COLT 350 The Comedy: Theater and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Europe

Leah Middlebrook

This course takes a look at the theory, practice and politics of comedy as it was written and performed in seventeenth-century France and Spain. Beginning with a review of the canonical, officially-sanctioned views of theater that were propounded and disseminated by the powerful elites of the French and Spanish Academies, we will consider how writers such as Spanish Lope de Vega and the French comedic genius Molière redefined the genre, changing its rules, and broadening its claims to legitimacy. Generally, before Lope and Molière, comedy was understood as a poor relation, a dramatic form based on the classical plays of Terence and Plautus, and dictated by the rules set out in Aristotle’s Poetics, but always subordinate to tragedy in a strictly-conceived hierarchy of genres (the seventeenth-century was all about hierarchies, after all). Driven partly by pragmatism–the public pays, Lope observed, so you give them what they want–and partly by their understanding of the tremendous literary potential of the comedic, and the tragic-comedic, plot, each of these writers struck powerful chords in the viewing public, thus widening the literary and cultural space for the appreciation of comedy. In this course we will center our focus on Lope and Molière, through study of the theory and the practice of their comedy; however, we will also look beyond and around them, and read comedies written by their contemporaries, in order to broaden our view of comedy in the seventeenth-century. Finally, we will consider the role of comedy in the context of the significant historical and political shifts –absolutism, modernity–which were occurring in the Europe, and in the New World, of Lope and Molière’s day. We will read treatises on comedy, tragedy and theater (Aristotle, Lope, Corneille, Molière); we will also read the major comedies of Lope, Molière, as well as those of certain of their contemporaries–most notably sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Ruiz de Alarcón and Alain-René Lesage. Contemporary critical readings include selections from the writings of Norbert Elias, Althusser, Maravall, as well as a selection of criticism of seventeenth-century theater by contemporary scholars.