Description

Cornell University Press [Published Date: 1988]. Softcover, 416 pp. In very good condition. Glossy red and white paper covers have light bumping to edges and corners and light overall scuffing. Binding tight. Pages clean and unmarked. [From back cover] During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English and Spanish theaters were part of an international flowering of dramatic arts. Although these two national theaters developed separately, both synthesized native popular traditions and learned neoclassical conventions in a way found neither in the more elite French and Italian theater of the period nor in any European drama before or since. Working from a Marxist perspective, Walter Cohen seeks to establish links among individual plays, dramatic genres, theatrical institutions, cultural milieus, and political and economic systems. He argues that Spanish and English drama owed its distinctiveness to the public theaters, especially those in London and Madrid. Emphasizing the ideology of form and paying particular attention to critical, utopian, and subversive elements, Cohen offers important new readings of plays by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Marlowe, Jonson, Calderon, and others.