A frequent criticism of new historicist approaches to cultural studies is that their efforts often have more to say about the theoretical and ideological concerns of the critics themselves than about their objects of study. Such is the case with Ivan Cañadas's Public Theater in Golden Age Madrid and Tudor-Stuart England. Cañadas proposes a major revision of early modern theater studies by refocusing traditional themes of social rank and gender around the representation of communal, that is, plebeian, groups. His thesis is that authors such as Thomas Dekker and Lope de Vega produce “potentially” subversive moments of reception through the festive celebration of collective protagonists from the lower classes of early modernity. Although the author correctly identifies the importance of creative tension, ambiguity, and ambivalence in the staging of social, historical, and political conflicts, the epistemological certainties he claims to uncover are undone or, more in keeping with the language of the study, subverted by an intentional “looseness” and “flexibility” in the theoretical and critical methodology of his arguments (4, 16). The tendency to conflate terms like ambiguity with subversion, in combination with the lack of theoretical framing and an excessively loose historical grasp of recurring themes and concepts such as reception, class, ideology, and the modern state, weaken both his overall hypothesis and the discrete readings of the texts.

A good example is the discussion in chapter 1 of the social makeup of theater audiences in London and Madrid. What I find particularly surprising here is how Cañadas rescues traditional views concerning the “democratic appeal” of early modern theater, a view that “old” historicism, especially in Spanish Golden Age studies, displayed as evidence of a transhistorical “realism” endemic to the Spanish national character. Cañadas's comparative framework leads him away from nationalistic essentialisms, but his dismissal of recent studies correcting this traditional view in favor of a thesis which states that “the need to appeal to the popular audience remained the primary concern of dramatists and theater companies” (14) is marred by theoretical and historical lacunae. The main problem is the lack of a convincing theory of social action tied to the concrete historical circumstances of historical subjects, be they writers or the urban masses. Even as Cañadas privileges the social aspirations of Dekker, William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, and so forth, the artistic sympathies of these social climbers are seen to be firmly entrenched in the social classes that represent the greatest threat to aristocratic power and privilege. Among these popular elements—again, the author fails to define the concept in theoretical or historical terms—are those wealthy commoners who aspire to see themselves as upper class. Such desire for recognition becomes a key mechanism of social identification—and ideological interpellation—in the historical transformation from medieval feudalism to the medievalizing tendencies of the modern state.

Thus, when Cañadas observes that Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday achieves an “alignment between an idealized monarchy and a London bourgeois culture” (90), rather than serving as an example of subversion, the author's statement underlines how the play stages the expansion of the power of the modern, absolutist monarchy into the lower social classes without radically altering the access (or lack thereof) of the urban masses to material or political privileges. Since the shoemaker is honored—as is Peribañez in Lope de Vega's Peribañez y el comendador de Ocaña—as a commoner and not as an aristocrat, he is interpellated into an emerging political and cultural hegemony based not on blood genealogy but on a dynamic of “theatrical identification” with the role of a national subject (David R. Castillo and William Egginton, “All the King's Subjects: Honor in Early Modernity,” Romance Languages Annual 6 [1994]: 422–27). Also problematic is Cañadas's tendency to link in a substantial way the negative representation of aristocratic, that is, feudal, antagonists with a subversive critique of the monarchy. As baroque thinkers and theorists such as Baltasar Gracián and Diego de Saavedra Fajardo demonstrate, the modern state is buttressed by a huge volume of texts that accomplish the rationalization of the political and material economies of the state in order to reform and expand its power, not to subvert it. Otherwise stated, the movement from medieval genealogical organicism to the theatrical subject of representation is not an impediment to the expansion of imperial hegemony but constitutive of it.

The myriad problems with this study come to a head in its longest chapter (5), in which Cañadas argues that Lope's Fuenteovejuna stages a “collective ideal of androgyny” which “appeals to the audience as a popular and specifically heterosocial community” (139). In this discussion, the author falls into the temptation to phenomenalize the festive and ritual elements artistically and strategically arranged in Lope's dramatization of the awakening of national consciousness. This process begins with the consideration and translation of Fray Francisco Rades y Andrada's chronicle of the historical occurrence of the uprising, which is meant to provide “overwhelming evidence that both the chronicle and the play share a focus on tyranny and its social consequences” (151). Part of this evidence is produced not by the 1572 text but by the author's translation, wherein “es más de admirar” becomes “what is most to be admired” in order to demonstrate the ideological sympathies of Rades with “los de la villa” (155). Although in keeping with the previous translation of “los” into “people” in support of his analysis of the carnivalesque elements of the play, it would have been more correct to connect the first phrase with a previous discussion concerning the importance of novelty and the representation of extreme cases of honor: philologically speaking, admiratio signals a dangerous suspension of moral judgment and not the adoration of the object of admiration. Finally, the largely unmediated projection of contemporary theories concerning androgyny into Lope's staging of the political, social, and sexual chaos brought about by the irrational, that is, feminine, excesses of Fernán Gómez opens onto a heterosocial utopia, or communal body. Such a valorization of androgyny in early modernity should be supported by both historical documentation, perhaps Neoplatonic philosophy, and the aforementioned theory of social action tied to the historical circumstances in early modern Spain. Without such a frame, the conclusions of this reading remain in suspension, a possibility whose concrete realization is placed on an unattainable horizon.