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The Shaping of Collective Memory in Lope's Isidro (1599)

2009; Routledge; Volume: 86; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14753820902937938

1478-3428

Marsha S. Collins,

Spanish Literature and Culture Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1All references to Isidro are to Lope de Vega, Isidro, in Poesía, I, Obras completas, ed. Antonio Carreño, 41 vols (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro, 1993), XXXVI. Quotations are cited by page-number or by canto and verse-numbers. 2Francisco Márquez Villanueva, Lope: vida y valores (Río Piedras: Univ. de Puerto Rico, 1988), 29. 3See Elizabeth Wright, ‘Virtuous Labor, Courtly Laborer: Canonization and a Literary Career in Lope de Vega's Isidro’, MLN, 114 (1999), 223–40 and Pilgrimage to Patronage: Lope de Vega and the Court of Philip III, 1598–1621 (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2001), 15, 138–39; Márquez Villanueva, Lope: vida y valores, 23–141; and Noël Salomon, Lo villano en el teatro del Siglo de Oro, trans. Beatriz Chenot (Madrid: Castalia, 1985), 177–96 for studies of Isidro closer to the present day. 4Wright, Pilgrimage to Patronage, 3–23. 5For more on the Elena Osorio episode in Lope's life consult Alan Trueblood, Experience and Artistic Expression in Lope de Vega: The Making of ‘La Dorotea’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1974), 21–47; Hugo A. Rennert and Américo Castro, Vida de Lope de Vega (1562–1635), 2nd ed. (Salamanca: Anaya, 1968), 31–58; and Atanasio Tomillo and Cristóbal Pérez Pastor, Proceso de Lope de Vega por libelos contra unos cómicos (Madrid: Fortanet, 1901). On Lope's refashioning of life into art see also Mary Gaylord, ‘Proper Language and Language As Property: The Personal Poetics of Lope's Rimas’, MLN, 101 (1986), 225–46; Arthur Terry, Seventeenth-century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), 94–121; and Marsha S. Collins, ‘Lope's Arcadia: A Self-Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man’, Renaissance Quarterly, 57 (2004), 882–907. For more on the complex topic of self-fashioning and self-representation in Lope's poetry, consult the important study by Antonio Sánchez Jiménez, Lope pintado por sí mismo: mito e imagen del autor en la poesía de Lope de Vega Carpio (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2006), Chap. 1. 6Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6–24. 7James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 74. 8The source for this précis of Madrid as a Hapsburg building project is Jesús Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2004), 17–60. See also Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1997), 31, 179–99, on Philip II's early interest in building, and the ambitious construction projects (Madrid, El Escorial, etc.) he undertook as a monarch. 9María José del Río Barredo, ‘Literatura y ritual en la creación de una identidad urbana: Isidro, patrón de Madrid’, Edad de Oro, 17 (1998), 149–68. For more on Isidro's canonization, and Madrid's emergence as a powerful city at once urban and pastoral, consult also Márquez Villanueva, Lope: vida y valores, 23–141 and Salomon, Lo villano, 184–96. On the two plays about Isidro's life that Lope was commissioned to write for the celebration by the Council of Castile see Elaine M. Canning, Lope de Vega's ‘Comedias de tema religioso’: Re-Creations and Re-Presentations (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2004), Chapter Two. 10Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1989), 37. William A. Christian Jr, Local Religion in Sixteenth-century Spain (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1981), 179, notes that religion in New Castile was associated with the landscape. He observes: ‘The local landscape, urban and rural, had a sacred overlay; special places for contacting the divine were known to everyone’ (176). 11Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 113 associate this socialized geography with ‘peasant memory’ and the creation of community identity. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 291–322 (p. 295) writes of landscape as a recurrent metaphor for the inscape of national identity. 12For more on Lope's use of earlier material on the saint in Isidro, see Wright, ‘Virtuous Labor’, 226–32. Salomon, Lo villano, 184–85 discusses the possible identity of Juan Diácono. Throughout Isidro, Lope provides marginal notations that reference sources of inspiration for his verses, and at the end lists the authors and books cited in the margins. The list is a heterogeneous mix of authorities ranging from books of the Bible (Proverbs, Numbers, Kings, etc.) to classical, canonical authors (Aristotle, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Apuleius, etc.), from chronicles (Corónica del Cid, Historia General de España, etc.) to noted humanists (Arias Montano, Justus Lipsius, Luis Vives, etc.), to more contemporary, canonical poets (Petrarch, Tasso, Ariosto, etc.). This list of authoritative sources was likely to be intended to elevate esteem for the poet and the poem, and lend additional forward momentum to Isidro's canonization process. 13Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 97. On Lope's persona as poeta enamorado consult Sánchez Jiménez, Lope pintado, 20–79. Readers encounter a particularly striking eruption of this self reflective, poetic ‘I’ that Sánchez Jiménez identifies as the poeta enamorado, clearly associated with the Petrarchan model at the beginning of Canto VII: amor ¿quién te trujo aquí, cuando más lejos, tirano, estaba mi pluma y mano, de mezclar aquí por ti lo divino a lo profano? (VII: 1–5) The poetic voice continues in this vein until verses 81–82 when he remarks on his own digressiveness, and then moves to get back on track: ‘Mas ¿dónde voy divertido? / Vuélveme, amor, a la historia,’. 14Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 162–63 write of the containing or stabilizing power of narrative conventions in remembering the past. 15Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints, trans. Donald Attwater (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), 72–73. 16Connerton, How Societies Remember, 2. 17Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books I–VIII, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library, Ovid III, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1977), 114–15. 18Ovid, Metamorphoses, 114–15. 19Ovid, Metamorphoses, 116–17. 20Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 6, 28–29. 23Note the first-person intervention of ‘yo sospecho …’ to take charge of the interpretation of the scene shown to the reader. This persona acts as an intermediary between the vignette and the audience. This is one example of what Margaret Persin describes as the duality of authority in the deployment of ecphrasis: ‘I would assert that through the ekphrastic text the poet demonstrates both surrender and sovereignty in that, on the one hand, s/he submits to the vision of another in her/his own text, and on the other, dominates that vision by controlling how it is represented through the medium of language’ (Getting the Picture: The Ekphrastic Principle in Twentieth-century Spanish Poetry [Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 1997], 22). 21Delehaye, Legends of the Saints, 58–59 writes of the importance of pictorial tradition in hagiography, while Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 50–56 stress the use of visual images in medieval sermons, for example, to fix sacred narratives in the audience's memory. Consult the following for general information on ut pictura poesis, and poetry and painting as sister arts during this epoch: Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), 3–9, 13–16; Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 3–10, 18–29, 45; and John Shearman, Mannerism (London: Penguin, 1967), 30–39. For more on ecphrasis in Early Modern Spain, see Emilie L. Bergmann, Art Inscribed: Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1979); Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age, ed. Frederick A. De Armas (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2004); and Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes, ed. Frederick A. De Armas (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 2005). De Armas notes that ‘pictorial writing in Spain was not just tied to the educational value of the visual image, to the mnemonic quality of visual writing, to the sibling rivalry between the arts, to the emulation of classical ekphrasis and Renaissance art, and to the impetus to visualize Platonic Ideas and to represent complex codes and concepts through visualization’ (Frederick A. De Armas, ‘Introduction’, in Writing for the Eyes in the Spanish Golden Age, 7–20 [pp. 12–13]), but also to the raising of the visual arts from their lower status as mechanical arts to the same level as the art of poetry. While here I stress the role of ecphrasis in hagiography, Lope's poetry, and in poetry in general at the time, critical discussion of ecphrasis almost invariably mentions Homer's description of the shield of Achilles, which situates the classical origins of pictorial writing in epic poetry. On the origins and changing definitions of ecphrasis, see Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 1992), xii–xvii, 1–28. Krieger's seminal essay (1967), ‘The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön’, on the ability of ecphrasis to capture or freeze the movement of time, is included in the same book as an appendix, 263–88. For recent interpretations of the symbolic function of the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, consult Susann Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Standford U. P., 1992), 71–80, and Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the ‘Aeneid’ (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1998), Chap. 5. 