A Hermaphrodite? Lope de Vega and Tragicomedy

A Hermaphrodite? Lope de Vega and the Controversy of Tragicomedy SOFIE KLUGE

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n his Tablas poéticas (1617), Francisco de Cascales notoriously called the contemporary Spanish plays hermafroditos and monstruous de la poesía, indicating that they were neither tragedies nor comedies in the Aristotelian sense, but a mixture of both dramatic genres. Since antiquity, traditional dramatic theory had treated the tragic and the comic separately, largely on thematic grounds (if a play showed persons of high rank, it was a tragedy; if it showed persons of low rank or common people, it was a comedy; if it involved death and suffering, it was a tragedy; if it didn’t, it was a comedy). With the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics in the fifteenth century, this view found new, irrefutable evidence. Yet a practice of mixing the genres was simultaneously emerging in Spain, witnessing its full bloom with the dramatic production of Lope de Vega, whom Cascales probably had in mind when he coined his famous metaphor. Lope and the dramatists of his “school” (such as Montalbán, Luis Vélez de Guevara, and Tirso de Molina) were admitting persons of high rank (gods and kings) into plays that otherwise had to be considered comedies, as well as persons of low rank (clowns) into tragedies. Moreover, they mixed the traditional attributes of the characters, creating chimeras,1 and readily transgressed the so-called Aristotelian doctrine of the dramatic unities.2 The incorporation of the post-Aristotelian phenomenon of tragicomedy into the traditional system of literary genres represented an obvious problem to contemporary critics and theorists. Although some did meet the dramatic innovations of the period with considerable hostility,3 the Spanish critics were, in fact, not as hostile to the monstrous hybrids of the native dramatists as Cascales’ words would have us believe,

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and they were certainly not as hostile as the critics abroad.4 During the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, tragicomedy was slowly becoming an accepted part of the poetic system, but simultaneously, the term was gradually being replaced by the term comedia. Why did the term comedia eventually end up as the hegemonic generic concept of Golden Age drama, when what was represented on Spanish stages was in fact—strictly speaking—tragicomedy? This article argues that this development must be seen as a result of the seventeenth-century Spanish revival of the Christian dramatic heritage and the corresponding transformation of Aristotelian theory in the Renaissance.

I. Aesthetics and Morality in the Golden Age As I have argued elsewhere,5 the normativity of Baroque classicism, of which Cascales is usually seen as a protagonist, was an integral part of the period’s profound Platonic-Christian suspicion of “fiction,” which generally emphazised the moral obligation of literature and zealously guarded the virtue of the public (apparently ever in danger of being compromised by the immoral charms of literature).6 In the seventeenth century, the violation of the classicist rules of poetic composition was not seen as a harmless violation of some manmade system, a “Romantic” impulse or a “Modernist” experiment with inherited poetic forms and stylistic conventions, incomprehensible to conservative contemporary theorists (as some modern scholars will have it),7 but rather, conceived of as an unnatural, immoral perversion. In this respect, the amazing metaphor of the hermaphrodite is very significant, since it suggests the entwinement of aesthetic and moral aspects in Baroque literary criticism. That Cascales’ metaphor was not just rhetorical, but an expression of a very serious concern for the moral stature of the audience, is confirmed by the numerous clerical attacks on Lope de Vega and his followers.8 The mingling of aesthetic and moral aspects in the Baroque theater controversy may on one hand explain why Lope never responded to the theological critique of his work, but only commented on the classicists’ attacks on his stylistic “errors.”9 He had no need, since these two aspects were essentially two sides of the same critique—and why engage in a dangerous debate with religious fanatics when you can keep to nearsighted intellectuals? On the other hand, it may account for the puzzling

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generic development of the seventeenth century, when the monstrous term tragicomedy—although certainly an appropriate designation for the majority of serious dramatic works produced in Spain that century10— was, for reasons that have still not been satisfactorily explored, gradually replaced by the term comedia. This development was followed by the increasingly emphasized demand that the theater state a moral example and seek to improve the virtue of the spectators.11 Although the problematic notion of tragicomedy is obviously relevant to the hybrid form of Calderonian drama, it is particularly pertinent to Lope and the early stages of Baroque drama. The real beginning of the great reform of classical drama in Spain, the “reign” of Lope, is particularly intertwined with the problem of tragicomedy.12 Why was the mixture of dramatic genres monstrous in Lope, but admissible in, for example, Calderón?13 It is true that Lope paved the way for later Golden Age dramatists and that his status as a forerunner of subsequent developments made him more exposed to criticism. But we may also look for less circumstantial explanations and advance the hypothesis that whereas the amorphous generic mixture of Lope’s dramatic production—according to the dramatist, the mirror of the original chaotic beauty of nature herself (“Nature gives us a fine example, / for its beauty depends on variety”)14—appeared as a sheer natural chaos, the mixture of tragic and comic elements in Calderón seemed to point to the hidden, as yet unrevealed, divine design behind physical and historical reality. In the latter case, the chaos of nature and the hybridity of dramatic form appeared as an allegory of something meaningful, immutable, and eternal behind appearances, not sheer “nature” as an end in itself or as a sole means of delightful entertainment (“The tragic and the comic mixed, / and Terence with Seneca, even if it be / another Pasiphae’s Minotaur, / will make one part serious, the other funny, / for such variety is very pleasing”).15 In accordance with our assumption of an intimate entwinement of aesthetics and morality in Golden Age literary theory and criticism, we may ask: were Lope’s notions of “variety” and “nature,” the justification for the “chaos” of his comedias, ultimately part of a moral worldview, or did they represent a dangerous flirtation with the world of matter, the domain of unbridled variety? As we shall see, there certainly was a difference between “nature” and nature—between nature as part

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of a greater metaphysical order and nature as an unregulated sphere, breeding in a furious rage of fertility ever more horrible monsters. Although characterized by an undeniable fascination with materiality and hybridity, the Baroque was in fact to an even greater extent dominated by a profound suspicion of nature roaming wild.16 The problem of tragicomedy is exemplary in this respect. In a period witnessing the bloom of secular drama, the suspicious attitude toward generic hybridity was not entirely unmotivated: the national stage was virtually exploding with aesthetic innovations, and contemporary writers and artists were delighting in the exploration of the “monstrous.”

II. The Tragicomic Vogue in the Seventeenth Century Although Cascales was probably the originator of the fantastic metaphor of the hermaphrodite,17 he was not the first to apply the adjective monstrous to the Baroque theater. Cervantes had praised Lope’s creative genius with the ambiguous designation “monstruo de la naturaleza” in his prologue to Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos (1615), and in the Arte nuevo, Lope himself employed a number of monstrous images to describe his own dramatic innovation (“máquina confusa,” “vil quimera,” “monstruo cómico,” “Minotauro,” “hipogrifo,” “semon,” and “centauro”), on a rhetorical level invoking the fundamental generic hybridity of the comedia (“We disrespect him [Aristotle] / when we mix tragic diction / with the modesty of comic baseness”).18 He even recalled the audience’s fondness for pants roles (“a breeches role usually pleases very much”),19 another phenomenon that played with generic identity and had repelled Christian adversaries of the theater since Tertullian. However, unlike the early Cascales of the Tablas (who later changed his mind and praised Lope’s genius),20 Lope didn’t see generic hybridity as something that compromised the artistic value of his plays, but rather demonstrated a profound fascination with the “artless” nature of his aesthetic creation.21 The tragicomic mixture of genres had actually been developing in Spain since the late fifteenth century with the Verardo brothers’ “tragicomedia” Fernando Servato (1493), Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (1499), the “Prohemio” to Torres Naharro’s Propalladia (1517), Gil Vicente’s Tragicomedia de Don Duardos (1521), Timoneda’s

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Tragicomedia Filomena (1559), and the Tragicomedia del paraíso y del infierno (1599).22 Yet the employment of the term arguably culminated during the reign of Lope, a considerable number of whose dramas bear the subtitle tragicomedia, among these some of the most famous plays (e.g., El Caballero de Olmedo, Lo fingido verdadero, and Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña).23 However, tragicomedy was not just a Spanish phenomenon. Around and after 1600, generic hybridity had become fashionable on a European scale. We may think of the German Trauerspiel or Shakespeare’s play with the conventions of the dramatic genres on a thematic level (Hamlet 2.2.396–402 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5.1.56–60)24 as well as via the introduction of comic elements and figures (clowns and fools, ordinary people, mirth and jest) in the history plays (Falstaff in Henry IV) and even in plays explicitly termed tragedies (the gravediggers in Hamlet, the nurse in Romeo and Juliet). Like the suggestion of tragic elements in the comedies (Hero’s “death” in Much Ado about Nothing), this trend represented a play with the strict separation of the genres, which pointed toward tragicomedy. Although it doesn’t of course mention Shakespeare, Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (1579) criticized contemporary English dramatists for mixing tragic and comic elements and characters and for not obeying the “classical” unities of time and place. In Italy, Guarini’s Il pastor fido (1590), explicitly called a tragicommedia, provoked a virtual scandal.25 Everywhere, dramatists and apologists pointed to Plautus’s famous prologue to Amphitryon (second century BC), where Mercury in his address to the audience refers to the play as a “tragicomedy,” in order to legitimize the contemporary nonAristotelian tendency to mix the dramatic genres. Even in France, the homeland of orthodox seventeenth-century classicism, tragicomedy was conquering the stage, with Corneille’s Spanish-inspired Le Cid (1637) bearing the subtitle “tragi-comédie” and subsequently becoming the subject of the heated Querelle du Cid.26

III. Toward a Tripartite System of Genres In Spain, theorists did their best to keep up with developments in drama. They sought to reconcile the hybrid form of tragicomedy with classicist standards in order to allay Platonic-Christian suspicions regarding the dangerous charms/beautiful lies of literature. The admittance of the

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tragicomic monster of the national stage into the classicist system of poetics represented the domestication and subjection of immoral, monstrous, and rebellious nature to the authority of divine Law, the restoration of the hierarchic relation between human and divine creation, “fiction” and revelation. However, officially incorporating a postclassical genre into the classical system did represent something of a challenge. What would Aristotle, who had strictly separated tragedy from comedy as two different genres, have thought about tragicomedy? On a theoretical level, the development of the modern tripartite system of poetic genres (the dramatic or “scenic,” the lyric, and the epic) on the basis of Plato27 and the Latin grammarians Diomedes and Donatus paved the way for the Spanish acceptance of drama as a single genre, encompassing tragic as well as comic elements.28 Aristotle’s separation of tragedy and comedy kept influencing theories of the tragic and the comic, considered separately in their “essence,” just as it had done since the rediscovery of the Poetics. El Pinciano (Philosophia antigua poética, ep. 5), Carballo (Cisne de Apolo, bk. 3, par. 6), and Cascales (Tablas poéticas, bk. 3), for example, all define tragedy in a more or less traditional Aristotelian sense as “imitation of an illustrious act, entire and of fitting length, in subtle dramatic language, to purify the spirit’s passions through compassion and fear.”29 In view of this rather mechanical definition of the material of tragedy and comedy on the basis of Aristotle—which was often taken directly from Minturno, Robortelli, Giraldo, or Castelvetro—the particular Spanish contribution to Baroque literary theory is found in the slow and hesitant, yet retrospectively clear, replacement of the quadruple Renaissance (Aristotelian) classification of genres (tragedy, comedy, epic, and lyric)30 with the tripartite generic system of Plato, Diomedes, and Donatus.31 Horace also supported this system, emphasizing the importance of the scenic aspect in the classification of poetic genres, and hence obviously sustaining the distinction between diegetic and mimetic art (Ars poetica, v. 179), which dominated the theories of both Diomedes and Donatus, and was of course seminal to Plato’s critique in the Republic. Whereas the traditional system of generic classification relied largely on thematic criteria (social rank of the protagonists, happy/unhappy ending), the tripartite Platonic-Latin classification rested primarily on formal criteria (diegetic versus mimetic art). From the latter point of view, tragedy and

