Women/Objects on the Modern and Early Modern Stage: Two Exceptional Case Studies

Abstract

So far in this book we have focused on the ways in which the analysis of cultural habitus might help us to reconstruct early modern staging practices. When we identify how the structures of habitus were structured in the early modern period, our analysis both informs our interpretation of the dramatic text in question and reveals the ways in which those structures might have been appropriated and manipulated for dramatic purposes in performance. As we have said from the beginning, these structured and structuring structures are in constant dynamic flux, and both influence, and are influenced by, space-time. One aspect of this strategy that has not yet been addressed is the potential appropriation of those structures across space-time, in epochs and cultures that might not otherwise have been directly impacted by those cultural structures. An obvious example of such a cross-cultural impact is Renaissance Humanism, in which the roundabout arrival of classical texts through Arabic translations rerooted classical ideals in the West such as perfection of proportion, poetic inspiration, and even dramatic unities. As we have previously stated, the discovery of the corral de comedias in Almagro, Spain in the mid-twentieth century, and the proliferation of university study-abroad programs in the last quarter of the same century, have reinvigorated both Spanish and foreign interest in Spain’s great tradition of classical drama.