Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age

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, ...