Refiguring the Hero reassesses the social significance of several of the most widely read plays of Spain's Golden Age in light of then-contempory ideas about heroism.

The Spanish dramatists Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderon de la Barca, near contemporaries of Shakespeare, are hailed by Hispanists as democrats at heart for making heroes, in both the literary and the positive moral sense, of peasants. Spanish drama is alleged to be the first literature in the Western world to find the common man worthy of heroic status. Refiguring the Hero reevaluates the place of the...