A Companion to Calderón de la Barca ed. by Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker (review)

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• A Companion to Calderón de la Barca ed. by Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker
• Sofie Kluge

Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker, editors. A Companion to Calderón de la Barca. TAMESIS, 2021. 414 PP.

THERE ARE ANTHOLOGIES of scholarly essays on Calderón in various languages; there are biographies of his life and monographs on specific aspects of his work; there are introductions to individual plays and myriad scholarly articles on every Calderonian topic imaginable. Yet following brilliant books published in the 1980s by the likes of Frederick de Armas, Alexander Parker, and Robert ter Horst, and notwithstanding the ongoing curricular presence of early modern Spanish studies in British and American universities, we were lacking a comprehensive, English-language study of the most important playwright of the Spanish baroque. Roy Norton and Jonathan Thacker's Companion to Calderón de la Barca is the first "general guide to the interested reader" (xv), which I take to mean not only students and scholars of early modern Spanish literature and early modernists in other fields but also comparatists and people interested in theater history and the theater more broadly. Appealing to this wide range of readers, this comprehensive volume sends two unmistakable signals: first, that Calderón is as fresh and relevant as ever, and not just to specialists; and second, that Tamesis Books is an essential player in the academic book market, serving the Hispanist community as well as the educated public.

The Companion to Calderón de la Barca is comprised of the editors' introduction; fourteen original and substantial essays (each of about 20–25 pages, three of them translated from Spanish); two useful appendices, one listing key digital and print sources and the works by Calderón mentioned in each contribution (appendix I), the other providing an introduction to Calderonian versification (appendix II); a full bibliography of all of the works referenced by the contributors; and an index. The volume is meticulously edited—the only minor inconsistency I noted was the subheading format in chapter 8, which is really quite impressive for a volume of over 400 pages—and the contributions are overall both magisterially written and pedagogically oriented. For the most part, individual chapters take off from one, or in most cases several, plays, as case studies for establishing broader syntheses (regarding, for instance, Calderón's worldview and his religious comedias) and creating subclassifications (biblical comedias, saints' plays, [End Page 449] and Marian dramas). Envisioning readers both inside and outside Hispanic Studies departments, all Spanish titles, quotations, and concepts are followed by an English translation in square brackets, and individual chapters cross-reference each other in footnotes and in the body. Some contributors suggest interesting parallels to the modern world; Jeremy Lawrance, for instance, discusses La vida es sueño with reference to science fiction (chapter 4), and Colin Thompson points to the resonance of Calderón's wife-murder dramas with contemporary domestic violence (chapter 5). The volume is enhanced by black-and-white illustrations, among which the contemporaneous drawings of the lavish performances of mythological court dramas reproduced in chapter 7, by Margaret Greer, are bound to be particularly illuminating for the targeted readership of educated but not (necessarily) expert readers. Equally enlightening are the depictions of the public playhouses, stage machinery, and carts from the representations of autos sacramentales in chapters 3 and 12.

Subjects treated range from the man and his time (chapters 1 and 2) to specific genres, covering honor plays, comedies, mythological spectacle plays, religious comedias, autos sacramentales (chapters 5–9, respectively). Continuing, the volume provides thematic orientations on cross-generic features, illuminating the figure of the gracioso; the links between Calderón's dramatic poetry and visual art (chapter 10); aspects of theater history, the Spanish entertainment industry, and staging (chapters 3 and 12); and the reception of Calderón within and outside of Spain (chapters 13 and 14). Lawrance's chapter on La vida es sueño is the only one to focus on a single play, but the importance of the work itself merits this special attention.

Norton and Thacker have assembled an impressive group of revered specialists—mainly British, plus a few Spaniards and...