The Joys and Sorrows of Diplomacy and Politics in Spanish Early Modern Theater

Mattza, Carmela V.; Mattza, Carmela V.

Early Modern Hispanic theatre and theatricality thrived in moments of joy and sorrow. The dramatic heritage of 16th and 17th century Spanish theater lived on through performative acts such as singing, dance, festive architecture, masquerade shows, farces, and plays. Often accompanied by political and diplomatic events—a royal or princely entry, a wedding, a funeral, or a political celebration—these feasts for the senses engaged streets, neighborhoods, and private spaces in the experience of joy and sorrow. However, such arenas of sensation also provided a space for contesting authority and creating alternative hegemonies. More than just a stage to gesture on political happenings, a study into this tradition reveals that the subversive tactics of performance—the subtle manipulation of emotion, thought, and action—for diplomatic aims will not fade but remain and recreate throughout western Mediterranean cities or the Americas.

This panel, then, seeks to study how these celebrations “made” joy and sorrow contagious through material conditions. How does the use of colors, costuming, music, dance, and other dramatic elements work together to serve a political purpose and to what extent these practices are still alive in today's recreation or re-appropriation of the Spanish comedias? The following research by the panelists explores the intersection between diplomacy, spectacle, materiality, and emotion in Early Modern Spain and the Americas. In this pursuit, “The Joys and Sorrows of Diplomacy and Politics in the Spanish Comedia” attempts to better understand how performance and theatricality became tools of political and ideological power in the Transatlantic Hispanic world that somehow are still alive today.

Rachel Williams will begin by analyzing moments of theatrical disillusionment that rupture the tension and power of the royal body. For Spanish Early Modern playwrights, the behavior of kings and their influence over their subjects were central themes, especially in the blood-honor plays of the seventeenth century. Williams explains how through the use of the desengaño moment—a powerful moment of pure emotion that drives the character into madness and exposes the inability of the subject’s mind to fathom misbehavior committed by the king—and its subsequent restoration of natural order, the theater of Early Modern Spain was used to instruct audiences on how the king should be treated, even as the plays seem to challenge the bedrock conception of kingly power.

The subtilties of playing with power and emotion in performance do not end with specific representations of royalty, rather the use of the theater as a form of soft power has been a longstanding tradition in international diplomatic affairs. From Philip IV to Ferdinand VI, Spanish diplomacy relied heavily on theatrical performances to celebrate royal weddings, military victories, and peace treaties. Ignacio López Alemany’s paper examines how the theater of the late baroque period was used to convey diplomatic messages, and how this tactic was institutionalized in the roles of playwrights, composers, actors, musicians, stage designers, and diplomatic officials.

Moving from the artistic to the public stage, Andrea Ariza García reveals the role of public shaming (vergüenza pública) as a form of performative politics, requiring an audience to witness the sorrow inflicted upon a convicted person condemned to otherness. In her investigation, she exposes the mobilization of emotion (shame, abjection, compassion) for the craft of colonial ‘common sense’ and the creation of a fictional character of the other (la bruja, la hechicera, la hereje) instituted by these criminalized practices.

However, to what extent emotions of joy and sorrow in the Spanish Early Modern drama are attached to the imaginaries of political liberation that are still able to speak to the contemporary reader? In "Dreaming of Freedom with Calderón: Place, Medium, and Political Imaginaries in Chile", Amy Sheeran explores Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño, one of the most frequently translated and adapted Spanish plays, whose literary and philosophical questions it poses are recreated in the 20th century in new settings and media. Thus, she studies Raúl Ruiz’s adaptation of Calderon's play 1986 Mémoire des Apparences. In it, Ruiz's oneiric exploration of the nature of film resituates Calderón’s play in the context of the Chilean dictatorship.

Each of these scholars, MLA members, in their 12 minutes papers (followed by 15 minutes for discussion) will engage with claims about the manipulation of art and emotion for diplomacy, revealing the subversion of power and materiality inherent in the theatricality of politics. Across these papers, we see the intersection of diplomacy and spectacle, of materiality and emotion, and of joy and sorrow converted into mechanisms of political and ideological embodiment that still resonate in the Americas.

713 The Joys and Sorrows of Diplomacy and Politics in Spanish Early Modern Theater: Calls for Papers