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comedy did in fact constitute a single genre, though treating different materials: It is left to say that tragedy does not differentiate itself, in disposition or form, from comedy, because both consist of the same parts. But the material is different, since, having begun with happy and nice things, it ends in sadness and misery, and it is usually about heroic and famous people stricken by destiny, wherefore the definition of tragedy is that it is a story of heroic fortunes.32

Comedia has a more ample signification than tragedia, for every tragedy is a comedy, but not the other way around. The comedia is a representation of a story or a fable and it has an end that is either merry or sad. In the first case it is called a comedia; in the second case it is called a comedia trágica, tragicomedia or tragedia. This is the true distinction of the terms, even if others may argue otherwise.33 This theoretical development, which mirrored the practice of contemporary dramatists and has been seen as the Spanish misunderstanding or even ignorance of classical poetics,34 was quite different from contemporary developments in Italy and France, where the separation between tragedy and comedy was being upheld more rigorously in theory as well as in practice. Hence Lope’s words “France and Italy call me ignorant.”35 Crucial formulations by critics such as Carvallo, who included tragedy and comedy under the “dragmatic” genre,36 or the mature Cascales, equally characterizing tragedy and comedy as one genre on the grounds of their common dependence on scenic representation,37 reveal this characteristic Spanish attitude, allowing through the back door a place for the tragicomic monster in the inherited literary system. Another seminal and erudite argument for the mixture of the tragic and the comic was launched by the humanist Francisco Fernández de Córdoba (Didascalia multiplex, 1615), who based his argument on the lack of “pure” tragedies and comedies in antiquity itself: if the ancient dramatists didn’t live up to the prescriptions of the Stagirite, how could detractors demand that Lope de Vega and his followers should do so?38 (He referred to a number of ancient examples, among these Aristophanes’ Frogs and Plautus’s Amphitryon, and quoted Cicero’s words from the Orator: “With great pleasure we see something comic in tragedies, and something tragic in comedies.”39 Finally, Francisco de Barreda’s “modernist” conviction (El meior príncipe Traiano Augusto, 1622) that new times and tastes demand a

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new poetry, eventually became the prototypical apologetic argument for disregarding the strict separation of the tragic and the comic. This defense basically matched Lope’s own famous reference to the public success of his monstrous dramas: I write for the art invented by those who sought the vulgar applause; for since the mob pays for the plays, it seems fair to speak to them in a stupid fashion to give them pleasure.40

It appears, in short, that there was a certain agreement between Spanish critics and dramatists on the subject of tragicomedy. With the undisputable authority of Plautus, the example of the much adored Terence, canonized by the authority of Donatus, as well as the passage in Aristotle’s Poetics admitting tragedies with a happy ending (such as Ifigenia in Tauris), tragicomedy had its obligatory classical pedigree. With the development of the tripartite generic system, it even had its theoretical justification, and a number of apologies had been written in its defense. I have advanced the hypothesis that whereas Lope’s mixture of the tragic and the comic represented to a certain extent an example of nature run wild, Calderonian drama provided tragicomedy with an allegorical superstructure, which allowed it a place in the Counter Reformation universe along with all the other monsters, such as Polyphemus, the Minotaur, the sirens, the fauns and the silens, and so on.41 Whereas Lope was the originator of monstrous tragicomedy, Calderón domesticated the monster by imposing upon it a systematic theological frame, transfiguring the tragicomic into the great divine comedy of human life, encompassing both tragic and comic elements, yet still essentially a comedy beheld sub specie eternitatis.42 It thus seems that the non-Aristotelian mixture of tragedy and comedy could only gain acceptance under the title of comedia and with the revival of the Christian dramatic heritage, which basically conceived of the drama as a—moral and transcendental—theatrum mundi. However, before the dramatic developments got this far, an essential terminological clarification of the term comedia had to be carried out. Since antiquity, comedy had been under a heavy siege of ecclesiastical attacks. Especially as a profane institution, instructing young girls in the infamous tricks of love through the representation of amorous affairs with no obvious didactic purpose, the theater had always been repellent to clerics.43

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A brief examination of the theological critique of the theater will help us understand the moral basis of the classicist critique of tragicomedy’s generic “impurity” and answer the question, why was it so terrible that Lope and his followers mixed tragic and comic elements? Was a moral impurity intuited behind the aesthetic contamination of pure form, produced by the mixture of dramatic genres? In view of the traditional clerical suspicion of the base moral stature of actors, plays, playhouses, and dramatists—as we have seen, in fundamental agreement with Plato’s ethical, moral, and ontological critique of tragedy—we may be tempted to assume so.

IV. The Temple of Evil In an official memorial of 1598 from the city of Madrid, a number of arguments defending theatrical representations were issued.44 This important historical document certainly proves the strong contemporary impact of the theological critique of the theater, and demonstrates that more was at stake in the theater controversy than only aesthetic matters: The memorial finds 1) that “every good republic has admitted them [comedias] and that the whole world holds them to be good and decent”; 2) that “in all this time there has never been done any universal harm, but to the contrary, much good in many respects”; 3) that “beginning by the substance of the comedia, it is the mirror, notice, example, doctrine, and lesson of life, in which the docile and prudent man may find the means to correct his passions and depart from his vices, uplift his thoughts by learning virtues through demonstration, because the comedia contains everything and it is so powerful, wherefore it often happens that one learns more with the eye than with the mind”; 4) that the comedia serves the illiterates who cannot read the “ancient stories and the praiseworthy heroic acts.… and because there may be a profane romantic comedy among them, they should not all be prohibited, since they cannot all be of the same kind and they don’t cease to be useful either in their variety or by example”; 5) “the comedias also give a universal recreation, a short break that to the idle is a great advantage and that is important to the working man”; 6) “the comedias bear another fruit of no small matter for the religious cult, which is that of turning the feast of Corpus Christi into a different and happy celebration, and considering that the public is used to seeing comedias on this day, it would diminish the importance of this feast, were they prohibited.”45

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Drawing heavily on the Christian writers of the early centuries, important clerics such as Juan de Mariana (De spectaculis, 1609) had elevated their voices against the public shows in the Madrid playhouses, the Corral de la Cruz and the Corral del Príncipe. In 1625, the Junta de Reformación de las Costumbres issued an edict against Tirso and his comedias. The most important predecessor of the Baroque detractors of the theater was of course Tertullian, to whose fervent De spectaculis (second century) Mariana’s work is obviously referring in the title. What were Tertullian’s reasons for condemning the shows (the theatrical representations as well as the horse races and gladiator fights)? Tracing the origin of the spectacles back to gentile rites in honor of pagan gods, he pondered their infamous immorality: The path to the theatre is from the temple and altars, from that miserable mess of incense and blood, to the tune of flutes and trumpets; and the masters of the ceremonies are those two all-polluted adjuncts of funeral and sacrifice, the undertaker and the soothsayer. So, as we turned from the origins of the games to the shows of the circus, now we will turn to the plays of the stage, beginning with the evil character of the place. The theatre is, properly speaking, the shrine of Venus; and that was how this kind of structure came to exist in the world. For often the censors would destroy the theatres at their very birth; they did it in the interests of morals, for they foresaw that great danger to morals must arise from the theatre’s licentiousness. So here the Gentiles have their own opinion coinciding with ours as evidence, and we have the preliminary judgement of human morality to reinforce Christian law. So when Pompey the Great—and there was nothing except his theatre greater than himself— when Pompey had built that citadel of all uncleanness, he was afraid that some day the censors would condemn his memory; so he built on top of it a temple to Venus, and, when he summoned the people by edict to its dedication, he called it not a theatre but a temple of Venus, “under which,” he said, “we have set seats for viewing the shows.” So a structure, condemned and deservedly condemned, he screened with the title of a temple, and humbugged morality with superstition. But Venus and Bacchus do very well together, demons of drunkenness and lust, two yoke-devils sworn to either’s purpose. So the theatre of Venus is also the house of Liber (Bacchus). For there were other stage plays to which they suitably gave the name Liberalia (Dionysia among the Greeks), not only dedicated to Liber, but instituted by Liber. And quite obviously Liber and Venus are the patrons of the stage peculiarly and especially its own, that effeminacy of gesture and posture, they dedicate to Venus and Liber, wanton gods, the one in her sex, the other in his dress; while all that is done with voice

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and song, instrument and book, is the affair of the Apollos and the Muses, the Minervas and Mercuries. You, O Christian, will hate the things, when you cannot but hate the authors of them.46

Coinciding quite precisely with Sebastián de Covarrubias’s seventeenthcentury etymology of the term comoedia,47 Tertullian presents the theater as a pagan temple of Venus (“Lust”) and Bacchus (“Drunkenness”), whose shows the good Christian must flee just as he flees other pagan rites. As a temple of pagan gods, the theater is basically a temple of Satan, lord of the demons.48 Although little is known of the nature of public shows during the Roman Empire, the fierce condemnation by the Fathers of both East and West has given Christian authorities reason to believe that they were for the most part gross and indecent, and that Christians were ridiculed in them.49 But the De spectaculis also testifies to a familiar Platonic-Christian abhorrence of the mimetic, colorfully presented in Tertullian’s macho rhetoric as an unmanly and godless deceit.50 As in Tertullian’s recollection of the ancient censors of the theater, we may here discover an echo of the Platonic critique of tragedy and of literature (as mimesis), but in the De spectaculis, the ambiguous PlatonicChristian notion of imagery and fiction is radicalized into a hysteric obsession with the “hypocrisy” and “adultery” of theatrical representation. Establishing an absolutely inflexible dichotomy between the semantic paradigm of truth-morals-perspicuity-Church on one hand and that of lies-hypocrisy-feigning-Theater on the other, Tertullian provides excellent material for a deconstructive or queer reading. No compromise between the pagan shows and spiritual truth seems possible. However, the uncompromising attitude of early Christianity toward aesthetics was simultaneously beginning to change. With Tertullian’s contemporary, Origen, a systematic allegorical attitude toward aesthetic imagery was developing, which would eventually mediate between aesthetics and theology throughout the Christian Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Baroque period, influenced by the Renaissance exaltation of the arts on one hand and dominated by a theological suspicion of the theater reminiscent of Tertullian on the other, certain ecclesiastics demonstrated a similarly uncompromising attitude toward public theatrical shows (the memorial of the city of Madrid certainly demonstrates their powerful

