Libros de investigación/Scholarly Books by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Diversas reseñas en pdf se pueden consultar en el dossier abajo. Con gusto envío un pdf del libro... more Diversas reseñas en pdf se pueden consultar en el dossier abajo. Con gusto envío un pdf del libro a los que no tengan acceso a una buena biblioteca. (A selection of reviews in pdf is bundled below.)
Contributing author, co-curator, and one of the original NEH grant writers for the show, with ent... more Contributing author, co-curator, and one of the original NEH grant writers for the show, with entries on the late album drawings and the etching and aquatint series called the Caprichos enfáticos and the Disparates: pp. 238-256, 303-304, 307-332, 334-339, 343-371, 380-386 of the exhibition catalogue scanned here. I was also responsible for the translations of the essays and entries from Spanish and French in the English-language edition of the catalogue (see the translation subsection below).
The research catalogue was designed to situate Goya's prodigiously varied works across media in relation to Spanish enlightened and (from 1812) liberal currents, to which he gave dramatic visual form by imagining their implications in the starkest terms. We were especially attuned to the enigmatic iconography of his works on paper (prints and drawings), frequently approached in isolation from the Spanish milieu as projections of a tormented psyche and/or as harbingers of Romantic or modern angst. The fear that art will be cheapened by politics to a simple-minded allegory, sermon, or caricature keeps some from recognizing that milquetoast bromides such as "man's inhumanity to man" often veil crimes by actual persons with names who believe their ideals license them to steal, kill, or rape; and that such shibboleths, presented as aesthetically or morally universal and therefore superior, are sometimes evasions of responsibility. In art historical scholarship about this period Hogarth’s on-the-nose satirical style is the typical bugbear.
We were keen to show that the distinction between a satirical view that looks down from a morally certain vantage point and a more ambiguous one that implicates the viewer leaves a lot of middle ground unaccounted for. A great artist’s outrage at injustices, political or otherwise, can fuel great art. And with the so-called Caprichos enfáticos Goya did not shy away from describing them first of all and explicitly as the fatal consequences of Napoleon´s bloody war in Spain: not war or human perfidy in general but that particular leader’s brutally destructive invasion and its lethal consequences in the artist’s homeland. Scholars on Goya sometimes seem to prefer to blame the victims (as if Napoleon’s meritocratic reforms in France were the primary motive for—or could excuse—his nakedly power-grabbing onslaught in Spain) or adopt an equidistance that is not his (as if doing what it takes to defend what is yours puts you on the same moral plane as rampaging invaders). Or else they make him out to be implausibly aloof from a uniformly benighted people rather than the artistically magnified expression of a complex, dynamic society’s deepest conflicts. Since "enlightened" persons always and everywhere are a minority, and in any case inconsistently rational, it was clear to us that only a persistent orientalizing strain of Black Legend assumptions about Spain could take for granted that English, French, or German societies (often standing in for an improbably homogeneous and idealized “Europe”) should be identified by their most forward-thinking representatives at their best while a Goya (like earlier, for instance, a Cervantes) could only be regarded as an anomaly. This is to believe in miracles. It is also to perpetuate what in most other contexts would be recognized as an offensive prejudice, with well-known historical roots in political and religious rivalries—a refusal to recognize Spanish society’s heterogeneity, another way of saying its humanity. In a word, that whatever we take to be Goya's sensibility could not have flourished in isolation.
One reason explored in the catalogue for this tendency to isolate Goya intellectually and politically in Spain is a failure to distinguish between collaborationist “afrancesados” (meaning “gallicized” sympathizers) and Spanish liberals, responsible for drafting the epochal Cádiz Constitution of 1812 while that great port city—entrepôt for New World trade—was under siege by the French. The 1812 Constitution’s suppression in 1814 and then again in 1823, owing in part first to English and then to French meddling in the conflict between Spanish liberals and so-called “serviles” (or conservatives), would stoke the American wars of independence precipitated by the French invasion of Spain in 1808. Many Spanish liberals might have been culturally “afrancesados” (or Francophiles) but politically, especially after the bloody invasion, looting, and imposition at gunpoint of the 1808 Bonapartist Bayonne constitution (rubber-stamped by a rump Spanish Cortes or parliament), were decidedly not. And the failure to distinguish these senses, if usually naive, is not politically innocent as conservatives since 1814 (and most especially under the Franco regime) have sought to tar Spanish liberalism with the collaborationist brush.
When the show opened (in 1988 in Madrid, 1989 in Boston and New York), it was news to many in the Anglophone world that 18th-century Spanish society had experienced its own vigorous, distinctive Enlightenment movement attentive to the claims of reason, nature, utility, and merit. Its late 18th-century protagonists overlapped substantially with Goya’s circle and had already been richly documented by Edith Helman (in Trasmundo de Goya, 1963) through newspapers of the period as well as literary texts. This broad reform-minded spirit emerged early in the 18th century on the back of a sharp increase in Spain’s economic and demographic vitality. The turn-about became possible once Spaniards were freed from the crushing military commitments of the Habsburg dynasty. Almost everything, at least in theory, was open to question, including the not always virtuous motives for the impulse to question itself or its variable results. This is liable to mislead only if we confuse Enlightenment with a sunny and serenely uncontested march of triumphant reason not just alien to Goya but to a proper understanding of a period with its well-documented dark (that is, persistently irrational) side, its awareness of the dark side of reason itself, and the movement’s shortcomings and enemies everywhere. That Janus-faced Enlightenment made itself felt, for instance, in the coexistence of Goya’s court portraiture and bucolic tapestry cartoons with the corrosive satire of the Caprichos and the early album drawings—well before the savageries unleashed by the French invasion and the horrors of political reaction.
