Eros en escena: el erotismo en la comedia del Siglo de Oro
by Esther Fernández

Eros en escena: el erotismo en la comedia del Siglo de Oro presents the Spanish comedia as an appealing dramatic experience, rediscovering the tensions that approximate the universal, through an eroticism that transcends Early Modern Spanish drama and crosses national borders.  This study concentrates on the literary, performative, and socio-historical dimensions of eroticism as manifested in Spanish Golden Age drama.  The sociological performance of the erotic in Spanish corrales de comedia consisted of two components: (1) the urban location of these theatrical spaces in conjunction with their interior architecture; and (2) the lifestyle of both male and female performers.  The literary part of this study focuses on the comedias as dramatic texts.  The author analyzes a collection of the most erotically daring scenes of the epoch, either in terms of their characters’ spoken messages or the physicality of the performances themselves.  Many of the scenes deal with on-stage nudity and the overt expression of sexual desire by aristocratic protagonists.  In addition, the book focuses on the hermeneutic possibilities of performance theory when applied to seventeenth-century plays and the implicit problem of successfully translating discursive and performative erotic codes from three centuries ago for a modern audience.