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influence on the public debate). Yet some clerics also defended the theater, pondering its eminent value as a didactic instrument.51 As we shall see, the transformation of tragicomedy into the comedia finally silenced the theological critique, which threatened to close down the public theaters.52 The most obvious reason why Tertullian would so violently condemn the theater was very likely its public appeal: addressing the virtue of the Christian community, apparently ever in danger of being compromised, he saw threats to its morality everywhere (“the whole world is filled with Satan and his angels”). The theater’s popularity was just one symptom of this danger. Why, we may ask, was Tertullian unable to see the didactic possibilities of the public shows, when he so easily recognized their hold on the imagination? In this, he was not alone. In the East, John Chrysostom in the fourth century likewise considered the theater the temple of the Evil One, and all those who frequented it his disciples (Hom. Mat. 2:10; 4:15; 7:8). Alone among the early Fathers, Augustine distinguished between the indecent mimes and the great classical drama, which could be studied for educational purposes (De civitate Dei 2:8). The theological critique of the theater provoked a number of restrictions on the shows in the early Christian era. Directions as to costumes were subsequently imposed on actors, who after the Council of Elvira (Spain) in 302 were only allowed to be baptized if they gave up their way of life. However, actors were subsequently excommunicated in Arles in 314, and at Hippo, it became forbidden in 393 that sons of bishops and ecclesiastics should be present at plays or finance them. The Theodosian Code of 438 prohibited theater and circus performances on Sundays and festivals, and finally, the Council of Trullo (692) condemned plays altogether.53 As if all this had happened yesterday, Ignacio de Camargo took up Tertullian and Chrysostom’s lead in his Discurso teológico sobre los teatros y comedias de este siglo (1689), stating: The arguments and topics of the comedias, if we begin with these, are mostly impure, filled with lascivious loves, interwoven with a thousand artificial mixups, profane suits, love letters, songs, music, strolling, tokens of love, visits, stupid requests, crazy details, unwise insistence, chimeras and impossible plans, which some servant, third party, key, garden, or false gate usually facilitates, the inadvertence of a lady’s father, brother, husband, and they usually contain some dishonest communication, a scandalous

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correspondence, incest, or adultery with a lot of stupid episodes, flattering praises of beauty, lying exaggerations, feigned expressions of love, promises of faithfulness, fights for love, anxiety, jealousy, suspicion, shocks, desperation, and, finally, pagan idolatry obeying the infamous laws of Venus and Cupid and Ovid’s stupid documents from Arte Amandi.54

Father Camargo’s critique obviously aims at the comedias de capa y espada (cloak-and-dagger plays), the prime object of concern among ecclesiastical critics55 and one of the dramatic genres that Lope developed to perfection. His reference to the concept of rebellious “nature” to justify his dramatic innovation was just what was needed to revive the ancient theological critique of the theater. To some ecclesiastics, Lope’s “naturalist” poetics seemed to represent a variation on the materialist heresy of ancient comedy, the unrestricted indulgence in the world of matter beyond any moral preoccupation. Perhaps they were right. In comparison with Calderón’s systematic insertion of rebellious nature and monstrous tragicomedy into a well-ordered allegorical worldview, Lope’s work does indeed at times seem a rebellious, natural chaos, emancipated from the realm of theology and morals. The confused set of assertions in the Arte nuevo doesn’t exactly contradict this impression either. Let’s have a closer look at Lope’s aesthetic “heresy.” Was he in fact flirting dangerously with the world of pure unbridled matter, as suggested by the aesthetic-stylistic heresy of disregarding Aristotle’s “eternal” rules of poetic composition? Was Lope really converting the playhouse into another temple of evil? And what exactly did he mean by the concept of naturaleza?

V. A New Art: Naturaleza and Gusto Lope’s own seminal contributions to the apologetic theory of the nonclassical (non-Aristotelian and non-Renaissance) hybridity of Baroque drama were the concepts of naturaleza and gusto, by which he defended his plays against the attacks of his classicist critics. Against the allegations of nineteenth-century criticism that Lope was ignorant of classical precepts and cared only for public success (based largely on the polemic affirmations of the Arte nuevo directed at an unidentified academy), later critics have convincingly demonstrated that the Fénix was in fact an erudite writer,56 perhaps engaged in a rebellion against outdated poetic standards, but hardly ignorant of them.57 Lope’s many affirmations on

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dramatic art seem to confirm this image of him as someone who knew and understood the classical norms of poetic composition, but deliberately discarded them because of their anachronistic and elitist hermetism as well as on the grounds of their fundamental restriction of the unfolding of natural poetic genius: “And when I have to write a comedia, / I lock the box of precepts with six keys.”58 With his copious dramatic production—the quintessence of hisoeuvre and the real source of his immortal fame—he very likely sought to create a genuinely popular art form with a certain aesthetic quality,59 essentially in accordance with the temper and taste of his audience, which included all the different social classes of contemporary society, educated people as well as the uneducated mob.60 In this endeavor, he referred to the concepts of naturaleza and gusto as the basis of an “artless art,” that is, an art emancipated from the yoke of obsolete, tyrannical “rules,” which might well have been justified at other times, but disagreed with contemporary Spanish taste (see the talk of the “Spaniard’s cholera” in Arte nuevo)61 and was by then the mere hobbyhorse of an erudite minority. In a number of places, Lope explored the natural metaphor and described his poetic production as “wild flowers” from his meadow (vega).62 Besides obviously announcing his break with “art” in the traditional, classical sense—poetry regulated by precepts and imitating an immutable, transcendent beauty—he hereby very likely wished to vindicate the world of his own secular drama, imitating the “nature” of human action, civic life, and contemporary customs, not the abstract eternal world of classical forms. We may recall Shakespeare’s similar words, that the purpose of playing is “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (Hamlet 3.2.21–24), affirming “nature” to be human nature, the historical existence of man and the world of mores and customs. Combining Aristotle’s definition of literature as “imitation of men in action” and the much-quoted dictum that “Comedy is imitation of life, the mirror of customs, and the image of truth,”63 Lope thus affirmed that his comedia imitated the world of man in its vivacious heterogeneity and complexity: “The true comedia / now has its law set, like every genre / of poetry or composing, and it is / to imitate the actions of men / and illustrate the customs of the times.”64

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Referring to Cicero’s definition of comedy and the Greek concept of comedy as essentially about “idiotika pragmata” (civil matters)65 and advocating his adherence to the urban comedies of Terence and Plautus as the classical sources of his comedias de capa y espada (“I dig out Terence and Plautus in my study,” Arte nuevo 40–42),66 Lope confirmed that his was basically a profane drama, of which rebellious “nature”—the original chaos of the historical human world—was not only the form, but also the subject.67 This vivarium of human species, or tableau vivant of ever-changing human fortunes, was essentially what Lope wished to imitate in his famous plays about national history (Fuenteovejuna), in his dramas (El caballero de Olmedo, Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña), and in his romance-inspired comedias de capa y espada (El acero de Madrid, La dama boba, El perro del hortelano)—genres which he developed to perfection, and which are probably the most characteristic of his dramatic production. History was obviously also coming onstage in the comedias that treated ancient and foreign history (El honrado hermano, Las grandezas de Alejandro, La imperial de Otón, and El Gran Duque de Moscovia), but Lope’s real achievement consisted in staging the Spanish nation: its history and legends in the plays of national history, and its everyday life in the dramas and comedias de capa y espada. Of course, Lope also wrote a considerable number of religious plays, the comedias hagiográficas, the comedias based on testamental material (El nacimiento de Cristo and Los trabajos de Jacob), and a number of autos sacramentales (an equivalent of the mystery plays). These, however, constitute a lesserknown part of his dramatic production, and weren’t the source of the theater polemics, although religious comedies were regularly submitted to clerical censure because of their impropriety and superstition, until they were finally forbidden by Carlos III in 1765.68 The dynamic organicity of the historical world surely required a flexible aesthetic form. The double perspective of tragicomedy met this need, its monstrous hybridity being better able to capture ever-changing human fortune than pure tragedy or pure comedy. As the burning passions of love and honor (evergreen subjects of the romances and the comedia) often had to break with social conventions and even the law, the original dynamism of “natural” art had to break with classical precepts. A notorious womanizer more than once in conflict with legal authorities because

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of his extramarital love affairs, Lope personally knew this all too well.69 Torn between his moral beliefs and the wild natural passions of a compulsive Don Juan, his entire existence, not only his poetics, evolved within the quintessential Baroque conflict between nature and regulation, dynamic worldly sensuality and transcendental spirituality, between immanence and transcendence, or within what we may somewhat dramatically term the “theme of the lover and the repentant sinner.”70 The seminal aesthetic conflict in Lope’s poetics between nature and art, the chaos and dynamism of the historical world and its necessarily regulated dramatic representation, mirrored his own personality. Now, did Lope’s key concept of naturaleza, that is, of chaotic, historical human existence, indicate the incipient emancipation of dramatic art from its symbiosis with morality and the realm of theology? Was the generic impurity of his plays in fact a symptom of their moral impurity? Was the concept of naturaleza part of a secular poetics, which disregarded the moral imperative traditionally endorsed by ecclesiastical authorities? Did Lope’s secular plays have a moral perspective, or did nature just run wild with passion in them? Confronted with a typical comedia de capa y espada such as La discreta enamorada (1606?), the interpreter may certainly have his doubts about Lope’s didactic purpose. In this play, we learn how a clever young girl succeeds in marrying the man she wants through numerous games, such as pretending to marry his father and marry the young man off to her own mother; how she circumvents her curfew and domestic isolation through various tricks in order to get in contact with the beloved; how young people steal off to the Prado to meet lovers; and how they provoke each other’s jealousy by dressing up as persons of the other sex—all without any obvious moral perspective, although the Arte nuevo pondered the didactic aspect of ancient comedy (“With attic elegance the Athenians / reprehended vices and customs / in their comedies”).71 Faithfully representing the chaos of historical life, ever involved in complicated enredos or marañas, Lope’s secular comedias apparently disregarded morality and didactics. According to contemporary ecclesiastical critics, this amounted to a usurpation of the transcendental reality of divine truth, and the replacement of it with a simulacrum: the world of natural appearances and materiality, an immanent world of chaotic human life emancipated from the yoke of regularity, the world of

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lies and errors.72 And the worst thing was—the public liked it! What made Lope’s irregularity most horrifying and dangerous was the public success of his comedias.73 Responding to what could easily have been La discreta enamorada, Fray Jerónimo de la Cruz complained: They incite the young girl to think what she shouldn’t and to desire what she doesn’t understand. They give her the key to disturb her father’s severity and her mother’s care. They teach her to receive notes, respond to letters, what to do on occasion, how to seek her luck: to pretend in public, to lose all propriety in private, to make false keys, to seek secret doors and windows, not to fear the dark of night, nor the dangers of the home. They teach the young men liberties, audacities, and insolence; the good argument, the sweet word, and the lying sigh.74

However, despite the provocative statements in the Arte nuevo, and no matter the “immorality” of a number of his monstrous plays, Lope’s dramatic art was after all not all that artless. In several places, he actually confirmed that “art” was a necessary element of great poetry.75 He thereby nuanced the provocative naturalist “statement” of the Arte nuevo (which did in fact invoke the concept of art in the very title) and showed that he intended to create a popular art form, which did, indeed, thrive on a certain natural vitality, but was far from pure chaos. By emphasizing the importance of naturaleza in poetic composition, Lope was not advocating an entirely irregular drama, but rather formulating the principles of an estilo de llaneza—a plain, yet graceful and, first of all, flexible style that could do justice to the dynamism of the historical world, the aesthetic material of the Baroque drama. The plainness and unostentatious beauty of Lope’s natural flowers, gently yet virtuously arranged in loosely bound bouquets, appealed to broad sections of his contemporaries. The concept of naturaleza thus converged with the concept of gusto, that is, the question of the audience and its moral instruction through delight.

