Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Con pretensión de Fénix
- 2 ‘Al cielo trasladado’: Quevedo’s Apotheosis of Leander
- 3 River Gods of Andalusia: Pedro Espinosa’s Fábula de Genil
- 4 Rewriting the Pastoral: Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea
- 5 Galatea Descending … Rereading Góngora’s Polifemo Stanzas 13–23
- 6 A Tale of Two Serpents: Biblical and Mythological Allusions in Cervantes’s El celoso extremeño
- 7 The Wound and the Bow: Cervantes, Philoctetes and the Pathology of Genius
- 8 Myth or History? Lope de Vega’s Caballero de Olmedo
- 9 Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Eco y Narciso: Court Drama and the Poetics of Reflection
- 10 From Allegory to Mockery: Baroque Theatrical Representations of the Labyrinth
- 11 Mars Recontextualized in the Golden Age of Spain: Psychological and Aesthetic Readings of Velázquez’s Marte
- 12 Ut pictura poesis: Calderón’s Picturing of Myth
- 13 Opera on the Margins in Colonial Latin America: Conceived under the Sign of Love
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Eco y Narciso: Court Drama and the Poetics of Reflection
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 May 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: Con pretensión de Fénix
- 2 ‘Al cielo trasladado’: Quevedo’s Apotheosis of Leander
- 3 River Gods of Andalusia: Pedro Espinosa’s Fábula de Genil
- 4 Rewriting the Pastoral: Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea
- 5 Galatea Descending … Rereading Góngora’s Polifemo Stanzas 13–23
- 6 A Tale of Two Serpents: Biblical and Mythological Allusions in Cervantes’s El celoso extremeño
- 7 The Wound and the Bow: Cervantes, Philoctetes and the Pathology of Genius
- 8 Myth or History? Lope de Vega’s Caballero de Olmedo
- 9 Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Eco y Narciso: Court Drama and the Poetics of Reflection
- 10 From Allegory to Mockery: Baroque Theatrical Representations of the Labyrinth
- 11 Mars Recontextualized in the Golden Age of Spain: Psychological and Aesthetic Readings of Velázquez’s Marte
- 12 Ut pictura poesis: Calderón’s Picturing of Myth
- 13 Opera on the Margins in Colonial Latin America: Conceived under the Sign of Love
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It has become a critical cliché to talk of the way seventeenth-century European courts were highly theatrical in their self-presentation. The idea of the court as theatre, of the king as the central protagonist in the elaborate ‘stage setting’ of court ceremonial, has been frequently applied to the Habsburg court. It is thus accepted that the court theatre mirrors, in John Varey’s words, the King’s ‘taste, his ambitions, his virtues, his nobility and, above all, his royal power’, and that, in turn, the court’s organizing principle is theatre.
Calderón’s court dramas certainly exhibit what Melveena McKendrick has recently referred to as an ‘extraordinary potent sense of place’. This is evident not only in the ways in which such plays written expressly for the court for performance in the various palace theatres serve to publicize what Margaret Greer has called the ‘text of royal power’, but also in the dramatic settings of the plays themselves. In the majority of court plays written by Calderón part of theaction on stage takes place in a royal palace. In their very staging, therefore, such court dramas dramatize the court setting of the audience: like Chinese boxes, a palace is contained within the stage, which is, in turn, contained within a real royal palace. This visual conceit created by the mise-en-abyme staging raises issues of art, authority and power, and offers, implicitly, a critique of the interdependence and interaction of each.
In those plays in which the audience see a sumptuous palace on the stage the metaphor of the court as theatre is literally realized. In such instances not only does Calderón put the king figuratively on stage (by making his plays refer to their royal performative context or by using them as a means of offering the king advice, criticism and moral guidelines) but he also puts the entire court via its setting on the stage as well. The court, which is dependent on illusion and theatre, watches a play in which a palace is seen to be the product of illusion and theatre.
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- Rewriting Classical Mythology in the Hispanic Baroque , pp. 119 - 127Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007