In 1988, again when the show opened, many had little idea of an even more vigorous if unstable period of parliamentary rule in Spain from 1820 to 1823 and then again from 1833 to the 1920s inspired by the 1812 Constitution, with corresponding cultural expressions of a high order. Even the Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the earliest political use in English of the terms liberal and liberalism emerged from this period in Spain, associated with proponents of constitutional monarchy against both the absolutist Bourbon Crown and the Napoleonic invaders. (To that point Whig, in contrast to the conservative Tory party, had been the term of choice in England.) Spanish liberals were regarded as a radical threat by the likes of Metternich and Wellington (who backed the vile, absolutist Ferdinand VII, as the restored French monarchy would do again in 1823) in a period of reaction against the fallout of the French Revolution by the great powers grouped in the so-called Holy League. This prompted a second French invasion of Spain in 1823, to reimpose Ferdinand VII at the expense of the constitutional regime recovered by military leaders in 1820. This liberal restoration had followed nearly yearly uprisings from 1814 against Ferdinand’s absolutist reign, with widespread but by no means undivided popular support. The army’s sympathies with the liberal regime are surprising only if we forget it had been among the earliest Old Regime institutions to (at least sometimes) reward talent and not just family connections; also that Ferdinand’s reaction favored conservative regular officers and soldiers at the expense of irregular, often commoner former guerrilla fighters.
In a recurring historical paradox that was to play out later with respect to US interference in its neighbors’s affairs, Goya left for Bordeaux in 1824 because of a French invasion that toppled the liberal Spanish regime and made life more difficult for the free-spirited in Spain than in France.
While respecting Goya’s stubborn idiosyncrasy, we set out to understand his genius more fully in dialogue with his compatriots during this extraordinarily transformative and still often misconstrued period of Spanish history. Given the unflinching honesty and moral integrity of Goya’s ways of looking, this approach helped us recognize how the artist’s relentless formal experimentation and virtuosity—expressions of vitality—enable viewers to face a tragic view of life squarely and not despair.
Reseñas de mis libros/Reviews of My Books by Michael Armstrong-Roche
El dossier se abre con Adobe después de bajar y contiene diversas reseñas. (The bundle contains p... more El dossier se abre con Adobe después de bajar y contiene diversas reseñas. (The bundle contains pdfs of multiple reviews that can be opened with Adobe after downloading.)
Capítulos y artículos/Chapters and Articles by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Boletín de la Biblioteca Menéndez Pelayo, vol. 99, no. 2 («Miguel de Cervantes: más allá de la obra maestra»), José Montero Reguera y María Zerari (coords), pp. 55-91, 2023
Para ver el número monográfico completo («Miguel de Cervantes: más allá de la obra maestra»), en ... more Para ver el número monográfico completo («Miguel de Cervantes: más allá de la obra maestra»), en acceso abierto, pinchar aquí (to consult the entire special issue on Cervantes's works aside from Don Quixote, with open access, click here): https://publicaciones.sociedadmenendezpelayo.es/BBMP/issue/view/29. Resumen y palabras clave en español (the abstract and key words in English are pasted below): Desde hace 40 años una eclosión crítica en la filología clásica internacional ha recuperado dimensiones insospechadas de las Etiópicas de Heliodoro. Aprovecho esta mirada renovada para resaltar aspectos sorprendentes del diálogo creativo que Cervantes entabla con la novela griega. Por una parte el juego con la voz narrativa nos ofrece dos propuestas muy distintas de la relación de las fuentes con la historia contada y el papel de la divina providencia. Por otra parte, aunque es notoria la impronta teatral en ambas obras, se manifiesta de manera muy diferente, desde la formulación del desenlace matrimonial hasta la caracterización femenina y la incorporación de historias secundarias. Es especialmente llamativo el muy variado sentido que se da a las maravillas y la oculta filosofía. En particular, trazar su uso moral o simbólico en Persiles y Sigismunda nos puede devolver una imagen más rica de personajes que a menudo se perciben como planos porque sus perfiles no responden a paradigmas decimonónicos de la caracterización. Palabras clave: Cervantes. Heliodoro. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. Las Etiópicas. La voz narrativa. La divina providencia. La teatralidad. El protagonismo femenino. La interioridad en la novela moderna. (Abstract: In the last 40 years a critical revolution led by scholars of Classics around the world has recovered previously-unsuspected dimensions of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica. I draw on this renewed approach to highlight striking aspects of Cervantes’s creative dialogue with the Greek novel. On the one hand the play with the narrative voice offers us two very distinct conceptions of the relation between each “history” as narrated and its putative sources as well as the respective roles of divine providence. On the other hand, although the drama left a conspicuous mark in both novels, it takes very different forms—from the formulation of the marriage plot to the portrayal of female characters and the incorporation of secondary episodes. The quite varied meanings lent to marvels and occult philosophy is especially striking. In particular, tracking their moral or symbolic use in Persiles y Sigismunda can yield us a richer image of characters that are often perceived as “flat” because their construction does not answer to 19th-century paradigms of “rounded” characterization. Key Words: Cervantes. Heliodorus. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. The Aethiopica. Narrative voice. Divine providence. Theatricality. Female protagonism. Interiority in the modern novel.)
The Oxford Handbook of Cervantes, ed. Aaron Kahn, 2021
Oxford Handbook chapter in English on Cervantes’s late masterpiece, Los trabajos de Persiles y Si... more Oxford Handbook chapter in English on Cervantes’s late masterpiece, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Batihoja, coords. Randi Lise Davenport e Isabel Lozano-Renieblas, 2019
Las paradojas de Persiles y Sigismunda (con Don Quijote y Viaje del Parnaso)
Cervantes' Persiles and the Travails of Romance, ed. Marina Brownlee, 2019
Cervantes y los mares, ed. María Fernanda de Abreu, 2019
A petición de la coordinadora del libro, la profesora María Fernanda de Abreu, se trata de una ve... more A petición de la coordinadora del libro, la profesora María Fernanda de Abreu, se trata de una versión actualizada de un anterior artículo titulado "Un replanteamiento paradoxográfico...." (2011). El pdf de ese otro artículo se puede ver abajo.
Revista de Occidente, coords. Isabel Lozano-Renieblas y Antonio García Berrio, 2017
La mirada lucianesca en el Persiles
eHumanista Cervantes no. 5, ed. Mercedes Alcalá Galán, 2016
Ironías de la ejemplaridad, milagros del entretenimiento en el Persiles (Feliciana de la Voz, Per... more Ironías de la ejemplaridad, milagros del entretenimiento en el Persiles (Feliciana de la Voz, Persiles III.2-6.447-484)
Ortodoxia y heterodoxia en Cervantes, ed. Carmen Rivero Iglesias, 2011
Border Interrogations: Questioning Spanish Frontiers, eds. Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday , 2008
This article was reprinted in slightly abbreviated form in Barbara Fuchs, ed., Norton Critical Ed... more This article was reprinted in slightly abbreviated form in Barbara Fuchs, ed., Norton Critical Editions: The Golden Age of Spanish Drama (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), pp. 547-65.
