El Castigo Research Articles

Lope de Vega’s “El Castigo Sin Venganza” Genre, Structure and Political and Moral Meaning

"El castigo sin venganza" is a literary work conceived by Lope de Vega in 1631, just four years before his death, when the author was seventy-three years old. This play represents a product of the author's creative activity at an advanced stage of his life, characterised by a mature and perhaps disenchanted Lope de Vega, in a context where the figure of Calderón de la Barca predominated on the literary scene.In these lines, we will focus on the analysis of three fundamental aspects of the work: the genre, the structure and the political and moral meaning.

Código sexual cerrado y género dramático: El castigo del penseque, de Tirso de Molina

El castigo del penseque, by Tirso de Molina, is a palatine comedy of entanglement that has also been classified as a «secretary comedy». It allows us to examine the closed sexual code, current in Spanish literature between the 13th and 17th centuries, from the multiple perspectives of emission and reception inscribed in the dramatic genre.

The Royal Master and El villano en su rincón Revisited: More than the Motif of the Reluctance to see the King

In 1890, in an article titled “Die Nachhamung spanischer Komödien in England unter der ersten Stuarts”, the German scholar A.L. Stiefel solidly demonstrated the clear textual relationship between James Shirley’s The Opportunity and Tirso de Molina’s El castigo del penseque. In 2003, following an intriguing footnote in that article, which pointed to five more dramatic Spanish sources, I postulated another transtextual relationship concerning Shirley’s The Royal Master and Lope de Vega’s El villano en su rincón. My analysis focused on the specific motif that he named “the reluctance to see the king” in the character of the English fool Bombo and the Spanish farmer Juan Labrador. However, after a review of the two plays, it seems clear that there are more textual relationships than the one disclosed in my previous study. Relying on Gerald Genette’s category of transtextuality, this article widens further the scope of the motif, explores its relationship with the topic of court versus country life, unearths architextual transferences of elements of plot and characters, proposes affinities based on the palatine affiliation of both plays and the similarities in the use of the dramatic method of matchmaking, and, finally, reveals the creative use that the Caroline playwright made of his Spanish source.

Engendering Golden Tongues

The Golden Tongues adaptation initiative, founded in 2013, pairs Los Angeles writers with comedias to produce new plays for modern audiences, inspired by the originals. I argue that reworking gender dynamics is a particularly rich dimension of the process of adaptation: as the plays take on the complexities of our modern gender system, they often bring out much that is latent in the source texts as well. The essay focuses on School for Witches, or Friendship Betrayed by Madhuri Shekar (2018), adapted from María de Zayas’s La traición en la amistad and The King of Maricopa County (2020), adapted from Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza by Mary Lyon Kamitaki.

The Influence of British Directors on the Fundación Siglo de Oro and its Productions of Early Modern Drama, 2007-2021

The Fundación Siglo de Oro –formerly Compañía Rakatá– has been staging Spanish Golden Age and Elizabethan theatre since it was founded in 2006. Over this time, the company has developed an identity associated not only with its staging of early modern drama, but also with the influence of a series of contemporary British theatre practitioners on its rehearsal process. Perhaps one of the most noteworthy constants in its work is a fruitful series of collaborations with British stage directors, beginning in 2007 with Laurence Boswell directing El perro del hortelano (revived in 2014), in 2009 Fuenteovejuna, and in 2015 co-directing Mujeres y criados with company founder and producer Rodrigo Arribas. While, at first, we can ascribe this collaboration to the impact of the Royal Shakespeare Company Golden Age season, curated by Boswell, which visited Madrid’s emblematic Teatro Español in 2004, the company have continued to seek out British directors including Tim Hoare on Don Juan en Alcalá (2016) and Trabajos de amor perdidos (2016), and most recently Dominic Dromgoole on a new production of El perro del hortelano (2021). This latter partnership is also the culmination of a collaboration with Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre which saw the company take part in the Cultural Olympiad with Enrique VIII (2012) and become the first company to perform Lope de Vega in Spanish at the London theatre, with El castigo sin venganza (2014). There has therefore been a clear exchange of ideas between Spanish classical theatre and contemporary British theatre practice. This article proposes to explore the methodological contributions of British directors to better understand how this has altered the in-rehearsal perspectives on the Spanish Golden Age to explain the benefits of this Anglo-Hispanic collaborative approach to the company’s work. This will be supported by an interview with Rodrigo Arribas, whose constant presence as founder, producer, actor and most recently as director can help us to understand the contributions made by Boswell, Hoare and Dromgoole to the company’s rehearsal methodology.

