Techniques of Ambiguity in Un drama nuevo

Abstract

reader, thanks largely to its balanced blend of literacy and theatricality. In this pastiche of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Tamayo imaginatively places Shakespeare himself, and a Shakespearean character (one who never appears in any play--unless his skull be termed an appearance), in the center of a drama of love and jealousy. Yorick is appropriated as the symbolic jester, metamorphosed into a comic actor. He is used, not to betoken the transitoriness and ultimate uselessness of action, as in Hamlet, but to reflect the tragic quality of certain human interrelationships. This quality inheres in the ambivalent nature, or at least, the ambivalent possibilities, of our emotional attachments. Given the proper circumstances, love and hate consort despairingly in our hearts; ingratitude feeds upon the absorbing claim for gratitude; ambition becomes the road to downfall; and the game we play may turn out as deadly as death. The risk of the stereotype and of the romantic Pagliaccio antithesis had to be accepted. Tamayo has to some degree exorcised the curse, inherent to his theme and situation, by unmatched skill in dramatic technique, deft character delineation, and a lyrical plumbing of the depths of human agony. Clearly a basic part of this skill lies in stagecraft: the handling of exists and entrances, the remarkable power to hold the characters -and with them, the audience-poised between two possibilities, now inclined to despair, now to hope, but ever filled with terror. These are traditional weapons of the dramatist. Our present interest lies beyond them, in a more literary and less usual technique, the persistent play of ambiguities. In truth, Tamayo makes deliberate use of two types of structural artifice. We shall refer only briefly to a device of repetition, which is lyrical, rather than dramatic. A particular kind of repetition, a sequence of parallel phrasings of parallel emotional states, it is employed twice in the first act, and both times by the illicit lovers, Edmundo and Alicia. We first experience its impact in the fifth scene, in the wider reverberations of the long speeches in which they confess to each other the feelings of guilt, remorse, and frustration that have been the fruits of their weakness. Immediately following, the second instance is antithetical in its emotion, and in the brief, clipped phrases that carry it to us. This second time, repetition is designed to convey the ecstasy of Liebesgeburt to their auditor, Shakespeare. The echo of the Paolo and Francesca episode (Inferno, v) is caught and emotionally heightened, though the loss of simplicity and directness must be weighed heavily against the artifice of the lyrical tremolo.