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La vida es sueño

Inganni orditi e mistificazioni messe in atto dai detentori del Potere? This play was first published in the 's in Spain. The translation I read at Project Gutenberg was published in The introduction by the translator included this information: A note by Hartzenbusch in the last edition of the drama published at Madrid , tells that "La Vida es Sueno", is founded on a story which turns out to be substantially the same as that with which English students are familiar as the foundation of the famous Induction to the "Taming of the Shrew".

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A frenzy, an illusion, A shadow, a delirium, a fiction. The same applies to the graciosos: It has been added to my Someday list now, though. I enjoyed the play, but I would like to read it in the original Spanish someday if possible. This play is wrote in a way that once you begin reading the text is like an old song and you find its rhyming works very well.

Calderon found This play was first published in the 's in Spain. Calderon found it however in a different work from that in which Shakespeare met with it, or rather his predecessor, the anonymous author of "The Taming of a Shrew", whose work supplied to Shakespeare the materials of his own comedy.

It has been added to my Someday list now, though. I will want to read that 'famous Induction' for myself!

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Oct 10, Nina rated it it was amazing Shelves: I'm not usually so much impressed by theatre plays, but this one,this one was very good. I read it with so much curiosity and the plot is really interesting. One such ideological adaptation of a key play in the Spanish classical repertoire was produced in New York City in The New York Times critic D.

His play should translate easily into captivating present-day theater. Initially, prejudice does not seem to be the cause of neglect, for it does not apply to other areas of Spanish culture. Cervantes, who is placed by Bloom at the center of the Western canon with Shakespeare, occupies a similar position in the British and North American intellectual world, as attested by the two recent translations of Don Quixote Rutherford; Grossman.

Perhaps the best way to begin the search for an answer is with the book Spanish Influence on English Literature , published in London in Reverie and speculation, cogitation with oneself, musing on things seen, are the natural bent of the English nature. An Englishman wants to get at the springs that turn the human wheels of life round; he wants to understand the works, to sound the reasons for action.

The Spaniards, like most semi-Latin peoples, care little for that. They wish to see and participate in the movement itself; to talk, to enjoy the surface of things whilst they may: What precisely makes it more profound? A Guide for Actors and Students. I do not believe it will be possible to find a similar title in the extensive bibliography on Spanish Golden Age drama. Because for the great majority of specialists in the field—and I include in this category actors and theater directors inand outside Spain—characters in Spanish classical drama are stereotypes, abstractions, and personified qualities, rather than true, rounded dramatic figures.

This belief goes back at least years to , when George Ticknor, first professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, proclaimed that one of the fundamental principles in the theater of Lope de Vega,. Thus, the characters are a matter evidently of inferior moment with him; so that the idea of exhibiting a single passion giving a consistent direction to all the energies of a strong will, as in the case of Richard the Third, or, as in the case of Macbeth [.

His categorical assertion seems to have been based on his reading of at most a dozen plays, one of which, La estrella de Sevilla , we now know not to have been written by Lope de Vega. Exactly half a century later, in , Hume further fueled the myth that the characters in Spanish classical plays are stereotypes. The same applies to the graciosos: A third and far more damaging contribution to this myth of characterization was made half a century later, when Alexander Parker published The Approach to the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age in But if an actor is assigned a role even before rehearsals begin, that character cannot surprise the audience with its individuality, humanity, or originality.

He or she will be subordinate to the exigencies of the plot, to the illustration of some aspect of the theme, to the fate assigned by dramatic convention, and will fail to give the spectators the illusion that they are seeing a real person on stage. If Casa is right, then Spanish classical drama is indeed a theater of puppets, of actors wearing invisible masks, of abstractions speaking in verse.

Why should Spanish classical theater be given such treatment? A possible explanation is that Ticknor, Hume, and Parker are right; that is to say, that there are not, aside perhaps from Don Juan, true characters in Spanish seventeenth-century drama. But is it plausible that such a creative, diverse, and popular theater could have succeeded in attracting audiences for well over four centuries without lifelike characters?

Are not characters the essence of drama?

Or put another way, is it possible to communicate emotions of fear, pain, shame, pride, honor, revenge, love, and despair through puppetlike characters? But I believe that there is another, perhaps more powerful, reason: Yet, audiences continue to identify with many of them. I would say that the scholarship of Spanish Golden Age drama has jumped from the scholasticism of the thematicstructural approach—an approach that believes that reason alone can explain all without resorting to observation and experimentation, that is to say, to the staging of plays—to the mannerism and baroquism of poststructuralist and post-modernist approaches.

Johnson to Auden, Browning, and others—that studied him as an authentic dramatic character—half a wild man, half a sea beast, but one with, as Bloom argues, legitimate pathos Shakespeare Golden Age characters have been transmogrified into abstractions, signs, and aberrations before they were given the opportunity to inform us of their humanity. Does Spanish art offer realism and humanism in all except the theater? Fortunately, it is now possible to explode the myth of Spanish classical theater.

The fact that actors as well as directors approached the text believing in the truth of the characters and therefore managed to portray them as genuine human beings. To what do we owe this method of acting? Probably to the widespread belief, encouraged by some scholars both in Spain and outside Spain, that Golden Age drama is more interested in themes, religion, kingship, and ideology than in human nature; that it is a theater of ideas rather than characters.

La vida es sueño (Clásicos españoles) (Spanish Edition)

La vida es sueño

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