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

Abstract

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

Key words:

• Lope de Vega
• Cervantes
• dramatic characterization
• El castigo sin venganza
• La entretenida
• imagery
• metatheatre
• emblem literature

Notes

1 Quotations are taken from the following editions: Lope de Vega, El castigo sin venganza, ed., with an intro., critical analysis, notes & vocabulary by Jonathan Thacker (Manchester: Manchester U. P., 2016) and Miguel de Cervantes, La entretenida, in Teatro completo, ed., intro. & notas de Florencio Sevilla Arroyo & Antonio Rey Hazas (Barcelona: Planeta, 1981), 543–630.

2 For more details on the relationship of Lope’s play to its sources and the sources themselves, see the introduction to Thacker’s edition of the play.

3 Victor Dixon & Isabel Torres, ‘La madrastra enamorada: ¿una tragedia de Séneca refundida por Lope de Vega?’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 19:1 (1994), 39–60 (p. 40).

4 For the source story, see the appendix to Lope de Vega, El castigo sin venganza, ed., intro. & notas de Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez (Barcelona: Octaedro, 2000). The quotation is from p. 245 of this edition.

5 Margaret A. Van Antwerp, ‘Fearful Symmetry: The Poetic World of El castigo sin venganza’, BHS, LVIII:3 (1981), 205–16 (p. 208).

6 Margit Frenk, ‘Claves metafóricas en El castigo sin venganza’, Filología, 20:2 (1985), 147–55 (p. 153); Donald McGrady, ‘Sentido y función de los cuentecillos en El castigo sin venganza de Lope’, Bulletin Hispanique, 85:1–2 (1983), 45–64 (p. 56). Edward Wilson also saw that the imagery of the play emphasizes and underscores the ‘deceits and confusions with which all in Ferrara are surrounded’, but he left the observation undeveloped. See Edward M. Wilson, ‘Quando Lope quiere, quiere’, in his Spanish and English Literature of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries: Studies in Discretion, Illusion and Mutability, ed. D. W. Cruickshank (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1980), 155–83 (p. 160).

7 The scene seems to us to belong to the pastoral tradition rather than to the emblematic depiction of the melancholy man, though there is some common ground between the two. On the latter, see Jorge Alcázar, ‘La figura emblemática de la melancolía en El sueño de Sor Juana’, Poligrafías, 1 (1996), 123–50.

8 Juan Francisco de Villava, Empresas espirituales y morales (Baeza: Fernando Díaz de Montoya, 1613).

9 On this central image see especially Mitchell D. Triwedi,‘The Source and Meaning of the Pelican Fable in El castigo sin venganza’, Modern Language Notes, 92 (1977), 326–29, and Currie K Thompson, ‘Unstable Irony in Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza’, Studies in Philology, 78 (1981), 224–40.

10 According to Melveena McKendrick, Casandra allows herself ‘to realize fantasies by formulating and defining them’ (Melveena McKendrick, ‘Language and Silence in El castigo sin venganza’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 35:1 [1983], 79–95 [p. 91]). On the connection with Renaissance painting, see Frederick A. de Armas, ‘From Mantua to Madrid: The License of Desire in Giulio Romano, Correggio and Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 59:1 (2007), 233–65 (pp. 246–48).

11 See, for instance, Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, ‘On La entretenida of Cervantes’, Modern Language Notes, 74 (1959), 418–21; Stanislav Zimic, ‘Cervantes frente a Lope y a la comedia nueva: observaciones sobre La entretenida’, Anales Cervantinos, 15 (1976), 19–119; Francisco José López Alfonso, ‘La entretenida, parodia y teatralidad’, Anales Cervantinos, 24 (1986), 193–205.

12 George Mariscal's reading of the play particularly focuses on issues of class and gender. See George Mariscal, ‘Woman and Other Metaphors in Cervantes's Comedia famosa de la entretenida’, Theatre Journal, 46 (1994), 213–30.

13 Critical analysis of La entretenida has also tended to focus on the comedia's metatheatrical facets. Such readings illuminate Cervantes’ work as a self-reflexive construct which draws explicit attention to the play's artifice. See Edward Friedman, The Unifying Concept: Approaches to the Structure of Cervantes ’ Comedias (York, SC: Spanish Literature Publications, 1981); Carmen Cubero, ‘En torno a La entretenida de Cervantes: el teatro dentro del teatro y el teatro sobre el teatro’, in El teatro dentro del teatro: Cervantes, Lope, Tirso: y Calderón: Actas del ‘Grand Séminaire’ de la Universidad de Neuchâtel, 18–19 de mayo de 1995, ed. Irene Andrés-Suárez, José Manuel López de Abiada & Pedro Ramírez Molas (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 1997), 59–72; Eric J. Kartchner, ‘Empty Words: Promises and Deception in La entretenida’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 56:2 (2004), 327–43.

