"Tuya soy": The Economics of Marriage in Cervantes's Entremés del rufián viudo llamado Trampagos

Abstract

It has been noted that Cervantes's Entremés del rufián viudo llamado Trampagos parodies many of the forms, conventions, and themes of early 17th-century Spanish literature. Less discussed is the fact that the entremés satirizes, and therefore questions the values of, the period's social institutions and assumptions about these institutions. El rufián viudo not only parodies Garcilaso's Eclogues , demonstrating their language and themes to be an illusion masking a very different reality; it also questions the idealistic concept of love as the foundation of marriage. In this entremés , marriage is a matter of economics, a reality that undermines the image of courtly love as conveyed by the spokesmen of the dominant social order. El rufián viudo sets into motion a series of binary oppositions that reveal the emptiness of the status quo 's vehicle and the fullness of the reality this illusion attempts to conceal under the guise of conjugal harmony. (JG-J)