The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes

Reviewed by: The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes William Flores Rivera-Barnes, Beatriz. The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures. Lexington Books, 2021. Pp. 235. ISBN 978-1-498-59648-0. The Nature of Hate and the Hatred of Nature in Hispanic Literatures is an impressive multidisciplinary collection of eleven insightful chapters that converge on the unifying themes of hate and ecophobia in major literary and cinematic works produced in the Spanish-speaking world. The first part of the book contains three chapters related to the Iberian world, while the second part encompasses eight chapters referring to Latin American film and literature. The introduction provides a rich discussion on ecocritical theory that includes Simon C. Estok’s view on ecophobia and a synthesis of Timothy Morton’s theory of dark ecology, to help the reader understand the ecocritical approximation of the book. Furthermore, the introduction provides a valuable academic discussion on what hate and the hatred of nature are, while using a historiographical approach that includes an examination of biblical narratives, medieval events and literature, and current ecocatastrophes. For those interested in Spanish Golden Age literature, the first chapter investigates psycho-philosophical elements in Fernando de Roja’s La Celestina. The chapter presents hate as an intrinsic component of the characters’ self, being generated by love in the form of an excessively manifested passion. Concurrently, the second chapter explores the hate that comes from intimacy as portrayed in Lope de Vega’s La creación del Mundo, El robo de Dina, Fuenteovejuna, and El castigo sin venganza. The chapter highlights how these adaptations of the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Amnon raping Tamar, or the rape of Dinah exemplify the propagation of hate through generations. The third chapter studies Miguel de Unamuno’s Abel Sánchez, a work based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel. This chapter provides a reading of that book as a representation of the hate that comes from the God of the Old Testament, human hate, and the resulting curse of nature. By examining narrative techniques that include stream of consciousness and introspective mono-dialogues, chapter three highlights that hate results from intimacy and is catalyzed by an envy that consumes, devours, and destroys humans and their natural environment. Utilizing an eclectic approach, the fourth chapter studies a variety of cinematic and literary texts that describe Lope de Aguirre’s search for El Dorado and Cabeza de Vaca’s foundering in the Florida Everglades. The chapter examines films including Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God, Carlos Saura’s El Dorado, Roland Joffe’s The Mission, Nicolás Echevarría’s Cabeza de Vaca, Icíar Bollaín’s También la Lluvia, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, in addition to literary works such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition, Rivera’s La vorágine, and a selection of jungle tales written by Horacio Quiroga. This chapter successfully examines and portrays these works as “doomed expeditions” that reflect hatred for nature in an existing, created, or re-created form. The fifth chapter explores hate while examining Alonso Carrió’s Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes, and Ernesto Guevara’s Diarios de motocicleta and Otra vez. This chapter is a pleasure to read as it presents, in rich narrative style, how these literary works can be juxtaposed while analyzing journeys that explore the Latin American reality of corruption and abuse. Rivera-Barnes connects the corruption and exploitation from colonial times as presented in Carrió’s Lazarillo with the abuses of neocolonialism exposed in Che Guevara’s narratives to provide a canvas of the continuity of colonialism and its foundational hatred of indigenous peoples and their natural environment. Furthermore, in the case of Che Guevara’s accounts, hatred is also examined as a tool to fight oppression. [End Page 149] Using a historical approach, the sixth chapter studies twentieth-century narratives written by Alejo Carpentier, Manuel Zapata Olivella, and Enrique Buenaventura, to explore literary representations of hatred that portray the 1791 rebellion in Haiti and the making of Haiti...

