| In the first half of the seventeenth century, the theater in Spain and England served as a vital mass communication medium that rivaled the printing press in its ability to voice socio-political commentary to a large segment of the population. Rather than serving solely as an entertainment medium, the theater at this time became a site for contemporary debate.;While some cultural theorists who specialize in early modern theater, such as Jose Antonio Maravall, have suggested that the theater was indeed a site of mass communication, they argue that playwrights diffused propagandist messages in support of the absolute monarchies in power. In contrast to Maravall's assumptions, this dissertation proposes that in many instances writers used the stage to express ideas of a controversial nature that challenged the status quo. Rather than simply backing the establishment, many plays written in the first half of the seventeenth-century presented ideas that opposed the ideologies of those who were in power and cast a more favorable light on the "Other," be that other national leaders of differing religious and political ideologies or women who played less submissive roles in their male dominated societies.;Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Hayden White and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as the mass communication principles of Melvin DeFleur and Everett Dennis, this dissertation takes a New Historical approach to the analysis of five plays that dealt with two important historical events: the English break from the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century and the Thirty Years War in the seventeenth century. The plays analyzed in this dissertation are Calderon de la Barca's La cisma de Inglaterra, William Shakespeare's Henry VIII, Lope de Vega's El Brasil restituido, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barnavelt and Calderon's El sitio de Breda. |
