Entremeses y mojigangas is the ninety-seventh text added to the burgeoning recovery project directed by Professor Ignacio Arellano since 1992, which is focused on Calderón's autos sacramentales (short religious plays). This volume, like all those that have preceded it in the collection, stands out for being an exhaustive philological critical edition. What makes this volume unique is that it is a compilation of thirteen farces written to accompany the autos sacramentales celebrated during the Corpus Christi festivities in seventeenth-century Spain; most remarkably, in some cases, it is even known which autos were pared with these farces.
This collection is divided into two parts, the prologue and the thirteen texts. A list of variants and an index of notes close the volume, as is the case with all the books belonging to this collection. It is striking that the bibliography mainly gathers sources in Spanish. What's more, few of these sources are from the 2000s. However, I do not believe that this is due to a lack of rigor on the part of the editors; to the contrary, there is a dearth of contemporary studies focusing on the works curated in this collection, or even on entremeses in general, a genre that deserves more visibility within Spanish literary and cultural history. This compilation is, therefore, a significant contribution to the lacuna of our current scholarship, as it puts within our reach a collection of unique plays, written by one of the most iconic Baroque playwrights, of whom there is tantalizingly little known.
As the editors state in their introduction, all the plays are thematically and symbolically related in some way to religious themes and to the corpus, although in a burlesque form. Most of the collection is made up of entremeses that highlight the vices and customs of the time in courtly and noble environments as well as in rural settings. Infidelity, theft, obsession with honor, gluttony, vanity, and false pretensions are prominent topics in the works. Several thematic elements have surprised me as a cultural and literary critic. For example, most of the entremeses present a multicultural context. In “Las lenguas,” multiculturalism resides at the very heart of the plot, highlighted by the different languages and dialects spoken by the characters as well as the multitude of nationalities, ethnic groups, and even regional identities that are displayed and foregrounded. After studying the thirteen works, the reader may visualize the Spanish Peninsula as a cultural mosaic where coexistence seemed to be possible in everyday life. This collection is also an anthropological testimony to the different customs of early modern Spain, as the entremeses present a rich catalogue of foods, music, dances, fashions, professions, trends, objects, and artifacts that lead us to delve deeper into some aspects of Spanish popular culture that are increasingly valued in present-day scholarship.
Finally, the thematic originality of these farces allows the reader to explore the ways in which popular theater gave material form to elements of everyday life on the stage. While much has been written about the staging of comedias (seventeenth-century plays) and courtly theater, much less has been said on the function of props in the entremeses. This is especially important when we try to understand the theatricality in some of the farces in the collection, where the dramatis personae are drinks, stews, or allegorical characters.
The footnotes that accompany each of the texts open a world of erudition to the modern-day scholar and make accessible most of the historical references to the nonspecialist. This volume underscores the idea of Calderón's genius as a writer of farces and, at the same time, leads us to a better understanding of his sometimes highly controversial ideas as a playwright. Contributions such as this tome give us the literary foundation to continue exploring the vast and always surprising history of Spanish Golden Age theater through new lenses while highlighting the value of philology as the cornerstone of new critical and interdisciplinary trends.