VI. Toward the Moral Drama When Lope died on 27 September 1635, his funeral, sponsored by his patron, the Duke of Sessa, was celebrated by his compatriots for nine days. On the grounds of the dramatist’s morally irregular life, the Consejo de Castilla had prohibited any official tribute, but a vast crowd followed

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Lope’s corpse around the streets of Madrid in a fervent exaltation. Lope had become synonymous with the spirit of the Spanish nation, the pueblo. The public success of his plays proved that Lope had indeed a very good grasp of contemporary taste, the popular gusto that he provocatively appealed to in the Arte nuevo (vv. 45–48) as something contradictory to the refined, rational, restrictive world of “art” and good taste (vv. 133–40).76 However, as has previously been noted, Lope’s dramatic art was popular, but not vulgar. Even a brief consideration of the formal characteristics of his new comedia confirms that Lope was very much aware of the many different demands of his audience: the Fénix had once and for all consolidated the reduction from five to three acts, because it gave the comedia an agility and verve matching not only the dynamism of the aesthetic material, but also the impatience or cólera of the baser parts of the audience;77 simultaneously, he employed a number of different lyrical meters, simple and popular as well as more complicated metrical forms (the typical El caballero de Olmedo contains redondillas, décimas, quintillas or coplas reales, romances, tercetos, and romancillos), not only in order to express the different aspects of his tragicomic universe, but also to respond to the demands of the educated sectors of his audience. Thus, giving everyone what he wanted, Lope developed a dramatic art that was in a way the true image of its heterogeneous audience: the Spanish nation.78 Although his affirmations about the necio vulgo (stupid mob) have often been seen as an expression of a somewhat embarrassed or paradoxical populist credo, Lope’s concept of his audience was much more complex than some of the more notorious formulations of the Arte nuevo would have us believe. In fact, a closer analysis of Lope’s use of the term vulgo in his famous palinode uncovers an eminent rhetorical smartness, conspicuously transforming the pejorative term vulgo into the semantically and sociologically neutral público, and eventually into the positive notion of the pueblo, simultaneously vindicating his own popular art yet capturing the benevolence of the classicist academics to whom he addresses his speech.79 In the Arte nuevo, Lope is on one hand precariously seeking to win the appreciation of the elect academic audience, which alone can concede him eternal glory, while on the other hand trying to stay true to the spirit of the audience who pays his bills and to whom his dramatic production was dedicated. Were Lope’s motives merely

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economical, then, or did he also have other things in mind? A closer consideration of Lope’s aesthetic development gives us good reason to believe the latter. Though in his rebellious youth he flirted with the base vulgo, Lope—later ordained a priest—eventually became the pastor of his pueblo in what has been referred to as his “second manner.”80 Beginning by capturing the benevolence of his audience by adapting to its tastes, he took on the responsibility of educating this audience, instructing it in good civic behavior and the mysteries of faith.81 By the time of Lope’s death, the theater audience had been transformed from vulgo to pueblo through the labor of Lope and his more accomplished followers. Educated spectators had seen hundreds of carefully constructed comedias and been initiated into the secrets of dramatic art. By then, the attacks on the monstrosity of the comedia were decreasing. Proportionate with Lope’s temperance of “nature” with “art” and his realization that the grip of the audience could be effectively used to didactic ends, the formal monstrosity of the plays apparently became less significant, at least until classicism reappeared with the dawning Enlightenment under the influence of France. Quevedo (who had a stern eye for morality) thus praised the didactic qualities of Lope’s plays in an official approbation.82 What looked at first like an abominable, immoral expression of unbridled nature and the depraved taste of the uneducated mob eventually turned out to be a seminal part of Baroque moralization. Although Lope (with his “naturalist” poetics and flirtation with the vulgo) sometimes certainly seemed to tend toward a materialist heresy—disregarding not only the classical rules of poetic composition, but also the rules of morality—his work was at its best an expression of the intermingling of the utilis and the dulcis recommended by Horace and the essential characteristic of Baroque aesthetics on a broad scale.83 By 1668, Juan Caramuel, defending Lope in his Primus Calamus, thus emphasized that the comic plot was in fact a parable, that is, a story with a double structure, or an allegory consisting of a literal level and a moral level. As evidence of this claim, he paradoxically attributed the traditional characteristics of tragedy to comedy, stating tragedy to be a subgenre of comedy, and referred to Lope’s “Ciceronian” creed, that comedy is the mirror of human life: Therefore we may also by the term comedia understand tragedy: for tragedies are tragic comedies.… It is a natural story (real and moral),

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representing the great deeds of illustrious men; so that seeing with the eyes, hearing with our ears, what others do gloriously, we may follow their virtuous example and be exercised spiritually, imitating them in glorious acts. Thus Lope, v. 12: Therefore Tullius [Cicero] called them the mirror of customs and a live image of the truth. The story is double; real, and yet moral, or virtual: or, as the Spanish say, sucedida or pensada. That is real which actually happens, as in the story of Susanna, which is full of politics and ascetic instruction, such as that the innocent should despise the threats of wicked men and trust in God’s mercy. That is moral which theologians call parable, and the critics novella. If that which never happens should happen, it truly would instruct men and reform their corrupt mores.84

It may be that only six of his 483 plays85 were written according to the rules of the ancients (“ad regulas veterum”), but Lope was right in estimating that plays written according to these rules didn’t please the public (“non placuerunt populo”). Demonstrating, on the basis of Cicero’s muchquoted dictum that comedy is simultaneously a mirror of customs and an image of truth, that Lope’s drama was in fact allegorical (the literal level hiding a moral truth), Caramuel ends his discourse on the comedia by enthusiastically exclaiming that “Optimus Magister Comoedias condendi fuit Lupus” (Lope was the greatest master at composing comedies). Significantly, Lope was apparently no longer the author of monstrous tragicomedies, but the master of the comedia. Caramuel finally states that although Lope in his youth sought to follow the ancients, he subsequently corrected them and replaced their aesthetic errors with the perfect comedia.86 The Spanish critics and theorists were certainly gaining confidence; and the reason for their pride in the hermaphrodite monster of the national stage was its moral superiority.

VII. Vindication of Tragicomedy as Comedia In the Poetics 1451b, Aristotle famously conceded a universal philosophical truth-value to poetry compared to the historian’s accurate, but only partial accounts. This passage was to become the quintessential apology for poetic imitation during the Renaissance.87 In the Baroque period, it seemed destined at first to collide with the Platonic-Christian suspicion

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of fiction, which emphazised the ontologically inferior status as well as the ethical and moral problems of literature. However, the development of the secular drama into a didactic art form, renouncing the sphere of eternal truth, demonstratively posing as fiction, and embracing “nature” or historical life from a moral point of view, allowed for a reconciliation of the positive Aristotelian notion of imitation and the negative PlatonicChristian notion of fiction. As a secular comedia treating profane matters (such as civic intercourse, customs, mores) on a moralizing basis, Baroque drama conquered the good will of the critics, even though it broke with classical rules of poetic composition. In this process, the transformation of the Aristotelian theory of drama was essential. Baroque critics generally took the Aristotelian qualification of poetry as “universal” to mean “moralizing” or “entailing a moral truth,” possibly encouraged by section 1448a in the Poetics, which stated that tragedy represents men as better than they really are (whereas comedy represents them as worse). In the development of the term comedia into a hegemonic generic concept of dramatic art (as a single genre), the process of moralization was in many respects absolutely seminal. The critics and theorists increasingly demanded that the theater state a moral example,88 while the dramatists were also increasingly conscious of their responsibility as moral educators of the public. Retrospectively revising his career in the prologue to the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses (1615), Cervantes claimed to be the first to have put moral examples on the stage. Although Cervantes’ work was basically in line with the Christian Renaissance humanist tradition of Erasmus and Vives, who had of course also recommended that art state moral examples (see, for example, Vives’s De causis corruptarum artium [1531], and his comments on dramatic art in De arte dicendi, bk. 3 [1555]),89 he obviously saw secular moral drama as a novelty. During the Renaissance, popular art and morality were, generally speaking, more strictly separated spheres. In his work on the decadence of the arts, Vives thus praised Fernando de Rojas’s moralizing prose work Celestina (1st ed. 1499) as a rather singular case: By then the Fable began to deal in veils, and little by little it began to treat funny things as preferred by the mob: love affairs, the tricks of prostitutes, villains’ plots, the wild deeds and glories of soldiers … and we would almost say that it incited sin, especially since the authors of these comedias

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On the grounds of its closely interrelated moral outlook and mixture of tragic and comic elements, the Celestina is often seen as a precursor of the Baroque theater. It was, in other words, “universal.” A century after the publication of Rojas’s work, moralization and the tragicomic mixture of genres became essential characteristics of the theater. Assisted by the classicist critics, the threefold Platonic-Christian critique of literature (the obvious background of Vives’s complaints) was slowly transforming the drama into a didactic art form. Dramatists were everywhere dropping comments on the illusory nature of dramatic art in order to exhibit its ontologically inferior status and hence avoid the problematic confusion of fiction and truth, paradoxically emphasizing that the universal truth of poetry was pure invention; the negative view of the cosmos pertinent to tragedy (and celebrated as the quintessential expression of spiritual nobility by various classicist trends) was being replaced with the Christian universe, dominated by a positive eschatological view of historical life—not ignoring its tragic elements, but ascribing them to the moral flaw of the essentially free Christian individual. Despite Lope’s rebellious flirtation with unbridled nature and the “bad taste” of the audience, his dramatic revolution eventually turned out to be yet another example of Baroque moralization, the first stage in the reform of classical drama in Spain and in the development of the Baroque comedia. In important plays such as El Caballero de Olmedo and Fuenteovejuna, Lope actually showed the castigation of the vicious and the reward of the virtuous, and later dramatists followed this trend. Thus, at the end of the epoch, we read in an edict issued by the junta superior of Madrid on 15 April 1672: The junta recognizes the proper political motives of entertaining the public with feasts and shows, which prudently alleviates the weight of its yoke and the melancholy of its discourse, and moreover that all well-ordered republics have to this end introduced feasts, games, and public shows, which no censure, however strict and rigid, has ever condemned as long as they are tempered and decent. It also recognizes the licitness of the comedias … in the sense of honest representations based on the Spanish dramatic tradition.… But if they

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surpass the honest either in words or in the way of speaking, in the time, place, or in the characters, they will be illicit and it will be the duty of all good government to prohibit them.91

