The Politics of Husband-Murder: Gender, Supplementarity and Sacrifice in Lope de Vega's "La reina Juana de Napoles"

Abstract

*St & f +3 T would surely be an understatement to observe .*n^ tft tthat violent death is far from rare in Spanish A IT c g |Golden Age drama, for the plots of tragic and | L I tragicomic comedias frequently involve one or . X more characters dying at others' hands. Among tf* 1^j>?g * the most famous killers in Golden Age theater, of course, are Calderon's honor-driven, simultaneously pitiable and reprehensible wife-murderers. Far less common in the comedia, unsurprisingly in light of early modem Spanish gender role expectations, are women who kill their husbands. Indeed, when women in the comedia kill under virtually any circumstances, the fundamental varonilidad of homicide makes it a problematic and potentially subversive deed. A woman's murder of her spouse, of the man from whom she derived her social identity and to whom her obedience was demanded by natural, religious, and civil law alike, constituted such a radical act according to conventional ideologies that only the most extreme circumstances could have rendered it even imaginable, let alone palatable or gratifying, to many audience members. This dramatic challenge did not deter Lope de Vega, however, who created in the protagonist of his comedia La reina Juana de Ndpoles a heroic and laudable husband-murderer. This historical Neapolitan queen (Joanna I) leads her ladies-in-