Refiguring the Hero: From Peasant to Noble in Lope de Vega and Calderon.

This handsomely-produced book, with its project of historical contextualization of Spanish theater, was well chosen to set the scholarly and editorial standards for this series. It is intended to reach a wide audience of non-Hispanist scholars and students of European theater: English translations precede citations from Spanish texts, the critical language is accessible and jargon-free, and pertinent historical background and plot summaries are provided. At the same time, addressing her colleagues in seventeenth-century Spanish literature, Professor Fox calls for a thorough reassessment of the plays that have been perceived as Spain's unique contribution to European theater: those with peasants as central characters. Her critique of twentieth-century interpretations points out inaccuracies in the representation of these peasants as "heroes" and as idealized bucolic figures: some are discovered to have been of noble birth, while others are elevated to higher social status. A more accurate reading of these plays, Fox proposes, will find that they are "more humane (if less democratic) than has been conceded in the past" (172).

The introductory chapter of Refiguring the Hero examines the concept of the hero from classical epic through medieval Spanish literature to the Renaissance, foregrounding the conflicts between Christian values and the violent idea] of heroism. While it may be assumed that violence and conflict drew crowds to public spectacle then as now, Fox's analysis stems from a revulsion toward the violent acts depicted in the plays discussed (x). She argues that the seventeenth-century public expected the qualities of "personal growth [desengano], spiritual strength, and noble blood in its literary heroes" (39, 126). Fox reiterates the problem: "We twentieth-century readers are so eager to throw our support behind the social underdog that we cheer on the insubordinate behavior of peasant protagonists in plays of a period that condemned such insubordination" (xi). The group of plays discussed in chapter 2 similarly support the division of heroic from unheroic behavior along lines of social hierarchy: Calderon's La vida es sueno and Lope de Vega's El villano en su rincon and El mejor alcalde, el rey.

Chapter 3 addresses Lope de Vega's Peribanez and Fuenteovejuna, his best-known "peasant honor plays," in which the attribution of heroism to peasants is most deeply invested. Whether or not one agrees with Professor Fox's depiction of the peasant Peribanez as the villain, and the aristocratic would-be seducer of his wife as the "tragic hero" of Peribanez y el Comendador de Ocana, she points out troubling contradictions and inconsistencies. In chapter 4, Professor Fox's reading of Calderon's El Alcalde de Zalamea together with the earlier, farcical Luis Perez, el gallego sheds new light on the representation of violence and political power. Chapter 5 examines twentieth-century cultural attitudes that impel readers "so earnestly to seek a revolutionary, democratic temper in these seventeenth-century Spanish masterpieces."

Throughout this study, Professor Fox draws on historical research on kingship and authority, and the specificities of the political context, to support her reading of the problematic representation of revenge and violence on the part of peasant protagonists. What is missing from this revisionist discussion of Baroque complexity and historical context is a conceptualization of audience response in terms of multiple and possibly conflicting subject positions, for the audience as a group and audience members as individuals.

EMILIE L. BERGMANN University of California, Berkeley