The debate on the licentiousness of the comedia thus seems to have been laid to rest, at least for a time, with the appeal to decorum and decency. Turning now to the concept of the comedia and the reasons for its triumph as a generic concept of dramatic art, we may begin by asking what is to be understood by the term itself. Fleeing lofty ideological questions, some scholars hold it to be another term for “play,” whereas others refer to the power of “tradition”;92 still others simply avoid the question, holding it to be unanswerable, considering the heterogeneity of the material.93 However, I think that the real and determinant background for this terminological development was ideological. The equation of literature’s universal quality with its moral impetus was the key to the seemingly paradoxical vindication of comedy, under suspicion ever since antiquity of encouraging the laxity of morals. Vives’s comments on the Celestina pointed to the pedagogical advantages of comedy, ever the most popular art form, and in the De arte dicendi, book 3, he further discussed the theater from a pedagogical point of view. Just as the pedagogical function of imagery had been acknowledged by Christian authorities as an important source of public education at least since Gregory the Great, the capability of dramatic representations to capture the minds of the spectators and turn them toward virtue was now being explored in the period of the Counter Reformation.94 In this respect, the particular popularity of comedy, once it was duly transformed into a moral art form, turned out to be absolutely seminal. In the Baroque period, the traditional definition of comedy as a play that ends in laughter, dating back to Diomedes’ commentaries on Terence, was gradually being supplemented by a moral notion of comedy.95 The equation of literature’s universal quality with its moral impetus may be observed in the significant transformation of the Aristotelian concept of katharsis, and its application to comedy. Defining the comedia in the third book of his Philosophia antigua poética, Pinciano thus stated that “Comedy is live imitation made in order to purify the spirit of its passions through delight and laughter,” a definition based on his notion of purgación as “the universal goal of poetry” (2:311),96 expressed elsewhere in his poetics:

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The Aristotelian definition of comedy as the representation of the “harmlessly ugly” had undergone a significant transformation by being subjected to a characteristic Baroque moralization. This transformation was more an expression of the moral outlook of the Platonic-Christian tradition and of the general allegorical outlook of the period than a logical consequence of Aristotle’s words in the Poetics 1453a, that the perfect tragedy depicts the ordinary man’s fall from fortune “not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty.”98 Aristotle’s view of the tragic seemed to rest on a pagan notion of destiny, which was fundamentally irreconcilable with the Christian doctrine of free will, considerably augmented in a Catholic context after the Council of Trent. The view that although the downfall of the villain may satisfy the moral sense, the tragic emotions of pity and fear are aroused instead by “unmerited misfortune,” obviously has nothing in common with the moral universe of the Baroque. In fact, I think that the real function of Aristotelian theory in this period is largely justificatory. Given the triumph of neoscholastic Aristotelianism in Catholic theology after the Council of Trent, scholars have tended to overestimate the importance of Aristotle for the development of dramatic theory in Spain. It may well be that a number of poetic treatises in the period are dressed up as commentaries on the Poetics (e.g., Pinciano’s Philosophia antigua poética and González de Salas’s Nueva idea de la tragedia antigua), but on closer analysis, they thrive on an entirely non-Aristotelian concept of literature as ambiguous “fiction” and a likewise non-Aristotelian demand that literature should be morally informed and state examples. At any rate, Baroque Aristotelianism (as previously noted) must be seen on an ideological background. Just as the authority of Aristotle had, since Thomas Aquinas, supported Christian doctrine on a theological level (and not the other way around), Aristotelian aesthetic theory was basically supporting the period’s Platonic-Christian critique of literature. Thus, in Invectiva a las comedias que prohibió Trajano y apología por las nuestras (1622), according to leading specialists in the field one of the three

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most important documents relating to the vindication of the comedia,99 Francisco de Barreda begins by refuting the authority of Aristotle and giving Plato due credit for his critique of Homer: Well, Aristotle couldn’t give us the art he didn’t have. He didn’t have it, because in his time, as he himself confesses, none of the poems had reached these heights. But if they hadn’t, who represented art to Aristotle? From which examples did he deduce what was decent, what improper? If from the imperfect and unfinished, his notion of art is imperfect and unfinished. Aristotle is defendable in two ways: either by saying that he took as his example Homer, who gave us splendid tragedies in the Illiad and comedies in the Odyssey, or that philosophy taught him a way of giving these form. One way or the other, these reasons are insufficient to defend him. Homer is not enough to establish precepts, since Plato justly condemns him as imprudent in his poems, little attentive to decorum, and inexact in developing his characters. As Scaliger elegantly says, we don’t have to reduce art to Homer, but Homer to art. What scandalous impropriety more deserving of the expulsion from Plato’s Republic, to represent divine characters with human emotions and lust? And to make a hero like Achilles behave as a woman in Deidama with woman’s clothes. And show him cruel and arrogant with an enemy already defeated and dead, as when the poet says that he would only exchange the corpse of Hector for its weight in gold.100

Barreda’s argument is double. Against the Renaissance exaltation of Aristotle and classicist servility to ancient authority, he voices the Platonic critique of literature in order to vindicate indirectly the contemporary comedia. As Plato “rightly” pointed out, Homer was morally and ethically flawed, even though he might have been aesthetically impeccable. (Aesthetic excellence is, however, tellingly of no interest to Barreda.) It logically follows, therefore, that contemporary Spanish poets and dramatists did not need to follow the authority of Aristotle, who based his theory on such dubitable writers; but neither should they follow the Romans (Seneca and Terence), who were themselves just imitators of the Greeks. Credulous imitation of the classics represented mere slavery, cowardice, and lack of self-assurance: Then let’s imitate these ancients cowardly. Let’s do like Italy, which, even though it has geniuses, loses the glory of the future because of its obedience to the past. They don’t dare exit those cloisters; those walls are inviolable. To their mind, what isn’t imitated, isn’t good, and they ignore that if these same ancients that they so slavishly imitate had just imitated their predecessors, they would have been as bad as them. Art develops over

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Referring to an argument similar to Lope’s, Barreda emphasizes the mutability of taste and the futility of imitating the aesthetic ideals of the past, and criticizes Guarini and Tasso, who only partly emancipated themselves from the “yoke” of antiquity. Compared to the Italians’ “superstition,” the erroneous Renaissance belief in pagan authority, contemporary Spanish playwrights demonstrated a real, heroic self-confidence in creating a highly idiosyncratic and as yet unseen aesthetic form, uniting all kinds of wisdom and excellence: natural philosophy, morality, history, poetry, and eloquence. The Baroque comedia is universal because it encompasses all fields of knowledge, first of all morality, and it hence supersedes ancient comedy, which was definitely not moral: Finally, [the blessed bravery of the Spanish genius] has superseded the ancient comedias, in such a way that these now appear as mere sketches or shadows. Neither were the ancient comedies morally useful; as Plato rightly says of Homer, the fables that they used as their basis were scandalous and of bad example.… They were blasphemous, because they ascribed human and even brutish actions to divine characters. They also offend the majesty of elevated characters, ascribing plebeian actions to heroes and generous princes.102

Barreda thus once again refers to the Platonic critique, emphasizing the moral problem of ancient poetry. His invective against ancient drama simultaneously vindicates the comedia as an ideal expression of a PlatonicChristian moral aesthetics and discards the dramatic theory of Aristotle and its prolongation in the classicist poetics of the Italian Renaissance. Confirming that the real ancient authority is not Aristotle, the chief basis of Renaissance dramatic theory, but Plato, the moralist and originator of metaphysical aesthetics, Barreda states that Renaissance imitation of the ancients has totally missed the point, by disregarding the seminal didactic aspect of ancient aesthetics: They say that they imitate the ancients; but they are, in fact, so far from imitating them, that they are much rather contradicting their style and their intention. The intention of the ancients was always instruction. This

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is the principal issue of poetry, as we have said before. Although it is true that they invented many pleasant things, great farces, smart novelties, this was always in order to dress up the first goal, which is doctrine.103

Even though some theorists, through rather tendentious interpretations, have discovered a strong moral motive in Aristotle’s Poetics, there can be no doubt that the real ancient authority, and the theoretical basis of the Baroque comedia, to Barreda’s mind, is Plato. Who else put morality and “doctrine” before all other concerns in dealing with dramatic art? The process leading from the vital and rebellious “naturalist” poetics of Lope’s early period to the ordered moral universe of Calderonian drama was almost completed when Barreda wrote his apology in 1622. One year later, Calderón’s first great public success, the palatial comedy Amor, honor y poder, premiered in the old Alcázar in Madrid on occasion of the Prince of Wales’s visit to the Spanish capital. The theoretical basis of the comedia was now firmly established. In his peculiar commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, the Nueva idea de la antigua tragedia (1633), Quevedo’s erudite friend Jusepe Antonio González de Salas could thus exclaim that the Spanish dramatists “have now developed the comedia to a height, which the ancients never reached,” holding the contemporary playwrights to be indeed disciples of Aristotle (as they should be, we may add), but not “ridiculously superstitious.”104 Through moralization, the tragicomic Spanish monster was finally accepted as a comedia.

University of Copenhagen

NOTES 1 In Don Quixote, pt. 1, chap. 48, we hear that the contemporary comedias have untraditional characters such as “un viejo valiente,” “un mozo cobarde,” “un lacayo rhetórico”, “un page consejero,” and “una princesa fregona” (a valiant old man, a young coward, an eloquent servant, a page adviser, and a cleaning-lady princess), among others. I quote from the edition of Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes, 1998), available online at the Centro Virtual Cervantes (http://cvc.cervantes.es). All translations from the Spanish in this essay are mine. 2 Whereas Aristotle only pondered the unity of plot, the unities of time and place were established by Castelvetro in his 1570 commentary on the Poetics. 3 Besides Cascales, Suárez de Figueroa (Pasagero, 1617), Cristóbal de Mesa (Valle de lágrimas y diversas rimas, 1604), Esteban Manuel de Villegas (Las eróticas o amatorias, 1617), and Torres de Rámila y Suarez (the Spongia, 1617). Later, Jáuregui, Cervantes, and Rey de Artieda.

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4 Using the same metaphor as Cascales, Ricardo de Turia wrote, “ninguna comedia de cuantas se representan en España es, sino tragicomedia, que es un mixto formado de lo cómico y lo trágico … y nadie tenga por impropriedad esta mixtura.… Lo mixto podemos comparar … al fabuloso Hermafrodito” (Of the many comedies represented in Spain, none is but tragicomedy, which is a mixture of the comic and the tragic … and nobody holds this mixture to be improper.… We may compare this mixture … to the fabulous Hermaphrodite); quoted in Federico Sánchez y Escribano and Alberto Porqueras Mayo, Preceptiva dramática española del Renacimiento y el Barroco (Madrid: Gredos, 1972), 177–78. 5 Sofie Kluge, “Góngora’s Heresy: Literary Theory and Criticism in the Golden Age,” MLN 122 (2007): 251–71. 6 The paradigm of the Platonic critique of literature (Republic bks. 2, 3, and 10)—subsequently the basis of the Christian persecution of “fiction”—is “tragic poetry,” more particularly Homeric poetry. 7 Cf. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, “Lope de Vega: El Arte nuevo y la nueva biografia,” Revista de Filología Española 22 (1935): 337–98; David H. Darst, Imitatio: Polémicas sobre la imitación en el Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Orígenes, 1985); and José F. Montesinos, “La paradoja del Arte nuevo,” in Estudios sobre Lope de Vega (Salamanca: Anaya, 1967), 1–20, all of whom see the theater controversy as a debate between ancients and moderns. 8 The documents relevant to the moral discussion of the Baroque drama have been published in Emilio Cotarelo y Mori, Bibliografía de las controversias sobre la licitud del teatro en España (Madrid: La Real Academia Española, 1904). 9 Principally in the Arte nuevo, in the second part of the Filomena (1621), and in letters such as the “Respuesta de Lope de Vega [al papel que escribió un señor destos reinos en razón de la nueva poesía].” However, Lope also reflected on poetics in various prologues, such as that of Peregrino en su patria (1604). Escribano and Mayo, Preceptiva dramática española, collect all of Lope’s affirmations on dramatic art. 10 See Margarete Newels, Los géneros dramáticos en las poéticas del Siglo de Oro, trans. Amadeo Sole-Leris (London: Tamesis, 1974), chap. 9. 11

Darst, 86.

