I’ve just recently read two great new works on the place of theater and plays in French history, Carol Symes’s A Common Stage: Theater and Public Life in Medieval Arras (Cornell, 2007), and Sara Beam’s Laughing Matters: Farce and the Making of Absolutism in France (Cornell, 2007). Both of these books do a fantastic job of integrating the content and performance of drama into the wider cultural and social trends of medieval and early modern France, both of them taking cliches about “theatricity” and “performance” in European history and making them come to life. Both have won prestigious prizes. With such a rich tradition in Spanish history of studying culture, on the one hand and such a rich tradition studying Golden Age drama, on the other, I feel like we need to take up this challenge! We need to emulate these path-breaking works that bring theater and performance into the realm of cultural and social history of early modern Spain.
Of course, Jodi Campbell has already taken a giant step in this direction, in Monarchy, Political Culture, and Drama in Seventeenth-Century Madrid: Theater of Negotiation (Ashgate, 2006). But more needs to be done to tear down the boundaries between the stage es of the corrales and the stages in the streets.
Is there anyone currently working on a project like Symes’s and Beam’s? Is there something published already that I’ve missed? Are there any graduate students out there looking for a dissertation topic?
