From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
17.1 (1997): 188-91.
Copyright © 1997, The Cervantes Society of America
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Zimic, Stanislav. El teatro de Cervantes. Madrid: Castalia, 1992.
422 pp.
This book is a boon to those specialists who have profited during the last 30 years from Zimic's detailed, provocative and highly original studies of Cervantes' theater. The volume collects those articles, brings them up to date and edits them for the general reader. Nothing of substance has been lost in the process, and both author and publisher are to be congratulated on the book's clarity, concision and ease of consultation. Each chapter is dedicated to one work. The ten extant plays (Los tratos de Argel and Numancia, followed by the eight plays of the 1615 Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nunca representados in their original order of publication) are studied as a separate section. A second section
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of eight chapters is dedicated to the interludes. There is a prologue, a
conclusion, an extensive bibliography, largely exemplary in its thoroughness,
and an index of authors cited. Footnotes are used judiciously throughout,
facilitating the reader's appreciation of their contribution to the arguments
they illustrate.
Zimic's prologue clarifies the focus and method
of his work. He sees in Cervantes' plays a highly ingenious synthesis of
historical and social reality with literary sources (11). He elects to classify
and study each play's episodes according to their poetic function, questioning
the validity of any system that classifies Cervantes' theater according to
its subject matter: for example, La casa de los celos, while based
on Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, has less to do with the deeds of
knights errant than with the dramatization of their most deeply hidden thoughts
by means of allegorical figures (Ibid.). Zimic considers Cervantes
a dramaturgical innovator, ceaselessly experimenting with historical and
fictional sources and with theatrical techniques to expand the limits of
the imaginative universe the theater could depict (12). An important catalyst
of Cervantes' experimentation was his rivalry with Lope, whose comedia
nueva, written to appeal to the sensationalism of a mass audience (12-13,
21), was largely incompatible with Cervantes' artistic vision, however much
the latter experimented with characters and episodes of the new school, notably
in El gallardo español and La entretenida. Zimic argues
persuasively that Cervantes found Lope's theater too formulaic, one in which
psychological, social and historical verisimilitude were sacrificed to an
idealized vision of society and the individual's place therein (22). By contrast,
Cervantes' greatest theatrical innovation is his treatment of each character
as an individual, rather than as the representative of a class or type (23).
Zimic finds most noteworthy Cervantes' treatment of humble characters, whom
their author endows with psychological depth and individuality. Their
foolishness, venality or bigotry come from their unique experience and viewpoint,
not from their lowly social status (25). And if they are humorous, they are
not so because they are common but because they are human, and much of humanity
is, alas, ridiculous. In this respect, Zimic argues that the plays and the
interludes are cut from the humanistic philosophical, aesthetic and ethical
cloth of Cervantes' prose works. For this scholar, the enduring value of
Cervantes' theater is its artistry and exemplarity, each quality inseparable
from the other (29). He finds this an especially remarkable innovation in
the interlude. Far from the slapstick and broad innuendo common to most
interludes of his time, Cervantes' creations are ironic, subtle and carefully
constructed so that each detail contributes to a rational appreciation of
the artistically and morally exemplary whole (28-30). Zimic sees the focus
of the interludes as either the vice or foolishness of one individual (for
example, the cuckolded husband Pancracio in La cueva de Salamanca)
or the ills of an entire society reflected in the actions of a group (as
when couples quarrel and cannot be reconciled, an emblem of a society in
conflict in El juez de los divorcios) (29).
Zimic's knowledge of his literary sources and
his reasoned, imaginative employment of them are themselves exemplary. For
instance, he illuminates our appreciation of the humor of La cueva de
Salamanca by arguing that Cervantes
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| 190 | ELLEN M. ANDERSON | Cervantes |
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had in mind that literary emblem of conjugal fidelity, the story of Odysseus'
return to Penelope, as he composed the story of the foolish Pancracio and
his libidinous wife Leonarda. Zimic demonstrates with carefully chosen textual
quotations from the Odyssey, placed next to appropriate passages from
the interlude, how Cervantes in the presentation of his characters has
consciously and with exquisite irony employed his epic source to enlarge
the scope of the work's comedy (378-81). Pancracio's utter refusal to read
his situation accurately makes his imprudence and foolishness even more telling
when contrasted with the emblematic prudence and sagacity of its parodic
model, Odysseus' return. I offer this example from the many that could be
cited throughout the book because it illustrates how carefully its author
follows to their logical conclusion all the textual hints he discovers, even
in a minor work. He does not merely ascribe a literary culture to Cervantes;
he clarifies how Cervantes incorporated his reading into his creative process.