12 According to Newels, 125, “La teoría de la tragicomedia está estrechamente vinculada a la famosa controversia en torno al teatro español y, en particular, en torno a la comedia de Lope” (The theory of tragicomedy is closely interrelated with the famous controversy concerning the Spanish theater and, in particular, Lope’s comedia). 13

Montesinos, 2.

14

Lope de Vega, Arte nuevo, in Lope de Vega esencial, ed. Felipe Pedraza (Madrid: Taurus, 1990), vv. 179–80. In the original, “Buen ejemplo nos da natureleza / que por tal variedad tiene belleza.” 15 Lope, vv. 174–78: “Lo trágico y lo cómico mezclado / y Terencio con Séneca, aunque sea / como otro Minotauro de Pasife / harán grave una parte, otra ridícula / que aquesta variedad deleita mucho.” 16 The domesticated symmetricality of the Baroque garden provides an illustrative example of the period’s zeal to dominate nature.

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17 Around the same time (1620), Bernini was restoring the famous Borghese Ermafrodito in Rome, on demand of the Cardinal Borghese himself, covering the male and female sexual organs of the ancient statue with a wooden frame and adding a mattress. 18 Lope vv. 190–92: “[a Aristóteles] ya le perdimos el respeto / cuando mezclamos la sentencia trágica / a la humilidad de la bajeza cómica.” 19

Ibid., v. 283: “suele el disfraz varonil agradar mucho.”

20

Cascales, Cartas philológicas (1634), ep. 3, par. 2.

21 As Louis Celestino Pérez and Federico Sánchez y Escribano have convincingly shown in Afirmaciones de Lope de Vega sobre preceptiva dramática a base de cien comedias (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1961), Lope’s entire oeuvre is permeated by affirmations and reflections on the nature of dramatic art, generally demonstrating a wholly different attitude toward the aesthetic qualities of his work than the depreciation usually extracted from his Arte nuevo. 22

I borrow this list from Newels, 125–26.

23 Edwin S. Morby, “Some Observations on Tragedia and Tragicomedia in Lope ,” Hispanic Review 11 (1943): 207–9, gives a full list and concludes that Lope had no propensity to and was by temperament unqualified for tragedy, emphasizing the tragicomic character of Lope’s plays. Addressing the contemporary dramatist Guillén de Castro, author of the Mocedades del Cid (1599), in the prologue to Las almenas de Toro, Lope referred to the “Spanish custom” of mixing “against Art” comic and tragic characters, high and low dramatic styles: “Como en esta historia del rey D. Sancho entre su persona y las demás que son dignas de la tragedia, por la costumbre de España, que tiene ya mezcladas, contra el arte, las personas y los estilos, no está lejos el que tiene, por algunas partes, de la grandeza referida, de cuya variedad tomó principio la tragicomedia” (quoted at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, http://www.cervantesvirtual.com). 24 Polonius’s enumeration of the poetic genres (“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”) and the mechanicals’ production of Pyramus and Thisbe (“very tragical mirth”). All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 25 See the dispute between Guarini and Denores, 1587–93. Guarini himself defined tragicomedy in Il Compendio della poesia tragicomica: “Dall’una prende le persone grandi e non l’azione; la favola verisimile, ma non vera; gli affetti mossi, ma rintuzzati; il diletto, non la mestizia; il pericolo, non la morte; dall’altra il riso non dissoluto, le piacevolezze modeste, il nodo finto, il rivolgimento felice, e sopratutto l’ordine comico” (From the one [genre], it takes the high characters and not the action; the plausible, but not true, fable; moving, but not alienating, emotions; delight, not sorrow; danger, not death; from the other, proper laughter, modest pleasantness, the invented plot, the happy ending, and above all, the comic structure); quoted in Morby, 200. My translation from the Italian. 26 The polemics (which included the intervention of the newly founded Académie Française on demand of Richelieu) subsequently caused Corneille to pay closer attention to the classical “rules” of dramatic art, and Le Cid is thus his only play that qualifies as a tragicomedy. 27

In the Republic, bk. 2, Plato included both tragedy and comedy under “mimetic art.”

28 See Newels on the classification of the genres (42–53), and on tragicomedy (125–52). Newels advances the hypothesis that Cascales was in fact the founder of the tripartite system (42), and concludes, “la clasificación en tres géneros ofrecía precisamente e la ‘nueva comedia’

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un lugar en que situarse dentro del ámbito de lo poético” (53; what the classification in three genres offered was exactly a place within the poetic sphere for the “new comedia”). 29 Cascales, pt. 2, table 3: “imitación de una actión illustre, entera y de justa grandeza, en suave lenguage dramático, para limpiar las passiones del ánimo por medio de la misericordia y miedo.” 30 However, Newels, 44, recalls that the quadruple Aristotelian classification is found in, for instance, Cristobál de Mesa (Compendio), Juan de la Cueva (Ejemplar poético), Soto de Rojas (Desengaño de Amor en Rimas), and Mártir Rizo (Poética de Aristoteles). 31 Plato had been recently edited by Ficino, but so had the works of Diomedes and Donatus, mediated through Badio (Prenotamenta, 1512) and Torres Naharro (Prohemio de Propalladia, 1517). See Newels, 45. 32 Carvallo, Cisne de Apolo (Madrid: Instituto Cervantes, 1958), bk. 3, par. 4: “Tragedia resta aora que digamos la qual en su disposicion y forma no se diferencia de la comedia, porque de las mismas partes consta. Pero la materia es diferente, porque acaua en cosas tristes y lamentables auiendo al principio començado en cosas alegres y suaues, y de ordinario es de personas eroycas y famosas abatidas por la fortuna, como de su diffinicion consta, que esta tragedia esta eroycae fortunae comprehensio.” 33 Caramuel, ep. 21: “Comedia tiene un significado más amplio que tragedia, pues toda tragedia es comedia, pero no al contrario. La comedia es la representación de alguna historia o fábula y tiene final alegre o triste. El el primer caso retiene el nombre de comedia; en el segundo es llamada comedia trágica, tragicomedia o tragedia. Ésta es la verdadera distinción de las palabras, no obstando elque otros arguyan lo contrario” (quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 229). 34 Especially by nineteenth-century scholars; see Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (Mexico: Porrúa, 1985); Joel E. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1976); and George Saintsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, 3 vols. (London: Blackwood & Sons, 1900–1904). 35

Lope, v. 366: “me llaman ignorante Italia y Francia.”

36 Carvallo, bk. 3, par. 2: “Dragmatica poesía, es aquella que los latinos llaman activa, o representativa, en la qual nunca el poeta habla en su nombre, pero induze o introduze personas, que hablen y representen el mismo caso, de cuyo genero de poesía son las comedias, tragedias, coloquios, diálogos, y algunas églogas” (Dramatic poetry is what the Romans call “active” or “representing,” where the poet never speaks in his own name, but instead induces or introduces characters who speak and represent his intention, and to which genre belong comedies, tragedies, colloquies, dialogues, and some eclogues). 37 Cascales, ep. 10, 3. Dec. [Al Maestro Pedro González de Sepúlveda]: “No ai mas que tres especies que son épica, lyrica i scenica, que si bien la Tragedia i Comedia son en rigor differentes; pero porque la una i la otra es dramatica i se representan en el tablado, se habla de ellas como de una especie” (There are no more than three genres, which are the epic, the lyric, and the scenic, even if Tragedy and Comedy are actually different; but because both are dramatic and represented on the stage, we speak of them as of one genre); quoted in Newels, 53. 38 The same argument, based on the systematic philological comparison between theory and practice in antiquity, is found in Ricardo de Turia, Norte de la poesía española (1616) as well as in the Expostulatio Spongiae (1618), a defense of Lope. 39 Cicero, Orator, 109: “Comoedum in Tragoediis, et Tragoedum in Comoediis admodum placere videmus.” My translation.

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40 Lope, vv. 45–48: “y escribo por el arte que inventaron / los que el vulgar aplauso pretendieron; / porque, como las paga el vulgo, es justo / hablarles en necio para darles gusto.” 41 See Calderón’s mythological autos, which demonstrate the dramatist’s ambiguous domestication of the monstrous and the hybrid: El golfo de las sirenas, Andromeda y Perseo, Eco y Narciso, etc. 42

See, for example, Bances Candamo, Teatro de los teatros (1690), article 2.

43

See, again, the theater critique in Quixote, chap. 48, pronounced, as is well known, by a cleric. The Spanish tradition included a number of texts concerned with the education and behavior of Christian women, e.g., Vives, De institutione foemina christiana (1524) and Fray Luis de León, La perfecta casada (1583). See also Erasmus, Vidua christiana (1529). 44 The memorial and other documents relevant to the theological critique of the theater in the period have been published by Cotarelo y Mori. The memorial is quoted on 421–24. Cf. also Juan Gaspar Ferrer, Tratado de las comedias en el qual se declara si son lícitas y si hablando en todo rigor será pecado mortal el representarlas, el verlas, y el consentirlas (1618). 45 “El memorial razona 1) ‘que toda buena república siempre las admitió, y toda historia las tiene por buenas y virtuosas’; 2) que ‘de este uso en tanto tiempo no se ha visto que naciese ningún daño univeral, sino mucha utilidad por muchos caminos’; 3) que ‘comenzando por la sustancia de la comedia, ella es espejo, aviso, ejemplo, retrato, dechado, doctrina y escarmiento de la vida donde el hombre dócil y prudente puede corrigir sus pasiones huyendo de vicios, levantar sus pensamientos aprendiendo virtudes por medio de la demonstración, que de todo hay en la comedia, y que tan poderosa es en los actos humanos, de donde suele acaecer que más se aprende con los ojos que puede enseñarse con el entendimiento’; 4) que sirve la comedia a los indoctos que no saben leer ‘de memoria de las historias antiguas y hechos heroicos loables.… y no porque se mezcle alguna profana comedia de amores entre éstas deben las demás quitarse, pues ni todas pueden ser de una manera, ni éstas dejan de ser útiles o por su variedad o por su ejemplo’; 5) ‘nace también de las comedias demás de la recreación universal, un engaño del tiempo que en el ocioso es gran fruto y en el más ocupado es importante’; 6) ‘nace también de las comedias otro futo, que para el culto divino no es pequeño que es hacer de la fiesta de Corpus Christi una celebración diferente y alegre, y puesto que el pueblo está acostumbrado ver comedias ese día, si se les prohiben, desminuará la importancia de la fiesta’.” Darst, 89, whose resumé of the memorial I quote, thus comments that the memorial “presenta argumentos bien diferentes de los de Lope y su séquito de dramaturgos, porque consta punto por punto las detracciones ecclesiásticas dirigidas a cerrar del todo los teatro municipales” (presents arguments quite different from those of Lope and his circle of dramatists, point by point answering the ecclesiastical detractions aimed at the final closure of the public theaters). 46 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, trans. T. R. Glover, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1966), 257–61. 47 In his Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1st ed. 1611), Covarrubias advanced the hypothesis that comoedia is derived from Como, “dios de la lascivia, del comer y del bever en chacota; en cuyas fiestas los moços componían versos descompuestos, y en ellos notavan los defetos y vicios unos de otros, hasta que por ley se les reprimió y vedó esta poesía licenciosa” (god of lasciviousness, of heavy eating and drinking; in whose feasts the young men composed disordered verses, exhibiting the defects and vices of each other, until they were reprehended by law and this licentious poetry was prohibited); quoted from the Tesoro edited by Martín de Riquer (Barcelona: Horta, 1943). However, Covarrubias reserves this description for ancient comedy. Marc Vitse, Eléments pour une théorie du théâtre espagnol du XVIIe siècle (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1990), has a resume of the predicates of the theater in the patristic tradition (51). See also “La controverse éthique,” in Vitse, 29–171.

