Wild Theater - by Harrison Meadows

About the Book

The role of the "Wildman" in Baroque Iberian theater

Book Synopsis

In Wild 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 as The Epic of Gilgamesh to more recent films like The 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 Theater addresses 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.

Review Quotes

"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 comedias that spans nearly a century. His innovative analysis of the dramatic representations of marginalized populations is rooted in the erudite scholarship of his predecessors, which he utilizes to construct a framework for an elegant analysis of baroque representations of marginality, otherness, and gender. His book offers new epistemic and aesthetic dimensions to our understanding of cultural practice as it relates to the Spanish baroque."
--Anthony J. Grubbs, author of The Playwright's Perspective: Innovative Dramaturgy and its Poetics in Early Modern Spain

"Wild Theater is a meticulously researched and elegantly written introduction to the aesthetic and political questions that shaped cultural production of the Iberian Baroque. Through close readings of key plays and performance practices, Meadows highlights the intersection of drama, mythology and national identity, and its enduring relevance. A vital resource for students and scholars of Spanish literature, performance studies, and Iberian cultural history."
--Margaret Boyle, author of Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence and Punishment in Early Modern Spain

"This book does an admirable job bringing the focus of early modern ideological media critique onto a succinct and well-defined body of theatrical works. In this way it is a significant contribution to comedia studies and one that will be a required reference for future scholarship."
--William Egginton, author of The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

About the Author

Harrison Meadows is an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.