The Loss of Identity: Towards a Definition of the Dialectic in Lope's Early Drama

Abstract

THE revival of interest in the Spanish classical theater, and the continuing reassessment of the seventeenth-century comedia in particular, have brought an important new focus to the problems of interpretation. Following the precedent of Ortega, Eugenio d'Ors, and Pedro Salinas-to name only a few-twentieth-century Hispanists have discovered in the drama a pattern which is perhaps best defined as a universal world view or ideology. As early as 1940, Professor E. H. Templin-referring principally to the plays of Tirso de Molina-described the span of the Spanish comedia as the age of deception (burla): comedia itself draws on the burla for background and foreground, for mechanical devices and moods that range from horseplay to disillusionment (desengafo).' It must be readily admitted that Professor Templin's intuition is profoundly illuminating, and that it opens up a new perspective through which to view the mature seventeenth-century drama. At the same time, it issues a challenge to trace both the origins of this phenomenon and the extent of its dissemination after its first manifestations. This investigation-undertaken to elucidate these questions-has led to the conclusion that Lope de Vega was the first to dramatize the burla in any appreciable degree, and that he did so at the very outset of his career as a playwright. Furthermore, while Lope's earliest plays paved the way for the rapid success of the device among his imitators, they are the origin of a dramatic formula which is the key to the understanding of Lope's own mature theater. Perhaps in awe of the enormity of his dramatic output, and certainly hindered by problems of dating, historians and critics have largely ignored Lope's sixteenth-century plays. Yet in these neglected works we glimpse not only the burla but also the interplay of truth and illusion which was to characterize the Spanish literature of the next one hundred years. The importance of Lope's early experimentation with the theme of deception cannot be overestimated. It is treated in more than one fourth of the two dozen-odd comedias composed by the year