Abstract

This paper offers an approach to the main features and conventions of the burlesque comedy of the Spanish Golden Age, a corpus formed by about fifty parodic plays that were performed during Carnival and on St. John’s Day as part of the court festivals celebrated in the Royal Palace or in the Buen Retiro palace complex. These two features (theatre of Carnival and courtier theatre) are the main key when analyzing these plays. The primary function of these pieces is to provoke laughter within the aulic audience —the king and his noblemen. To achieve this goal, authors of burlesque comedies use all of the resources at hand, including both scenic and verbal humor. The plays are marked by an absurd wit, and they bring on stage a carnivalesque world turned upside-down in which everything (including characters, plots, literary motifs, and dramatic conventions) is grotesquely parodied, brutally degraded, and made comical.

Abstract

Little has been written on La escuela de Celestina y el hidalgo presumido (1620), one of the few comedies penned by Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo. In this essay I read this piece as part of a tradition of parodies of the famous academic exercises known as gallos and vejámenes, so frequent in the universities of the time. Through humorous inversion, Salas leads us to formulate new questions on the role of high culture, on the nature of true knowledge and, ultimately, on the transmission of specific literary myths —a transmission that is here interrupted by the rewriting of the Celestinesque character

Abstract

El «teatro breve», en general, y el «entremés», en particular, cuentan ya con una más que considerable bibliografía. Sin embargo, la crítica ha dedicado poca atención a los «autores de comedias» o actores que ejercieron también de dramaturgos. Entre ellos se encuentra Alonso de Olmedo, famoso por su interpretación del papel de galán, sobre todo en obras de Calderón. Es autor de un considerable número de «bailes» que se representaron en diversas funciones calderonianas, son sus entremeses los que resultan de mayor interés (Píramo y Tisbe, Las locas caseras, La dama toro y El sacristán Chinchilla).«The Actor Alonso de Olmedo: An entremesista in Calderón’s Orbit»The «teatro breve», in general, and the «entremés», in particular, already have a more than considerable amount of bibliography. However, critics have paid little attention to the «autores de comedias» or actors who were also playwrights. Among them is Alonso de Olmedo, who was famous for playing the role of «galán», especially in Calderon’s works. He is the author of a large number of «bailes» that were performed at various Calderonian plays, it is his «entremeses» that are of greater interest (Píramo y Tisbe, Las locas caseras, La dama toro and El sacristán Chinchilla).