El Medico Research Articles

Dos autores judeoconversos frente a la censura: Antonio Enríquez Gómez y Felipe Godínez

Como testimonio de la incidencia de la censura sobre la obra de los dramaturgos de segunda fila del Siglo de Oro (donde frecuentemente se encuentran ejemplos de gran interés para conocer la censura teatral en aquella época), se estudian aquí dos autores de ascendencia judeoconversa, Felipe Godínez y Antonio Enríquez Gómez (ambos tuvieron problemas con la Inquisición y sufrieron persecución y censura, tanto en el siglo XVII como en el XVIII, cuando algunas obras suyas fueron incluidas en el Índice de libros prohibidos). Se parte en este trabajo de algunos casos ya publicados con anterioridad (La conversión de la Magdalena, Las misas de San Vicente Ferrer o el entremés El alcalde de Mairena), pero se indaga también en otros que estaban pendientes de estudio (Santa Táez y El médico pintor, San Lucas, ambas de Enríquez Gómez).

Esbozo de un teoría verbal de la comedia

Theater is constituted by a double and correlative tension between auditory and visual elements, on one hand, and verbal and factual components, on the other. Due to restrictions in staging or to aesthetic preference, in the Spanish Golden Age Comedia there is an initial preference for auditory constituents over visual elements. However, this partiality does not entail, as could be expected from the double binary, a supremacy of the verbal over the factual, but rather requires an equivalence between both dimensions. Given the original diminished role of visual action, in the Spanish Comedia the word becomes the action; both are one and the same. From this hypothesis, I propose an analytical model wherein the play’s plot appears as set of verbal incidents that could be reduced to four: utterance of a statement, silence, correct and incorrect interpretation of an utterance. To prove or test the validity and the critical fruits of this theorization of the Comedia and the analytical method derived from it, the essay reviews (or better, rehears) a corpus of representative plays: El medico de su honra, El desden con el desden, El condenado por desconfiado, and Entre bobos anda el juego.

Puertas cerradas y cuartos a oscuras en las tragedias calderonianas (con algunas excursiones en las comedias)

In many Calderon’s tragic plays, a room or a hall can turn into a space of violence, if locked or opened against the will of the character (mostly a woman) who lives in it. That is what we can observe in La gran Cenobia, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra, El mayor monstruo del mundo, La vida es sueno . In comic plays, on the contrary, dramatic situations like these use to turn out well, thanks to ingenious solutions or favorable chance: it is what happens in Amor, honor y poder and La dama duende ; whereas the case of No hay cosa como callar confirms the generic ambiguity of this play.

Staging the State in Calderón’s “Argenis y Poliarco”

Calderon adapted Barclay’s best-selling political romance Argenis (Paris, 1621) with the title Argenis y Poliarco sometime between 1626 and 1636, the date of its first recorded performance. It was first printed in 1637, in the Segunda Parte of his plays. In comparison with other works from that collection, such as El medico de su honra or the two comedias palaciegas , El mayor encanto amor and El galan fantasma , Argenis y Poliarco is virtually unknown, with only a few critical studies and one recent edition by Alicia Vara Lopez (2015). This edition, coupled with the renewed interest in Barclay’s neo-Latin romance, should inspire critical reconsideration of a play that appeared in a transformative moment in Calderon’s career. After reviewing the scholarship on how Calderon transformed the romance into his distinctive theatrical idiom, I investigate the play’s political meaning and challenge the view that Argenis y Poliarco is above all a palatine play about love. While it is true that Calderon simplifies the plot, by eliminating or pushing offstage the overtly political action and by cutting Barclay’s disquisitions on good government, I argue that the political element is not suppressed. It is, rather, recast in theatrical terms. Calderon’s skillful stagecraft constitutes a dramatic representation of a European political order marked by ambiguity, plurality and contingency, where the destiny of a state is determined in large measure by what happens beyond its borders.

Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes by Roland Greene (review)

Roland Greene. Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. ccxxiv + 210. $35.00. It would take far more than a few words to justice to Roland Greene's Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes given the broad scope of its subject. Five Words's erudition and scope are indisputable as it draws on a vast store of sources ranging from Cicero to Philip Sidney, Antonio Viera to the Inca Garcilaso, to mention Shakespeare and Cervantes. Greene explores five words (invention, and world) based on the key role they play in the early modern dedicating a chapter to each. According to Greene, these terms do carry obvious ideological marks but instead seem natural, neutral, and quotidian. Invention, language, resistance, blood, and world are words that early modern people only thought through but lived with (5). In Five Words each of these terms becomes an actor in a turbulent of change in the collective history of Europe and the Americas, a in which the vested interests of colonialism radically change the literary landscape. One of the most surprising aspects of Greene's work consists of its departure from both past and current approaches to literature. The introduction makes clear that it is not charting semantic developments as a linguist would, but trying to make tangible what is often abstract and obscure (8). Greene further proposes such an approach as a model to follow, one that can be applied to terms other than the ones he explores in his own study. How this might be accomplished is self-evident, as his discussion moves effortlessly from one text to another suggesting a fluid approach to his subject, one that is bound by any strict methodology. Readers may so much consider other terms as dwell on those that Greene himself chooses to examine. For example, how does a term such as figure in texts such as Cervantes' Lafuerza de la sangre (which he briefly mentions) or Pedro Calderon de la Barca's El medico de su honra, works that exemplify the complex conflicts arising from questions of blood understood as both substance and metaphor during the early modern period? The suggestive power of focusing on a few, individual terms, is one of Five Words's greatest strengths. Whether future studies beyond Greene's own scholarship replicate such an approach remains to be seen; Five Words describes this approach as oblique and the questions Greenes introduction raises are worthy of investigation. Nonetheless, it is difficult to imagine how to respond to them without historicizing them; to examine how people in Europe and the Americas in the early modern conceived of their relationship to the past and present necessarily requires a contextual framework. In contrast, while Five Words engages the politics of the particularly the vested interests of transatlantic ventures, the singularity of language in literary discourses remains its primary focus. For example, Greene's reading of the role the word plays in both Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina and the Inca Garcilaso's Comentario reales is both subtle and persuasive as he makes the argument that as word and concept is recognizable as modern. Like revolution, it becomes part of a vocabulary that imagines and emplots the political developments of the Enlightenment and the late colonial period (78). Less persuasive is the claim that little has been said about resistance as a historical and imaginative concept of the early modern period, given the profound changes in Hispanist scholarship ever since Americo Castro published Historia de los heterodoxos espanoles in 1956 and many others since (78). …

El médico de su honra (review)

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro. El medico de su honra. Ed. Donald McGrady. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2007. 291 pp.In an informai poll asking colleagues to name the comedia they most enjoy teaching, the title that came up consistently and enthusiastically was Calderon de la Barca's El medico de su honra. This complex and controversial work continues to hold tremendous sway over students- both graduate and undergraduateand scholars, to judge from the articles and editions that continue to appear with some regularity. The edition by Donald McGrady, reviewed here, is one of the most thorough and student-friendly of the many already available, including D. W. Cruickshank's 1981 edition, the bilingual edition by Dian Fox and Donald Hindley (2007), and the Edicion Critica by Ana Armendariz Aramendia (2007).Once one gets beyond the generic cover with its incongruous Romantic landscape, McGrady's is indeed an attractive edition. The text is nicely laid out and easy to read, and the notes appear after the text of the play rather than as footnotes, so as to not clutter the page and distract from the pleasure of reading. The unencumbered layout of the text helps to bring certain scenes and passages into sharper focus. The notes themselves are extensive, even exhaustive, explaining everything from idioms to grammatical usage to cultural allusions. One could argue that certain terms do not, in fact, need to be explained. It is hard to imagine a reader who would not understand that frivolo means vano, or that en mi vida means nunca. Nevertheless, undergraduates should benefit from the meticulous clarifications. There are, in fact, two sets of annotations, and Notas suplementarias, the latter consisting of more in-depth commentary, including references to critical articles. There are also two separate bibliographies, one on the scholarship of the play and the other referencing the works cited in the notes. While this duplication attests to the editor's thoroughness, the effect is somewhat redundant, since many works appear in both.The introduction includes a general account of the date of composition, a helpful description of the staging, and an examination of the sources for El medico, including the work by the same name that has been wrongly attributed to Lope (an appendix includes a summary of the plot of the earlier play). The longest part of the introduction is dedicated to tracing the critical fortunes of the play and to a discussion of the character and themes, and it is here that the introduction comes up short, in my opinion. Although the bibliography is comprehensive and up-to-date, the overview of critical approaches to the play seems limited and even dated. For one thing, McGrady completely ignores in his discussion some of the more interesting approaches to the play, including the feminist and political readings by critics such as Ruth El Saffar, Georgina Dopico Black, and Dian Fox. …

