Wild Theater: Staging the Margins of Baroque Ideology in the Spanish Comedia [Paperback]

InWild Theater, Harrison Meadows critically examines the genealogy of one of world literature’s most well-known figures: the “Wildman.” From its earliest manifestations in works such asThe Epic of Gilgameshto more recent films likeThe Green Knight, the transhistorical figure of the Wildman has fascinated generations of scholars and the broader public for centuries. Despite this widespread interest, the place of the Wildman—and ideas of wildness more generally—have been underexplored in scholarship on the Spanish Baroque period.Wild Theateraddresses this lacuna in scholarship by exploring the ideas of wildness in the Spanish comedia, a popular Spanish Golden Age theater genre that combined elements of tragedy and comedy.

In five compelling chapters, Meadows argues that a major shift occurred during the Baroque period, whereby the largely positive quality of previous iterations in the genealogy of wildness take on a negative character in the cultural ethos—and that this fundamental shift was representative of the influence of Spanish colonialism on racial thinking and a larger set of changes in how early modern people viewed gender and class. In this way, the book identifies the wild figure’s dramatic roots in the carnivalesque as an indispensable point of departure to plot the trajectory of wild representation in the theater of the Hispanic Baroque. From this guiding premise, Meadows traces the carryovers, transformations, and negations of the carnivalesque into early modern dramaturgy, specifically the Spanish comedia, which are emblematic of the poetic and ideological features of the emerging commercial theater in Iberia.The role of the “Wildman” in Baroque Iberian theater“Wild Theater is an extremely important contribution to our field. In it, Meadows presents us with a meticulous study of wildness in a comprehensive corpus of ten comediaslè