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, special issue ed. Jacques Lezra, 2005
Imperial Theater of War: Republican Virtues under Siege in Cervantes's 'Numancia'
Peregrinamente peregrinos, Actas del Quinto Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Cervantistas, Jan 1, 2004
Traducciones/Translations by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Goya: Order and Disorder Boston Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition Catalogue, 2014
Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment Exhibition Catalogue, Museo del Prado, Metropolitan Museum of New York, and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1989
Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment Exhibition Catalogue Museo del Prado, Metropolitan Museum of New York, and Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 1989
Translation from French of Jeannine Baticle essay on Goya
Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Boston Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition Catalogue, 1987
Translation from German of Josua Bruyn essay on Dutch landscape painting
Reseñas y homenajes/Reviews and Tributes by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Renaissance Quarterly Volume LXXIV, no. 3, pp. 990-91, 2021
Comparto este pdf porque me pareció el programa en homenaje a la profesora Mary Gaylord organizad... more Comparto este pdf porque me pareció el programa en homenaje a la profesora Mary Gaylord organizado por Felipe Valencia y Ricardo Padrón especialmente original por varios motivos. Nos reunimos sendos exalumnos en mayo de 2018 en Harvard con motivo de su jubilación. La idea era hablar sobre nuestros proyectos actuales dejando tiempo sobre todo para el diálogo que siempre ha caracterizado el trato de una profesora que buscaba fomentar nuestra independencia intelectual y no una estela de «discípulos». Se puede ver la diversidad de sensibilidades, procedencias, temas y acercamientos en el programa.
Lo más llamativo fue que los organizadores nos pidieron escoger el artículo de Mary que más nos había marcado y escribir una sinopsis que lo contextualizara y comentara. Además de compartir esas lecturas con Mary, el objetivo era eventualmente publicar los artículos seleccionados con nuestros comentarios. En un momento en que la avalancha bibliográfica amenaza con enterrar cosas valiosas (el aún no reconocido problema de la sostenibilidad y degradación del ecosistema intelectual universitario en modo fábrica descontrolado), me parece una manera ejemplar de rescatar, digerir y difundir aportaciones dispersas.
Por ello he incluido en el mismo documento el programa, la lista de artículos seleccionados por los alumnos de Mary y mi sinopsis de un artículo que ofrece una potente y aún vigente manera de entender la relación entre la preceptiva y la creación literaria (en este caso de don Quijote). El reto planteado era no exceder una página a un espacio, lo cual explica la compresión pero quizá también su valor orientativo.
El programa (sin la bibliografía selecta y la sinopsis) también se puede ver en este enlace: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/event/retirement-celebration-mary-gaylord-location-tba-may-4-and-may-5th-fri-and-sat
(I share this pdf because I thought the retirement tribute to professor Mary Gaylord organized by Felipe Valencia and Ricardo Padrón especially original for several reasons. A number of former students came together in May of 2018 at Harvard on the occasion of her retirement. The idea was to talk about our current projects, allowing time especially for the kind of conversation that has always characterized the style of a professor who sought to stimulate intellectual independence rather than create an army of “disciples.” It’s easy to see the diversity of sensibilities, origins, themes, and approaches in the program.
The most unusual feature of the occasion was that we were asked to choose the one article by Mary that had left the most indelible mark and to write a précis that contextualized and commented on it. In addition to sharing these readings with Mary, the aim eventually was to publish the selected articles with our commentaries. At a time when the bibliographic avalanche threatens to bury valuable work (the still-unacknowledged problem of the sustainability and degradation of the academic intellectual ecosystem in unbridled factory mode), I regard it as a model for how to rescue, digest, and share scattered contributions.
For that reason I have included in the same scan the event program, the list of articles chosen by Mary’s former students, and my précis of a piece that offers a powerful and still valuable way to understand the relation between poetics and precept (or, as we might call it, theory) and literary creation (in this case, of Don Quijote). The assignment came with a challenge: not to exceed a single-spaced page, which explains the compression but also perhaps its value as an orientation.
The program (without the selected bibliography and précis) can also be seen at this link: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/event/retirement-celebration-mary-gaylord-location-tba-may-4-and-may-5th-fri-and-sat)
Uploads
Libros de investigación/Scholarly Books by Michael Armstrong-Roche
The research catalogue was designed to situate Goya's prodigiously varied works across media in relation to Spanish enlightened and (from 1812) liberal currents, to which he gave dramatic visual form by imagining their implications in the starkest terms. We were especially attuned to the enigmatic iconography of his works on paper (prints and drawings), frequently approached in isolation from the Spanish milieu as projections of a tormented psyche and/or as harbingers of Romantic or modern angst. The fear that art will be cheapened by politics to a simple-minded allegory, sermon, or caricature keeps some from recognizing that milquetoast bromides such as "man's inhumanity to man" often veil crimes by actual persons with names who believe their ideals license them to steal, kill, or rape; and that such shibboleths, presented as aesthetically or morally universal and therefore superior, are sometimes evasions of responsibility. In art historical scholarship about this period Hogarth’s on-the-nose satirical style is the typical bugbear.
We were keen to show that the distinction between a satirical view that looks down from a morally certain vantage point and a more ambiguous one that implicates the viewer leaves a lot of middle ground unaccounted for. A great artist’s outrage at injustices, political or otherwise, can fuel great art. And with the so-called Caprichos enfáticos Goya did not shy away from describing them first of all and explicitly as the fatal consequences of Napoleon´s bloody war in Spain: not war or human perfidy in general but that particular leader’s brutally destructive invasion and its lethal consequences in the artist’s homeland. Scholars on Goya sometimes seem to prefer to blame the victims (as if Napoleon’s meritocratic reforms in France were the primary motive for—or could excuse—his nakedly power-grabbing onslaught in Spain) or adopt an equidistance that is not his (as if doing what it takes to defend what is yours puts you on the same moral plane as rampaging invaders). Or else they make him out to be implausibly aloof from a uniformly benighted people rather than the artistically magnified expression of a complex, dynamic society’s deepest conflicts. Since "enlightened" persons always and everywhere are a minority, and in any case inconsistently rational, it was clear to us that only a persistent orientalizing strain of Black Legend assumptions about Spain could take for granted that English, French, or German societies (often standing in for an improbably homogeneous and idealized “Europe”) should be identified by their most forward-thinking representatives at their best while a Goya (like earlier, for instance, a Cervantes) could only be regarded as an anomaly. This is to believe in miracles. It is also to perpetuate what in most other contexts would be recognized as an offensive prejudice, with well-known historical roots in political and religious rivalries—a refusal to recognize Spanish society’s heterogeneity, another way of saying its humanity. In a word, that whatever we take to be Goya's sensibility could not have flourished in isolation.
