Capes and Swords: Teaching the Theatricality of Golden age Poetry

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;