'Pues no entiendo tus palabras, / y tus bofetones siento': Linguistic Subversion in Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano

Abstract

In recent years substantial critical attention has been devoted to an exploration of the darker voices at work in Lope de Vega's drama. Within this reassessment of Lope's work, the subversive role of language has been highlighted, most significantly from the perspective of speech act theory. This study of Lope's play El perro del hortelano, operating within a similar theoretical perspective, analyses the way in which the constantly shifting rhetoric(s) of love and honour lead to a gradual disintegration of artificial linguistic codes, and hint at the presence of a darker, more sinister, and collectively compromising, social instability beyond the framework of the play. The dramatic irony which underpins the simultaneous containment and revelation of 'truth' throughout the drama produces a resolution more liminal than closed and, perhaps, allows for recovery of significances beyond the play's historical moment of origin.