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Spanish poet, playwright, and novelist Félix Lope de Vega (1562-1635) was a key figure of Golden Age Spanish literature, second only in stature to Cervantes, and is considered the founder of Spain's classical theater.

In this article I focus on the authorship of Siempre ayuda la verdad, an early modern Spanish play first published in 1635 as part of the volume Segunda parte de las comedias del maestro Tirso de Molina. This drama, which is one of several early modern Iberian plays related to the figure of Inês de Castro, is currently considered by most scholars as penned by Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, probably in collaboration with Luis de Belmonte and maybe even with Tirso de Molina. In the first part of this paper I will examine how this traditional attribution relies on a bibliographic ghost, subjective impressions of style, and the creation of a scholarly discourse based on the repetition of statements—including some explicitly made up—without any critical examination of facts. The possible attribution of this play to none other than Lope de Vega—a name that has been associated with Siempre ayuda la verdad since 1906—has not received specific examination until now. I will proceed to do so in the second part of this paper by using a variety of resources that offer objective criteria: early modern documentation, strophic versification, stylometry, and orthoepy.

This article examines the tragic story of Tamar–the only daughter of King David mentioned by name in the Bible–through a comparison between the passage from 2 Samuel 13 and the play La venganza de Tamar (Tamar’s revenge), by the Spanish playwright and friar Tirso de Molina (1579–1648). Through close-readings of excerpts from both texts, I emphasize the transition of the story from biblical drama to seventeenth century Spanish comedia. Within an intertextual frame, this comparative approach emphasizes the relationship between literature and law by focusing on Amnon’s iter criminis (path of crime); Tamar’s plea for her own integrity; and King David’s duties as public authority. My goal is to explain the way Tirso reconfigures these three biblical characters to present the problem of justice from the points of view of the criminal (Amón), the advocate (Tamar), and the judge (David).

This article seeks to apply a number of concepts and approaches developed by celebrity studies during the past decades in the field of early modern theatre. More specifically, I will focus on the commercial theatre that developed in Spain from the 1560s onwards. This dramatic practice represents a privileged vantage point from which to observe how a number of key dynamics related to celebrity culture came into play within the context of early modern society, as the characteristics of this business and its cultural impact allowed for the emergence of processes of celebrification among performers. This study focuses on the characteristics of this theatre that made it possible for an early modern version of celebrity to emerge, such as the large role that actresses played in its success or the contact with performers that a wide variety of audiences enjoyed all along the country. I also analyse how actors and actresses were subject to forces of commodification, eroticization and the public's attention to their private lives, which led them to become early modern stars.

One of the founding characters of the ancient drama is the Chorus, the collective voice in front of an individualized actor. Taking the theoretical foundation of chorus as an essential element of dramaturgy, its function is compared in sex plays of two different times, authors, and geographical zones: classical Greek tragedy and the Silver Age of the Spanish theatre. The aim of this work is to study how the chorus relates to other characters through the analysis of social networks that are generated on the scene. The object of the comparative study are three Greek works: Elektra by Sophocles, Iphigenia Among the Taurians by Euripides and The Eumenides by Aeschylus, against three modern Spanish dramas: Luces de bohemia by Valle-Inclán, Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba by García Lorca hosted in the Drama Corpora Project (DraCor). Graph visualization and analysis are applied for their digital study.

A study of Lope's religious plays and their reflection of the theocentric world of seventeenth-century Spain.Lope de Vega's religious plays are a distinctive part of his output, but little scholarly work is available on them. This study focuses on five plays, La hermosa Ester, the Isidro plays, Lo fingido verdadero and La buena guarda. Within the context of the seventeenth-century stage, Canning examines Lope's manipulation of religious material, and his treatment of socio-literary themes - love, the role of women - and the way in which theyare employed to generate audience reception. She considers the relationship between religious drama and metatheatre, focusing on Lope's techniques for highlighting the illusory nature of life and the relationship between lo verdadero and lo divino, concepts which lie at the heart of the theocentric world view of seventeenth-century Spain. The conflicting imperatives of human and divine love and the issue of identity are features of all of theplays. And she shows that the interplay between illusion and reality and the relationship between playwright and audience are crucial to Lope's dramatic output. ELAINE CANNING lectures in Spanish at the University of Wales, Bangor.

Emboldened by their success in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Nationalist ideologues sought to revitalize the stagnant Spanish theater and promote values associated with the newly formed authoritarian regime. The memory and restaging of seventeenth-century comedias became a crucial part of this project that focused particularly on Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna, a history play that dramatizes a village’s fifteenth-century rebellion against a tyrannical overlord. The definitive performance of Fuente Ovejuna during the early years of Franco’s dictatorship, a production directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena at the Teatro Español in 1944, represented the culmination of the right’s struggle to regenerate the theater. By adopting a fascist aesthetic and reinforcing the regime’s political legitimacy through history, Luca de Tena’s production captured its contemporary moment and signaled a possible solution to the theatrical crisis, one that blended historiography, aesthetics, and politics.

Este artículo analiza once textos teatrales de dramaturgas contemporáneas publicadas en España que abordan la migración. El corpus se centra en el espacio dramático como campo de batalla, en la intersección entre lo social y lo teatral. Dicho espacio se configura relacional y performativamente, reproduciendo tensiones políticas, sociales y humanas inherentes al movimiento migratorio. El teatro escenifica y critica las prácticas de control y exclusión estatal mediante metáforas espaciales como mares, muros y fronteras, que simbolizan los múltiples obstáculos enfrentados por las personas migrantes. Argumentamos que el teatro es una plataforma clave para visibilizar y cuestionar las dinámicas de poder, dramatizando luchas por pertenencia y reconocimiento.

This article studies how independent theater in 1970s Spain challenges the hegemonic narrative of the Spanish transition to democracy as a negotiated and nonconfrontational process. Focusing on four case studies of highly successful plays, it argues that theater offered a space for dissent and for debating the process of democratization. Using archival material and oral sources, it proposes to study what Kate Elswit calls “archives of watching” from testimonies of actors and audience members in order to problematize the memories of the performances. Moreover, examples of non-textual theater studied in this article cast new light on the debates about democracy and participation in the Spanish transition to democracy.

Iñigo Rodríguez-Claro and Carlota Gaviño of Grumelot Compañía Teatral staged a version of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño. Their version, conceived as \"una reflexión sobre nuestra convivencia con el mundo de lo virtual. Mundo que, a pesar de ser cada vez más relevante para nuestra existencia, interpretamos como ilusión, como irrealidad, como engaño de los sentidos (o no),\" closely follows Segismundo's own journey of discovery of what is real, and what is not.