Reading Performance: Spanish Golden-Age Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage (review)

Fischer, Susan L. Reading Performance: Spanish Golden-Age Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, U.K., 2009. 368 pp.Through the collection of essays Reading Performance: Spanish GoldenAge Theatre and Shakespeare on the Modern Stage, Susan L. Fisher offers a comprehensive overview of early modern plays in performance. Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Lope de Vega are the key playwrights analyzed in this book, as well as the theatrical adaptations of Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina and appropriations of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in Spain and France. As Fischer makes clear, the study of performance energizes potentials that have remained obscure or dormant in the original (220). The book makes the argument for theoretical inquiry into performances as nonstatic cultural events.Reading Performance is composed of revised versions of Fischer's alreadypublished articles across three main areas: productions of comedias done by Madrid's Compania Nacional de Teatro Clasico (CNTC) between 1986 and 2005, comedias translated into English and performed in the U.S. and U.K, and productions of Shakespeare and Lope de Vega in translation on the French and Spanish stage. Although each essay stands alone, this collection inspires consideration of the critical overlaps between the plays in performance. Fischer utilizes theoretical perspectives from a variety of authors, including Patrice Pavis, Peter Brook, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, and brings into conversation the often-estranged academic critic and theater practitioner. In Fischer's words, contemporary theory, then, can prompt the critic of the text and performance to recall that all readings have ideological implications, to examine the extent to which interpretation and ideology are intertwined, and to create a framework for deciphering the operations governing the production of new readings that arise from such culturally determined constructs (20).One of the most significant contributions of this book is that it offers a detailed record of CNTC's comedia productions over nearly two decades, comprising such canonical works as El medico de su honra, Fuenteovejuna, El burlador de Sevilla, El castigo sin venganza, and La vida es sueno. Special attention is paid to the influence of the late director of the company, Adolfo Marsillach, and his particular interest in learning from CNTC performances in order to benefit future productions. Although Fischer acknowledges that the experience of participating in theater as an event is almost always subjective, as a critic she attempts to offer an analytical description of performance by following a meticulous approach to reading performance. She views productions multiple times from different locations in the theater and rigorously studies the play's script in order to detect spontaneous or intentional additions or omissions. …

Why and how tú in three plays by Calderón

Spanish second-person pronominal forms are well known to vary according to factors such as familiarity and social status. There are few quantitative investigations of social factors contributing to this variation in seventeenth-century Spanish. This article offers a qualitative and quantitative analysis of second-person pronominal forms in three plays by the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright, Pedro calderon de la Barca, El medico de su honra, El pintor de su deshonra and A secreto agravio, secreta venganza. A qualitative analysis shows that terms of address vary according to socio-economic class, gender and relationships between characters. A quantitative multivariate analysis explores their effect on one pronominal form, tu. Results reveal that the importance of social status is mitigated by relationships within the same family and household.

Médicos de su honra: violencia contra las mujeres en la Castilla medieval

El medico de su honra (The surgeon of his honor) and other plays of the traditional Spanish Baroque drama helped to spread the conception that husbands, lovers, brothers, or men of the family in general have the right to punish a woman who had broken the social rules about family, love or sex. This article studies domestic violence in late medieval Castile looking at the case of a woman, Catalina Fernandez, accused of living with a married man and put in prison for thirteen months. It stresses the support of legal authorities in the punishment of women who broke the mentioned social rules.

Presencias y silencios. Biografías de médicos en el antiguo régimen

The article presents the experiences and reflexions arisen from the elaboration of physicians' biographies -individual as well as collective- in the Spanish Court during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth-centuries. They are part of a twelve years research project, which culminates with the publication of the book El medico en la palestra.

