Walter Cohen
Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain.
Cornell University Press, 1985. Author-inscribed first edition. 0801417937 416 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6.5" x 9.75", is bound in red cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is as new, with solid binding, clean and bright interior.
Inscription on half title page reads "To Maria Antonia, / In friendship and / with admiration / Walter."
"During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English and Spanish theaters were part of an international florescence of drama. Although these two national theaters developed in relative isolation from each other, they displayed striking similarities. Both synthesized native popular traditions and neoclassical learned conventions in a way found neither in the more elite Italian and French drama of the time nor in any other European drama before or since. "In Drama of a Nation," Walter Cohen illuminates the reasons behind this significant parallel development. Working from a Marxist perspective, Cohen seeks to establish correlations among individual plays, dramatic genres, theatrical institutions, cultural milieus, and political and economic systems. He argues that the drama owed its distinctiveness to the public theaters, especially of London and Madrid, which opened in the 1570s and closed, under government order, seventy years later. Both drama and theater in turn depended on a relative cultural homogeneity perpetuated by a state that served primarily the aristocracy. Absolutism, he maintains, first fostered and then undermined the public theater. Cohen begins by providing comprehensive theories of medieval and Renaissance European theater, based on the relationships between popular and learned culture and between feudalism and capitalism. He then surveys the development of society, theater, and drama in England from the 1570s to the 1640s and in Spain from the 1560s to 1700. Emphasizing the ideology of form and paying special attention to critical, subversive, or utopian tendencies, he offers important new reading of works by Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Marlowe, Jonson, Calderon, and others. Synthetic in approach, political in intention "Drama of a Nation" offers an innovative and persuasive view of English and Spanish Renaissance drama in particular and of medieval and Renaissance European theater in general. A major work of scholarship and interpretation, Cohen's book will interest students of literature of drama and theater, of Marxism, and of intellectual and social history."