Don Juan and some myths of the Spanish Golden Age

Part of the Arts Week 2007 celebrations at Queen Mary, University of London

For far too long, the Spanish Golden Age has been characterised, by historians and literary specialists alike, as a period where ordinary Spaniards lived in a country dominated by the Inquisition, an absolute monarchy and a strict hierarchical social structure, where the nobility lived off their rents and did little or nothing to invest in or develop the land and industry, where the peasants were ground down and starving, where there was no toleration of minorities and ‘others’ and pluralism was nonexistent, and where women were virtually invisible.

These ‘myths’ and their representation were the standard fare of the English Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and in truth few have changed substantially in the intervening centuries. For many aspects of the Spanish Golden Age the ‘Black Legend’ lives on. Drawing on much of his own research over the last thirty years, Professor Dadson will re-examine in this lecture some of these enduring myths in an effort to get closer to the ‘real’ Golden Age.

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