The Theatre and Hispanic Life

This Collection of essays relates Spanish drama to Hispanic life from the late Middle Ages to Drama and its Foreign Affiliates,” a discussion by W.T. McCready of the many interactions between Spanish and English, French, and German drama. J.H. Parker follows with a discussion of the modernity of Lope de Vega’s plays, a modernity of theme and psychology. T.B. Barclay’s “Reflections of Reality” provides intriguing comment upon Spanish drama in the eighteenth century, when it followed a French artistic formula, and in the Romantic period, during which purity of form was abandoned. Borras’s “Twentieth-Century Spanish Drama: In Defense of Liberty” thoughtfully examines the attack of modern theatre, including exiled playwrights, upon traditional, narrow, intolerant Spain. The final essay, Levy’s “Ideology and Stagecraft in Hispanic American Theatre of the 1960’s,” is a comprehensive review of the social commitment of the theatre of this period, a theatre which strove, above all, to shock the bourgeois out of complacency.

Spanish drama has been a special interest of Neale H. Tayler, the honoree; the volume marks his retirement as President of Wilfrid Laurier University.