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In Wild Theater, Harrison Meadows critically examines the genealogy of one of world literature’s most well-known figures: the “Wildman.” From its earliest manifestations in works such as The Epic of Gilgamesh to more recent films like The Green Knight, the transhistorical figure of the Wildman has fascinated generations of scholars and the broader public for centuries. Despite this widespread interest, the place of the Wildman—and ideas of wildness more generally—have been underexplored in scholarship on the Spanish Baroque period. Wild Theater addresses this lacuna in scholarship by exploring the ideas of wildness in the Spanish comedia, a popular Spanish Golden Age theater genre that combined elements of tragedy and comedy.

In five compelling chapters, Meadows argues that a major shift occurred during the Baroque period, whereby the largely positive quality of previous iterations in the genealogy of wildness take on a negative character in the cultural ethos—and that this fundamental shift was representative of the influence of Spanish colonialism on racial thinking and a larger set of changes in how early modern people viewed gender and class. In this way, the book identifies the wild figure’s dramatic roots in the carnivalesque as an indispensable point of departure to plot the trajectory of wild representation in the theater of the Hispanic Baroque. From this guiding premise, Meadows traces the carryovers, transformations, and negations of the carnivalesque into early modern dramaturgy, specifically the Spanish comedia, which are emblematic of the poetic and ideological features of the emerging commercial theater in Iberia.

The first comprehensive study of its kind, this book explores the contradictory connections between women and dramatic comedy. Women and Comedy shows how a genre that has been used historically to restrict women's behavior is being reconfigured to express women's triumphs. It thus redefines the assumptions with which both traditional comedy and contemporary women's plays are read and viewed. Challenging a critical consensus that has seen comedy as a haven for female power, Carlson argues that traditional comedy is deeply sexist, welcoming strong women characters only because it can contain their power. Through an analysis of a range of comedies by Shakespeare, Congreve, Maugham, Shaw, and Ayckbourn, the author shows that even in these plays self-consciously about liberated females, women gain only a limited freedom, a freedom that the endings of the plays work to negate. This negotiation is seen to result in part from the comic structure itself, which privileges a merely temporary inversion and an ultimate return to the status quo. Carlson then examines the transitional work of three writers – Aphra Behn, Henry James, and Ann Jellicoe – whose heroines follow an unorthodox trajectory through their comic worlds. While the work of these writers clearly remains within the mainstream comic tradition, the author notes in them a subtle departure, most notably in their description of the heroine as subject rather than object, which prefigures the full-scale transformations of women in comedy by contemporary women writers.   The book then examines contemporary comedy that revises traditional comic structure at the same time as it explores fundamental social change. In making her case for the difference of contemporary comedy by women, Carlson examines the reformulations of structure and character and considers issues of community, self, and sexuality in a broad range of plays by individual playwrights and by the new women's theater collectives.  Women and Comedy is an important work for students of British drama and will appeal to theater practitioners, critics, feminist scholars, and all those interested in the performing arts.