Abstract
In Seeking Spatial Justice, Edward Soja relates that, in 1968, deteriorating conditions for the poor in the outskirts of Paris led to riots and unrest, even as public policy emphasized democratic ideals and principles. In spite of France’s insistence on égalité, Soja notes, the poor in Paris “were actually constrained by persistent republican values that refused to recognize differences in the socioeconomic and spatial configuration of the city, seeing everyone as equal under the law, le droit.”1 Comedia-goeis had no such delusions as evidenced by the strict division of public space in the corral theaters. Unlike Elizabethan theaters, which were constructed as discrete buildings on the outskirts of town, Spanish corrales began as improvised spaces; stages were built in the open courtyards between buildings in urban settings. Apartments overlooking the courtyards became valuable real estate. Theater-going men, known as mosqueteros, took their place in the patio, clergy in the first balcony, or tertulia, women in the second balcony (known as the cazuela, or cooking pot), and the nobility in their shaded boxes, or aposentos. Each individual took his or her assigned place in the corral for the afternoon, inhabiting a Foucauldian heterotopia:
We do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light. We live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.2
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Notes
Edward Soja, Seeking Spatial Justice (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 34.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 23. My emphasis.
Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 11.
Lope de Vega, El caballero de Olmedo. Ed. J. M. Blecua (Zaragoza: Editorial Ebro, 1979), 18.
Lope de Vega, Lope de Vega: Three Major Plays, trans. Gwynne Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xix.
J. T. Snow, “Five Centuries of Celestina Readings: An Overview and an Example from the Nineteenth Century,” in Fernando de Rojas and Celestina: Approachingthe Fifth Centenary, ed. Ivy Corfis and Joseph T. Snow. (Madison, WI: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 1993), 267.
J. T. Snow, “The Iconography of the Early Celestinas: The First French Translation (1527),” Celestinesca 8.2 (1984): 25.
See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
Henri Lefebvre, La Révolution urbaine (Paris: Gallimarde, 1970), 25.
Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga, “Espacios escénicos en el teatro español del siglo XVIII,” in V Jornadas de teatro clásico español, ed. Juan Antonio Hormigón. Madrid: Dirección General de Música y Teatro, 1983, 1:87
N. D. Shergold, A History of the Spanish Stage: From Medieval Times to the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 3.
Marina Brownlee, The Severed Word: Ovid’s Heroides and the Novela Sentimental (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 16.
See illustration in Alfred W. Pollard, Early Illustrated Books: A History of the Decoration and Illustration of Books in the 15th and 16th Centuries (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1917), Chapter X. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/39845/39845-h/39845-h.htm
Baldwin’s writings on Don Quixote help to clarify his distinction between what he calls “monologic” and “dialogic” discourse. In premodern or “monologic” discourse, the text functions under a single mode of discursive principles, for example chivalric, pastoral, or courtly love. A dialogic discourse recognizes the multiple discursive possibilities of real life. Cervantes’s Don Quixote is considered by Bakhtin and others to be the first modern novel precisely because of its critical treatment of the various types of pre-novelistic discourses. In his Discourse in the Novel, he states that “auto-criticism of discourse is one of the primary distinguishing features of the novel as a genre…Already in Don Quixote we have a literary, novelistic discourse being tested by life, by reality” (412). For more on Bakhtin and Cervantes, see Howard Mancing. “Bakhtin, Cervantes, and Cervantes,” in Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in Honor of Edward Dudley, ed. Francisco LaRubia-Prado (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000), 141–162.
For more on the technical and theoretical limitations of the TESO database, see John J. Allen, “Staging Calderón with the TESO Data Base.” Boletín de los Comediantes 53.1 (2001): 15–39.
Sebastian Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Ed. Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: S. A. Horta, I. E, 1943), 294–295.
Carla Rahn Phillips, “Visualizing Imperium: The Virgin of the Seafarers and Spain’s Self-Image in the Early Sixteenth Century,” Renaissance Quarterly 58 (2005): 827.
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© 2014 Laura L. Vidler
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Vidler, L.L. (2014). The Habitus of Corral Scenic Space. In: Performance Reconstruction and Spanish Golden Age Drama. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137437075_3
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