Allende, Buitrago, Luiselli: aproximaciones teóricas al concepto del ‘Bildungsroman’ femenino by Leasa Y. Lutes

MLRy 98.2, 2003 491 light of Gerard Genette's theory of hypertextuality. Forne uses Genette's theory, as laid out in his book Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982), to examine the rewriting of the memoirs of former pirate Alexander Olivier Exquemelin in the two novels by the Mexican writer,with particular focus on form and theme. Following the structure of the doctoral thesis on which La pirateria textual is based, in the firstthree chapters of the book Forne establishes the con texts forher subsequent reading of Boullosa's work in the last two chapters. She firstsituates the 'hypertexts' Son vacas, somospuercos and El medico de los piratas within Boullosa's fictional work as a whole, as well as within the more general context of trends in contemporary Latin American literature, in particular the 'new' historical novel. Forne also undertakes a survey of the existing criticism of Boullosa's work, taking issue especially with postmodernist interpreta? tions ofthe firstnovel, Son vacas, somospuercos, as well as taking critics to task fornot reading the 'hypotext', Exquemelin's Los piratas de America (1678). The third chap? ter deals precisely with the memoirs of the pirate and also explains Genette's theory of hypertextuality in some detail. In her analysis of the Mexican writer's novels in the final chapters, Forne points out that, while Boullosa's hypertexts remain faithful to the original plot of Exquemelin's work, there is evidence in both of a difference in style. In the analysis of Son vacas, somos puercos (chapter 4), for example, Forne highlights textual 'amplifications', such as the inclusionof new characters such as Ella and Negro Miel, and thematical 'transformations', including the stronger presence of female characters and the greater role of the indios bravos. Forne also maintains that there is a greater subjective presence on the part of the narrator-protagonist in Boullosa's 1991 novel, which, she underlines, is neither a subversive nor an alternative version to Exquemelin's memoirs but a complementary one. Similarly, Forne reads El medico de los piratas as a further variation of the hypotext with a more objective narrator than in the earlier novel. While more consideration might have been given to adapting the style and structure ofthe original Ph. D thesis to the formof a book, there is no doubt that this is a rigorous and well-executed study of the relationship between Exquemelin's memoirs and the two novels by Boullosa using Genette's theory. Goldsmiths College, University of London Claire Lindsay Allende, Buitrago, Luiselli: aproximaciones teoricas al concepto del 'Bildungsroman' femenino . By Leasa Y. Lutes. (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, 87) New York: Lang. 2000. 130 pp. ?29. ISBN 0-8204-4472-3. This work by Leasa Lutes is an original comparative exercise which brings together the three women writers of the title in the light of new feminist interpretations of the concept of the Bildungsroman or novel of formation. One of the qualities of this book is that it appears as a contribution to the development of the body of scholarship de? voted to the 'female Bildungsroman' not only in the field of Latin American women's writing but in the area of women's writing in general. The purpose of the study is to analyse the differentvariations of formation as experienced by the protagonists of three novels by three writers from Latin America: Isabel Allende's Eva Luna (1987), Fanny Buitrago's Senora de la miel (1993), and Alessandra Luiselli's Reina de corazones (1986). In order to produce an organized analysis of the development of these characters according to or against the model of formation, the study is divided into fivechapters which attempt to achieve a thorough examination of the process of development of the women in the texts, Eva, Teodora, and Anna respectively. Chapter 1 is conceived as an introduction to the study and attempts to establish the theoretical framework which will be used foranalysing the differentworks. It offersa 492 Reviews quite up-to-date literature review in which the author provides a brief history ofthe term Bildungsroman, its development and main problematic aspects, and its application to narrative works, especially by women. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 concentrate on...

