Madrid en el Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro

An exhibition on Madrid's role as a centre of creation, staging and promotion of Spanish Baroque theatre, with pieces ranging from oil paintings to digital applications. It is housed at the Biblioteca Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid Joaquín Leguina.

The exhibition examines how the capital became the main centre of the Comedia Nueva, the genre that defined the Spanish stage of the Golden Age. The itinerary covers the figures of authors such as Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina or Calderón de la Barca, as well as Cervantes and Quevedo, placing them in the urban setting that hosted their premieres.

The display looks at Madrid's weight within the Hispanic Monarchy through its corrales de comedias, the spaces linked to the court and the popular celebrations tied to theatre and the feast of Corpus Christi. To do so, it combines oil paintings, manuscripts, scale models, costumes, photographs, videos and digital resources, so that visitors can follow how the stage phenomenon took shape in the capital and then spread.

The works come from the Biblioteca Regional itself and from institutions such as the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Archivo de la Villa de Madrid, the Archivo Histórico de Protocolos and the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. The exhibition is curated by Germán Vega García-Luengos, emeritus professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Valladolid, and by Javier J. González Martínez, senior lecturer in Spanish Literature at the same university.