Two Baroque Heroes: Segismundo and Hamlet

Abstract

the Seventeenth Century which, therefore, embraces both Shakespeare and Calder6n. Critics have been aware for a long time that the period between the High Renaissance and Neo Classicism constitutes a separate entity. Some, like Elisha K. Kane, term it an age of decline and deplore the excessive ornamentation that characterizes both the plastic and literary arts of the time as attempts to cover up an underlying exhaustion and lack of creative power.' Others, like Sacheverell Sitwell, see in it an epoch of and power.2 This is the period known as Baroque, and we hope that by pointing out its dominant features, we can define the term baroque sufficiently to show the reader why we consider Segismundo and Hamlet to be baroque. The subtitle of Kane's work is A Study of Exuberance and Unrestraint in the Arts, and the mere fact that one writer uses the word exuberance with a pejorative and the other with a laudatory intent serves to point up the division of opinion surrounding the art of this age. Kane propounds a theory of cyclic development according to which all literatures are born, gather strength and beauty in maturity and then decay. To illustrate he gives some very interesting examples of, of all things, Scandinavian Gongorismo that are to be found in the Scalds. An examination of this period will show that certain terms are constantly and consistently applied to it. One is soon very conscious of the great usefulness of expressions like flamboyant, exaggerated, transcendental, unrest, etc., regardless of whether he considers Spanish, Italian, French or German literature. This fact led the Germans to consider all of Europe as a literary unit. Writing in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1946, Ren6 Wellek says, Thus all literatures of Europe in the seventeenth century (and in part of the sixteenth century) are conceived of by German scholars as a unified movement.3