Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A Hermaphrodite? Lope de Vega and the Controversy of Tragicomedy

2007; Western Michigan University; Volume: 41; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cdr.2007.0031

1936-1637

Sofie Kluge,

Early Modern Spanish Literature

A Hermaphrodite? Lope de Vega and the Controversy of Tragicomedy Kluge Sofie In 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, [End Page 297] 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 of 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 [End Page 298...