{"title":"Capes and Swords: Teaching the Theatricality of Golden age Poetry","authors":"Bradley J. Nelson","doi":"10.5325/CALIOPE.11.2.0111","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"A s is the case with many undergraduate Spanish programs, the teaching of Golden Age poetry at Concordia University is combined with that of Golden Age theater. Although this arrangement severely limits what one can do with either of these significant and vast cultural phenomena, the traditional rationale for this type of program is solid, as the concentrated study of poetic forms, themes, imagery, and topics in the more manageable texts of sonnets and canciones prepares students for the formal, conceptual, and intertextual complexities that make Renaissance and Baroque drama so endlessly challenging. The purpose of this paper, however, is to describe what can happen when one inverts the terms of this relationship and focuses on the theatricality of Golden Age poetry rather than the lyricism of Golden Age theater. Theatricality, of course, is a very complex concept which has produced a quiet unmanageable theoretical and critical corpus; so for this course I settled on four distinct yet interrelated approaches to theatricality which were introduced throughout the thirteen-week semester.1 My goal was to construct a series of dialogues between Renaissance poesia cancioneril and the theater of Encina, the mystical eroticism of Juan de la Cruz and the marketplace humor of Lope de Rueda, the political wit of Gracian, and the political allegories of Calderon, and so on. I began the course with a consideration of the cancionero movement of the early Renaissance. Not only is this witty and enigmatic theatrical in its ritualistic, competitive, and performative aspects, but the central role played by the Spanish nobility in this courtly movement makes the cancionero a compelling stage on which the social, political, religious, and artistic transformations and conflicts of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance may be played out for students. What was perceived in the Middle Ages as the nobility’s inalienable moral and social superiority, a superiority based, in turn, on a universalizing, cosmological Chain of Being, in the Renaissance becomes theatrical;","PeriodicalId":29842,"journal":{"name":"Caliope-Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2017-11-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Caliope-Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/CALIOPE.11.2.0111","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE, ROMANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
A s is the case with many undergraduate Spanish programs, the teaching of Golden Age poetry at Concordia University is combined with that of Golden Age theater. Although this arrangement severely limits what one can do with either of these significant and vast cultural phenomena, the traditional rationale for this type of program is solid, as the concentrated study of poetic forms, themes, imagery, and topics in the more manageable texts of sonnets and canciones prepares students for the formal, conceptual, and intertextual complexities that make Renaissance and Baroque drama so endlessly challenging. The purpose of this paper, however, is to describe what can happen when one inverts the terms of this relationship and focuses on the theatricality of Golden Age poetry rather than the lyricism of Golden Age theater. Theatricality, of course, is a very complex concept which has produced a quiet unmanageable theoretical and critical corpus; so for this course I settled on four distinct yet interrelated approaches to theatricality which were introduced throughout the thirteen-week semester.1 My goal was to construct a series of dialogues between Renaissance poesia cancioneril and the theater of Encina, the mystical eroticism of Juan de la Cruz and the marketplace humor of Lope de Rueda, the political wit of Gracian, and the political allegories of Calderon, and so on. I began the course with a consideration of the cancionero movement of the early Renaissance. Not only is this witty and enigmatic theatrical in its ritualistic, competitive, and performative aspects, but the central role played by the Spanish nobility in this courtly movement makes the cancionero a compelling stage on which the social, political, religious, and artistic transformations and conflicts of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance may be played out for students. What was perceived in the Middle Ages as the nobility’s inalienable moral and social superiority, a superiority based, in turn, on a universalizing, cosmological Chain of Being, in the Renaissance becomes theatrical;
与许多西班牙本科课程一样,康考迪亚大学的黄金时代诗歌教学与黄金时代戏剧教学相结合。尽管这种安排严重限制了人们对这些重要而巨大的文化现象的处理,但这种课程的传统理论基础是坚实的,因为在十四行诗和诗行的更易于管理的文本中,对诗歌形式、主题、意象和主题的集中研究为学生准备了形式、概念和互文的复杂性,这些复杂性使文艺复兴和巴洛克戏剧具有无限的挑战性。然而,本文的目的是描述当人们颠倒这种关系的术语并关注黄金时代诗歌的戏剧性而不是黄金时代戏剧的抒情性时会发生什么。当然,戏剧性是一个非常复杂的概念,它产生了一个安静的难以管理的理论和批评语料库;因此,在这门课上,我选择了四种截然不同但又相互关联的戏剧方法,这些方法贯穿了这十三周的学期我的目标是构建一系列的对话,在文艺复兴时期的cancioneril诗歌和恩西纳的戏剧,Juan de la Cruz的神秘情色和Lope de Rueda的市场幽默,Gracian的政治智慧和Calderon的政治寓言,等等。我以文艺复兴早期的cancionero运动作为课程的开始。这种诙谐而神秘的戏剧不仅体现在仪式、竞争和表演方面,而且西班牙贵族在这场宫廷运动中所扮演的核心角色,也使cancionero成为一个引人注目的舞台,在这个舞台上,中世纪晚期和文艺复兴早期的社会、政治、宗教和艺术变革和冲突可能会在学生面前上演。中世纪贵族不可剥夺的道德和社会优越感,这种优越感,反过来,建立在普遍化的宇宙存在链上,在文艺复兴时期变得戏剧化了;