One reason explored in the catalogue for this tendency to isolate Goya intellectually and politically in Spain is a failure to distinguish between collaborationist “afrancesados” (meaning “gallicized” sympathizers) and Spanish liberals, responsible for drafting the epochal Cádiz Constitution of 1812 while that great port city—entrepôt for New World trade—was under siege by the French. The 1812 Constitution’s suppression in 1814 and then again in 1823, owing in part first to English and then to French meddling in the conflict between Spanish liberals and so-called “serviles” (or conservatives), would stoke the American wars of independence precipitated by the French invasion of Spain in 1808. Many Spanish liberals might have been culturally “afrancesados” (or Francophiles) but politically, especially after the bloody invasion, looting, and imposition at gunpoint of the 1808 Bonapartist Bayonne constitution (rubber-stamped by a rump Spanish Cortes or parliament), were decidedly not. And the failure to distinguish these senses, if usually naive, is not politically innocent as conservatives since 1814 (and most especially under the Franco regime) have sought to tar Spanish liberalism with the collaborationist brush.
When the show opened (in 1988 in Madrid, 1989 in Boston and New York), it was news to many in the Anglophone world that 18th-century Spanish society had experienced its own vigorous, distinctive Enlightenment movement attentive to the claims of reason, nature, utility, and merit. Its late 18th-century protagonists overlapped substantially with Goya’s circle and had already been richly documented by Edith Helman (in Trasmundo de Goya, 1963) through newspapers of the period as well as literary texts. This broad reform-minded spirit emerged early in the 18th century on the back of a sharp increase in Spain’s economic and demographic vitality. The turn-about became possible once Spaniards were freed from the crushing military commitments of the Habsburg dynasty. Almost everything, at least in theory, was open to question, including the not always virtuous motives for the impulse to question itself or its variable results. This is liable to mislead only if we confuse Enlightenment with a sunny and serenely uncontested march of triumphant reason not just alien to Goya but to a proper understanding of a period with its well-documented dark (that is, persistently irrational) side, its awareness of the dark side of reason itself, and the movement’s shortcomings and enemies everywhere. That Janus-faced Enlightenment made itself felt, for instance, in the coexistence of Goya’s court portraiture and bucolic tapestry cartoons with the corrosive satire of the Caprichos and the early album drawings—well before the savageries unleashed by the French invasion and the horrors of political reaction.
In 1988, again when the show opened, many had little idea of an even more vigorous if unstable period of parliamentary rule in Spain from 1820 to 1823 and then again from 1833 to the 1920s inspired by the 1812 Constitution, with corresponding cultural expressions of a high order. Even the Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the earliest political use in English of the terms liberal and liberalism emerged from this period in Spain, associated with proponents of constitutional monarchy against both the absolutist Bourbon Crown and the Napoleonic invaders. (To that point Whig, in contrast to the conservative Tory party, had been the term of choice in England.) Spanish liberals were regarded as a radical threat by the likes of Metternich and Wellington (who backed the vile, absolutist Ferdinand VII, as the restored French monarchy would do again in 1823) in a period of reaction against the fallout of the French Revolution by the great powers grouped in the so-called Holy League. This prompted a second French invasion of Spain in 1823, to reimpose Ferdinand VII at the expense of the constitutional regime recovered by military leaders in 1820. This liberal restoration had followed nearly yearly uprisings from 1814 against Ferdinand’s absolutist reign, with widespread but by no means undivided popular support. The army’s sympathies with the liberal regime are surprising only if we forget it had been among the earliest Old Regime institutions to (at least sometimes) reward talent and not just family connections; also that Ferdinand’s reaction favored conservative regular officers and soldiers at the expense of irregular, often commoner former guerrilla fighters.
In a recurring historical paradox that was to play out later with respect to US interference in its neighbors’s affairs, Goya left for Bordeaux in 1824 because of a French invasion that toppled the liberal Spanish regime and made life more difficult for the free-spirited in Spain than in France.
While respecting Goya’s stubborn idiosyncrasy, we set out to understand his genius more fully in dialogue with his compatriots during this extraordinarily transformative and still often misconstrued period of Spanish history. Given the unflinching honesty and moral integrity of Goya’s ways of looking, this approach helped us recognize how the artist’s relentless formal experimentation and virtuosity—expressions of vitality—enable viewers to face a tragic view of life squarely and not despair.
Reseñas de mis libros/Reviews of My Books by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Capítulos y artículos/Chapters and Articles by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Traducciones/Translations by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Reseñas y homenajes/Reviews and Tributes by Michael Armstrong-Roche
Lo más llamativo fue que los organizadores nos pidieron escoger el artículo de Mary que más nos había marcado y escribir una sinopsis que lo contextualizara y comentara. Además de compartir esas lecturas con Mary, el objetivo era eventualmente publicar los artículos seleccionados con nuestros comentarios. En un momento en que la avalancha bibliográfica amenaza con enterrar cosas valiosas (el aún no reconocido problema de la sostenibilidad y degradación del ecosistema intelectual universitario en modo fábrica descontrolado), me parece una manera ejemplar de rescatar, digerir y difundir aportaciones dispersas.
Por ello he incluido en el mismo documento el programa, la lista de artículos seleccionados por los alumnos de Mary y mi sinopsis de un artículo que ofrece una potente y aún vigente manera de entender la relación entre la preceptiva y la creación literaria (en este caso de don Quijote). El reto planteado era no exceder una página a un espacio, lo cual explica la compresión pero quizá también su valor orientativo.
El programa (sin la bibliografía selecta y la sinopsis) también se puede ver en este enlace: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/event/retirement-celebration-mary-gaylord-location-tba-may-4-and-may-5th-fri-and-sat
(I share this pdf because I thought the retirement tribute to professor Mary Gaylord organized by Felipe Valencia and Ricardo Padrón especially original for several reasons. A number of former students came together in May of 2018 at Harvard on the occasion of her retirement. The idea was to talk about our current projects, allowing time especially for the kind of conversation that has always characterized the style of a professor who sought to stimulate intellectual independence rather than create an army of “disciples.” It’s easy to see the diversity of sensibilities, origins, themes, and approaches in the program.
