The Play in the Mirror: Lacanian Perspectives on Spanish Baroque Theater.

Matthew D. Stroud. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. London: Associated University Presses, 1996. 242 pp. $39.50. ISBN: 0-8387-5315-9.

Matthew Stroud in this study fruitfully couples key concepts of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and readings of ten dramas of the Spanish Baroque to show how the study of the human condition in the one can illuminate the other. The result is far removed from the simplistic applications of theory that have given psychoanalytic criticism a bad name in some quarters; Stroud guards against performing a clinical analysis on dead authors or attributing an unconscious to fictional characters or literary texts. He argues that using Lacanian theory to read seventeenth-century texts is no more anachronistic than readings grounded (consciously or unconsciously) in other critical perspectives, for all perception is shaped by the perspective of the viewer. As in the "mirror of life" metaphor of theater, the virtual reality perceived is an intersubjective production of the desires of creator and viewer, and critical articles similarly express the desires of their creators. Hence, much can be gained by a Lacanian perspective that shares with Baroque Spain an anticartesian view of the human subject and an understanding of the human condition not centered on the rational, autonomous human subject presupposed by most modern theorists and readers.

One of Stroud's stated goals is that of making the difficulties of Lacanian theory comprehensible to students of the Spanish Golden Age literature, and to this end he makes good use of one or two well-known dramas in each chapter, rather in the manner in which Slavoj Zizec employs Hitchcock films and other popular texts to explain and illustrate Lacanian ideas to postmodern readers. Through the actions and interactions of human subjects in a familiar drama, Stroud explains with clarity and efficiency - and non-reductively - complex and difficult Lacanian concepts that in turn provide new insights into the truth of human subjectivity as portrayed by Calderon, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina. Particularly effective is his use of La vida es sueno to demonstrate the structuring of human subjects around a lack in being, their inscription in a signifying chain ordered by the Non/m du pere, the Name-of-the-Father that is initially lacking for both Rosaura and Segismundo, their engagement in the imaginary register (dramatized in Basileo's fear of overthrow by a monster-son) and the obligation to sacrifice their desires to the symbolic order, to the imperative of civilization and its ever-incomplete promise of pleasure in law and order. Equally perceptive and illuminating is his consideration of El burlador de Sevilla as a struggle between two competing ethical systems embedded in the honor code, the Kantian law that moves don Gonzalo and the Sadean imperative of jouissance that don Juan obeys.

Reading La dama boba, El caballero de Olmedo, El castigo sin venganza, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza, La dama duende, and Don Gil de las calzas verdes, Stroud explores the dramatization of such themes as the inherent otherness of desire, the working of fantasy in love, the play of the death drive, the nature of gender identity and the feminine masquerade. His chapter on the play of the imaginary and the symbolic and the hysterical feminine jouissance of the mystic in religious dramas, El principe constanta and Tirso's Santa Juana trilogy, is certain to be anathema to many traditional Golden Age scholars. But for those who look for a comprehensible introduction to a challenging new perspective on the Spanish Baroque, this book promises - and delivers - both pleasure and knowledge.

MARGARET RICH GREER Duke University