The Poetics and Practice of Space in the Theater of the Spanish Baroque

Catalog description

This seminar will explore the real and virtual spaces of seventeenth-century Spanish drama. We will examine the diverse spaces in which theatrical performances took place (public playhouses, city streets, court theaters, convents), as well as the various types of spaces represented on the stage (domestic and public, urban and rural, worldly and supernatural, familiar and distant). How did dramatic space articulate the boundaries of the public and private in the Spanish baroque? How did it function in the configuration of social hierarchies, subjectivities, and marginal as well as normative identities? In the theatrical world of seventeenth-century Spain, how did spatial practices on stage shape the experience of space off stage?