Erotic Paranoia and Wife Murder in Calderonian Drama

Calderon's three famous wife-murder plays El medico de su honra, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza and El pintor de su deshonra dramatize the predicament of the husbands who believe they have been dishonored through adulterous acts committed by their wives, who are consequently killed. In each case the marriage is an arranged one, contracted after the death or departure of the wife's former suitor, who then returns to pursue her. Although all three wives remain faithful, they often act precipitously and unwisely, inducing their husbands to believe that their suspicions are justified. In two cases the suitor is killed alongside the wife; the third lover is a royal personage and therefore immune (McKendrick, Theatre, 147). In El medico de su honra only the object of desire, Mencia, is murdered, whereas Enrique, her suitor, escapes punishment because he is the king's brother. In A secreto agravio, secreta venganza and El pintor de su deshonra both the subjects and objects of the illicit, adulterous desire, the lovers and the wives, are punished by the jealous husbands. fact that wife-murders were actually no more frequent in seventeenth-century Spain than elsewhere in Europe, and that their depiction should consequently not be taken as evidence that they were, has led McKendrick to conclude that the idea that the mere suspicion of a wife's or daughter's guilt should lead to bloodshed is a theatrical device; so too is the risk-laden avenging of a secret dishonor (Honour/Vengeance, 317). There were very few recorded cases of wife-murder in the sixteenth as well as the seventeenth century, and, in fact, violence was far more frequently directed outside the family than within it (Stone 77). honor/vengeance code needs to be viewed as a dramatic convention which signifies on a symbolic plane; it expresses anxieties linked to a loss of self-control and rationality: The honour code by its rationalizations protected man from those passions of love and jealousy alien to the self-respecting, self-controlled individual (McKendrick, Honour/Vengeance, 333). sacrifice of an innocent wife can thus be understood as a desperate attempt to redraw boundaries which have been blurred through the dangerous supplement, the desire which exceeds the heterosexual contract of marriage, and to re-gain the control which has been lost. By charting a radically different ideology of sexuality and desire for the Early Modern period, it will be possible to analyze the deeper motivations and anxieties that induce the husbands to murder their wives beside the more obvious ones. Adultery was a far from private issue in Early Modern Europe, and preoccupied social and political institutions alike. church officially viewed adultery as a mortal sin, regardless of whether it was committed by the husband or the wife. In practice, however, a double standard existed owing to the fact that an adulterous woman threatened the principles on which the perpetuation of property was based, whereas an adulterous man left his home unscathed. In countries such as Spain, where criminal codes were based on Roman law, an adulterous woman could be killed by her husband on the spot without his incurring the charge of murder, providing there were witnesses and the wife was caught in flagrante delicto. A woman, however, had no recourse to the law if her husband had a concubine; she was expected to tolerate her husband's extra-marital sexual activities (Hufton 56-7). In England, a wife's murder of her husband was classed as petty treason. husband fulfilled the role of king within the household and his murder was equated with the destruction of sovereign power and the subversion of a God-ordained order. In Early Modern Europe, monogamous marriage was regarded as the institution at the heart of the social system, and this English characterization of the murder of a husband as petty treason suggests that the correspondence between husband and king was more than pure analogy. …

El médico de su honra and the Politics of Reading

El medico de su honra offers many possible readings to its audience, readings that do not end with the final curtain. Each character is not only a reader of the other characters but also a reader of himself or herself. While each admits the possibility of misreadings, each nonetheless believes his or her reading of himself or herself and of others to be correct. In judging whether Mencia is guilty or innocent, whether Gutiere acts prudently or viciously, or whether Pedro is cruel or just, critics have repeated what one or more of the charac- ters have said about these questions. The play not only demands readings; it is, in effect, about reading itself. The politics of reading, in the broadest sense, involves a judgment, conditions of judgment, context, and point of view, all which merit careful consideration.

Lectura ideológica de Calderón: 'El médico de su honra' (review)

