Publisher's Synopsis
Translation into English verse, with facing annotated Castilian of Lope de Vega's three American plays. It is with joy and sadness simultaneously that I write this preface to this elegant and superb contribution to the theater of the Spanish Golden Age: With sadness because its author, Kenneth A. Stackhouse, has passed on to a better world; with joy because Ken's beloved wife, Marcia, asked me subsequently to write this preface, unaware perhaps that Ken had earlier asked my advice on this project. If this is not synchronicity - dare I say Providence - I don't know what is. I have perused Ken's informed and meticulous study, which clarifies many issues with respect to the three Lope de Vega plays on what used to be called the Conquest and is now termed the Encounter of America and Spain. I have also perused, with awe and admiration, Professor Stackhouse's superb verse translations of La famosa comedia del Nuevo Mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon, (The Famous Drama of the Discovery of the New World By Christopher Columbus), El Arauco domado (The Conquest of Araucania), and El Brasil restituido (Brazil Restored).;To date, only the first work has had the benefit of a critical text and an English prose translation. That is both good and sad: good because the play is little known and deserves more attention; sad because the other two plays should have been studied more and translated earlier into English. In my estimation, El Arauco domado is a practically unknown masterpiece of epic proportions, especially as far as the indigenous Americans are concerned. El Brasil restituido is a world drama that treats transnational affairs (indigenous Brazil, the Jewish Diaspora, the dual Luso-Iberian monarch, and the Dutch West India Company) from multiple ethnic and religious perspectives. Finally, the Nuevo Mundo play remains the only work written by a Spanish Baroque dramatist on the Columbine discovery and European settlement of this continent. As if this were not sufficient, Kenneth A. Stackhouse, thinking not only of non-Hispanists but of Comedia scholars as well, presents us in this edition the three plays in the original Spanish, hence making available works that, again, lack for the most part critical and textual studies. This text represents a labor of love, to be sure.;It is also the culminating work of a scholar who, thanks to the wisdom of Marcia, Bob, and the Mellen Press, will live on much longer than any of us will. Ken would be pleased.