The most unusual feature of the occasion was that we were asked to choose the one article by Mary that had left the most indelible mark and to write a précis that contextualized and commented on it. In addition to sharing these readings with Mary, the aim eventually was to publish the selected articles with our commentaries. At a time when the bibliographic avalanche threatens to bury valuable work (the still-unacknowledged problem of the sustainability and degradation of the academic intellectual ecosystem in unbridled factory mode), I regard it as a model for how to rescue, digest, and share scattered contributions.
For that reason I have included in the same scan the event program, the list of articles chosen by Mary’s former students, and my précis of a piece that offers a powerful and still valuable way to understand the relation between poetics and precept (or, as we might call it, theory) and literary creation (in this case, of Don Quijote). The assignment came with a challenge: not to exceed a single-spaced page, which explains the compression but also perhaps its value as an orientation.
The program (without the selected bibliography and précis) can also be seen at this link: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/event/retirement-celebration-mary-gaylord-location-tba-may-4-and-may-5th-fri-and-sat)
The research catalogue was designed to situate Goya's prodigiously varied works across media in relation to Spanish enlightened and (from 1812) liberal currents, to which he gave dramatic visual form by imagining their implications in the starkest terms. We were especially attuned to the enigmatic iconography of his works on paper (prints and drawings), frequently approached in isolation from the Spanish milieu as projections of a tormented psyche and/or as harbingers of Romantic or modern angst. The fear that art will be cheapened by politics to a simple-minded allegory, sermon, or caricature keeps some from recognizing that milquetoast bromides such as "man's inhumanity to man" often veil crimes by actual persons with names who believe their ideals license them to steal, kill, or rape; and that such shibboleths, presented as aesthetically or morally universal and therefore superior, are sometimes evasions of responsibility. In art historical scholarship about this period Hogarth’s on-the-nose satirical style is the typical bugbear.
We were keen to show that the distinction between a satirical view that looks down from a morally certain vantage point and a more ambiguous one that implicates the viewer leaves a lot of middle ground unaccounted for. A great artist’s outrage at injustices, political or otherwise, can fuel great art. And with the so-called Caprichos enfáticos Goya did not shy away from describing them first of all and explicitly as the fatal consequences of Napoleon´s bloody war in Spain: not war or human perfidy in general but that particular leader’s brutally destructive invasion and its lethal consequences in the artist’s homeland. Scholars on Goya sometimes seem to prefer to blame the victims (as if Napoleon’s meritocratic reforms in France were the primary motive for—or could excuse—his nakedly power-grabbing onslaught in Spain) or adopt an equidistance that is not his (as if doing what it takes to defend what is yours puts you on the same moral plane as rampaging invaders). Or else they make him out to be implausibly aloof from a uniformly benighted people rather than the artistically magnified expression of a complex, dynamic society’s deepest conflicts. Since "enlightened" persons always and everywhere are a minority, and in any case inconsistently rational, it was clear to us that only a persistent orientalizing strain of Black Legend assumptions about Spain could take for granted that English, French, or German societies (often standing in for an improbably homogeneous and idealized “Europe”) should be identified by their most forward-thinking representatives at their best while a Goya (like earlier, for instance, a Cervantes) could only be regarded as an anomaly. This is to believe in miracles. It is also to perpetuate what in most other contexts would be recognized as an offensive prejudice, with well-known historical roots in political and religious rivalries—a refusal to recognize Spanish society’s heterogeneity, another way of saying its humanity. In a word, that whatever we take to be Goya's sensibility could not have flourished in isolation.
One reason explored in the catalogue for this tendency to isolate Goya intellectually and politically in Spain is a failure to distinguish between collaborationist “afrancesados” (meaning “gallicized” sympathizers) and Spanish liberals, responsible for drafting the epochal Cádiz Constitution of 1812 while that great port city—entrepôt for New World trade—was under siege by the French. The 1812 Constitution’s suppression in 1814 and then again in 1823, owing in part first to English and then to French meddling in the conflict between Spanish liberals and so-called “serviles” (or conservatives), would stoke the American wars of independence precipitated by the French invasion of Spain in 1808. Many Spanish liberals might have been culturally “afrancesados” (or Francophiles) but politically, especially after the bloody invasion, looting, and imposition at gunpoint of the 1808 Bonapartist Bayonne constitution (rubber-stamped by a rump Spanish Cortes or parliament), were decidedly not. And the failure to distinguish these senses, if usually naive, is not politically innocent as conservatives since 1814 (and most especially under the Franco regime) have sought to tar Spanish liberalism with the collaborationist brush.
When the show opened (in 1988 in Madrid, 1989 in Boston and New York), it was news to many in the Anglophone world that 18th-century Spanish society had experienced its own vigorous, distinctive Enlightenment movement attentive to the claims of reason, nature, utility, and merit. Its late 18th-century protagonists overlapped substantially with Goya’s circle and had already been richly documented by Edith Helman (in Trasmundo de Goya, 1963) through newspapers of the period as well as literary texts. This broad reform-minded spirit emerged early in the 18th century on the back of a sharp increase in Spain’s economic and demographic vitality. The turn-about became possible once Spaniards were freed from the crushing military commitments of the Habsburg dynasty. Almost everything, at least in theory, was open to question, including the not always virtuous motives for the impulse to question itself or its variable results. This is liable to mislead only if we confuse Enlightenment with a sunny and serenely uncontested march of triumphant reason not just alien to Goya but to a proper understanding of a period with its well-documented dark (that is, persistently irrational) side, its awareness of the dark side of reason itself, and the movement’s shortcomings and enemies everywhere. That Janus-faced Enlightenment made itself felt, for instance, in the coexistence of Goya’s court portraiture and bucolic tapestry cartoons with the corrosive satire of the Caprichos and the early album drawings—well before the savageries unleashed by the French invasion and the horrors of political reaction.
