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THE MANY AND PARADIGMATIC parallels between the drama produced in England and in Spain in early modernity have led to comparative overviews such as the now foundational Parallel Lives: Spanish and English National Drama, 1580–1680, edited by Louise and Peter Fothergill-Payne (Bucknell UP, 1991), and Vidas paralelas: el teatro español y el teatro isabelino, 1580– 1680, coordinated by Anita K. Stoll (Tamesis, 1993). David J. Amelang’s monograph builds on this comparative tradition of scholarship, which he furthers thematically and methodologically in avenues underexplored in the trailblazing publications of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Playgrounds is structured around five chapters anchored in a specific category for comparison (“Cities,” “Playhouses,” “Players,” “Dramatists,” and “Playbooks”), framed by an introduction and a conclusion, and interspersed with two so-called interludes. Chapter 1 provides an account of the theater landscape of both countries, and chapter 2 explores the architecture of the English amphitheatric playhouses vis-à-vis the corrales de comedias. Chapters 3 and 4 jointly review the social perceptions and reputation of theater, focusing on the playmaking communities in England and Spain, with chapter 3 centered on the acting companies, the impresarios, and the guilds, and chapter 4 on the playwrights. Chapter 5 lastly considers the production, circulation, and consumption of playbooks. By choosing a distinct category per chapter against which to test each tradition, the book manages to strike a balance in addressing the similarities and differences between the two theatrical cultures, which is no small feat in comparative research.
Despite Routledge’s choice to print the titles of the interludes in the table of contents in bold and in a considerably larger font size than chapter titles, the interludes are neither disconnected from the chapters themselves nor have a completely independent status of their own, which is what the misleading layout suggests. The compact interludes each gather to some degree the partial conclusions of the first two chapters, and of chapters 3 and 4. Interlude 1, “Why Did Madrid Not Have a Blackfriars?,” seems largely addressed to [End Page 131] readers who approach the study of Spanish drama from a previous knowledge of the English tradition. Interlude 2, “Professional Actresses: To Have and Have Not (and How It Made a Difference),” draws on an article Amelang published in this journal in 2019 using quantitative data on the percentages of lines allocated to female and male roles to examine how the respective presence and absence of women on Spanish and English stages impacted the depiction of gender in the plays produced for each (“Playing Gender: Toward a Quantitative Comparison of Female Roles in Lope de Vega and Shakespeare.” Bulletin of the Comediantes, vol. 71, no.1–2, 2019, pp. 119–34). Taken together, the chapters and interludes provide a full panorama of the workings of English and Spanish theater in Shakespeare’s time and in the longer timespan that the notion of Golden Age comprises in the case of Spain.
From the start, Amelang asserts that many of the similarities between the dramatic traditions of the two countries are far from serendipitous coincidences, but rather result from what he calls “the same broader cultural ecosystem” (3). This he defines as a shared literary and cultural framework in which a body of classical and vernacular works of literature hailed as exemplary was widely disseminated through a growing publication industry that encompassed abundant translations. Only such activity can account for the fact that, for instance, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Lope de Vega’s Castelvines y Monteses reworked the same story by Italian writer Matteo Bandello (ca. 1480–1562) without each knowing about the existence of the other. Indeed, while Playgrounds hones its focus on the theatrical traditions of just two nations, it duly acknowledges the wider picture, referenced in brushstrokes throughout the book, as when chapter 4 reviews the school curricula of grammar schools across Europe to prepare the way for a discussion of the conditions for “the making of a professional playwright” (103).
Playgrounds also points the reader’s attention to what draws the two theatrical cultures apart and yet avoids accentuating their divergences. For instance, chapter 1, “Cities,” charts the geographies of the urban centers where commercial theater...