REVIEWS Amezcua, José. Lectura ideologica de Calderón: 'El médico de su honra '. México: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1991. Paper. 343 pp. José Amezcua's Lectura ideológica de Calderón is an ambitious and thorough dilation of a play that has held Hispanists in thrall over many generations. His close reading of Calderón's El médico de su honra, indebted to psychoanalysis, philology, cultural anthropology, and semiology , leads him to "la secreta lógica del texto" (14), which he sets out here to explicate. It is a laudable undertaking, and succeeds in so many ways that its conclusion, which is quite flimsy, can be rejected even as the book is deemed a "must" read for anyone planning to write about the play in the future. A discourse of keen intuition guided by visual components of Calderón's play, Lectura ideológica is divided into two parts, "El espacio y los objetos," and "Los personajes." Without going into the complexities of the theoretical framework, I would like to note some of the kinds of observations that result from Amezcua's eclectic approach. The author, who is exquisitely sensitive to the poetry of El médico, finds it a densely masculine world, replete with recurring references to images like the Have, the camino, the horse (it is significant that Gutierre offers his yegua to Enrique). Compatible with the language of male domination is the subtle and telling "contaminación semántica" (89) that Amezcua detects between Mencia and the slave woman Jacinta. Interestingly, Jacinta can also be seen as an extension of Enrique's appetites (170), as she facilitates his incursions into Gutierre's household. The author is especially perceptive in his treatment of Leonor as she contrasts with Mencia. Gutierre's wife is, in essence, a "mujer-niña" (262) imprisoned in her own house, toward whom Gutierre acts first as a "padre clemente," and then a "padre tiránico." Her imprudent actions result from panic and terror. Leonor, on the other hand, is constantly on 149 150BCom, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Summer 1993) the move and never at home. Because she has no man to oversee her honor, she internalizes that masculine function and sets out to repair it herself. She is assertive, and outspoken as no other character in the play, delivering a heroic and violent speech to the King demanding satisfaction from Gutierre—who is by comparison a reverential mouse when in the royal presence. But for Amezcua, Leonor is, finally, disappointing, since all her exertions are aimed toward restoring her honor as defined by the patriarchal society which so limits her options. While Calderón is regarded as a consummate craftsman in the construction of his comedias, Amezcua discovers what he calls a spatial anomaly in El medico's dénouement. Late in Act III, Gutierre, Diego, Coquin, Leonor, and the King converge in the street. With no apparent movement, they find themselves witness to the horrifying discovery of Mencia's body—inside Gutierre's house. How to account for such an inconsistency ? Amezcua's exploration of space and character leads him to propose that the irregularity is symbolic: during the course of this play, the home—the private place, where honor resides—becomes as public and degraded as the streets of Seville. Indeed, entropy is a general trend throughout the work, so that at the last we are left with a sick, debased society, a world ofhopelessness and loss. By association, Amezcua concludes, the play constitutes "una decidida oposición a la sociedad del XVII" (324). It is a little disconcerting to encounter such a provocative assertion, which pleads for a chapter of corroboration, on the very last page ofthe book. Logically, if the dramatist really were flatly condemning his own society, we would find evidence of it in other plays and in his biography. It is also my sense that the strong and intimidating presence of King Pedro on stage would remind few playgoers ofFelipe IV—in whose court Calderón served. However, Amezcua's unsubstantiated closing remarks should in no way diminish the cumulative force of his astute and illuminating examination ofEl médico de su honra. Dian...

Cubillo de Aragón's "La mayor venganza de honor"

Most critics now accept that the theme of marital honour is not always treated in exactly the same way in Golden-Age drama. However, it was not until after the war that scholars began consistently to suggest that some plays, once thought to be unquestioning in their support of a certain attitude to marital honour, were implicitly critical of that attitude. Four plays in particular, each one presided over by a suspiciously flawed or at least ambiguous ruler, were mentioned in this context: El castigo sin venganza, El medico de su honra, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza and El pintor de su deshonra.1 Since then, it has been argued cogently that even such a play as Los comendadores de Cordoba, ‘safely’ presided over by King Ferdinand the Catholic, presents the protagonist in such a light that we cannot take his vengeance at face value.2 The portrayal of conjugal honour in La locura por la honra and La victoria de la honra has also revealed significant ironies.3

Further thoughts on King Pedro's predicament at the end of Calderón'sEl médico de su honra

E. M. Wilson appended a possible source-story of the plot of Calderon's El medico de su honra to the printed version of his 1966 Taylorian lecture ‘Some aspects of Spanish literary history’ (Oxford...