Дантовский сюжет о Франческе и Паоло в испанской литературе XV–XVII вв.

The article discusses the reception of the Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia) by Dante Alighieri and, in particular, of Canto 5 of the Inferno and its central episode — Dante’s encounter with Francesca and Paolo, in Spanish literature of the 15th–17th centuries. It began at the end of the initial third of the 15th century that was caused by late reception of the European courtesy tradition in Spain. Old translations of Infierno by Dante (Enrique de Villena, Pedro Fernández de Villegas) saw in the story of Francesca and Paolo first and foremost a cautionary example of the tragic effect of the courteous poetry and its ideals on real fates of people, thus partly determining further ways of perception of the narrative of killed lovers and its effect on the Spanish poetry and drama. The brightest expression of this idea is the episode, where Marquess de Santillana, hero of El Triumphete de Amor vision, meets the Dante’s characters and the “dona de Ravenna” gives place to Galician troubadour Macias. The national legend and didactic representation of Dante’s episode forced the narrative of Francesca and Paolo out of the Spanish literature. Lope de Vega’s play titled El castigo sin venganza written on the basis of the plot of Bandello’s novella and transformed under the influence of Dante’s episode became in a way the return to the initial and tragic essence of the story of two lovers.

A New («Princeps»?) Edition of «El castigo sin venganza»

In this article we give notice of an unknown edition of Lope de Vega’s play El castigo sin venganza, a suelta or quarto lacking any publishing information. After offering a general view of the context of this tragedy’s creation and the history of its circulation, we examine different aspects of this new suelta: we prove that it was published by a Sevilian printing shop and that it can be dated in 1632-1638 based on its bibliographic characteristics; we evaluate and place this new witness within the play’s textual tradition; we present different hypotheses about how the text reached the printing press based on an analysis of the theatrical companies that performed this play; and we present our conclusions, which include the possibility that this new suelta could be the editio princeps of El castigo sin venganza and what led Lope de Vega to publish his play in 1634, which has been considered until now the first edition of this tragedy.

Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture by Anne Fuchs

MLR, .,   character who speaks. Chapter  examines the difficulties of conveying the shis in tone and situation that this rich polymetric verse marks in the original. Jeffs examines the opening stanzas of the four plays that were staged in the Swan to exemplify the kinds of decisions that were taken to preserve some sense of the original verse structure. Chapter  augments the analysis of these decisions with respect to characterization, while Chapter  analyses the deployment of metatheatrical moments, particularly with respect to the play-within-the-play sequences, ceremonies, and role-play. ese two chapters offer a wealth of individual case studies of how the texts were explored in rehearsal and how they worked in performance. e final chapter considers the impact that the RSC’s Golden Age season has had on subsequent productions in the US, Spain, and, more centrally, the UK until . Apart from briefly considering two American stagings of e Dog in the Manger, it traces Boswell’s subsequent comedia productions, first in Madrid with Rakatá (El perro del hortelano in – and Fuente Ovejuna in , both performed in Spanish) and then in Bath. As Artistic Director of the Ustinov Studio in the latter city, he produced e Phoenix of Madrid (a reworking of No hay burlas con el amor) by Calderón in , and then a three-play season in : A Lady of Little Sense (La dama boba) by Lope de Vega, Don Gil of the Green Breeches (Don Gil de las calzas verdes) by Tirso de Molina, and Punishment without Revenge (El castigo sin venganza) by Lope de Vega. Jeffs’s book is a stimulating and hugely detailed account of the making of the landmark RSC’s Spanish Golden Age season. It analyses the challenges of working on the interface between two very different dramatic traditions and languages, displaying rigorous linguistic, cultural, and scholarly awareness of the processes of translation and adaptation. is book proposes a model to foster more widespread production of these plays, a kind of collaborative toolbox to revive Spanish comedias for modern English-speaking audiences in the twenty-first century. We can only hope that theatre practitioners and producers may draw inspiration from Jeffs’s painstaking work to revive more of the hidden treasures of Spain’s rich dramatic heritage. U  L J A. P D Precarious Times: Temporality and History in Modern German Culture. By A F. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. . xx+ pp. $.. ISBN ––––. Precarious Times takes as its starting point fundamental shis in the temporal conditions of the twenty-first century brought about by the interconnected forces of digitization, globalization, and accelerated capitalism. As Anne Fuchs observes, much recent criticism on these matters is imbued with ‘temporal anxieties’ (p. ) and pervaded by a crisis narrative that paints present-day experiences of time as stagnant, flat, disembedded, or atomized. Wary of such ‘monolithic and deterministic ’ (p. ) perspectives, Fuchs turns to the realm of culture to draw a more  Reviews multifaceted picture of our contemporary timescapes. Engaging with a remarkable collection of authors and genres, ranging from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century and focusing on German-language literature and culture in particular, Fuchs interrogates the alarmism underpinning much of the recent temporal diagnostics. She convincingly illustrates that temporal anxieties and complexities ‘are part and parcel of the complicated story of modernity’ (p. ) and hence not solely a problem of the here and now. Moreover, she emphasizes that artistic practice has since modernity provided opportunities for questioning dominant time regimes, allowing for the exploration of alternative temporal trajectories and the recuperation of Eigenzeit (pp. –). Fuchs is careful, though, not simply to celebrate art as a panacea for modern culture’s continuing struggles with time. While contemporary art in particular is deeply committed to the possibility of alternative experiences of time, oen accompanied by more attentive relationships with the world and others, these attempts oen remain fleeting and precarious. e book’s first chapter introduces key theoretical engagements with time in the era of digitization, including seminal accounts by Hartmut Rosa, Byung-Chul Han, John Tomlinson, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, David Harvey, and Robert Hassan. Fuchs identifies...

