Icons of Honor: Cervantes, Lope, and the Staging of Blind Faith

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to initiate an analysis of the commonalities between secular and sacred theatrical institutions and conventions by focusing on a few moments in Cervantes's El retablo de las maravillas in which the socio-economic embeddedness as well as the aesthetic conventions of both dramatic genres are foregrounded. Thus, rather than pursue a reading of the ways in which the religious themes and images described in the empty retablo satirically subvert the rhetoric and ideology of racial purity (Molho, Wardropper, Zimic, Moner, Reed), I am more interested in how Cervantes's staging of Chanfalla and Chirinos's engaño uncovers the commercial and political compromises of baroque theater, including religious theater. My thesis, in short, is that Cervantes's devastating critique of the debilitating enfermedades of honor and limpieza de sangre can and should be understood within the context of the entire array of institutionalized theatrical practices in Counter Reformation Spain, including—perhaps even especially—its most powerful expression of ethno-religious triumphalism, the auto sacramental .