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48 Tertullian, 255: “The whole world is filled with Satan and his angels. Yet not because we are in the world, do we fall from God; but only if in some way we meddle with the sins of the world. Thus if, as a sacrificer and worshipper, I enter the Capitol or the temple of Serapis, I shall fall from God—just as I should if a spectator in circus or theatre.” 49 The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Theatre”: “We can only infer that the plays and mimes most popular under the Empire were as a rule grossly indecent and poisonous to virtue. The surviving plays of Aristophanes would alone suffice to show how inconceivably lax public opinion was, even at the most cultured periods of paganism, while the infamia which marked the legal status of an actor at Rome is significant of the degradation involved by such a profession.… Further, there is a good deal of evidence that in the third and fourth centuries the parody of Christian rites formed a regular feature of the mimes. Probably the Christian (ho christianos komodoumenos) was almost as familiar an object of ridicule at these representations as is the pantaloon in a modern pantomime.” 50

Tertullian, 285–87.

51 See, for instance, the Aprobación del reverendo padre Fray Manuel Guerra y Ribera a la verdadera quinta parte de Calderón (1682), quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 320–27. In addition, a number of deported Jesuits living in Italy after the expulsion of the Society from Spain (1767) wrote apologies for the Spanish Baroque theater, by then under heavy attack. 52 The documents relevant to the life of the theaters in Madrid in the period have been published by N. D. Shergold and J. E. Varey, Teatro y comedias en Madrid: Estudio y documentos, 6 vols. (London: Tamesis, 1971); see vol. 1 (1600–1650) and vol. 3 (1666–1687). 53

The entry “Theatre” in The Catholic Encyclopedia gives a good survey of this develop-

ment. 54 Quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 327–28: “Los argumentos o asuntos de las comedias, empecemos por aquí, son por la mayor parte impuros, llenos de lascivos amores, entretejidos de mil artificiosos enredos, de galanteos profanos, de papeles amorosos, de rondas, de músicas, de paseos, de dádivas, de visitas, de solicitaciones torpes, de finezas locas, de empeños desatinados, de quimeras y de empresas imposibles, que les facilita ordinariamente un criado, una tercera, una llave, un jardín, una puerta falsa, un descuido del padre, del hermano, del marido de la dama y, por último, suelen parar en una comunicación deshonesta, en una correspondencia escandalosa, en un incesto, en un adulterio, en que hay muchos lances torpes, alabanzas lisonjeras de la hermosura, hipérboles mentirosos, expresiones afectadas del amor, promesas de constancia, competencias del afecto, temores, celos, sospechas, sustos, desesperaciones y, en suma, una gentílica idolatría ajustada puntualmente a las leyes infamas de Venus y Cupido y a los torpes documentos de Ovidio en el libro de Arte Amandi.” 55 See also the view of Juan de Zabaleta: “Las comedias que más acuso son las que llaman de capa y espada; porque estas desde el principio al fin están hirviendo en afectos de amor” (The comedias that I censure the most are those called cloak-and-dagger; because from the beginning to the end these are burning with amorous passion); quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 286. 56 See Miguel Romera-Navarro, La preceptiva dramática de Lope y otros ensayos sobre el Fénix (Madrid: Yunque, 1935); Pérez and Escribano; Montesinos; and Morby. We primarily encounter the “erudite Lope” in the lyrical poetry. 57

See the work of Menéndez Pidal, Montesinos, Newels, Darst, et al.

58

Lope, vv. 40–41: “Y cuando he de escribir una comedia, / encierro los preceptos con seis

llaves.”

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59 Conspicuously distinguishing between “vulgar” and “popular” art, Montesinos qualifies Lope’s drama as “Arte popular, pues, ma non troppo” (12; popular art all right, but not too much). Later, Montesinos refers to Lope’s words in a letter to Antonio de Mendoza as evidence of Lope’s conscious cultivation of the comedia as a popular genre: “‘Necesidad y yo, partiendo a medias / el estado de versos mercantiles, / pusimos en estilo las comedias. / Yo las saqué de sus principios viles, / engendrando en España más poetas / que hay en los aires átomos sutiles” (15; Necessity and I … gave the comedias style. / I dragged them from their vile origin, / generating more poets in Spain / than there are subtle atoms in the air). 60

Montesinos, 10–12.

61 Lope, vv. 205–8: “Porque considerando que la cólera / de un español sentado no se templa / si no le representan en dos horas / hasta el jüicio final desde el Génesis” (Considering that the cholera / of a seated Spaniard is not tempered / unless he witnesses, in two hours, / the whole story, from the Genesis to the Final Judgment). In the metadramatic play Lo fingido verdadero (around 1608, coinciding with the Arte nuevo), Lope lets the character Nero voice a similar conviction. 62 The metaphorical description of poetry as flowers was a sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury commonplace; see the collection of poems entitled Ramillete de flores, published in 1593 by Pedro Flores, the Flores de poetas ilustres de España, published in 1605 by Pedro Espinosa, or the Ramillete de varias flores poéticas, recogidas y cultivadas en los primeros abriles de sus años, published in 1676 by Jacinto de Evia. However, as these examples demonstrate, this description usually entailed a notion of “cultivation.” 63 “Comoedia est imitatio vitae, speculum consuetudinis, imago veritatis”; attributed to Cicero by Donatus in De comoedia 1:22. 64 Lope, vv. 49–53: “Ya tiene la comedia verdadera / su fin propuesta, como todo género / de poema o poesis, y éste ha sido / imitar las acciones de los hombres / y pintar de aquel siglo las costumbres.” See also Juan de la Cueva’s definition in El viaje de Sannio (1585): “De la vida humana /es la comedia espejo, luz y guía, / de la verdad pintura soberana; / en ella se describe la osadía / de mozo, la cautela de la anciana / alcagüeta, las burlas de juglares / y sucesos de hombres populares” (Of human life / is comedy the mirror, light, and guide, / a sublime picture of truth; / it describes the impudence of young men, the old woman’s caution, / jesters’ jokes / and popular men’s lives); quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 74. 65 The Greek definition was recorded by both Donatus (Commentum Terenti) and Diomedes (Grammaticae Libri, bk. 3). 66 Lope, vv. 40–42: “y cuando he de escribir una comedia / … / saco de Terencio y Plauto de mi estudio.” 67 Menéndez Pidal, 344, accordingly describes Lope’s notion of a “natural art” as an art surged from the vital fountain of life itself and impregnated by romance aesthetics. 68 In the dialogue on the theater (Quixote, chap. 48), Cervantes lets his character voice the following critique of the religious drama: “Pues, ¿qué si venimos a las comedias divinas? ¡Qué de milagros falsos fingen en ellas, qué de cosas apócrifas y mal entendidas, atribuyendo a un santo los milagros de otro!” (And what shall I say of the comedias divinas? What fake miracles do they invent, what false and misapprehended things, attributing the miracles of one saint to another!); quoted at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 69 Lope was forced into eight years of exile from Castilla (1588–96) on this account. He certainly led a genuinely “romantic” life.

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70 On the background of La Barreda’s Nueva biografía de Lope de Vega, Menéndez Pidal, 338, characterizes Lope as “un hombre en todo contradictorio: ferveroso creyente en las eternas leyes de la moral y atrevido pecador contra ellas” (a totally contradictory character: a fervent believer in the eternal laws of morality and a daring sinner against them). 71 Lope, vv. 119–20: “Con ática elegancia los de Atenas / reprehendían vicios y costumbres / con las comedias.” 72 Escribano and Mayo, 391: “En efecto, en la vertiente artística caben manipulaciones y fingimientos, pero en la vertiente moral se presenta el problema de la mentira y del error” (In the artistic sphere there is room for manipulations and fictions, but in the moral sphere the problem of the lie and the error arises). 73

Darst, 92–93.

74

“A la doncella la incitan a que piese lo que no debe y desee lo que o entiende. Danla modo de divertir la severidad del padre y el cuidado de la madre. Enséñanla a recibir billetes, a responder a cartas, lo que ha de hacer en la ocasión, cómo ha de lograr la suerte: a fingir en lo público, a perder los temblores en lo secreto, a hacer llaves falsas, a buscar puertas ocultas y ventanas excusadas, a no temer la oscuridad de la noche, ni los peligros de la casa. A los mozos, libertades, atrevimientos y insolencias; la razón bien dicha, la palabra blanda, el supiro mentiroso” (quoted in Cotarelo y Mori, 203). Quoting from Fr. Jerónimo and the anonymous Diálogos de las comedias (1620), Darst, 89, asks: “¿Y quién tiene la culpa de todo esto? ‘Vuestro Lope, o lobo carnicero de las almas, tan celebrado de los críticos’” (And who is to blame for all this? “Your Lope, the carnivorous wolf [lobo] feeding on souls, so celebrated by the critics”). 75 For example, the prologue to La Arcadia, the prologue to the thirteenth part of the Comedias, “Égloga a Claudio” from La vega del Parnaso, vv. 427–38, et al. Defining Lope’s concept of “art” as knowledge and technique, rather than as “rules,” Pérez and Escribano, 35, write, “Pero cierta naturaleza o predisposición no es todo lo necesario para escribir bien; es sólo el principio. La Naturaleza únicamente predispone ciertos rasgos, ciertas inclinaciones. El estudio y los libros no se deben omitir, porque ilustran” (But a certain natural talent or predisposition is not enough to write well; it is only the beginning. Nature only gives certain traits or inclinations. Study and books cannot be disposed of, because they enlighten). 76 See the important words from Arte nuevo, vv. 133–40: “por que veáis que me pedís que escriba / arte de hacer comedias en España, / donde cuanto se escribe es contra el arte; / y que decir cómo serán agora / contra el antiguo, y qué en razón se funda, / es pedir parecer a mi esperiencia, / no al arte, porque el arte verdad dice, / que el ignorante vulgo contradice.” (But you should know that you are asking me to write / the art of writing comedias in Spain, / when all that is written here is against the principles of art; / and that to say in how far those that are written now are / against the ancient style, and what the reason may be, / is to ask advice of my experience, / not of art itself, because art represents a truth, / which the ignorant mob misapprehends.) 77 See, however, Cervantes’ claim in his prologue to the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, “que se vieron en los teatros de Madrid representar Los tratos de Argel, que yo compuse; La destruición de Numancia y La batalla naval, donde me atreví a reducir las comedias a tres jornadas, de cinco que tenían” (the theaters in Madrid played Los tratos de Argel, which I wrote; La destruición de Numancia and La batalla naval, where I daringly reduced the comedias to three acts instead of five as was traditional); quoted at Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. 78

Montesinos, 13.

