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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.

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.

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.

En primer lugar, contextualizo Una extraña armonía (1956), pieza apenas analizada de Antonio Buero Vallejo, atendiendo al intento autorial y el proceso de escritura. En segundo lugar, partiendo de las reflexiones del autor acerca de la desmitificación y la creación de nuevos enfoques en torno a los mitos clásicos, ahondo en la reformulación de la historia de Orfeo y Eurídice a través de Pablo y Marina, los protagonistas, la cual, pese a su novedad en el intercambio de los papeles masculino y femenino, mantiene los roles de género tradicionales.

El artículo aborda el estudio de la comedia anónima de la colección Gondomar Los propósitos a partir de su configuración lingüístico-versificatoria —grafías y correspondencias fonéticas, tipos y frecuencia de rimas— conectándola con ciertos aspectos dramatúrgicos definitorios del género, en los albores de la comedia nueva.

This paper proposes a study of contrasts and ironies in Jacinto Benavente's play La ciudad alegre y confiada. They produce stylistic and comical effects that are typical of the Spanish drama in the first decades of the 20th century. However, they also define the ideological structure of the play and justify its outcome. The contrasts and the ironies of this play will be studied in three sections. In the first one, the personal characteristics and roles will be examined. Their contradictions and incoherencies contribute to the unpredictable nature of the play. In the second section, the analysis of the socioeconomic structure of the society will provide the bases for individual and collective conflicts. The last section focuses on the relation between life and death. The key protagonists Crispin and Desterrado are convinced that death is the only way to purify the people and to save their town. Soren Kierkegaard, Wayne Booth and Peter Roster provide the theoretical approaches to irony that will be used in this study.

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.

La datación del repertorio alarconiano sigue representando un reto para todo estudioso que se acerque a su dramaturgia. En este trabajo abordaremos la cronología de composición de La manganilla de Melilla, publicada en 1634 en la Parte segunda de las comedias de Ruiz de Alarcón. A partir de una serie de datos textuales, documentales, métricos y estilométricos, se avanzará una nueva propuesta cronológica para la pieza, distinta de la hipótesis que la crítica ha venido defendiendo hasta ahora acerca de una composición que se remontaría a la primera fase de la producción de este dramaturgo novohispano.