The Play of Power: Mythological Court Dramas of Calderon de la Barca.

The appearance of Margaret Greer's comprehensive study of the (mostly) late mythological festival-plays of Calderon marks the moment when a book that one day had to be written finally found its author. These court dramas--some nineteen in number and, hence, approximately ten percent of Calderon's total output--are the last genre in the Calderonian canon to be accorded genuinely serious attention (seven are treated here). The critical reception history of these works prior to, say, the pioneering essay of W. G. Chapman in 1954 is literally a litany of misunderstanding. Since then, the perception of the court dramas as mere royal divertissement and insubstantial extravaganza has been gradually corrected by the studies of Sebastian Neumeister, Mythos und Reprasentation (1978), Robert terHorst, Calderon: The Secular Plays (1982), and Thomas A. O'Connor, Myth and Mythology in the Theater of Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1988). Dr. Greer's own contribution to the reassessment of the genre in her monumental edition of La estatua de Prometeo (1986) is surpassed only by her 1991 study presently under review.

Dr. Greer's theme is the manner in which Calderon's mythological plays were related to issues of political power in Habsburg Spain and also an inextricable commentary on such issues. Her title is an apt one, since it captures in its ambiguity many of the dimensions of the play/power dialectic which she will develop in detail in the body of the book. These court spectacles, she states, "are indeed 'plays of power' in every way except the way they have traditionally been viewed--mere toys for the entertainment of the powerful" (199; Greer's italics). In rejecting the notion of the fiesta mitologica as an artistic bauble or flattering act of political subservience, Greer problematizes the registers of political meaning discoverable in these texts more insightfully than any other scholar who has written on the subject. She distinguishes among 1) an overall "text of royal power" to celebrate the monarch before whom the piece was performed, 2) a "political text" of local and specific relevance to the political climate in which such performance took place, and 3) a "particular text" in the sense of a construction of meaning not anchored in the specific framework of political issues at the Spanish Habsburg court, i.e., one constructed on a hermeneutic tradition of "bounded pluralism" (123-24).

Dr. Greer introduces two other concepts that will refine further critical thinking on the spectacle plays: Barthes' notion of "polyphony" and Calderon's own term "composicion de lugares." By the first is meant the theater as a semiologically privileged object that is many-voiced or "polyphonic" by comparison with the simple linearity of the language system per se. In her chapter 2, the author makes the claim that "Calderon achieved in his court-spectacular plays a true mastery of the polyphony of the theatrical idiom and produced works that combined this dramatic coherence with a thematic complexity that was perhaps unique in the history of the European court spectacular" (31). She vindicates this claim by a detailed comparatist analysis of Italian and French treatments of the Perseus theme, in order to argue the artistic superiority of Calderon's Las fortunas de Andromeda y Perseo.

Calderon's own expression from the Preface to the first edition of his autos (1677), "composicion de lugares," refers to an Ignatian visualization or mental recreation of the sensuous stimuli associated with a scene or spectacle from the past (e.g., the scene of Christ's crucifixion). Calderon used it in a plea to his readers to supplement the bare bones of his auto text from their own imagination, thus supplying the effects of music, dance, color, and spectacle to flesh it out. Greer employs Calderon's term with a critical purpose: to encourage modern readers to recreate the world of the royal extravaganza with only a bare script of the dialogue before them.

This is a magnificent book, carefully constructed and argued, and lavishly illustrated with nineteen black-and-white figures and three plates in color.

UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI-COLUMBIA