79 Escribano and Mayo have a detailed analysis of Lope’s concept of the vulgo (app. 1). See also Orozco Díaz, Arte (¿Qué es el “Arte nuevo” de Lope de Vega? (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1978).

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80 Menéndez Pidal, 360: “Así cuando en 1624 extiende Lope sus ideas acerca del teatro a otro género nuevo, a la novela, le asigna por fin el dar ‘contento y gusto al pueblo,’ no al vulgo” (Thus, when Lope in 1624 extends his ideas concerning the theater to another genre, the novel, he sees its end as that of giving “satisfaction and pleasure to the pueblo,” not the vulgo). Escribano and Mayo, app. 1, thus recall the Christian notion of the “pueblo de Dios” as an important element in Lope’s notion of the vulgo. 81 Escribano and Mayo, 373: “De todas maneras, se está ya plasmando la esencia de lo que será la comedia nueva de Lope de Vega. Empezar por abajo, apara agradar al vulgo y, así, poco a poco, transformarlo en un auditorio instruido, dramáticamente especializado, producto de una constante modelación del poeta que conseguirá extraer de él un arte de nuevo cuño que será la tragicomedia” (At any rate, the essence of what would eventually be Lope de Vega’s new comedia is already in preparation. To begin from below, to please the mob and, thus, little by little, transform it into an educated auditorium, specialized in the drama, the product of the poet’s constant modelling, through which he will eventually succeed in” extracting” from it the totally new art that will be tragicomedy). 82 “Por mandado de vuestra alteza he visto estas doce comedias de fray Lope Félix de Vega Carpio del hábito de San Juan. Son todas de muy honesta enseñaza, y otros tantos ejemplos elegantes y entretenidos para la advertencia moral” (On your highness’s order I have seen these twelve comedias by brother Lope Félix de Vega Carpio from the habit of San Juan. They are all very honest, and represent a series of elegant and entertaining examples for our moral edification); quoted in Pérez and Escribano, 71. See also Quevedo’s introduction to La Dorotea (ibid., 70). 83

Darst, chap. 3; Pérez and Escribano, app. 4.

84

“Est igitur Comoedia, quo nomine nunc etiam Tragoediam intelligere possumus: nam Tragoedia sunt Comoediae Tragicae.… Est inquam viva quaedam historia (realis, moralisve) quae egregia illustrium Virorum representat facinora; ut, dum videmus oculis, et aure audimus, quae alii gloriose fecerint, eorum exemplo ad virtutum prosequutionem, et exercitium accendamur, illosque in actibus gloriosis imitemur. Unde Lupus s. XII. Por eso Tulio las llamaba, espejo de las costumbres, y una viva imagen de la verdad.

“Historia est duplex: Realis, necnon Moralis, seu Virtualis: vel, ut Hispanus loquitur, sucedida, o pensada. Est Realis, quae revera accidit, ut Historia Susannae, quae est plena Politicis, et Asceticis monitis, ut innocentes minas improborum despiciant, et in Dei misericordia supersperent. Est Moralis, quae a Theologicis vocatur Parabola, a Criticis vero Novella; quae nunquam accidit, verum enim vero, si accidisset, instrueret homines, et eorum corruptos mores reformaret”; quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 292. My translation from the Latin. 85

Lope, v. 369.

86

Caramuel, 298.

87

Newels, 43; Escribano and Mayo, 388.

88

Vitse, 228; Newels, 127: “Aunque esta necesidad de un Terencio nuevo que se hace sentir en España no sea, como en los países del norte de Europa, consecuencia de la Reforma, el resultado es el mismo: se exige un drama de forma cristiana” (Although this necessity of a new Terence felt in Spain is not, as in the Northern European countries, a consequence of the Lutheran Reform, the result is the same: a Christian drama is wanted). See also Darst, 86. 89 The relevant passage from De arte dicendi is quoted in Newels, app. 1. Vives’s De causis corruptarum artium included a critique of the chivalric romances (bk. 2) influencing the Quixote.

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90 Cervantes, De arte dicendi, 2:4: “Entonces la Fábula empezó a envolverse con velos y poco a poco pasó a tratar cosas de burla y gustadas por el vulgo: amores, artimañas de meretrices, perjuicio de rufianes, ferocidades y gloria de soldados … y casi diríamos incitación al pecado, especialmente porque los autores de comedias imponían siempre un desenlace feliz a los amores y a la impudicia.… En lo cual fue más prudente quien escribió la tragicomedia española la Celestina; pues a la progresión de los amores y los gozos del placer unió un final amarguísimo, muerte y desastre de los amantes, de la alcahueta y de los rufianes” (quoted in Newels, 127). 91 “La Junta, para hacer dictamen en esta materia, reconoce cuán justos son los motivos políticos de divertir con algunas fiestas o entretenimientos al pueblo, aliviándole por este medio prudentemente el peso de los ahogos y la melancolía de sus discursos, y que a este fin en todas las repúblicas bien ordenadas se introdujeron fiestas, juegos y regocijos públicos, que siendo con templanza y decencia no los ha condenado nunca ni la censura más estrecha y rigurosa. “Reconoce también que el uso de las comedias, considerado especulativamente, contenido sólo en los términos de una representación honesta y abstraído de las circunstancias con que se practican en España, le tiene por lícito o indiferente el sentir común de los autores, así teólogos como juristas. Pero que excediendo o en las palabras o en elmodo, por el tiempo, por el lugar o por las personas, se hace ilícito y toca a la obligación del buen gobierno su prohibición” (quoted in Cotarelo y Mori, 338). 92 Morby, 190: “For one thing, by the obvious device of reading play for comedia, many contradictions vanish.” Newels, 57, explains this development by the fact that tragicomedy had provoked such a fervent debate in Italy. 93

For example, Escribano and Mayo.

94

Newels, 62.

95 Newels, 77–78: “Se enfrentan dos concepciones distintas de la comedia. La más antigua se fundamenta en los comentarios a Terencio: la comedia se caracteriza principalmente por el desenlace risueño de la obra. Esta concepción permitía manejar una gama amplia de personajes procendentes de distintas clases sociales. Ante ella se eleva una nueva concepción cuya capacidad fundamental para renovar la comedia queda muy menoscabada por una interpretación de la risa, lo cómico y los ridículo estrechamente vinculada a un cierto clima moral e intelectual de la época” (Two different concepts of the comedia collide. The most ancient is founded on the commentaries on Terence: the comedia is primarily characterized by its ending in laughter. This conception allowed for a broad range of characters from different social classes. Opposite this view, a new concept arises, whose ability to renew the comedia is … closely related to a certain moral and intellectual climate of the period). 96 Alonso López Pinciano, Philosophia antigua poética (1596), 2:311: “Comedia es imitación activa hecha para limpiar el ánimo de las passiones por medio de deleyte y risa” 97 Ibid., 2:54: “y assi toda buena fabula deue perturbar y alborotar al ánimo por dos maneras: por espanto y conmiseración, como las épicas y trágicas; por alegréa y risa como las cómicas y ditirámbicas. Y deue también quietar al ánimo, porque, después destas perturbaciones, el oyente ha de quedar enseñado en la doctrina de las cosas que quitan la una y la otra perturbación.” 98

Trans. S. H. Butcher; quoted at the Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu.

99

Vitse, 185; Escribano and Mayo, 382. The other two are Lope’s Arte nuevo and the Idea de la comedia de Castilla (1635) by Pellicer de Tovar, who gives the precepts of the comedia. 100 “Aristóteles, pues, no pudo darnos el arte que no tenía. No le tenía, porque en su tiempo confiesa él mismo que no habían llegado a colmo esos poemas. Pues si no habían llegado a colmo, ¿quién le hizo el arte dellos a Aristóteles? ¿De qué ejemplos observó cuál era decente, cuál impropio? Si de los imperfectos y mal limados, imperfecto y mal limado es su arte. De dos

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maneras puede defenderse Aristóteles: o diciendo que tuvo por ejemplo a Homero, que le dejó espléndido de tragedias en la Iliada y en la Odisea de comedias, o que la filosofía le enseñó razones con que darles forma. En lo uno y en lo otro anda manco (insuficiente, incompleto), luego mal le defiende. No basta por ejemplo Homero para sacar dél preceptos, porque Platón le condena con justa causa poco prudente en sus poemas, poco atento en los decoros, poco mirado en las personas. Elegantemente dice Escalígero, no hemos de reducir el arte a Homero, sino Homero, al arte. ¿Qué impropiedad más escandalosa, ni que más merezca el destierro de la República de Platón, que fingir personas divinas con afectos humanos y lascivos? ¿Y a un héroe como Aquiles hacerle afeminado en el estrado de Deidama con las galas mujeriles? ¿Y cruel y soberbio con el enemigo ya vencido y muerto? Uno y otro cuando dice que no quiso dar el cuerpo de Héctor sino cambiado a oro” (quoted in Escribano and Mayo, 217). 101 Ibid., 223–24: “Probemos, pues, a imitar estos antiguos medrosamente. Hagamos lo que Italia, que, teniendo ingenios, pierde por obediente de la edad pasada la gloria que le prometía la venidera. No se atreven a salir de aquellos claustros; son inviolables aquellos muros. No es acertado en su opinión lo que no es imitado, y no echan de ver que si los mesmos a quien tan atados imitan hubieran guardado las huellas de los primeros, quedaran cortos como ellos. Crece el arte con el tiempo; él le alienta, él le cria. Él sobre sus hombres pone en la cumbre de la perfección. Deposita sus tesoros en el atrevimiento. Atrevámonos, dice Quintiliano, que éste los dispensa; a éste debemos la invención de los estudios liberales; éste hace grado de lo inventado de otros, para adelantarse a todos. Grande ingenio prometen de sus autores el Pastor Fido y el Aminta. Grande y digno de admiración; pero temeroso y acobardado. No tuvieron ánimo para sacudir el yugo de la antigüedad. No se atrevieron a caminar sin guía, a dar paso sin luces. No es religión, superstición es del arte; la escrupulosa imitación no es gallardía, cobardía es.” 102 Ibid., 224–25: “Finalmente, [el atrevimiento dichoso de los ingenios de España] ha aventajado a las comedias antiguas con las suyas [de los antiguos]. De manera que ya no parecen aquéllas sino diseños o sombras déstas. Tampoco el provecho de las comedias antiguas nos encomienda su imitación porque, como condena Platón en Homero, las fábulas de que hacían fuste para sus comedias eran escandalosas y de siniestro ejemplo.… Éstas pecan de blasfemas, porque delineando personas divinas las acomoda acciones humanas y aun brutas. Ni se escapan del delito de la majestad ofendida las que, pintando héroes y generosos príncipes, los derriban a hechos más que plebeyos.” 103 Ibid., 225–26: “Dicen que imitan a los antiguos; están tan lejos de imitarlos que antes van contra su estilo, contra su intento. El de los antiguos siempre fue enseñar. Éste es principal oficio de la poesía, como hemos dicho. Bien es verdad que inventaron modos de mucho gusto, grandes sainetes, agudas novedades; mas esto fue para vestir el fin principal que es la doctrina.” 104 Ibid., 254: “tienen ya en aquel grado la comedia adonde de ninguna manera llegó la de los antiguos”; “ridiculamente supersticiosos.”