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By engaging in dialogue the voices of both male and female writers who participated both in the broader courtly love tradition and in the theatrical production of early modern Spain, this book demonstrates that all representations of desire are gender-inflected.

The Criminal Baroque
The Criminal Baroque

Author: Ted Lars Lennard Bergman

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1855663392

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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.

A Concise History of Spain
A Concise History of Spain

Author: William D. Phillips, Jr

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-07

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0521607213

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Engaging history of the rich cultural, social and political life of Spain from prehistoric times to the present.

Treating the Public
Treating the Public

Author: Rachael Ball

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2017-04-10

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0807165093

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Treating the Public is a comparative history of commercial theater, charitable organizations of welfare and public health, and public opinion in important cities in the Spanish and Anglo Atlantic Worlds during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines theater as a cultural, political, and social phenomenon, especially in Spain and its empire. This unique study highlights public drama’s rapid expansion into urban daily life in the Spanish Atlantic, where men and women provided and sought entertainment while engaging in Catholic piety and poor relief.

Music and Power in Early Modern Spain
Music and Power in Early Modern Spain

Author: Timothy M. Foster

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1000485196

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This book explores the representation of music in early modern Spanish literature and reveals how music was understood within the framework of the Harmony of the Spheres, emanating from cosmic harmony as directed by the creator. The Harmony of Spheres was not ideologically neutral but rather tied to the earthly power structures of the Church, Crown, and nobility. Music could be "true," taking the listener closer to the divine, or "false," leading the listener astray. As such, music was increasingly seen as a potent weapon to be wielded in service of earthly centers of power, which can be observed in works such as vihuela songbooks, the colonial chronicle of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and in the palace theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. While music could be a powerful metaphor mapping onto ideological currents of imperial Spain, this volume shows that it also became a contested site where diverse stakeholders challenged the Harmonic Spheres of Influence. Music and Power in Early Modern Spain is a useful tool for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in musicology, music history, Spanish literature, cultural studies, and transatlantic studies in the early modern period.

Subject Stages
Subject Stages

Author: María Mercedes Carrión

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1442641088

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Subject Stages argues that the discourses and practices of marital legislation, litigation, and theatrics informed each other in early modern Spain in ways that still have a critical bearing on contemporary events in Spain, such as the legalization of divorce in 1978 and of same-sex marriage in 2005.