We are pleased to announce that Professor Jonathan Thacker's inaugural lecture as King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies is now available online, here.

The great writers and artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain – the Golden Age – are admired in part for their explorations of the boundary between reality and fiction, the world and artistic representations of it. Cervantes’s experiments in the novel and Velázquez’s in his paintings helped to question notions of truth, identity, authority, and the place of the human in a re-imagined world. The dramatists of this period are not usually viewed in quite the same light despite, or perhaps because of, the enormous popularity of Golden Age theatre. What was the nature of their contribution to early modern culture in Spain? How did they reflect the uncertainty and complexity of the period?

Professor Thacker’s main research interests are in the Spanish Golden Age. He has written on the prose and drama of Miguel de Cervantes and on various aspects of Golden-Age drama, including its metatheatrical elements, its translation and performance, and its ideological content.