“Drowned in Blood”:

Abstract

The family bloodline was a crucial metaphor within the dramatic literatures of early modern England and Spain; again and again, English tragedy and Spanish tragicomedy depicted blood as the manifestation of competing discourses on race, class, sexuality, and gender. At first glance, the emblematic character of the bloodline—steeped, as was often the case, in the imaginative mythologies associated with those competing discourses—might appear too abstract and stylized to significantly shape our understanding of the more specific concerns of domesticity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In fact, the language of bloodline points distinctively to domestic ideology in the early modern drama of England and Spain. Both traditions emphasized the home space during this time, and both staged the home in terms of bloody violence—literalizing threats to and preservation of the family bloodline. This article argues that a comparison of bloodline in English and Spanish drama reveals that the negotiation of domestic ideology through physical violence was divided along gender lines between the two traditions. While the small but popular genre of Spanish wife-murder plays manifested corrupt or threatened bloodlines in the bodies of women, English domestic tragedy located such hazards in the bodies of men. Ultimately, early modern English drama suggested that the male body was uniquely susceptible to domestic threats; on the post-Reformation English stage, the bloodline was at its most vulnerable when embodied by the head of household.The degree to which the familial bloodline was materially understood in Siglo de Oro Spain has garnered significant critical attention, due in large part to the fifteenth-century limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) statutes that decreed Jewish and Moorish ancestry a “taint” to the purity of a family's Christian blood. By the seventeenth century, the Spanish corrales featured plays that embraced the rhetoric of limpieza de sangre to frame a broad range of social and familial conflict while at the same time pointing up the flaws inherent to the Inquisitorial epistemology that had authored and validated the blood purity statutes. The concepts of familial and sexual honor especially were annexed to limpieza de sangre on the Spanish stage, as ideals of masculine and feminine honor were articulated in terms of blood purity and the shame of social dishonor met its “cure” through the purging of diseased, impure blood. Pedro Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honra (The Physician of His Honor), published in 1637 but probably first performed 1628–1629, is perhaps the best example of the dramatic conflation of familial dishonor and tainted blood. In it, the jealous husband Don Gutierre, thinking his wife, Mencía, has been unfaithful, determines to bleed her to death in order to “cure” his diseased honor: Médico soy de mi honor,la vida pretendo darlecon una sangría; que todoscuran a costa de sangre.(I am the physician of my honour, I intend to give it life with a bleeding, for everyone cures at the expense of blood.)1Although Gutierre's murderous actions to protect his honor are kept secret and are nominally sanctioned by the complicit King Pedro, the play ends with a series of profound ironies—Mencía was never unfaithful, and King Pedro forces the jealous husband to marry his former love Leonor, whose honor was compromised by Gutierre himself—that reveal the absurdity of the social codes of blood and honor. While the familial bloodline was most prominently rendered in terms of limpieza de sangre and sexual honor, the enforcement of such codes (and the literalization of the blood purity metaphor) onstage regularly took the form of a powerful social critique.2In Renaissance England, however, the language of blood had a distinctly different history. The use of blood as a metonym for lineage, of course, was common.3 England's relationship to blood was also deeply connected to the Protestant Reformation's transformation of ritual and sacrament as well as its distrust of theater.4 The most hotly contested revision of blood in Reformation theology occurred in the transition from the ritual of mass to the ritual of the Lord's Supper. The reimagined ceremony hinged on the symbolic presence of God and rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation that allowed for the real presence of Jesus' body and blood in the Eucharistic elements. The emphasis on symbolic rather than real blood in the liturgy reflected the iconoclasm of Protestant Reform in England, which characterized the mistaking of the symbolic presence of God for the real, substantial body and blood as a form of Catholic idolatry.As scholars of the Reformation in England have noted, the paradoxical flourishing of an often-bloody public drama in the face of the Reformation's nuanced attitudes toward blood and spectacle suggests a profound ambivalence on the part