Roger Chartier on “Chronicle and Comedia, Stage and Page: Fuente Ovejuna”

Please join us next Monday, April 9th, for the next meeting of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts. Roger Chartier, Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, will present on “Chronicle and Comedia, Stage and Page: Fuente Ovejuna.”

We will meet at 5:15 in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Center, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevator bank.

Chartier writes:

Lope de Vega’s Fuente Ovejuna was printed in 1616 in the “Dozena parte” of his “comedias.” This presentation will address two main questions. First, I will begin by analyzing Lope de Vega’s interpretation and appropriation for his dramatic plot of the “hecho de Fuente Ovejuna” as it is related in Francisco de Rades y Andrada’s Chronica de las tres ordenes y cauallerias de Santiago, Calatrava y Alcantara, published in Toledo in 1572. As Shakespeare did in his Histories, so Lope distorted the narration of the Chronicle by staging both the 1476 revolt of the villagers of Fuente Ovejuna against their master and the forgiveness granted by the King Ferdinand. Secondly, the seminar will look at the different modes of circulation and publication of Lope’s “comedias” and, more broadly, the relations between performance and edition in Golden Age theater. As on every Monday, the seminar will be built on the foundations given by the splendid collections of the Library and it will be made possible by the infinite patience and dedication of the librarians of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Roger Chartier is Professor at the Collège de France, Directeur d’études at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, and Annenberg Visiting Professor in History at the University of Pennsylvania since 2001. His most recent book, Cardenio entre Cervantes et Shakespeare. Histoire d’une pièce perdue, was published by Gallimard last September. This presentation will not be his first one for the Material Texts Seminar.