This book explores early modern Spanish plays through the lens of social justice, extending its analysis to contemporary adaptations and how they can be used as a tool for achieving social justice today.

This collection of original new essays focuses on the many ways in which early modern Spanish plays engaged their audiences in a dialogue about abuse, injustice, and inequality. Far from the traditional monolithic view of theatrical works as tools for expanding ideology, these essays each recognize the power of theatre in reflecting on issues related to social justice. The first section of the book focuses on textual analysis, taking into account legal, feminist, and collective bargaining theory. The second section explores issues surrounding theatricality, performativity, and intellectual property laws through an analysis of contemporary adaptations. The final section reflects on social justice from the practitioners’ point of view, including actors and directors. Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theatre reveals how adaptations of classical theatre portray social justice and how throughout history the writing and staging of comedias has been at the service of a wide range of political agendas.

The first comprehensive study of Tirso de Molina and his work in English Tirso de Molina (c.1583-c.1648) may not have written El Burlador de Sevilla, but the works of this prolific author, one of the three pillars of Golden Age Spanish theatre, are notable for their erudition, complex characters, and wit. Informed by a multidisciplinary critical perspective, this volume sets Tirso's plays and prose in their social, historical, literary, and cultural contexts. Contributors from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain offer a state of the art in current scholarship, considering such topics as gender, identity, spatiality, material culture, and creative performativity, among others. The first volume in English to provide a richly detailed overview of Tirso's life and work, Tirso de Molina: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century grounds the reader in canonical theories while suggesting new approaches, attuned to contemporary interests, to his legacy.

"This anthology of "new" approches to literary study takes its name from Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias. Like Lope's poem on poetics, this volume also operates as a defense, in the sense that many of the articles include a defense of the usefulness of literary theory in general, and of their chosen approach in particular, for enriching the study of the comedia." "In these essays, it is the not quite new art of "estudiar" rather than "hacer" drama that is the central concern, the contributors defending theoretical innovations approximately twenty years after James Parr, in the pages of Hispania, issued his challenge to Hispanists to update their approach. This volume, which combines innovative scholarship with the "metacriticism" that many critics advocate in all literary study, is directed both the students of literature and to scholars who wish to expand their knowledge of the many different areas of theoretical inquiry that comediantes are currently exploring."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Spain's Golden Age, the seventeenth century, left the world one great legacy, the flower of its dramatic genius -- the comedia. The work of the Golden Age playwrights represents the largest combined body of dramatic literature from a single historical period, comparable in magnitude to classical tragedy and comedy, to Elizabethan drama, and to French neoclassical theater. A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama is the first up-to-date survey of the history of the comedia, with special emphasis on critical approaches developed during the past ten years. A history of the comedia necessarily focuses on the work of Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca, but Ziomek also gives full credit to the host of lesser dramatists who followed in the paths blazed by Lope and Calderon, and whose individual contributions to particular genres added to the richness of Spanish theater. He also examines the profound influence of the comedia on the literature of other cultures.