of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audiences. Huston Diehl and Andrew Sofer, for example, have argued separately that blood on the early modern English stage could act as a site of nostalgia and cultural mourning, assuaging the grief of Protestant audiences for which the real blood of Christ was no longer materially present.5 On the other hand, bloody spectacles were often rendered onstage as purposefully misleading—a Protestant caution against taking a symbolic representation of a body for the body itself. We see an example of this paradox in John Webster's 1614 The Duchess of Malfi, when the villainous Duke Ferdinand tortures the duchess—his twin sister—by drawing aside a curtain to reveal a bloody tableau of the duchess's slaughtered family (4.1.55 SD).6 The audience is horrified along with the duchess, but Webster qualifies the shock a few moments later, when Ferdinand reveals that the bodies were artificial, designed to torment her: Excellent; as I would wish; she's plagued in art.These presentations are but framed in wax,By the curious master in that quality,Vincentio Lauriola, and she takes themFor true substantial bodies. (4.1.111–15)On Ferdinand's delight that the duchess has been “plagued in art,” Ellen Caldwell has observed that “as if to confirm his sister's moral blindness, Ferdinand borrows the term ‘substantial bodies’ from contemporary theological discourses on the nature of the Eucharist to comment on her lack of discernment.”7 The trick, of course, is on the audience as well as the duchess, suggesting that anyone might fall victim to the misleading power of the image. Just as the Siglo de Oro stage dramatized the residual power as well as the weaknesses of limpieza de sangre and the honor code, the theater of post-Reformation England exploited the ambivalence of gory spectacle to reveal the porosity between real and symbolic when it came to blood.The idea of the family bloodline on English and Spanish stages, then, drew from and satisfied radically different cultural expectations on matters of theology, sexuality, race, and theatricality. The Duchess of Malfi and El médico de su honra portray, however, some important similarities in terms of gendered dynamics and the language of family. Both are plays in which the purity of the familial bloodline is in question, and in both anxieties of bloodline are resolved through spectacular—and exceptionally bloody—murder. For Webster, the conflict over blood is largely one of class, whereas in Calderón, the “taint” is a perceived injury to the concept of sexual honor. The chief difference between the blood economies of the two plays rests in the ways in which ideas of domesticity and bloodline are conflated and materially represented onstage. In El médico, the fusion of limpieza de sangre with social honor is signaled by women's blood, brutally (if ironically and wrongfully) spilled to preserve male honor. The home—along with its perceived perdurability or weakness—was metonymized in the female body, on which patriarchal systems of honor were contested. England's dramatization of the home space, on the other hand, underscored the embodiment of domesticity—that is, the idea that the home was a body of which the husband was the head.8 Female transgressions were often the subject of English domestic tragedy, but the bodies at stake were consistently male: it is typically the broken, bleeding body of the householder that signifies the destruction of domestic order on the English stage. Within The Duchess of Malfi, then, the family bloodline is strikingly manifest in male blood, offering a fleeting portrait of the Protestant household ideal that is at once celebrated and doomed. Furthermore, as is the case in El médico, in Webster's play the figure of the murderer as physician (represented in the figure of Ferdinand) articulates the theological, sexual, and cultural attitudes toward the family bloodline that shape domestic ideology.Here I must offer one important qualification to my comparison of The Duchess of Malfi with El médico de su honra. Scholars of the Spanish comedia will no doubt wonder why Lope de Vega's 1605 El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi (The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward) does not figure prominently into my analysis. Lope's El mayordomo was probably written about ten years before Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and although the two plays share a source text, it does not seem that Webster read Lope's play.9 There are, however, meaningful echoes between the two plays. In Webster's Duchess of Malfi, the widowed duchess secretly marries her steward, Antonio, in direct conflict with the demands of her brothers that she not remarry. Over the course of a few years, the two raise several children within the duchess's court, drawing the suspicion of her brothers. Lope's El mayordomo depicts the love between the duchess and Antonio and their secret marriage, but in Lope's version the couple send their children to be raised in the