The past in the light of the present and power in josé de cañizares' history plays: Some samples

Under the Ciceronian motto historia magistra vitae and in the wake of the Spanish comedia, a court dramatist who lived between two centuries, José de Cañizares (1676-1750), in his history plays makes use of past events mingled with fiction and invention in order to discuss them better and above all to link them to the political situation of his own time, which was starting with the government of a new dynasty (the Bourbons) during Philip V's reign. The corpus selected includes the “privanza” comedy El picarillo en España, señor de la Gran Canaria (played for the first time in Madrid's Teatro de la Cruz in 1716), focused on the conflicts between king John II of Castile, Álvaro de Luna and the aristocracy of their tormented age, and full of synchronisms and anachronisms; and El pastelero de Madrigal, rey don Sebastián fingido, whose plot is set during the time of king Sebastian of Portugal, after whose death in the battle of Alcazarquivir in 1578 harsh dynasty fights broke out, ending in 1581, when the country fell under Spanish domain: the play was written in 1706, while the War of the Spanish Succession was being fought far from reaching any military and political solution. Other comedies by Cañizares analyzed are La Poncella de Orleans, composed in cooperation with Antonio de Zamora and explicitly pro-French: it was composed in 1706 as well, and it was represented for the first time in Madrid in 1707, in order to celebrate the pregnancy of Maria Luisa of Savoy, Philip V's first wife. Finally, La banda de Castilla, y duelo contra sí mismo, is also considered: a manuscript witness of it, dating back to 1727, is kept in the BNE (Ms. 16.594). In the present essay, the comedies by Cañizares quoted above are studied in order to examine both their peculiar treatment of the past facing the playwright's present and the author's mindset swaying between the Baroque and the Enlightenment.