The Golden Age Comedia Text, Theory, and Performance

Drawing on the groundbreaking Spanish scholarship and editions of earlier generations and relying on research conducted in Spanish archives, this pioneering group of English-speaking scholars offers a new treatment of familiar material. The editors yoke together widely varying critical practices, including incisive New Critical readings and far-reaching explorations that draw on the most current European critical thought. In addition to these more strictly literary studies, there are interdisciplinary essays focusing on seventeenth- and twentieth-century reception and the social makeup of the comedia audience. The whole thus presents a balanced picture of the many ways in which the comedia can be viewed, and the contributors complement each other's work in often surprising ways, illuminating the same corpus from a number of perspectives.