country by peasants to protect them from the wrath of the duchess's brother Julio. In Lope's play, the duchess and Antonio's union is drily parodied by Doristo and Bartola, the children's foster parents.10 In Lope's finale, Julio reveals a grotesque tableau that mirrors Webster's wax corpses, only in El mayordomo the spectacle is “substantial”: the actual heads of Antonio and his two children appear on platters. Several useful studies of Webster and Lope's Malfi plays exist, most of which pay particular attention to these moments in light of the generic conventions of English tragedy and Spanish tragicomedy.11As compelling as comparisons between the literary traditions of the two plays may be, El mayordomo does not represent the family bloodline materially nor stage the crisis of blood and home to the same extent as The Duchess of Malfi and El médico. The villain of El mayordomo, the brother Julio, does indeed articulate his sister's transgressions in terms of blood—“Hoy la sangre Aragón queda afrentada/con la bajeza de tan vil cuñado” (327) (“The baseness of this vile brother-in-law is an affront to the blood of Aragon”)—but his appearance toward the end of the play does not exert the same dramatic force as that of the obsessive, murderous physicians Ferdinand and Gutierre.12 Because my intent is to find a comparative approach to material representations of the family bloodline on the early modern English and Spanish stages and not to forge a new comparativist reading of the Malfi story exclusively, the present study does not consider Lope's play any further.13By focusing on The Duchess of Malfi and El médico, I mean to show that both dramatic traditions used visible stage blood to mark the physical and affective boundaries of domesticity and to explore the cultural value of bloodline. The blood in The Duchess of Malfi serves to articulate, valorize, and then signal the martyrdom of an ideal Protestant home. The play stages competing models of the family that correspond (roughly) to a post-Reformation household body and a Spanish/Italian, Catholic bloodline, parodic in its incestuous obsession with impurity. As we can see in Webster's play, English drama was moving toward conventions whereby the family was represented as occupying an ambivalent, embodied domestic space, especially on the major events that may occur within its walls—sex, childbirth, violence, and healing—and the blood associated with those events. The Spanish dramatization of Inquisitorial suspicion and punishment within the home shares a visual vocabulary with the English staging of family conflict and tragedy but differs significantly by satirizing the royal authorization of domestic violence and honor killing. In Calderón's play, the household is also marked with blood, but domestic blood is ultimately—if ironically—subsumed by the epistemology of the abstract bloodline, the purity of which depends on absurd displays of violence. This contrast highlights the nuances of domestic ideology vis-à-vis religious difference. Reformation attitudes toward blood reframed the home as a space defined by the masculine body, displacing the female body as the source and site of violent conflict. The irony of this revised fantasy of the home is that, while Reformation theology valorized the home as a haven for companionate marriage, the drama of the time represented the home as a space in which the male householder was in constant and profound danger.El médico de su honra depicts sexual honor as a system that can be maintained only through violence and only at the expense of the domestic space. Scholars of sexual violence and adultery in the Spanish comedia have shown that, historically, the legal context of injured honor and uxoricide suggests a complex picture of cultural attitudes toward the disciplining of female sexuality, in which the rhetoric of purity and immaculacy prescribed feminine behavior but also inscribed anxieties of masculine identity.14 The ideology of honor publicly sanctioned certain forms of domestic discipline and control, even if the logical (and often lethal) application of the honor code was punishable by law. The so-called wife-murder plays of this period manifest this tension between legal and social validation through a variety of common dramatic topoi, including, as Melveena McKendrick observes, the husbands' anguished protests against the self-imposed tyranny of an honour code which allows them to rationalize the jealousy they consider it degrading to feel … [and] closing scenes riddled with irony and ambiguity in which the husbands' actions are ratified by authority figures who have already been shown to speak with compromised voices.15El médico de su honra stages all of this. Gutierre's rant against jealousy is, of course, a disgusted admission of his own all-consuming suspicion. He thus threatens Mencía by claiming he would be uncontrollable in the face of true jealousy: ¿Celoso? ¿Sabes tú que son celos?Que yo no sé qué son, ¡viven los cielos!;Porque si