In the Golden Age of Spanish Theater, an age of highly dramatized coronations and regal spectacles, Alban Forcione has discovered a surprising but persistent preoccupation with the disrobing of the king. In both the celebrations of majesty and the enthrallment with its unveiling, he finds the chilling recesses in which a culture struggled to reconcile the public and the private, society and the individual, the monarch and the man.

In brilliantly reinterpreting two of Lope de Vega's plays, long regarded as conventional royalist propaganda, Forcione places his texts in the...

Alban Forcione analyzes the problem which has most troubled modern readers of the Persiles, its episodic character and confusing proliferation of action. Examining closely the structure of the romance Cervantes considered his masterpiece and boldest contribution to literature, Mr. Forcione discerns in it a simple pattern: a coherent cycle of catastrophe and restoration linked symbolically to the Christian vision of man's fall and redemption.

Originally published in 1972.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make...

This examination of the last two tales of Cervantes' Novelas ejemplares reveals the Christian Humanist tradition implicit in the most elusive works of the collection. In his study of El casamiento enganoso and El coloquio de los perros Alban Forcione demonstrates that Cervantes retained in their ostensible pessimism the themes of Erasmus' vision of the renovation of Christianity.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of...