Moreover, he makes manifest how the realization of this source can deepen
its reader's or spectator's enjoyment of the work's hilarity and of its exquisite
subtlety by comparison with entremeses of the period.
Zimic's appreciation of Cervantes' historical
milieu and his judicious explanation of its salient features for the
well-educated general reader is equally impressive. Even in Pedro de
Urdemalas, based on folkloric and literary antecedents carefully adduced
by Wardropper and Canavaggio, Zimic is able to find and elucidate a cunning
Cervantine portrait of the venality and incompetence of the highest level
of Spanish society. He reveals and explains the similarities between the
King, the courtier Silerio and the Queen of the play with Philip III, the
Duke of Lerma and Margaret of Austria (274-81) to arrive at a reading that
demonstrates the play's profound social criticism as an integral part of
its exploration of the frontiers between fiction and history, artfulness
and hypocrisy. Zimic provides a suggestive alternative to most previous
evaluations of the play as a loosely-constructed, episodic work whose coherence
is difficult for any spectator to discern. By intertwining history with
literature in his reading, he leads his reader to an appreciation of Pedro
de Urdemalas as a carefully ordered journey with the protagonist through
all ranks of society to explore how women and men of every station employ
words to deceive themselves and one another (283). The title-character in
this reading succeeds (where Don Quixote fails) to find a parallel universe,
the world of the theater, where Pedro's talent ingenuity and good will can
be rewarded with the success that the theater of the world chooses to deny
to one of his lowly station (285-8). This chapter's elegant logic and restrained
eloquence distinguish it as one of the volume's finest.
Zimic considers not only the linguistic and
literary characteristics of Cervantes' playscripts but also their visual
characteristics in performance. A particularly fine example is his discussion
of the interplay of named characters and emblematic figures in La casa
de los celos, a play frequently dismissed as impossible to perform and
difficult to understand. His discussion of Angélica's initial appearance,
only to be “transformed” by means of a tramoya into a satyr,
is acutely discussed as an example of Cervantes' theatrical innovation: showing
to the audience the paladin Roldán's moral surrender to lust and arrogance
by means of a striking visual metamorphosis of his beloved (135). This is
one of his
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most convincing and original examples of Cervantes' overriding dedication
to the task of showing the audience the inner life of his characters.
Zimic's study may well cause the greatest
controversy in his conclusions about Cervantes' original intentions in composing
the plays and interludes and about why those published in 1615 were never
performed in his lifetime. He firmly rejects the notion, most recently championed
by Spadaccini and Talens and Reed, that Cervantes wrote his works to be read
rather than performed, adducing as evidence Cervantes' own words in the prologue
to the 1615 volume and in the Adjunta al Parnaso (13-14). He modifies
Spadaccini's and Talens' thesis that Cervantes originally composed the plays
in their published form in order to be read because their literary subtleties
would inevitably escape the ear of the spectators, distracted by the speed
and by the overwhelming visual impact of performance. Zimic contends that
Cervantes later saw as a rather good second best the alternative of publishing
plays he hoped to see performed (402-3), a reasonable and defensible position
that in effect re-opens the question for scholarly discussion.
Zimic's contention that Cervantes' theater
is more effective on the page than on the stage is less convincing. He finds
Cervantes' plays too dependent on verbal complexity, linguistic subtlety
and literary intertextuality to be appreciated by any audience of any epoch
(25-26). These qualities can be appreciated, he affirms, only when the plays
are read and savored by the individual reader (402-3). Students of oral culture
might beg to differ with that assessment; audiences accustomed to the complex
rhetoric of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century public sermons were unlikely
to miss all aspects of Cervantes' verbal artistry for the stage. This is
another aspect of the problem that deserves further research and discussion
in light of Zimic's carefully reasoned arguments. His book was completed
before the Teatro Clásico's 1992 production of La gran sultana,
performed to nearly universal acclaim, greatly appreciated by its extremely
heterogeneous audience. It would seem from that experiment that, in Canavaggio's
poignant phrase, Cervantes' plays are “un théâtre à
naître,” waiting to be born into our time, whose audiences and
readers are comfortable with images and with print: spectators who read what
they see. It would be fascinating to re-open this debate in the light of
this theatrical experience. As the first book on Cervantes' complete dramatic
corpus since Canavaggio's seminal 1977 work, Zimic's study is of great importance
and will be a most worthwhile addition to the collections of
cervantistas and comediantes alike.
| Ellen M. Anderson |
| York University |
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Prepared with the help of Sue Dirrim |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/cervante/csa/artics97/anderson.htm | ||