lo supiera … … llegar pudieraa tener …no más que una esclava, una criada,por sombra imaginada,con hechos inhumanos,a pedazos sacara con mis manosel corazón, y luegoenvuelto en sangre, desatado en fuego,el corazón comieraa bocados, la sangre me bebiera,el alma le sacara,y el alma, ¡vive Dios!, despedazara,si capaz de dolor el alma fuera. (2015–31)(Jealous? Do you know what jealousy is? I don't know what it is, by heaven!, because if I knew, and jealousy … could come to possessme … of no more than a slave woman, or a maidservant, because of an imagined shadow—with inhuman deeds, I would rip out her heart in pieces with my own hands, and then, covered in blood, unbound in fire, I would eat her heart by mouthfuls, I would drink her blood, I would tear out her soul, and if her soul were capable of pain, I would—as God lives!—tear it to pieces. [153])At the end of the play, the king accepts Gutierre's account of Mencía's death but nevertheless punishes him by means of a new marriage. The “justice” of such a decree is complicated by the figure of King Pedro himself, a “compromised” voice of authority to whom I return.Gutierre's vile account of the punishment for arousing his jealousy and threatening his honor—a speech that Dian Fox-Hindley has described as “a kind of ecstasy”—is most notable in the blatant delight he expresses toward the thought of a bloody, mutilated female body.16 His desire to “eat her heart by mouthfuls,” “drink her blood,” and “tear [her soul] to pieces” reflects a masculine fear prevalent in wife-murder plays: familial honor is embodied by women, whose material bodies are seen as penetrable, porous, and vulnerable to moral and sexual failing. Georgina Dopico Black's magnificent study of El médico in Perfect Wives, Other Women articulates the anxiety generated by a form of social currency (honor) that inhabits the body and blood of women: “In nearly all of the honor plays, (male) honor” is “radically dependent on (female) chastity”; honor is “the site, localizable on the wife's body, through which the husband's subjectivity is vulnerable to the wife's will. The question of whether a woman can possess or manifest honor or whether she is a mere receptacle for her husband's honor—or, if she is unmarried, her father's or her brother's—is quite salient. In the majority of the honor plays, mention of a woman's honra almost invariably remits to her chastity.”17That honor should live within a woman's body and be subject to a woman's sexual continence reveals the weakest premise of the honor code. For Black, the frustration of a jealous husband over the unknowability of his wife's body (and, by extension, the status of his honor) rehearses a flawed Inquisitorial epistemology that maintained that various measures of purity were legible on the body. In turn, Black argues, El médico calls into question reading and interpretation and points to “the instability that inheres in any system that takes itself for authoritative, whether one that prescribes meaning or one that prescribes objects of desire and rules of conduct.”18 As an authorized and authoritative system of prescribing meaning, medical practice is also revealed, like the honor code, to be fundamentally flawed and easily abused in the service of blood purity ideology. By framing the honor code as a discourse of health and sickness treatable by bloodletting, Calderón's Gutierre and Webster's Ferdinand mask their violent impulses with a fantasy of healing.As both El médico and The Duchess of Malfi illustrate, threats from inside the home typically took a bloody form on the Renaissance stage, reinforcing a visual association between family, domestic space, and personal danger. The blood of menstruation, childbirth, butchery, and medical therapies like phlebotomy—everyday blood of the domestic sphere—provided a range of rich visual signs for the Renaissance stage. The plays rely heavily on the blood imagery associated with phlebotomy, heightening the danger the duchess/Mencía are put in with what should be a source of healing. Bloodletting, a common means of treating illness and maintaining well-being, embodied the paradox of the surgeon who harms in order to heal; the procedure involved opening a vein with a lancet, directing the blood into a bowl, and making sure the patient did not faint. This unnerving process is described in John Woodall's 1617 Surgions Mate: Likewise that the orifice be large not deep; yet not ouer-large, for it is ouerlarge when the bloud tumbleth out without a streame, for that spendeth too much the spirits…. Note also that if your Patient incline to faintnesse, or sounding [swooning], you cause him betimes to thrust his longest finger of the other hand into his throte, and a little prouoke himself to casting [vomiting], it helpeth presently.19By Woodall's account, the purported benefits of bloodletting pale in comparison to the ordeal of the procedure. In The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand pushes the dual aspect of bloodletting to the