The Rhetoric of Therapeutic Symbols in Calderón's El medico de su honra

THE RHETORIC OF THERAPEUTIC SYMBOLS IN CALDERON'S EL MEDICO DE SU HONRA ROBERT Y. VALENTINE The University ofNebraska An individual from any age brings his ready-made values to the literary experience. Whereas Eric Bentley insists on «universality» in the comedia [HR 38 (1970), 147-162/, Arnold G. Reichenberger suggests that there is something«unique» about the way the comedia was originally intended by the dramatist and experienced by the public three hundred years ago [HR 27 (1959), 303-316; HR 38 (1970), 163-1737. How does one read El médico de su honra? Roberta J. Thiher calls it the most ambiguous of Calderón's dramas because «the reader is left bewildered.»' Often the twentieth-century reader reacts differently to rhetorical aspects of earlier cultures. We can appreciate El médico more fully when we examine and attempt to understand symbols that normally do not affect the modern audience. The medical imagery of «therapeutic» theme that distinguishes this drama has been discussed primarily with regard to the roles of Gutierre and Mencia, but other applications of this imagery, important to the Golden Age spectator, have escaped contemporary critical attention.2 Gutierre is not the only one occupied with the safekeeping of his honor in Calderón's «play about suspicion and fear of suspicion.»3 Almost all of the characters distrust each other, but the significance of King Pedro's suspicions has been generally overlooked. He has been evaluated primarily as a judge.' However, Pedro is also the «médico de su honra,» anxious to preserve his salud as King of Castile, wary of his half-brother Enrique, who seeks to replace him on the throne. The King has a «premonition that Mencía's experiencia is to be repeated on his own person (Soons, 379). In each instance the salud of King Pedro and Gutierre is threatened by Enrique, Gutierre's faulty perceptions cause Mencía's death. Pedro also makes an erroneous diagnosis, which precipitates his own death after the conclusion of the play. That Gutierre and Pedro are both doctors of their respective honors gives El médico de su honra dramatic unity. Calderón introduces therapeutic symbols, either absent or deemphasizfed in Lope's earlier version of the play, that reinforce Pedro's concern with the preservation of the health of his honor, body and kingdom. The significance of Pedro's gifts of diamonds coupled with the display of a bloody handprint on the door of Gutierre's house may escape most modern readers, but the 39 40Bulletin ofthe Comediantes rhetoric of these symbols augmented the emotional and intellectual reaction of earlier audiences. Whereas Lope de Vega uses no gems in his version, a diamond figures prominently in the court scene in Seville and, later, in the encounter between Pedro and the blood-letter Ludovico in Calderón's version of the play. The King is acknowledging his court and dispensing favors when he is suddenly confronted by an old beggar. Pedro removes a diamond from his apparel and gives it to the astounded old man who exclaims: «¿Para mi os le quitáis?»1 Judging Pedro to be a cruel man, A. E. Sloman brushes off this incident as the act of a disinterested monarch who merely performs the expected functions of his station." But A. Irvine Watson argues that Pedro is an «exemplary King who is never cruel in any way.»7 Watson insists that in the diamond scene Calderón shows that «Peter despite his reputation is a just, essentially kind and generous King who has the interest of his subjects at heart ...» (Watson, 331). C. A. Jones labels Pedro an «odd mixture: cruel, just and recklessly generous by turns . . . unstable and unpredictable . . .»' Pedro speaks to the astonished old man to whom he has just given the diamond: Y no os espante; que, para darle de una vez, quisiera, sólo un diamante todo el mundo fuera (I, 592-594). What the scene reveals, beyond possible generosity, cruelty or indifference, is a modicum of suspicion, which will grow throughout the drama. No doubt Pedro wishes he could rid himself of his personal and political burdens as easily as he gives...

