Bulletin of the Comediantes

IN THIS GROUNDBREAKING BOOK, Paul Michael Johnson reads Miguel de Cervantes’s works through the lens of affectivity and situates them within the context of the Mediterranean world. Whereas many past studies on the Mediterranean—from Fernand Braudel’s La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Armand Colin, 1949) to Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (Blackwell, 2000)— have principally depended on geography, climate, and economics to guide their inquiry, Johnson prioritizes the literatures of this region, specifically the work of Cervantes, to show that “literature, in particular, may be as influential in constructing the Mediterranean as are its geomorphological, climatic, or economic features” (4). As he clearly demonstrates, a focus on literature helps bring to light the complexity of emotions in early modernity that might otherwise be relegated to the margins or rendered invisible. Furthermore, his book seeks to recover the diversity of emotions that are present in Cervantes’s works. Instead of basing his study on one defining emotion of the Mediterranean, Johnson aims to investigate what he calls the “Mediterranean’s affective micro-(hi)stories,” the many life stories of Cervantine characters and other individuals that reflect the affective richness of the region (25). Finally, by putting critical approaches to the Mediterranean in dialogue with affect theory, always with an eye on Cervantes, the author aims to correct some misconceptions that have until now inhibited a robust discussion about the interdependence of a Mediterranean experience and an emotional one. This interdisciplinary approach allows Johnson to offer new and erudite readings of Cervantes’s fiction. Thus, his book contributes significantly not only to scholarship on Cervantes’s œuvre, but also to the field of Mediterranean studies as well as the history of emotion.

The book is divided into three parts with two chapters each and concludes with an afterword. Part 1 (“Casting Off”) introduces the theoretical framework by using a diverse variety of Cervantes’s fiction including poetry, prose, and theater, and putting it in conversation with a wide range of critical works on affect and the Mediterranean. Chapter 1 (Introduction) outlines the premise of the book and convincingly shows why the Cervantine corpus is [End Page 117] especially appropriate to undertake the task of analyzing affective structures in the Mediterranean. In particular, Johnson argues that “Cervantes’s engagement with affect is not only fundamental but fundamentally different” (13). Since Cervantes’s works frequently treat questions of emotion across a diverse terrain of cultural encounters and exchanges, his writings offer a fruitful vantage point from which to explore human relations and the multiplicity of affective responses that they inspire. While Johnson carefully incorporates a rich variety of Cervantine texts in his analysis, showing how the Mediterranean is present throughout, he justifies his focus on the author’s prose works because it is there, he contends, that emotions are most salient and developed. Readers of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, thus, will be particularly interested in how Johnson homes in on the theatricality of Cervantes’s prose to illuminate how emotions are expressed and performed by the characters in the texts.

Chapter 2 (“Connected (Hi)stories: The Cervantine, Literary, and Affective Mediterranean”) further extends his initial arguments by elucidating how the themes of his book, namely “Mediterranean, emotion, literature, Cervantes,” are all interconnected and how they cannot be considered solely in isolation (28). The chapter exposes how Cervantes’s fiction both reveals the complexity of these connections as well as destabilizes some common stereotypes about the Mediterranean world. Johnson, thus, reinforces that “a central proposition of this book is to interrogate the macro (Mediterranean framework) and the micro (emotions),” using the personal narratives of many characters interspersed throughout Cervantes’s literature as the common thread throughout the project (30). This chapter is one of the most attractive and suggestive of the study because it offers readers a roadmap for how they can approach these themes in other Cervantine texts, which could also be expanded...