Religious and Secular Theater in Golden Age Spain

The essays in this book honor the seminal contributions to the field of early modern Spanish drama of Donald T. Dietz, who has devoted his career to the promotion of classical theater, not just as dramatic poetry but as vibrant performance art. Written by a variety of respected scholars and never before published, the twenty-two essays, organized into six sections, present a wide variety of interests, approaches, and methodologies, including ideological and theological exegesis, poetic analysis, cultural studies, and semiotics of theater. The first section reviews Dietz’s impact on the field of Comedia studies, where he played a critical role in moving the discussion from page to stage. The next two sections explore facets of religious theater, including autos sacramentales and comedias de santos, as well as religious aspects of secular theater. Essays from the other sections explore questions of reading and of staging classical theater, in the original Spanish, in English translation, and in adaptation for the stage and for radio, as well as theoretical and practical approaches to the pedagogy of performance. Specialists and students within and across many disciplines—theater history, comparative performance studies, literary studies—will find this collection both useful and illuminating.

Susan Paun de Garcia, Professor Emerita of Spanish at Denison University, has written on the seventeenth-century Comedia, and the post-baroque Comedia of the early eighteenth century. With Donald R. Larson, she co-edited The Comedia in English (2008) and, with Harley Erdman, she co-edited Remaking the Comedia (2015).

Donald R. Larson is Emeritus Professor at the Ohio State University. In addition to numerous articles dealing with Spanish theater, he is the author of The Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (1978) and co-editor, with Susan Paun de Garcia, of The Comedia in English (2008).