Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Dramas of the Portrait

1. Visual Literacy and Urban Comedy

2. Stolen Identities

3. Blood Portraits

4. The Powers and Perils of Doubles

5. Framing the Margins on Center Stage

Concluding Reflections

Notes

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

Laura R. Bass is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University. She is the co-editor, with Margaret R. Greer, of Approaches to Teaching Spanish Golden Age Drama (2006).

Reviews

“Bass has interwoven detailed research in Spanish art history, treatises on painting, and the social history of portraiture with illuminating readings of specific plays to present an enormously valuable perspective on a quintessential art form of the baroque.”—Emilie L. Bergmann,University of California, Berkeley

“Despite the very complex ideas at work here, and the ambitious reach of the project, Bass’s prose is limpid and highly accessible. While The Drama of the Portrait is a tremendous contribution to both visual and literary studies in the field, it will also help disseminate this new and sophisticated approach to the comedia to a broad audience. The richly appealing book, with its over sixty sumptuous illustrations (many of them in color), itself makes a persuasive case for the seductiveness of the visual image.”—Barbara Fuchs Renaissance Quarterly

“[Laura Bass’s] erudite, innovative, elegantly written, and—it should be mentioned—beautifully illustrated monograph is an essential contribution to studies of classical Spanish theatre and of early modern Spanish culture in general.”—Donald R. Larson Iberoamericana

“[Laura R. Bass’s work] explores the drama of the portrait reenacted in seventeenth-century Spanish theater as a historical and cultural chapter of an ideal history of responses to human likeness. . . . Through the study of selected plays interwoven with visual images, crossed with the analysis of specific paintings, understood in the wider context of art theory and of social, political, and economic history, Bass gives a striking reading of the practice and culture of portraiture seen through the lens of theater as shaping the Spanish ideal of monarchy at the same time that it reveals the underlying anxiety about its crisis.”—Diane H. Bodart Art Bulletin

“Laura R. Bass has written a beautiful and significant book: aesthetically pleasing in terms of the sixty-seven illustrations (a large number in colour) and the comprehensible scholarly style; and conceptually discerning in respect of the historical, material and theoretical readings of select plays interwoven with visual images, the thorough documentation in the accompanying notes, and the exhaustive bibliographical apparatus.”—Susan L. Fischer Bulletin of Spanish Studies