Some Observations on the Sonnet in Golden-Age Plays and Quevedo's ‘Dramatic’ Sonnets

Abstract

While the characteristic potential of the sonnet is seldom realized by Golden-Age playwrights, is there a poet who has unlocked the sonnet's dramatic possibilities? It is argued that the most fertile area for consideration is to be found in the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Whereas Góngora's sonnets seldom lose sight of their potential for the architectural, Quevedo's veer more obviously towards the verbal and the colloquial. If Góngora's amatory sonnets have the plastic arts as a reference point, then Quevedo's evoke more the spoken language, providing a discursive development that could be termed dramatic. To illustrate such effects, the following traits will be examined: the use of direct speech; the recourse to colloquialism and natural speech-patterns; a tendency to hyperbaton and a readiness to disregard the constraints of end-stopped lines; the predilection for aphoristic one-liners to encapsulate a mental or emotional condition; and an argumentative structure that incorporates surprises and twists, so that more than with other practitioners of the sonnet in that period they emerge as movements through rather than moments in time.

Key words:

• sonnet
• Francisco de Quevedo
• colloquialism
• aphorisms
• argumentative structure

Notes

1 In one passage his aspiration appears to be confined to the desire merely to see Isabel, the object of his desire, akin to the Petrarchist poets of the Golden Age: ‘En toda mi vida vi / más divina, más perfecta / hermosura. ¡Ay, Rebolledo! / No sé qué hiciera por verla’ (II, 131–34) (Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El alcalde de Zalamea, ed., intro. & notes by Peter N. Dunn [Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966], 66).

2 ‘¡Fuego, fuego, que me quemo, / que mi cabaña se abrasa / [ … ] / Mas si amor abrasa peñas / con gran ira y fuerza extraña, / mal podrán de su rigor / reservarse humildes pajas. / ¡Fuego, zagales, fuego, agua, agua!’ (I, 986–98) (Tirso de Molina, El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, ed., intro. & notas de Mercedes Sánchez Sánchez [Madrid: Castalia, 1997], 94).

3 According to José F. Montesinos, it is ‘uno de los escritos peor entendidos de la literatura española’, and an ‘opúsculo algo confuso y, por consiguiente, no fácil de interpretar’ (‘La paradoja del Arte nuevo’, in Lope de Vega: el teatro, ed. Antonio Sánchez Romeralo, 2 vols (Madrid: Taurus, 1989), I, 145–67 (p. 145). According to Jonathan Thacker, however, it is ‘a practical man-of-the-theatre's guide to (and apology for) what has been shown to work in the Spanish corral at the turn of the seventeenth century’ (A Companion to Golden Age Theatre [Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2007], 27).

4 Victor Dixon, ‘The Study of Versification As an Aid to Interpreting the Comedia: Another Look at Some Well-Known Plays by Lope de Vega’, in The Golden Age ‘Comedia’: Text, Theory and Performance, ed. Charles Ganelin & Howard Mancing (West Lafayette: Purdue U. P., 1994), 384–99 (p. 386).

5 Lope de Vega, El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, ed. & estudio preliminar de Juana de José Prades (Madrid: CSIC, 1971), 297.

6 Peter N. Dunn, ‘Some Uses of Sonnets in the Plays of Lope de Vega’, BHS, XXXIV:4 (1957), 213–22 (p. 213).

7 Lope de Vega, El arte nuevo, ed. José Prades, 198.

8 Dunn, ‘Some Uses of Sonnets', 221.

9 See Dixon, ‘The Study of Versification’, 396–97.

10 ‘Tristes voces de una parte, / y a otra míseros gemidos / escucho, que no conozco, / porque llegan mal distintos. / Dos necesidades son / las que apellidan a gritos / mi valor [ … ]’ (II, 878–84) (Calderón, El alcalde de Zalamea, ed. Dunn, 91).

11 Pedro Calderón de la Barca, La vida es sueño, ed., with intro. & notes, by Albert E. Sloman (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 1961), 64.

12 Mireno refers to how a horse dressed up for a festive event acquires a taste for pomp and splendour and establishes a comparison with his own situation: ‘mas despertó mi pensamiento noble, / como al caballo, el cortesano traje: / que aumenta la soberbia el buen vestido’ (I, 671–73) (Tirso de Molina, El vergonzoso en palacio, ed. & estudio preliminar de Everett Hesse, 6^th ed. [Madrid: Cátedra, 1987], 61).

13 Tirso de Molina, El burlador de Sevilla, ed. Sánchez Sánchez, 61.

14 See, among numerous discussions of this issue, the pioneering study by Dámaso Alonso, Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, 2^nd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1960), 117–247.

15 Luis de Góngora, Sonetos completos, ed., intro. & notas de Biruté Ciplijauskaité (Madrid: Castalia, 1969), 230.

16 Góngora, Sonetos completos, ed. Ciplijauskaité, 122. The sonnet concludes: ‘ni el monte rayes, ornes, ni colores, / ni sigas de la Aurora el rojo paso, / ni el mar argentes, ni los campos dores’.

17 Góngora, Sonetos completos, ed. Ciplijauskaité, 136.

18 Francisco de Quevedo, Poesía original completa, ed., intro. & notas de José Manuel Blecua (Barcelona: Planeta,1981), 4. Further references are drawn from this edition and appear directly after the quotation.

19 For further discussion of the subject of the erotic dream in Quevedo's poetry see D. Gareth Walters, ‘The Theme of Love in the romances of Quevedo’, in Studies of the Spanish and Portuguese Ballad, ed. N. D. Shergold (London: Tamesis Books/Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1972), 95–110 (pp. 97–100).

20 R. O. Jones, however, rightly counsels against seeing the Ignatian ‘composition of place’ ‘in every sharply visualised scene in devotional poetry’ (A Literary History of Spain. The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry [London: Ernest Benn/New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971], 88).

21 Dunn, ‘Some Uses of Sonnets’, 221.

22 Dunn, ‘Some Uses of Sonnets’, 221, 213.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.