Honor and the Wife-Killers of Calderon

In both situations the role of Prince Henry of Trastamara is of paramount importance. At Montiel it is Henry who plunges the dagger into his halfbrother 's body after a companion has helped him to gain the advantage in their struggle.7 In El médico de su honra Henry's total disregard for his vassal's reputation forces the punctilious Gutierre into the ritual murder and thereby fulfills two predictions stated earlier in the play. The first is Arias' prediction that the heaven will punish a man who has been "necio, escrupuloso y con extremo celoso" even before marriage. The second is Henry's own prediction in Act I that his fall from his horse was not accidental, but rather a "divino decreto" (246). Indeed , Prince Henry is as much the instrument of divine vengeance in the case of the overzealous Gutierre in El médico de su honra as he is later for the tyrannical King Peter in the historical drama at Montiel. In addition to his symbolic role as the agent of divine justice, we have seen the importance of Prince Henry's actions and influence on the other characters throughout the development of dramatic tension that culminates in Mencia's death. Although his role has often been overlooked by critics, Henry of Trastamara is unquestionably a major character in Calderóne El medico de su honra. NOTES *I wish to thank Dr. Bruce W. Wardropper for his encouragement to me in the preparation of this study, which I began while participating in his 1975 NEH summer seminar "Comedy in the Drama of the Spanish Golden Age." 1 Albert E. Sloman considers Henry the only willfully evil character in the play. See his study of Calderón's play and its source play of the same title attributed to Lope de Vega, in The Dramatic Craftsmanship of Calderón (Oxford: The Dolphin Book Company , 1958), 15-58. 2 Alexander A. Parker, "El médico de su honra as Tragedy," Hispanófila, Número especial dedicado a la comedia, I (Spring, 1974), 5. 3 Bruce W. Wardropper, "El problema de la responsabilidad en la comedia de capa y espada de Calderón," in Actas del segundo congreso internacional de hispanistas, ed. Jaime Sánchez Romeralo and Norbert Poulussen (Nijmegen: Universidad de Nimega, 1967) 692-3. 4 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El médico de su honra, in Teatro español del Siglo de Oro, ed. Bruce W. Wardropper (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970), lines 243-7. Numbered Une references in the text correspond to this edition of the play. 5 This episode has been commented upon by many critics of the play. Its foreshadowing of future events adds an element of historical interest to the play. Henry of Trastamara usurped the throne of Castile from his half-brother King Peter and killed him in hand-to-hand combat at the Casde of Montiel on March 23, 1369. 6 Frances Exum, "Lope's King Pedro: The Divine Right of Kings vs. The Right of Resistance ," Hispania, 57 (1974), 428-33. 7 Juan de Mariana mentions this aid given to Henry by one of his followers: "que les dio vuelta y le puso [a Enrique] encima," Historia de España, BAE, XXX (Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1931), 487. HONOR AND THE WIFE-KILLERS OF CALDERÓN Frank P. Casa, University of Michigan The wife-killers of Calderón persist in the consciousness of readers of the Comedia as dark, solitary figures entrapped in self-imposed isolation. Their irrevocable act of destruction remains, in spite of many excellent attempts at interpretation, a disquieting and alien gesture of absolute self-assertion. We 6 think we understand the cultural imperatives that move these personages, but our continuously changing attidues toward them are proof of our bewilderment and unacceptance.1 Having lost our confidence in the absoluteness of many values, we are uncomfortable with them and with anyone who dares to sustain them. Having accepted the principle of relative truth, we reject those who maintain its oneness. Having dismissed the concept of a hierarchy of values, we can no longer perceive the boundaries of each. So the murders remain either confusing...

"Tienen los celos pasos de ladrones": Silence in Calderon's El medico de su honra

gOR all his elaberate attempts to keep it quiet, Don Gutierre's l murder of his innocent wife has probably been more talked about than any other crime in Spanish drama.l Horror and indignation at this refined and stylish atrocity have in the past understandably interfered with appreciation of the artistry of Calderbn's play. But, now that there is widespread acceptanceat least among English-speaking scholars for the view that Gutierre may not after all be held up for our approval,2 that admiratzo is not the same thing as admiration, critical attention has begun to turn towards consideration of the play's poetry. In 1958, B. W. VVardropper appealed for a rearaluation of El medico as dramatic poetry3; and in support of this plea, offered an account (modestly described as "sketchy") of the imagery, with particular reference to the extensions of the metaphor contained in the title. In the same year, A. E. Sloman,4 while chiefly concerned with the play as a play, included in a chapter on El medico a brief discussion of language and imagery, notably the imagery of light and darkness. In 1962, in a lecture gi+en to the Primer Congreso Internacional de

"El pintor de su deshonra" and the Neo-Aristotelian Theory of Tragedy

As P. N. Dunn has recently pointed out in this journal, there has been of late a tendency amongst scholars to depart from more traditional attitudes towards Calderon's honour plays. These calderonistas no longer see the author of El medico de su honra, A secreto agravio, secreta venganza and El pintor de su deshonra as an “advocate of revenge”, nor do they believe him to have been “an unquestioning accepter of accepted social attitudes”. They believe rather that Calderon was hostile to those aspects of the code of honour, such as the cruel honour-vengeance, which could not be reconciled with Christian ethics.