“Take (Meta)physic, pomp”: King Lear and (Dis)oriented Ontology

This essay uses Object-Oriented Ontology, a posthumanist theoretical model, to explore how King Lear’s use of and relation to objects can provide insight into his characterization. This essay provides a model for scrutinizing the role of objects—whether animate or inanimate—in performances of early modern drama; furthermore, it argues that King Lear’s use of objects reveals a consistent refusal to understand others, which upsets a redemptive arc in the play. To that end, the article proposes an ethical model—demonstrated by Kent—that responds to the play’s otherwise desolate worldview.

Juan del Encina’s Nativity Eclogues: A New English Translation

Juan del Encina has long been recognized as a crucial figure in Iberian drama, yet few of his works have been translated into English. Encina wrote plays, poetry, and music in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and scholars have traditionally regarded Encina’s writing as a turning point in early Spanish drama, both because of the secular material included in his plays and because Encina supervised the publication of his own works. He is also credited with contributing to the professionalization of Spanish theater by depicting the court of his patrons, the Duke and Duchess of Alba, as a site of theatrical performance. Encina’s innovative dramas interweave courtly, religious, and pastoral drama with metafictional elements. Atiya presents translations of two plays included in Encina’s 1496 Cancionero, a printed compilation of poetic, dramatic, and musical works.

Zambra, Codes of Honor, and Moorish Dress: Transculturation in Calderón’s Love after Death

This paper will offer a reading of Calderón’s Love after Death (Amar después de la muerte) that is removed from the binary opposition between Christianity versus Islam, which premise readings of the text as a pro-morisco play, and focuses on teasing out nuances of transculturation inherent in the text. At pivotal moments in the play, the morisco and the “pure” Christian are simultaneously presented in opposition and equality to one another in their shared adherence to a strict moral code of honor, which is arguably a Christian contribution to Spain’s hybrid culture. The cultural hybridization of clothing and costume points to the unreliability of visible signifiers that distinguished the morisco from the “pure” Spaniard and as a result, brings forth the difficulties Spain had in self-identification in opposition to the morisco. The only real signifier – the Arabic language – is linguistic, although it is clear many words from Arabic made their way into Spanish. Read in the context of a text produced in a Spain that was located at the border between purity and hybridity and between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, it can be argued that the representations of cultural practices in Calderón’s re-imagination of the rebellion of Alpujarras, bring forth evidence of a gradual process of transculturation between the moriscos and Christians and shed light on Spain’s almost desperate attempt to fight that process. Through this lens, the conflict between the moriscos and the Christians appears to have been conceived in the struggle against external forces that relegated Spain to the periphery of Europe. As a result of anti-Spanish prejudices of the leyenda negra that identified “Spanishness” with “Moorishness,” Spain was at once the colonial center in relation to the Americas and the New World, and simultaneously, Europe’s very own morisco “other.”

Census of Performances of Medieval and Early Modern Plays

A table that details information on performances of medieval and early modern plays for the calendar year beginning January 1, 2021.

Review: Angels and Demons (2020), performed by the Department of Theatre, University of South Dakota

A review of Angels and Demons, an adaptation of the York and Wakefield/Towneley civic cycles by the University of South Dakota. It considers the performance in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and US elections of 2020.

Introduction

Introduction to ROMARD 58 (2021)