Doubling Down on Stupid: Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque

Doubling Down on Stupid:Direction, Misdirection, and Miscommunication in El castigo del penséque Robert L. Turner III (bio) Although Tirso de Molina (1579–1648), pseudonym for the Mercedarian priest Gabriel Téllez, is best known as the author of El burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) and El condenado por desconfiado (Damned by Despair), his corpus includes dozens of plays spanning multiple subgenres.1 Tirso is one of three key playwrights who dominated Spanish theater in the early modern period. Together with Lope de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), the creator of the comedia nueva ("new theater"), and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), the master of baroque language and palace theater, Tirso de Molina helped to elevate an immensely popular public entertainment to a deeply philosophical commentary on society, identity, power relationships, and justice. For early modern Spain, the corral ("theater") was an extremely popular destination with a higher per capita attendance than that at North American movie theaters in the early twenty-first century.2 The comedia, as the dominant theatrical form of the period came to be known, took form in the late sixteenth century as Lope de Vega created a winning formula based on domestic and Italian sources. As he explains in his El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo [End Page 33] (The New Art of Writing Plays in Our Time), his vision includes a break with the classic tradition in favor of a more popular set of themes, all set within a three-act structure that runs for roughly three thousand lines of verse. The comedia is characterized by the use of multiple verse forms and a plot that almost always ends in either marriage or murder. Parallel or doubled plots, with the nobles' efforts frequently being echoed by a coarser or more satirical version involving the servants, is a common element as well. The genre is also full—especially in the urban and cloak-and-sword subgenres—of derring-do, battles, duels, disguises, secret marriages, betrayals, mistaken identities, and similar attention-grabbing plot devices. At the same time, the comedia includes a focus on character development and a psychological depth that was lacking in earlier Spanish theater. Born Gabriel Josepe López Téllez to humble parents in the San Sebastian parish of Madrid (Vázquez, "Gabriel Téllez" 22), Tirso joined the Mercedarians as a young man and served within the order until his death. This religious involvement formed a core part of his literary identity and may also explain his use of a pseudonym since some religious leaders strongly opposed the ribald nature of these secular plays (Vázquez, "Tirso de Molina" 358). While both Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca were also ordained to the priesthood, each entered into formal religious orders in their fifties, and writing was always their paramount focus. In contrast, Tirso took on several important roles within his order, including writing its history as the order's chronicler. At the time of his death he was the comendador ("interim abbot") for the Mercedarian monastery in Soria. Tirso's plays are often structured around the overarching concept of justice, where divine and social justice excuse actions that violate contemporary mores.3 His criticism of societal corruption, including that of King Philip IV's favorite, the Count-Duke of Olivares, is likely the reason that the Junta de Reformación ordered him, in 1625, to cease his writing and leave Madrid, calling his works "scandalous."4 Tirso's work consistently tilts toward psychological conflicts and shows an obsession with the use of disguise, a love of mistaken identities, a tendency to write sympathetic and norm-breaking female characters, and a fascination with multiplications of the self—all of which further his exploration of issues surrounding power and justice. These themes are [End Page 34] frequently expressed through various forms of doubling. This doubling includes the creation of doppelgangers (as is the case in this play); the creation of multiple identities, such as in La celosa de sí misma (Jealous of Herself), where the protagonist has to win against an idealized version of herself; layered identities, as in El amor m...

