Calderón and the Politics of Honour
1993; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3828/bhs.70.1.135
ISSN1478-3398
Autores Tópico(s)Early Modern Spanish Literature
ResumoThe relationship of the theatre's honour-vengeance code to the prescriptions of Christian morality has over the years attracted considerable attention, and the comparison of one with the other has led many to the logical conclusion that no Christian dramatist worthy of the name could possibly have been recommending — as has been claimed by those innocent enough to believe that art seeks to promote what it depicts — the slaughter of the innocent or even the not-yet-guilty. However, to bring into confrontation two such opposed value systems is by itself, perhaps, too starkly polarized an exercise to provide the basis for an adequate understanding of the contortions of honour as they are depicted in Calderon's wife-murder plays, and therefore of the authorial attitudes possibly inscribed in them. That they should have been condemned by some contemporary churchmen as harmful and praised by others as highly moral in itself reveals the difficulty of measuring their ‘enormes crueldades’1 by the yardstick of the ...
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