In 1988, again when the show opened, many had little idea of an even more vigorous if unstable period of parliamentary rule in Spain from 1820 to 1823 and then again from 1833 to the 1920s inspired by the 1812 Constitution, with corresponding cultural expressions of a high order. Even the Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the earliest political use in English of the terms liberal and liberalism emerged from this period in Spain, associated with proponents of constitutional monarchy against both the absolutist Bourbon Crown and the Napoleonic invaders. (To that point Whig, in contrast to the conservative Tory party, had been the term of choice in England.) Spanish liberals were regarded as a radical threat by the likes of Metternich and Wellington (who backed the vile, absolutist Ferdinand VII, as the restored French monarchy would do again in 1823) in a period of reaction against the fallout of the French Revolution by the great powers grouped in the so-called Holy League. This prompted a second French invasion of Spain in 1823, to reimpose Ferdinand VII at the expense of the constitutional regime recovered by military leaders in 1820. This liberal restoration had followed nearly yearly uprisings from 1814 against Ferdinand’s absolutist reign, with widespread but by no means undivided popular support. The army’s sympathies with the liberal regime are surprising only if we forget it had been among the earliest Old Regime institutions to (at least sometimes) reward talent and not just family connections; also that Ferdinand’s reaction favored conservative regular officers and soldiers at the expense of irregular, often commoner former guerrilla fighters.
In a recurring historical paradox that was to play out later with respect to US interference in its neighbors’s affairs, Goya left for Bordeaux in 1824 because of a French invasion that toppled the liberal Spanish regime and made life more difficult for the free-spirited in Spain than in France.
While respecting Goya’s stubborn idiosyncrasy, we set out to understand his genius more fully in dialogue with his compatriots during this extraordinarily transformative and still often misconstrued period of Spanish history. Given the unflinching honesty and moral integrity of Goya’s ways of looking, this approach helped us recognize how the artist’s relentless formal experimentation and virtuosity—expressions of vitality—enable viewers to face a tragic view of life squarely and not despair.
Lo más llamativo fue que los organizadores nos pidieron escoger el artículo de Mary que más nos había marcado y escribir una sinopsis que lo contextualizara y comentara. Además de compartir esas lecturas con Mary, el objetivo era eventualmente publicar los artículos seleccionados con nuestros comentarios. En un momento en que la avalancha bibliográfica amenaza con enterrar cosas valiosas (el aún no reconocido problema de la sostenibilidad y degradación del ecosistema intelectual universitario en modo fábrica descontrolado), me parece una manera ejemplar de rescatar, digerir y difundir aportaciones dispersas.
Por ello he incluido en el mismo documento el programa, la lista de artículos seleccionados por los alumnos de Mary y mi sinopsis de un artículo que ofrece una potente y aún vigente manera de entender la relación entre la preceptiva y la creación literaria (en este caso de don Quijote). El reto planteado era no exceder una página a un espacio, lo cual explica la compresión pero quizá también su valor orientativo.
El programa (sin la bibliografía selecta y la sinopsis) también se puede ver en este enlace: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/event/retirement-celebration-mary-gaylord-location-tba-may-4-and-may-5th-fri-and-sat
(I share this pdf because I thought the retirement tribute to professor Mary Gaylord organized by Felipe Valencia and Ricardo Padrón especially original for several reasons. A number of former students came together in May of 2018 at Harvard on the occasion of her retirement. The idea was to talk about our current projects, allowing time especially for the kind of conversation that has always characterized the style of a professor who sought to stimulate intellectual independence rather than create an army of “disciples.” It’s easy to see the diversity of sensibilities, origins, themes, and approaches in the program.
The most unusual feature of the occasion was that we were asked to choose the one article by Mary that had left the most indelible mark and to write a précis that contextualized and commented on it. In addition to sharing these readings with Mary, the aim eventually was to publish the selected articles with our commentaries. At a time when the bibliographic avalanche threatens to bury valuable work (the still-unacknowledged problem of the sustainability and degradation of the academic intellectual ecosystem in unbridled factory mode), I regard it as a model for how to rescue, digest, and share scattered contributions.
For that reason I have included in the same scan the event program, the list of articles chosen by Mary’s former students, and my précis of a piece that offers a powerful and still valuable way to understand the relation between poetics and precept (or, as we might call it, theory) and literary creation (in this case, of Don Quijote). The assignment came with a challenge: not to exceed a single-spaced page, which explains the compression but also perhaps its value as an orientation.
The program (without the selected bibliography and précis) can also be seen at this link: https://rll.fas.harvard.edu/event/retirement-celebration-mary-gaylord-location-tba-may-4-and-may-5th-fri-and-sat)
Of the three Let's Go books entrusted to me, the 1992 edition for Spain & Portugal was by far the most important not only for personal and professional reasons but also because it was the most in need of a thorough overhaul. Previous editions had tried to cover Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. The implied condescension toward all three countries was undoubtedly inadvertent, but nevertheless real if we remember that whole books were devoted to France, Germany, and Italy with mere nods to neighbors. Bear in mind that as of 2022 Spain's list alone of UNESCO World Heritage Sites is longer than France's. And its prodigious variety of climates, topography, gastronomy, subcultures, immigrant communities, and cultural influences (from North Africa and subsaharan Equatorial Guinea to Latin America and the Philippines, as well as both Atlantic and Mediterranean Europe), a global crossroads since Antiquity, makes it something of a subcontinent. Travel, if not adequately informed and alive to the unexpected, is more likely to close than to open minds. In that light I decided to refocus the book on Spain (as well as Portugal), with a glance across the straits, while lobbying for a Morocco book in its own right.
The 1992 events (Barcelona Summer Olympics, Seville World Fair, and Madrid Cultural Capital of Europe) were an occasion to reframe a picture of Spanish history and culture too long held hostage by demeaning and impoverishing stereotypes. These tend to blame all Spaniards for the sins of their masters or the unfortunately near-universal existence of such historical blights as elite-driven Inquisitions and expulsions, often in service to foreign dynasties and transnational ruling classes, and to ignore (or suppress) major Spanish and Hispanic contributions to American (and global) political and cultural history. To this day how many Americans know the Spanish were as decisive as the French in helping secure the U.S.’s independence from Britain? Besides financing, there was then Spanish Louisiana governor Bernardo de Galvez’s string of victories against the British, thwarting the fleet’s encirclement of the southern colonies—as decisive for the American defeat of the British as Lafayette. So decisive indeed that Congress later distinguished him as one of, to this day, only eight honorary American citizens. Another telling example: the Capitol features a relief portrait plaque of the 13th-century King of Castille, Alfonso the Wise, because his codification of Castillian laws in the vernacular rather than Latin became a model and source for American legal codes. Alfonso’s vast cultural project of translation from Arabic to Castilian, an expansion of what Charles Homer Haskins called the 12th-century Renaissance (centered in Toledo and Paris rather than Italy), enabled ground-breaking work in astronomy, navigation, cartography, medicine, and literature for centuries. Thereafter came the world-altering diffusion of New World crops, medicines, and commodities such as chocolate, tomatoes, potatoes, chile peppers, maize, quinine for malaria, logwood for a vastly cheaper black dye-stuff (then associated with luxury), and the use of the piece of eight or peso as the first international reserve currency till the early 19th century, not least in the US and China.