Caught in a Mirror of Princes: Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza, from Early Modern Statecraft to Helena Pimenta's Stagecraft

In Helena Pimenta's production of Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza (1631) with the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC, 2018–19), a massive mirror presided literally in the created palace space on stage, implicating all the characters and even the audience. This mirror was responsive as a dramatic character, as it were, constituting the central axis—a main protagonist—of this mise-en-scène. It functioned technically and iconographically to effect an admonitory representation of the Duke of Ferrara's aberrations that were, ironically, a living portrait of his son's. This path leads naturally into the painterly domain of geometry and perspective, for which Diego de Velázquez's Las Meninas will serve as a point of reference. The notion that the reflective surface was not at the geometric center of the staging but at its pictorial center will be considered vis-à-vis certain technical aspects of the court painter's quintessential work. Given that the mirror provided an illustrative portrait of the Duke's imperfections, we also turn to the genre of advice literature known as specula principum to explore the iconographic meaning of the onstage glass reflector in Pimenta's mise-en-scène.

Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre by Henry W. Sullivan

Reviewed by: Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre by Henry W. Sullivan Jane W. Albrecht Henry W. Sullivan. Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain: Seven Essays on the Definition of a Genre. sullivan's splendid study is presented in seven interwoven essays that cover a lot of ground in great depth. They move nimbly from consideration of early modern literary treatises to German Romantic and idealist philosophy to Greek mythology and drama, Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology, and more; from analysis of plays by Luis Velez de Guevara and Lope de Vega to those by Antonio Mira de Amescua, Tirso de Molina, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and others. Those familiar with Sullivan's decades of scholarship will see its stamp on several of the new essays, along with his characteristic luminous prose and affable style. The thread that Sullivan keenly advances throughout the chapters of Tragic Drama in the Golden Age of Spain is that, contrary to what was claimed for centuries, there was "a lucid and tangible 'idea of tragedy'" in the Golden Age made manifest in a uniquely Spanish style (35). That style is founded on the "embrace of Aristotle as to key affective features such as the Oedipal conflict, uxoricide, hamartia, Fate, catharsis of pity and fear, anagnorisis, and poesis" (33). Golden Age Spanish tragedy has found its champion in Henry Sullivan. Chapter 1, necessarily the longest, reviews the history of scholarly interest in the theory and practice of Spanish Golden Age tragedy, including the genre's rejection by eighteenth-century classicists in Spain and France. Sullivan singles out three moments of heightened critical attention to tragedy. The 1630s in Spain produced two notable works, González de Salas's "A New Idea of Ancient Tragedy," a lengthy exegesis of Aristotle's Poetics, and Lope de Vega's prologue to El castigo sin venganza, a brief commentary on Spanish-style tragedy (32). Second, the German Romantic movement of the nineteenth century yielded the insights of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel on the opposition of freedom versus necessity as the axis of Spanish drama (103). Finally, the British Calderón school of criticism of the twentieth century bore fruit in the achievements of, among others, A. A. Parker on the domination of action over character and subordination of theme to poetic justice in the comedia and the concept of "diffused responsibility" in [End Page 337] Calderonian tragedy; Bruce Wardropper on Spanish admiración as "the new catharsis"; Peter Dunn on the Christian background of Calderonian tragedy; and A. Irvine Watson on the neo-Aristotelianism of Golden Age tragedy (98–100). Sullivan, a son of the British school, takes up these topics in later chapters, drawing on some of those scholars' insights, repudiating others, and mostly relying on his own ideas and convictions. Chapter 2 illustrates a Spanish-style tragedy in extended analysis of Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza. An extraordinarily practical review of the uses of meter is followed by examination of the play's base images and poetic images. Sullivan shows that, similar to Shakespeare, Lope obeyed a formal design that reached back to the "affective substance and human interest of Ancient Greek theater described by Aristotle" (164). Chapter 3, to my mind the highlight of the volume, treats family tragedy in dramas of parricide and incest. Sullivan highlights two points where Spanish tragedy diverges from Western tradition, which have gone unremarked by scholars. First, in a reversal of Greek myth, sons are immolated by their fathers and never the other way around (205). Second, the status of the wife and wife murder are idiosyncratic (205): "Spanish drama inverts the mythic Kronos tradition of the wife winning out over an injurious husband by showing a jealous husband winning out over his [innocent] wife" (211). The lessons of this chapter will resonate in theater studies for years to come. Chapter 4 treats hamartia. First, Sullivan establishes that Spanish dramatists rejected fate as pagan destiny (in the manner of ancient Greek dramatists) as well as fate as character (in the style of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English playwrights). Instead, fate...

«El castigo sin venganza», Conquering the Repertoire

The essay gives an account of all the stagings of Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza, from its debut in 1632 to 2014, both in Spain and abroad. The representations of the piece are gathered in the both the professional and school fields, paying special attention to the productions in the Performing Arts Schools and universities. We analyse the signs that intervened in the most praised productions, from the cast to the scenery, costumes, music, text version and dramaturgical reading of the director, commenting on the circumstances of each premiere and its subsequent impact, as well as the critical apparatus that accompanied it. The study of the scenic fortune of this fundamental pillar of our Golden Era drama opens an interesting field of investigation that relates literary-dramatic text and theatrical praxis, and allows us a deeper understanding of the theatrical phenomenon as artistic expression and also as a product subject to the tastes of the public.

Bad Faith? The Weak and Feeble Will of Antonio Coello's Elizabeth I

A majority of the critics who have written about Coello's El conde de Sex have expressed surprise at the play's depiction of Elizabeth I, holding it to be a sympathetic portrayal that eschews the prejudices concerning the English queen held by seventeenth-century Spaniards. Ann Mackenzie reads the character as praiseworthy even. This essay builds upon María Cristina Quintero's reading of the play and supports her contention that, contrary to this majority view, El conde does partake of many of these prejudices and presents a character, Isabela, who is far more ambivalent than has generally been recognized. Whereas Quintero focuses on the physical presentation of the queen, this essay considers her interior life. A close analysis of Isabela's thought processes demonstrates that Coello—known for his subtle characterization—presents his Isabela as an akrates, morally incontinent. Far from being a praiseworthy figure, this places the queen in the company of Phaedra, Macbeth, and Medea. Drawing on Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza and Calderón's La cisma de Inglaterra, this essay subsequently considers whether Isabela's akrasia should be attributed to the period's misogyny or to the Spanish view of the English queen's reformed religion. It concludes with an analysis of further evidence from El conde that points to the latter as the more likely reading. Quintero notes how in her Tilbury speech, Elizabeth urged her nation to recognize in her the heart and stomach of her father, Henry VIII. Perhaps influenced by Calderón, Coello shows how, more worryingly, she inherited her father's weakness of will.