14 Friedman contends that the failure of Cervantes’ characters results from the negation of true selves and the assumption of inauthentic roles (The Unifying Concept, 108–17). See also, by the same author, ‘The Comic Vision of Cervantes's La entretenida’, Theatralia, 5 (2003), 351–59.

15 See Jean-Louis Flecniakoska, ‘Quelques propos sur la Comedia famosa de La entretenida’, Anales Cervantinos, 11 (1972), 17–32.

16 Rina Walthaus, ‘Contrapunto, distancia, aislamiento: La entretenida de Cervantes como drama barroco’, in Cervantes: e studios en la víspera de su centenario, ed. José Ángel Ascunce Arrieta (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1994), 447–62 (p. 450).

17 Nicholas Spadaccini & Jenaro Talens, Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World (London/Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 41.

18 Kartchner, ‘Empty Words’, 336.

19 See Friedman, The Unifying Concept, 113.

20 Melveena McKendrick, ‘Writings for the Stage’, in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony Cascardi (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002), 131–59 (p. 136).

21 Kartchner notes that Cristina fails to accept the sexual implications of her role as fregona which would most likely undermine the expectations of characters as well as readers of the play (‘Empty Promises’, 340).

22 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), 256.

23 See Melanie Henry, The Signifying Self: Cervantine Drama as Counter-Perspective Aesthetic (London: MHRA, 2013), 30.

24 Ruth El Saffar, ‘Voces marginales y la visión del ser cervantino’, Anthropos, 98–99 (1989), 59–62 (p. 61).

25 For further discussion of the metaplay's inversion of the captor/captive relationship, see Melanie Henry, ‘Playing Lope in Cervantes's Los baños de Argel’, in Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age, ed. Terry O’Reilly & Stephen Boyd (Oxford: Legenda, 2014), 116–25.

26 Jonathan Thacker comments on Cervantes’ blurring of the boundaries in La entretenida's metaplay. See Jonathan Thacker, ‘Play Rehearsals on the Golden Age Stage’, in Artifice and Invention in the Spanish Golden Age, ed. O’Reilly & Boyd, 126–35 (p. 133).

27 For a further discussion of the way in which the servants ‘re-represent’ themselves in terms of Butler's ideas of subversive repetition, see Henry, The Signifying Self, 33.

28 Jean Howard's analysis of the early modern English stage is useful in this regard. The scholar imagines the stage in terms of contest, struggle and competing forces constantly at odds. See Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

29 According to Mariscal: ‘the critique of the mistress's holiness as an ideological front for exploitation and abuse […] while not subverting the established system of domination, with the proper information about her mistress's vices she might at least ease if not temporarily reverse the relations of power’ (‘Woman and Other Metaphors’, 222).

30 Viewed from this perspective, it is little wonder that Don Quijote's disempowered hidalgo casts off his former life and fashions himself as the knight from La Mancha.

31 For further discussion on the symbolic resonance of the ermine, see Mariscal, ‘Woman and Other Metaphors’, 214.

32 See Henry, The Signifying Self, 27–28, for comment on Marcela Osorio's disruption of the boundaries between private (female) and public (male) sphere.

33 See Melveena McKendrick, Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the ‘mujer varonil’ (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1974), 323.

34 Jean Canavaggio, ‘Cervantine Variations of the Theme of the Theater within the Theater’, in Critical Essays on Cervantes, ed. Ruth El Saffar (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 147–62 (p. 152).

35 María Ángela Celis Sánchez comments that Cervantes’ portrayal of the servant's individualism ‘es uno de los más obvios reflejos del Cervantes-hombre renacentista que descubre la autonomía del ser y la miseria de la condición humana en la conciencia de serlo’. See María Ángela Celis Sánchez, ‘Planos de comunicación en las comedias cervantinas: el juego metateatral’, in El teatro en tiempos de Felipe II: Actas de las XXI Jornadas de Teatro Clásico (Almagro, julio de 1998), ed. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez & Rafael González Cañal (Almagro: Univ. de Castilla-La Mancha, 1999), 83–98 (p. 93).

36 To some extent, the ending is, of course, a form of retaliation against the formulaic endings typical of the comedia nueva. Cervantes also draws attention to marriage as an overly convenient closing device at the end of Pedro de Urdemalas.

37 For Walthaus, the ending of Cervantes’ play ‘se denota un hondo sentido de desengaño barroco’ (‘Contrapunto, distancia, aislamiento’, 460).

38 Such a judgment fits within recent critical appraisal which perceives Cervantes’ stage as a counter-perspective to the aesthetics and ideologies practised and transmitted by the Early Modern Spanish corral. See, for instance, Henry, The Signifying Self and Antonio Rey Hazas, Poética de la libertad y otras claves cervantinas (Madrid: Ediciones Eneida, 2005).

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