TheaTheor · Theorizing the Production of 'Comedia Nueva': The Process of Play Configuration in Spanish Golden Age Theater

Theorizing the Production of 'Comedia Nueva': The Process of Play Configuration in Spanish Golden Age Theater

How was the process of writing and reviewing a play in the Spanish Golden Age Theatre? Was this process exclusively in the hands of the playwright? The study of the creation of different national theaters has paid little -or no- attention to the establishment of the theatre text, i.e. the process of gestation and revision of the play. The main objective of THEATHEOR project is to reconsider the traditional idea of the production of the Spanish Golden Age Theatre, also known as Comedia Nueva, witch is based on the individual creation of the theatre text, and explore the possibility of uncovering an active collaboration between playwrights and other agents of the theatre system. The project has the following goals: a) reconsider the traditional idea of the production of Comedia Nueva based on the individual creation of a theatre text; b) theorize the intervention of autores de comedias in the plays; c) propose a new model for the configuration of Spanish Golden Age Theatre which takes into account the participation of other agents in the creation of the theatre text. To achieve these objectives it’s necessary to work with a corpus of authorized text: the 45 Lope de Vega’s autograph plays, an exceptional corpus for its quality and quantity. In terms of methodology, this project joins the philological and palaeographic postulates with digital technologies and chemical methods. In this regard, another objective of the project has been to explore new instruments and techniques for manuscript analysis. In addition to studying autograph manuscripts with hyperspectral photography, the project has carried out tests with other instruments and techniques, has established collaborations with chemists and restorers and has experimented with spectroscopy (X-ray fluorescence and XRaman). These techniques have offered a lot of interesting information related to the chemical analysis of inks. THEATHEOR’s results offer a faithful reflection of the creation process of Lope de Vega’s plays, from the prose abstract to the definitive text, allow to establish an active collaboration between playwrights and other agents of the Spanish Golden Age Theatre and provide a wide list of digital and chemical techniques and instruments to study Golden Age manuscripts.

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