Damas tramoyeras en el poder: tres casos tirsianos

The present study examines three plays by Tirso de Molina ( Amar por senas, El castigo del penseque and Quien calla otorga ) in which female protagonists in positions of power (or as relatives of those in power) use their authority to confuse and deceive the male protagonists, who is a foreigner in their lands. Their position allows them to go beyond the typical deceptions of Tirso’s intrigue comedies (e. g., Don Gil de las calzas verdes ). Concretely, they manage to detain the young man physically, to torment him without revealing their identity and to send ambiguous message that keep the male character in uncertainty. However, they are constrained by their sense of honor and it is implied that, after the traditional wedding that ends these plays, the women will no longer have the authority to continue their manipulation.

El hábito que hace al monje: El castigo sin venganza en Rusia y la problemática de la traducción de los títulos

ABSTRACTThis article examines the Russian translations of Lope de Vega's tragedy El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Vengeance), with a special focus on the 1962 translation by Yuri Kornéyev, which today remains the official and only available translation to the general Russian reader. The main objective of the study is to analyze how the meaning of the work changes in the translated version, due to a series of lexical decisions made by the translator. Specifically, I explore how Kornéyev's decision to keep the nineteenth-century Russian translation of the title as Nakazanie—ne mschenie (Punishment Is Not Vengeance) affects his own interpretation of the tragedy and therefore his work with Lope's text.

Self-Construction and the Imagination in the Drama of Lope de Vega and Cervantes

In their mature drama Lope de Vega and Cervantes each produced characters of some sophistication. In spite of the conclusions of some scholars, both playwrights were able to imagine, create and sustain the illusion of character depth and development on stage. However, they did this in distinct ways and with differing aims. In this article we examine the ways characters are created and are seen to develop in the two dramatists’ work (using El castigo sin venganza and La entretenida as examples of their practice). In particular we are interested in the role of the imagination in this process: characters’ use and exploitation of earlier visual, poetic and dramatic models; the creation of theatre within theatre; the power of pre-existing images in self-construction; and the clash of the imaginary and the real world. Although it is common enough to contrast the popular theatre of Lope with the more overtly experimental Cervantes, this article moves beyond the antagonistic confines of the Lope/Cervantes debate to compare in depth their techniques of characterization.