If travelers are not adequately informed about the past they are likely to misconstrue almost everything they experience in the present. It is hard to remember now that until the 1992 Summer Olympics Barcelona was chiefly known and often dismissed as a somewhat gray commercial and industrial city, sometimes called (like Bilbao) the Pittsburgh or Manchester of Spain. I took every opportunity in this guidebook to draw attention to the progressive legacy of 18th-century enlightened and 19th-century liberal (parliamentary, educational) currents, reforms, and greater or lesser victories for justice. It was impossible to understand Spain's exceptionally dynamic post-Franco cultural and political renaissance (including the Madrid Movida that gave us Almodóvar and later the very early adoption of gay marriage laws, the third country in the world to do so with broad popular support to this day) if previous democratic and progressive experiences that long predated the Second Republic were ignored. I knew from family history how those historical experiences of liberty remained a powerful living collective memory, kept alive by example and oral tradition as well as literature.
That richly documented if not always acknowledged Spanish heterodox, liberal, and republican past helps explain widespread support by the 1920s for such precocious advances as women’s enfranchisement, legalized divorce, and Philosemitism. A symptomatic case of the latter is Rafael Cansinos Assens’s extraordinary trajectory, the man whom Borges insisted to the end of his days was one of the three greatest intellectual forces in his life and whose neglect baffled him. It also helps explain the artistic, literary, educational, and scientific efflorescence that has been called Spain’s Silver Age (ca. 1870-1936), including Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s Nobel-Prize winning foundational work for modern neuroscience; the ground-breaking contributions to philosophy, literary criticism, and other fields of Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and Maria Zambrano; and brilliantly influential gadflies such as Max Aub (close to Buñuel) and Ramon Gomez de la Serna, whose aphoristic humor Gabriel García Marquez cited as an inspiration. Ignorance of this richly contestatory past, often handed down as I saw from experience by under-the-radar women survivors of the Second Republic to their daughters and grand-daughters in post-war Spain, make it very difficult to understand the extraordinary speed of social, political, and economic changes following the death of Franco.
This can be seen everywhere in the 1992 edition from the revamped historical essay in the front matter, to vastly expanded city coverage of Madrid beyond the medieval and Habsburg core (which I have always regarded as one of the great cities of the world), of Barcelona's reinvention of itself, and of Seville's magnificent architectural, artistic, and literary legacy against the grain of its habitual reduction to a debased folklore or the Conquest. It can also be seen in new coverage of overlooked historical gems, including such fascinating urban-planning projects as the vast 18th-century repopulation scheme along the royal road from Andalusia to Madrid called Las Nuevas Poblaciones. The Nuevas Poblaciones included a string of towns—such as La Carlota, La Carolina, and La Luisiana—built according to Enlightenment principles, emphasizing utility (for example) over seigneurial or ecclesiastical privilege. They were settled often by Catholic immigrants from Flanders and Germany, a fact still visible in the local phone books. This inspired and still not adequately recognized historical example of rational planning could now (in 2022) encourage fresh solutions to the demographic decline of large swathes of the rural interior in Spain, called of late with much hand-wringing but few ambitious solutions La España Vacía or Vaciada.
Among this edition’s researcher-writers was Simon Doubleday, who has since had a distinguished career as a scholar of the European Middle Ages. The Acknowledgments page in the front outlines some of the other initiatives undertaken.
I inherited a mature France edition, so my focus was on reframing the Paris coverage as well as the parts of southern France (especially Toulouse, Montauban, and environs) where I had close family connections and a strong memory of place. The Acknowledgments page in the front outlines some of the other initiatives that year.
I considered my major obligation with this California edition to recover and enhance the superb writing of the 1984 edition including contributions by Dan Max, who went on to become a nationally recognized writer for The New Yorker. The Acknowledgments page in the front outlines some of the other initiatives that year.
We were not visible sometimes even in 1st-year orientation materials or virtual-campus tours & were not being used in university recruitment or capital campaigns even though 30% of our majors were also STEM majors. The explosive growth of STEM double-majors in Hispanic Literatures & Cultures was driven in part by medical (& other professional and graduate) schools as well as corporate employers, which have documented for decades the exceptional performance & adaptability of liberal arts graduates in comparison with business or technical peers. This normalized double-major trend with STEM students has provided Wesleyan a distinctive advantage with respect to larger rivals (notably, the private & public Ivies) that will always be able to count on greater laboratory resources. The last straw was to learn some senior administrators thought tenure-track professors in the language departments did not want to teach language, even though virtually all courses at all levels in Spanish are taught in Spanish as are most courses in French and Italian. TT faculty are not generally needed below the 5th-semester Spanish 221 because we found a way to shift demand primarily to the upper level!
As course descriptions are published in English, the key explanation for our success had effectively been rendered invisible even on our own campus: the explicit integration of language, literature & culture from the first day of the elementary level to the most advanced seminar. This commitment to permanent, active work on language mastery was our way around the self-defeating tendency to pit literature against culture & to consider language instruction over after the fourth semester—as if it weren’t the deepest human attribute even native speakers never altogether master. Students want to work on language proficiency at all levels, since they continue to make major gaffes even after study abroad. We also reoriented what we understood by the teaching of literature: making classwork deeply participatory (banishing the deadly lecture), treating film as another genre of literature (like theater, with their visual and performance dimensions) & literature—about everything after all—as the original “interdisciplinary” subject. We work to cultivate our students’s intellectual authority rather than make a spectacle of our own.
