El teatro de Cervantes (review)

Abstract

Reviews129 be commended for a splendid job as editor of a volume that will certainly sharpen the critical discourse about one of the most intriguing plays ever written in the Spanish language. C. Christopher Soufas Tulane University Zimic, Stanislav. El teatro de Cervantes. Madrid: Castalia, 1992. Paper. 422 pp. This volume covering Cervantes' ten comedias and eight entremeses brings together nineteen essays published by Zimic in recent years. He has reworked them where necessary to provide a composite and coherent picture of "el humano y artísticamente vasto, profundo, variado y excitante mundo del teatro de Cervantes" (9). Indeed, not since Americo Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925) has anyone produced a more compelling case for Cervantes as Renaissance humanist, imbued with a system of values that was advanced for his time and perhaps even for ours. In the prologue Zimic examines Cervantes as dramatist, reminds us ofhis long-standing rivalry with Lope de Vega, and contrasts his thoughtful and critical plays with the facile and distorted image oflife embodied in Lope's theatrical paradigm. Cervantes never loses sight of the exemplary purpose of his comedias and entremeses as he probes the subtle interior world ofhis characters , both as individuals and as social beings. Thus his theater is more suited for reading than for staging. Zimic returns time and again to these themes as he also emphasizes the unique features of each play. Herewith a few examples ofhis approach. To the autobiographical reading of Los tratos de Argel Zimic adds a Dantesque influence. The four jornadas become four circles of Hell, and Saavedra, a Dante-like visitor of the riva malvegia, who converses with its inhabitants, then departs and proclaims to the world what he has witnessed. Zimic believes Numancia exalts the Numantine resistance fighters, but he diverges from other critics by characterizing Scipio Aemilianus as an amoral , Machiavellian general, blindly committed to the unconditional surrender of Numancia. Since Cervantes condemns the Roman notion of empire embodied in Scipio, he cannot be advocating it for his own country. El gallardo español, in turn, explores the conflict between personal honor and patriotic and moral responsibility. Zimic regards this play as a dramatized book 130BCom, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Summer 1994) of chivalry, and notes its many features that are more characteristic of the novel than the drama. The love affairs in La casa de los celos are, for Zimic, parodies of love as this theme appears in chivalric and pastoral romance; what passes for love in La casa is in truth an obsession or hypocrisy. Cervantes' concern in this play with the inner struggles of his characters explains the presence of allegorical figures like those found in Calderón's autos sacramentales, Zimic also finds positive things to say about one ofthe most scorned ofthe comedias, La gran sultana, which projects Cervantes' attitudes toward the political, social and religious issues of his day. Here the characters' religious background does not determine whether they are good or bad; followers of Islam are capable of lofty sentiments and Christians of dastardly ones. Zimic reads La entretenida as a sustained and coherent parody ofthe comedia nueva. The playwright aims his sharpest barbs at the exaggerated emotionalism ofthe galanes, the impertinence ofthe graciosos, and the defense of the status quo, that frozen, hierarchical society in which everyone is happy in his corner. Zimic believes Cervantes' criticism of love in this play is also an implicit attack on Lope's personal life, which was characterized by equally exaggerated infatuations. In fact, Zimic suggests that Lope pierced the thin fictional disguise ofLa entretenida and expressed his anger and resentment by helping to pen the false second part ofthe Quijote. Thus the name A/onso Fernández de Avellaneda contains the letters in Lope's name (261). In a similar vein, Zimic interprets the braggart soldier in the entremés La guarda cuidadosa not as a self parody but as another satirical portrait of Lope, who in his personal life exhibited the same military presumptuousness and whose relationship with Elena Osorio was as absurd as the soldier's with Cristina. Zimic reads Pedro de Urdemalas as a comedia à clé; the king is Felipe III; the fictional...