Dying for Love: Eros and Violence in Lopean Drama

Lope de Vega's El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano, and El castigo sin venganza are plays ostensibly concerned with questions of love and honor. All three comedias center upon dilemmas facing individuals in conflictive relationships that often culminate in violence and death. It has been argued that because Lope favors theme over action, his plays generally exhibit little psychological depth and his characterization strike one as perfunctory (Pring-Mill xiv). To be sure, complex issues such as existentialist problems or a character's deep psychology were not the comedia's principal concerns. This theatrical genre was, after all, primarily a popular form of entertainment. Lope aimed to please his audience by giving them plays that were swift-moving and exciting [...] lithe in plot and both lifelike and witty in dialogue (Pring-Mill xiv). As such, his drama tends to relegate psychology and other less immediate aspects of human existence to a secondary plane, using them only to the extent that they lend themselves to a lively illustration of theme or action (Pring-Mill xiv-xvi, Gerstinger 55).Be that as it may, a good number of Lope's works do reveal a metaphysical dimension and owe much of their structure and appeal to the psychological dynamics of complex love triangles. The mechanics of these triangles and the role they play in the three comedias in question constitute a promising avenue of exploration. Concepts such as Denis de Rougemont's notion of passionate love and Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire1 can be used productively in a reinterpretation of these plays, thus affording new perspectives into the development of the intrigues so much at the heart of Golden Age comedias.The plays of Lope de Vega have been studied extensively from various critical perspectives in the recent past. They have especially benefited from poststructuralist critical approaches such as the ones employed by Edward H. Friedman (semiotics), Christopher B. Weimer (Girardian mimetic desire), and Anne M. Pasero (Freudian psychoanalysis), among others. In recent rereadings of Lope's drama, the connection between love (or sex) and death has been examined at length by students of the Spanish Golden Age comedia such as Helmy F. Giacoman, Thomas A. O'Connor, Laura Ana Leo de Belmont, Bert Carduilo, and Antonia Petro, although never in the light of the de RougemontGirard model as it is applied here.El caballero de Olmedo is the story of Alonso, a knight from Olmedo, who comes to the fair of Medina and falls in love with Ines, the lovely daughter of a widowed nobleman. Unable or unwilling to approach the young woman himself, Alonso enlists the aid of Fabia, an old bawd and sorceress, who agrees to serve as their go-between. Due in part to Fabia's spells and beguiling rhetoric, Ines becomes infatuated with Alonso, even though her father has already agreed to give her hand in marriage to another knight, Rodrigo. At the prospect of having to marry a man whom she does not love, Ines pretends to develop an interest in a religious career and asks her father for permission to enter a convent to become a nun. Surprised but at the same time pleased with the news, the father grants his daughter her request and hires two to prepare Ines for convent life. However, these tutors are none other than Fabia and one of Alonso's servants, Tello, who have been instructed to infiltrate Ines's household in order to establish and maintain communication between the two lovers. During a celebration in honor of King Juan II, Alonso has an opportunity to display his courage and bullfighting skills, both of which are greatly admired and celebrated. He has a chance to showcase his expertise in this area especially when he dramatically saves the life of Rodrigo, who deeply resents this embarrassment and dishonor at the hands of his rival. That evening, as Alonso returns home along the solitary road to Olmedo, he is attacked and killed by Rodrigo and his cronies. …

The Punishment/El Castigo: Undocumented Latinos and US Immigration Processing

For undocumented people who become eligible for a US immigrant visa, the pathway to lawful status bifurcates around one central question: how did you get into the USA? While most visa overstayers can adjust their status within the USA, undocumented border crossers must leave the USA to change their status. When they do, all but a few trigger a 10-year bar—often called ‘el castigo’ in Spanish or ‘the punishment’—on their return. This paper draws on a three-year ethnographic study to explore the process of legalisation for Latinos who entered and lived in the USA unlawfully. I pay particular attention to how ‘grounds of inadmissibility’ and federal criminal prosecutions for unauthorised entry disproportionately penalise working-class Latinos, creating a minefield of racialised obstacles to their lawful status. Together, I argue, racialised criminalisation and higher hurdles to lawful status amount to a one–two punch that makes it extraordinarily difficult for undocumented Latinos to ever change their status, even when they are eligible for an immigrant visa based on their marriage to US citizens.

Adapting History: Bandello, Lope de Vega, Lord Byron, and Donizetti

In May, 1425, Niccolò III d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, discovered that his wife, Parisina, and his bastard son, Ugo, were carrying on an incestuous affair. Concerned for his own reputation and that of the land over which he ruled, Niccolò enacted swift retribution: he ordered the young lovers to be arrested and then had them publicly beheaded. In the years following, news of what had transpired in Ferrara spread throughout Italy, and eventually reached other European countries as well, inspiring over time a number of fictitious re-creations of the shocking events. One of these is Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza ; other appropriations of the historical record include a short story by Matteo Bandello, a narrative poem by Lord Byron, and an opera by Gaetano Donizetti. The basic contours of the story in each of these retellings are roughly similar, but there are significant differences among them in how the principal characters in the four works are portrayed, in how the action is developed, and in the thematic concerns that the works display. Some of these differences reflect the generic competences of each of the texts; others have to do with the interests and values of their creators and of their audiences. In the present study, I examine some of the most important variations that may be noted among the four adaptations of Ferrarese history, placing each insofar as possible in its own context of time and place.