Once students know they can count on that commitment to language proficiency, they enthusiastically embrace any challenge & work at the highest intellectual level. Science students often discover a gift for philology, literary interpretation & artistic adaptation. All students love the personal—interpretive, imaginative & creative—side of our focus on literature & film, the small classes (capped at 15), the close work with professors & the intensive attention to writing & public speaking, with the liberating bonus of learning to think through another language. Having grown up with digital devices, undergraduates now recognize their tendency to isolate and addict. They hunger for face-to-face immersion & making things. Great literature, especially if students learn another language while studying it & go abroad, provides mind-blowing inspiration for their own creativity—even just as readers. Trapped in the media- and trivia-saturated present, they respond to the (for them) surprising resourcefulness & diversity of the past. It reminds them the future will be different and, with a little imagination, could be better. The humanities, if taught with a broad & long view, spark the imagination of students no matter what their primary intellectual or professional interests.
Programmed outreach & recruitment (beginning with incoming 1st-years before they pick their courses), notably the presence of all TT faculty in the 5th-semester Spanish 221 course—the first that counts for the major; a crucial occasion to hook students & show them we're not bent on turning them into narrow specialists; & the closest we come to a “methods” course—has been another key factor with equivalent solutions in French & Italian. A 3rd factor is tight-knit integration of our majors with study abroad programs that focus on direct-enrollment courses (with local native speakers rather than Americans), major credit being granted for coursework in a range of fields that develop our core skills (analysis, interpretation, speaking, writing) in Spanish. Wesleyan runs its own programs in Madrid, Paris, and Bologna & has an exchange arrangement with the U. de los Andes in Bogotá. A 4th factor in our early success was the suppression of fixed-course requirements, an administrative road-block, in favor of area & period requirements. A 5th is tight control of cross-listings, limited to study abroad or a couple of electives so we don’t lose student contact with our own faculty in at least 5 courses & wind up with a farmed-out major. A zero-sum game of cross-listings with global studies centers or other departments serves no one: we want to grow enrollments in languages & not just shift them around.
The dean of the arts & humanities (Nicole Stanton) & the interim university provost (Robert Rosenthal) thought the story should be told & encouraged me to share it with the university's periodical, The Wesleyan Connection. Lauren Rubenstein, who wrote the piece, later told me it was the second-most shared article in the periodical’s history. This was an especially gratifying, because unexpected, result. Against the doomsayers, it proved there is deep interest in languages as an intellectual & professional opportunity for all students (e.g., through double-majoring) rather than a sinking ship. It shows American isolationism & the English is Enough syndrome (a form of cultural imperialism rarely acknowledged on American campuses) need not be accepted blindly. It also shows we can reverse the slide in languages by raising rather than lowering standards. This prompted the Zippia request (see the next item) for professional advice to modern-language graduates, offered in the same unapologetic & hopeful spirit.
A final factor in Wesleyan’s unusual success: faced with the invisibility of language departments & our study abroad programs in advising, orientation, & campus tours, a collective of 50 faculty members meets regularly with the Global Studies Center to ensure deep study in another language is promoted as an opportunity for all students in advising, orientation, admissions & fund-raising. Since administrators regularly rotate out of positions and, with them, our hard-won gains in visibility where they count (enrollments & majors), we recognized the need for collective vigilance, tracking, and outreach to faculty, students, and deans.
To reconstruct the key pieces of how we made a language-literature-culture focus work for enrollments & majors, even after a recent dip explained by suspension of study abroad during the pandemic (followed by an encouraging uptick in fall 2024 with 21 junior-class declarations, close to our peak of 25 per class year with an undergrad population of 3000), see our major description (https://www.wesleyan.edu/romance/spanish/about.html). It spells out the logic of the area & period requirements & related-field courses taken in Spanish abroad. Also see the Wesmaps current course offerings (https://owaprod-pub.wesleyan.edu/reg/!wesmaps_page.html?stuid=&facid=NONE&subj_page=SPAN&term=1249). Wesmaps shows actual enrollments & pending petitions for admission. An archive link at the top shows other courses we teach in 2-year cycles, as does our on-line course catalogue. Lively course titles & descriptions are key. Anyone wanting hard evidence, not wishful thinking or bandwagons, will notice we put literature & film unapologetically at the center of course titles, descriptions & graded work—albeit tied always to language learning with a broadly historical & cultural rather than narrowly specialized approach. Most importantly, our courses are participatory at their core & taught in Spanish—no droning lectures! In spring 2025 we’ve filled 6 of 7 seminars (courses over Span 221), with additional petitions.
Benjamin took a course from me on Golden Age Spanish drama, as a result of which he was inspired to translate and direct a Golden Age play for his senior thesis project. I've always thought the so-called "palace comedy" genre, romantic comedy with a political edge (famously, Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano, adapted well for the cinema by PIlar Miró), would have more legs with modern theater audiences than honor drama or history plays such as Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. The genre often features anti-aristocratic satire and the threat of cross-rank marriage, with a subset of plays centered on upstart secretaries who plausibly served a wish-fulfillment fantasy for talented but commoner playwrights (including Lope, Cervantes, Ana Caro and many others) elevated by commercial success on Madrid’s professional stages. To judge by the number of extant plays, palace comedies also happened to be more representative of what Golden Age theater audiences most responded to. As an experiment, I suggested to Benjamin Tirso's clever, high-spirited, and marvellously metatheatrical El vergonzoso en palacio. The audience response, documented by the review linked above, confirmed my intuition beyond our wildest expectation.
One telling sidenote: I noticed in rehearsals that the Wesleyan students cast in the three leading female roles, written as spitfire divas, were playing them demurely as blushing flowers. I asked them why. Their explanation was they just assumed women in this time period would have been self-effacing. I countered that leading ladies were the main draw of the early modern Spanish commercial stage, sometimes as a result paid more than leading men, and that they were often portrayed as intellectually, politically, and even sexually commanding——and rewarded for it. To give them a modern example of women on top in comedy, oddly I found myself unable to come up with a suitable recent American example of an equivalent powerful feminine presence on the screen. So I asked whether they had seen Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story or Bette Davis in All about Eve. Astonishingly, they hadn't! So I said: “Let’s forget about Spanish Golden Age theater for the moment. You need to get in touch with your own movie heritage!”
After watching Hepburn, they turned their performances around 180 degrees and, eventually, brought the house down. It confirmed my sense that Golden Age comedy might still answer to a need as well as a desire. I was moved to find that in the acknowledgments on their program the cast included Katharine Hepburn!