Early Modern Spectacular Culture

3 units

This seminar studies a range of early modern visual and theatrical representations from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in order to understand the major role that public spectacle played in Hispanic cultures shaped by popular literacies. We will examine the deployment of spectacle for the purpose of cultural formation, in royal pageantry and elite portraiture that sought to shape historical memory, and in the rich staging of Jesuit school plays that aimed to inform beliefs and recruit (male) public interest in reading, writing, and social advancement. At the same time, we will explore works of the comedia that drew crowds from all walks of life, as Lope de Vega's Arte de Nuevo de Hacer Comedias spurred a boom in plays that abandoned classical formal models instead to mirror life for an avid public of mixed literacies. Shaped by popular tastes, this new form of entertainment represented social relations between elites and common subjects, as well as between genders, as complex and contested dynamics of power, negotiated by performances of identity that could invite public laughter, scorn, or censure. These works incorporated a wide range of questioning voices into the spectacular formation of early modern Hispanic culture. Our focuses will include visual and textual sources of elite spectacles, a Jesuit school play, Lope's dramatic treatise, and a range of comedias that deploy visual and linguistic spectacle as a means of cultural performance, including most works on the doctoral reading list for this period. Critical and theoretical selections as well as visual materials will inform our analyses.