extreme by taking on the position of a surgeon intent on killing the patient as he sets out to “purge infected blood” (2.5.26) from his royal bloodline. Don Gutierre echoes the image of Ferdinand's homicidal surgeon as he aims to heal his wounded honor by killing his wife. Both men employ intermediaries to perform the murder, and both are punished: Ferdinand becomes delusional and is murdered by Bosola, and Don Gutierre's royal “pardon” takes the form of a new marriage, equally vulnerable to the exigencies of the honor code as his first. Don Gutierre reluctantly receives the king's blessing to replace his murdered wife with a new patient/victim, and because the “physician” has the blood of murder on his hands as he reaches out to take a new wife, the marriage serves as punishment—not redemption—for both bride and groom. Ultimately, however, the plays demonstrate fundamentally distinct approaches to a single bloody act: it is Ferdinand's body that bears his punishment, as he is stabbed with a dagger stained in Antonio's blood, whereas at the end of Calderón's play, the threat of a bloody “cure” is transferred chillingly from the murdered Mencía to Gutierre's new wife. Whether male or female blood is at stake, the plays imagine the surgeon as a figure of brutality and pain.The barber-surgeon of medieval and Renaissance Europe was closest in appearance and function, after all, to a butcher. As Marie-Christine Pouchelle reminds us, the “surgeon was, in the literal sense of the term, ‘bloody’”; that is, diagnostic procedures demanded he dip his hands in blood to test its consistency, retain blood to observe its congealment, and even taste his patients' blood for sweetness or bitterness.20 In The Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand imagines himself a member of this bloody profession. When the play first introduces Ferdinand, he attempts to recall a jest involving “all the chirurgeons o' the city” (1.1.107–8), and, once inflamed, he begins to use the chirurgeons' language himself: “Rhubarb, oh, for rhubarb/To purge this choler!” (2.5.12–13). Ferdinand the “physician” also prescribes a grotesque recipe reserved for Antonio when he plans “to boil their bastard to a cullis, /And give't his lecherous father to renew/The sin of his back” (2.5.73–75). The absurd violence of this description—lechery, cannibalism, infanticide—is heightened by Ferdinand's language of healing.Their blood under threat from the duchess's corruption of “her honours” (2.5.21), the cardinal and Ferdinand determine to purge the taint medicinally: Cardinal. Shall our blood,The royal blood of Aragon and Castile,Be thus attainted?Ferdinand. Apply desperate physic—We must not now use balsamum, but fire,The smarting cupping-glass, for that's the meanTo purge infected blood, such blood as hers.There is a kind of pity in mine eye,I'll give it to my handkercher; and now 'tis here,I'll bequeath this to her bastard. (2.5.17–29)The “desperate physic” Ferdinand proposes features the sadistic application of medical treatments, including phlebotomy and the “smarting cupping-glass.” “Cupping” was a form of cautery: scratches or corrosive substances were applied to the skin, and white-hot glass cups were placed over the treated areas in order to draw the humors into balance.21 Here Ferdinand devises the solution to the cardinal's fears for the royal bloodline. Ferdinand imagines the duchess's entire body is the contamination in the “royal blood of Aragon and Castile” and determines to act as a surgeon to purge the “royal” blood of the “infected” blood. Ferdinand revises his preference for “the smarting cupping-glass” over the lancet moments later when he asserts that “'tis not [the duchess's] whore's milk that shall quench my wildfire, /But [her] whore's blood” (2.5.47–48). Ferdinand wants to “purge” the tainted blood by whatever means exacts the most pain, purifying the “royal blood of Aragon and Castile” by killing the duchess. The survival of Antonio's eldest son, however, serves as a reminder that the brothers, blinded by their obsession, did not “purge” all of Antonio's blood from their own.Likewise, it must be noted that the brothers do not ultimately spill their sister's blood. Like Shakespeare's Desdemona, the duchess is bloodlessly strangled. In their inability to make her bleed, they stand in sharp contrast to Don Gutierre in El médico, who literalizes the metaphor of the play's title. Heightening the impact of Gutierre's actions is the legacy of limpieza de sangre, which manifested the impulse to “purge infected blood” articulated by Webster's villains. Barbara Weissberger has argued that limpieza de sangre was inevitably linked “to sexual control and heightened conjugal normativity,” and, as we see in El médico, the cleanliness or purity of blood depends on the strict regulation of domestic practices like marriage, sex, and reproduction.22 By framing the purity of blood as a medical concern, however, Calderón imagines honor as subject to the application of phlebotomy, which