Erin A. Cowling, Esther Fernández, Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas, and Susan Paun de García, eds. La comedia entre mundos: Intersecciones críticas en el teatro de la temprana modernidad

Conceived in the wake of the 2022 conference “La comedia entre dos mundos,” co-hosted by the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater and the Almagro International Classical Theatre Festival, this ambitious 430-page volume of the same name seeks to demonstrate—rather than assume—the global reach and contemporary urgency of the Spanish Golden-Age comedia. The editors’ introduction positions the genre as a “vital, regenerating act” that resists the museum-piece label and invites intersectional, transnational, and interdisciplinary readings.The collection is organized into four thematic parts that together comprise eighteen essays, framed by a substantial introduction and followed by detailed contributor biographies. Part I, “Identidades en escena / Identities on Stage,” interrogates constructions of nation, race, gender, and sexuality through close textual readings, from Tania de Miguel Magro’s re-evaluation of fortress walls in La Numancia as a device for humanizing the “other” to Eduardo Paredes Ocampo’s archival reconstruction of queer, homoerotic desire on the early-modern stage. Also exploring nonhegemonic approaches to the comedia as a recurrent topic, Conxita Domènech reads La prudente Abigaíl as a drama of Marrano dissent without falling into moralizing simplifications, while Shifra Armon lucidly exposes the inconsistencies and possibilities of racial casting in El hechizado por fuerza (1697). In turn, Laura Muñoz articulates a subtle critique of gender and embodiment in La fuerza de la costumbre and its reinterpretations. The collection shines for its attention to the body, costume, and gesture as living archives; at times, however, some pieces could engage more with each other on methodologies of material evidence and the limits of anachronism. This is a minor consideration since the section nonetheless provides a robust framework for understanding how identity is constructed (and contested) on the stage.Part II, “Empeños transatlánticos / Transatlantic Endeavors,” shifts the geographic lens to the New World, pairing analyses of colonial melancholia with reception histories in nineteenth-century Argentina and Chile and an innovative practice-as-research dossier on staging Calderón in 1789 and again in 2025. Mikkel-Theis Paulsen links “gold” and melancholy between English and Spanish dramaturgy in the New World with a provocative thesis on the affective economy of the empire; Elena Nicole Casey traces in La aurora en Copacabana an American “illness” filtered through Marian symbols and imperial politics; Alejandro S. Fielbaum offers perhaps the most incisive historiographical intervention, mapping the nineteenth-century reception of the Baroque in Argentina and Chile—from republican rejection to playful revisions—and showing how “freedom” changes its meaning according to the shifts of liberalism; and the team of Gunter, Paun de García, Grubbs, Costales, Borden, Ruiz Sanchez, Rodríguez Villar, and Wilks documents the Translation Lab project to reconstruct and stage Amigo, amante y leal in Florida, a work of public history that transforms the archive into a civic event. The arc is exemplary: from colonial symptom to community stage praxis. If anything is missing, it is an explicit conversation about the ethics of adaptation and translation in postcolonial contexts. Even so, it is the part that best fulfills the promise of “between worlds.”Part III, “Políticas de la representación / Politics of Performance,” foregrounds representations of power, captivity, and hospitality. It opens with Bruce R. Burningham’s reading of Sueño by José Rivera as a rewriting of the Calderonian myth under the “prosperity gospel”: a sharp nod to the theological-economic displacement of desire in the American dream; Beatriz Salamanca turns the “home” of the Lopean villain into a laboratory of hospitality and sovereignty; Mina García explores meta theatricality in El trato de Argel as a device for processing personal trauma and politically mobilizing the audience; Emmy Herland compares variants of “The Grateful Dead” to consider alliances and boundaries (living/dead, Spain/England); and Robert L. Turner III unravels, in Por el sótano y el torno, the house as a metaphor for female cloisters and ideological contradictions. The section is conceptually robust and politically sharp, albeit lacking a holistic conclusion able to connect hospitality, captivity, and haunting as a theoretical triad. In its current guise, it functions as something akin to a mini-seminar on how power is acted out, embodied, and contested onstage.Part IV, “Stages without Limits,” reaches beyond the early-modern canon to consider musicology, kabbalistic hermeneutics, and TikTok-based pedagogy with other audiences and formats in mind. Alexander McNair proposes reading Enríquez Gómez from the perspective of Lurianic Kabbalah to illuminate the double crypto-Jewish coding; Alexander Samson problematizes translation and temporal framing, defending anachronism as a creative tool; J. Yuri Porras analyzes the music of La serrana de la Vera (INAEM/CNTC) as a dramaturgical score to guide ideology and action; and Ana Yunuén Castillo Colín brings Lope and Calderón to the Mexican classroom with TikTok, practicing a critical pedagogy that connects gender violence and Golden Age theater. This is the most “transferable” section, as it provides concrete curatorial and teaching tools. Even if the dialogue among religious theory, musical practice, and digital teaching could be more tightly choreographed, this conclusion deserves to circulate as a kit of best practices for research-creation.Across the lengthy volume, three principal strands emerge. First, several chapters decenter traditional Hispanocentric narratives by mapping cross-imperial or hemispheric circuits. Second, gender and embodiment recur as analytic pivots. Third, a welcome attention to performance praxis infuses the volume. Methodologically, the essays blend philology, performance studies, critical race theory, queer studies, sound studies pedagogy, and digital humanities. The range is impressive and it reminds readers that comedia studies can and should speak to twenty-first-century publics.La comedia entre mundos arrives at a propitious moment. Recent years have seen surging interest in performance-based research, decolonial frameworks, and digital pedagogy; this volume both reflects these trends and helps set the next decade’s agenda. Reading comedia through intersecting lenses—race, gender, empire, media—it foregrounds ethical spectatorship and scholarly responsibility beyond Iberian studies. In short, the volume—curated by an editorial team with vision and discernment—offers an essential overview: diverse in its corpus, honest in its limitations, and exemplary in its transformation of theater history into public conversation and living performance. Standout essays exemplify rigorous scholarship without losing sight of the stage’s capacity to move audiences—past, present, and future. The volume will undoubtedly become a touchstone for scholars seeking to navigate, and enlarge, the ever-expanding worlds of Golden Age theater.