Celebration or Subversion?:Los comendadores de CórdobaReconsidered

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: COMENDADORES DE CÓRDOBA, LOS [LOPE DE VEGA]HONOUR [AS SOCIAL CODE & LITERARY/CULTURAL THEME]VEGA, LOPE DE (1562–1635) - PLAYS Notes 1. ‘Conjugal Honor in the Theater of Lope de Vega’ in his edition of El castigo del discreto (New York: Instituto de la Españas, 1925), 68. 2. ‘The Comic Treatment of Conjugal Honor in Las ferias de Madrid’, HR, 41 (1973), 33–42. 3. In his introduction to El sembrar en buena tierra (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1944), 20. 4. In his excellent study The Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard U.P., 1977), 31. 5. For a general reconsideration of the wife-murder plays and their relationship to their social context see Melveena McKendrick, ‘Honour-Vengeance in the Spanish Comedia—a Case of Mimetic Transference?’, MLR, 79(1984), 313–35. 6. A Literary History of Spain (ed. R. O. Jones), E. M. Wilson and Duncan Moir, The Golden Age: Drama (London: Ernest Benn, 1971), 63. 7. In his edition of Francisco Bances Candamo's Theatro de los Theatros de los Passados y Presentes Siglos (London: Tamesis, 1970), lxxxv. 8. Spain and the Western Tradition: The Castillan Mind in Literature from El Cid to Calderón, (Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), 1, 37. 9. Epistolario de Lope de Vega, ed. Agustín G. de Amezúa, 4 vols (Madrid: Olózaga and Aldus, 1935–43), III,49–51. 10. The other two plays are dealt with in McKendrick, ‘"Aquellos pies … ¿son míos?" Towards a reassessment of Lope's Treatment of Conjugal Honour’, forthcoming in the BHS. 11. McGrady, in explaining the pundonoroso husband's desire to catch his adulterous wife and her lover together, seems to suggest that other cultures have differed from Spain in allowing the husband the right to kill an adulterous wife only if caught in the act. But Spanish law was also clear on this point (see McKendrick, Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age [London: Cambridge U.P., 1974], 15–16); it seems to have been the theatre itself which propagated the idea that Spanish husbands could kill on suspicion alone with total impunity. 12. Los comendadores de Córdoba was based on a historical incident; but the fact that one third of male lifers in British jails in 1983 were imprisoned for killing wives or girl-friends does not persuade us to think that ours is a society where men habitually kill their women. 13. In his famous postscript to the novela, La prudente venganza. 14. In his Las seiscientas apotegmas. For other possible sources, see E. Cotarelo y Mori's edition of the Cancionero de Antón de Montoro (Madrid: José Perales y Martínez, 1900), 316–25; M. Menéndez y Pelayo, Estudios sobre el teatro de Lope de Vega, ed. E. Sánchez Reyes (Santander: Aldus, 1949), V, 249–85; and Margit Frenk Alatorre, ‘Un desconocido cantar de los Comendadores, fuente de Lope’, Homenaje a William L. Fichter, ed. A. David Kossoff and José Amor y Vázquez (Madrid: Castalia, 1971), 211–22. Rufo himself might well have used a source unknown to us, of course. 15. For Larson the comendadores are models of valour and circumspection at first. 16. Textual references are to the Real Academia Española edition, reprinted in BAE CCXV, Obras de Lope de Vega, XXIV (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1868). 17. Surely lemons could not by then have been rare in a land where oranges grew in plenty? 18. See n. 10.