practically replicated and symbolically necessitated an act of violence. Furthermore, as Andrew J. Brown has illustrated, the image of the médico was an ambivalent and vaguely threatening figure in Calderón's Spain, suggesting prestige as well as danger.23When Don Gutierre claims, “Médico soy de mi honor” (3.2630) (“I am the physician of my honour” [193]), then, he draws on the intertwined histories of limpieza de sangre, the sexual honor code, and a potentially fatal medical therapy. The play dramatizes his devolution from a man who appears paralyzed by the honor code to a murderer who upholds the code past the point of absurdity. In his past, Gutierre had injured the honor of another family, abandoning his first love, Leonor, after destroying her honor in error. As the play begins, Leonor pleads with King Pedro to help restore her honor, making plain to the audience that Gutierre's heightened anxieties with respect to her fidelity, and not her own behavior, are to blame for her disgrace. For Gutierre the concept of honor develops a life of its own, threatened and wounded as it is by his paranoia. Leaping over his walls to spy on Mencía in the garden, Gutierre justifies his suspicion as a form of diagnostic concern: Médico de mi honrame llamo, pues procuro mi deshonracurar; y así he venidoa visitar mi enfermo, a hora que ha sidode ayer la misma (2.1871–75)(I call myself the physician of my honour, because I am procuring the cure for my dishonour; and thus I have come to visit my ailing patient at the same hour as last night. [143])The “enfermo” (“ailing patient”) here is a complicated figure; Gutierre has leapt over the garden walls by night to apprehend Mencía, but the masculine “enfermo” suggests he here imagines an embodiment of male honor. The paradox of sexual honor in seventeenth-century Spain, as Black, McKendrick, and Matthew Stroud have observed, is expressed by the fact that a masculine currency of social status is only materialized in the body and blood of women.24 Thus the gender of Gutierre's patient is fluid; when he addresses his male honor, he laments that en vuestro sepulcrovivís: puesto que os alientala mujer, en ella estáispisando siempre la güesa. (2.1661–64)(you live in your sepulchre: since woman breathes life into you, in her you are forever treading on your grave. [131])Healthy male honor, Gutierre seems to say, exists only in a dead woman.The woman in question, Mencía, is deeply troubled by the honor code throughout the play. She once loved Prince Enrique, the younger brother of King Pedro, but remains faithful to her husband; nevertheless, a mishap reignites the suspicions that led Don Gutierre to abandon his first love. After a chance meeting, Prince Enrique slips into Mencía's garden late at night, but she refuses his advances and he flees the garden. When Gutierre then approaches her, she assumes he is the prince and addresses him with the royal honorific, fueling Gutierre's fears. Calderón repeats this tragic series of events later in the play, when Gutierre discovers Mencía writing to the prince to request that he stay in Sevilla to help suppress rumors against her honor. Gutierre surprises Mencía and she faints in fear; when she regains consciousness, she articulates a prescient nightmare: Mas, ¿qué es esto? ¡Ay de mí! ¿No estaba agoraGutierre aquí? ¿No vía (¿quién lo ignora?)que en mi sangre bañadamoría, en rubias ondas anegada? (3.2486–89)(But what's this? Ah, me! Wasn't Gutierre just here? Did I not see—who could doubt it?—that I was dying bathed in my own blood, drowning in crimson waves? [183])Mencía's prediction of a death “bathed in [her] own blood, drowning in crimson waves” reveals the extent to which blood is imbricated with honor in El médico and reiterates the primacy of women's bodies and female blood in the rhetoric of sexual honor.25 Perhaps most importantly, Mencía's horrified vision here anticipates her husband's physical enforcement of the honor code. In a brutal irony, Gutierre frames the manipulation and destruction of her life in the service of honor as a process of bleeding by which honor is restored to health. In both scenes, the play makes a strong association between an endangered Mencía and the home space—even within her garden or private chambers, Mencía is isolated but unprotected and vulnerable to threats against her body and honor.Thus El médico considers the terror and unknowability of infidelity by imagining honor in a physical form, a body that can be diagnosed, treated, cured, and killed. Within Gutierre and Mencía's home, Calderón offers the audience two relevant bodies of honor: the physical body of Mencía, presumed by her husband to be despoiled by infidelity, and the imagined body of Don Gutierre's honor, sick and in need of bloodletting to regain health. We must take note, however, that the imaginary body of Gutierre's honor cannot and does not undergo the brutal mutilation that the bloodletter Ludovico eventually enacts on Mencía. The formula that Gutierre offers her