Allegories of Kingship: Calderon and the Anti-Machiavellian Tradition.

A post-doctoral project, Rupp's book confirms the traditional view that Calderon remained "strikingly faithful to the anti-Machiavellian view of kingship and statecraft' (11). Rupp's careful examination of several Golden Age political treatises reinforces a detailed perusal of two comedias and six sacramental autos. His contextualized readings also probe neo-historicism:" [Calderon's] political theater can be studied in relation to the competing readings of history that others offer to the princes of early modern Europe" (14). When analyzing the "conceptual background and internal development" of this theater (ix), the reader should indeed focus on one "striking achievement" of the playwright: his allegorical adaptation of "Christian statecraft and limited sovereignty . . . to the changing conditions of politics in seventeenth-century Spain" (174).

The changing conditions of politics are key to Rupp's prudent hypothesis, which can be followed throughout the book's structure. As both point of departure and convergence, La segunda esposa y triunfar muriendo (The Second Wife and To Triumph Dying) - an auto which dramatizes Philip IV's impending marriage to his thirty years younger niece, via an "allegory of matrimony and [Spanish] revival" (128) - not only yields a persuasive first chapter on post-Machiavelli history and King-as-Christ allegories, but also provides the remaining chapters with three sites of inquiry about the Hapsburg monarchy: law; institutions (the councils and the royal favorite's valimiento, chapter 3 offering outstanding insights on its evolution); key public events (8, 11). Chapter 4's incisive analysis of two chronologically distant autos illustrates Calderon's evolving dramaturgy:

In the comedias Calderon often dramatizes the failures of kings and princes who promote immediate political interests in defiance of legal and spiritual constraints; in the autos he defends true statecraft in theoretical terms and demonstrates its operation in the institutions and affairs of government. These two perspectives are complementary. Taken together, they present a comprehensive program for Christian monarchy, illustrated through the methods of example and counterexample (10).

Calderon may have learned this method at the Jesuit Imperial School he attended, and Rupp obliges by pairing up comedia and auto in chapters 2 and 3.

Other methods yield less context-sensitive cohesiveness. Granted the king's central role in the staging of the autos, and the presence of Loyola's meditative techniques in the prologue to their 1677 collection (see Bruce Wardropper, Dian Fox, Margaret Greer, Barbara Kurtz), Rupp's conclusion approaches the rim of reception theory, soon superseded by arguments on the "centrality of historical study in the education of princes [which] dearly influence the political vision of his theater" (14). Conspicuously absent, then, is the most renowned Golden Age diatribe against theater, Jesuit Mariana's De Rege et Regis Institutione - dedicated to Philip IV's father - thematically an heir to that of Jesuit Rivadeneira, forecaster of the Providential "triumph" of the Armada, whom Rupp often quotes as an influence on Calderon.

Since less theocentric explanations for historical change were also acceptable in the period, could a dramatist of the political pedagogue persuasion, Calderon, offer historical exemplars more immediate to Philip IV's century than Gracian's Ferdinand the Catholic, or Saavedra's orthodox generalities (1819, 41) about Christian princeliness scattered through a hundred empresas? If addressing political discourse and implied debate - e.g., monarchical tyranny over voiceless commoners (52) - a productive venue of exploration could be Solis's 1630s denunciation that discourse is permitted to those born to obey (Historia de la conquista de Mexico); that work is less theoretically anti-Machiavellian than those represented by Rupp's judicious selections. If addressing historical events and shifting political realities, Rupp should mention that La segunda esposa was composed shortly after the 1648 Peace of Westphallia, which put an end to the Thirty Years War, as well as to Spanish imperial dominance in Europe.

MARIA E. MAYER Citrus College