22Delehaye, Lives of the Saints, 73–75. Sánchez Jiménez, Lope pintado, 96–107 writes of Lope's Franciscan rhetoric and persona in Isidro. 24See Christian Jr., Local Religion, 58, 166–68 on the Tridentine Church's struggle with the confraternities’ abuse of and inefficient approaches to charity. 25Consult Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 36, 73, 84–85, 96 on saints’ work and active, saintly virtues. 26Christian Jr., Local Religion, 126–41 writes of the powerful cult of relics in Spain and elsewhere in Catholic Europe. 27See Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism, 14–19 on saintly corporeality. The fact that Isidro and María are subjects of portraits in and of itself confers elevated status to them, for, as Javier Portús notes, ‘for a long time the genre was restricted to certain sectors of society who were seen as having achieved a particular degree of sophistication’ (The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso [London: Scala, 2004], 43). Lope has placed his peasant saint and his wife in exalted company, for Portús further observes that during the seventeenth century the portrait appealed to a limited part of society, continuing to a degree the same restriction of subjects as during the medieval epoch—to the monarchy, aristocracy, and important members of the clergy. 28Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1999), Chap. 1. Barkan writes of du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome: ‘As the poem engages in a vast cultural act of enargeia, it will make absent things present and will overcome its own belatedness in relation to the unobtainable material remains of antiquity; it will present these things both as ruined and as (to use the Renaissance term) repristinated—that is, like new’ (xxvii). 29Fentress and Wickham observe that writing ‘freezes memory in textual forms’ (Social Memory, 9). They state that transferring memories from the context of one genre to another changes the perspective of the remembering group such that generic rearticulation of memory gives it another meaning appropriate to the new context in which it is articulated (ibid., 76–78, 85). 30Salomon, Lo villano, 156–76 similarly notes in regard to the Spanish enthusiasm for the classical pastoral tradition that analogous historical conditions gave rise to both: ‘Virgilio (el Virgilio de las Bucólicas y de las Geórgicas) y Horacio ofrecían primero a los hombres del Renacimiento que tropezaban con la nueva vida urbana, una respuesta determinada a su problema personal; […]’ (165). Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and the Mythic Image of the Emperor (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1993), 11–22, discusses the Aeneid, the Trojan and Argonautic legends as a symbolic template for the image of the emperor, especially as enacted by the Hapsburg rulers Charles V and Philip II. 31Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 61–65. 32Tanner, Last Descendant, 23. C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1948 [1st ed. 1945]), 34–35, 57–58, 66. 33Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 34 notes that one sees Rome through a legendary past in the Aeneid, and that Virgil often employs prophecies or ecphrasis to link that past with recorded history and the author's own time. Prophecies and ecphrasis figure prominently in Isidro as well. 34Bowra, From Virgil to Milton, 35. 35Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, 319. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1993), 21–49 writes of an imperial ideology in the Aeneid that constitutes Virgil's legacy to subsequent literary epics, focusing on the interplay between literary epic and dominant political ideologies. While Lope epics do not figure among the works analysed, Quint characterizes Spaniard Alonso de Ercilla's La Araucana as a poem that is an epic both of the victors and the defeated (157–85). Elizabeth B. Davis, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2000), 10–11, 207–08 sees the role of Spain's epic as the idealization of a social group compatible with the monarchy's imperial project, writing of a heroic identity derived negatively, casting the objects of conquest as evil barbarians. Davis focuses on Lope's Jerusalén conquistada (1609) in Chapter 5. Márquez Villanueva, Lope: vida y valores, 122 describes Isidro as a divisive, orthodox, exclusionary myth, stating: ‘Canoniza como en sí edificante una vida de mínimas aspiraciones, donde todo está bien con tal de que no intente salir de límites elementales ni perturbe la sencillez de unos esquemas sempiternos’ (59–60). Salomon, Lo villano, 177–96 advances a different view, noting that Isidro's composition and publication coincide with a period in which treatises advocating for agrarian reform and increased appreciation for the values of rural life were circulating. Frank Pierce, La poesía épica del Siglo de Oro, trans. J. C. Cayol de Bethencourt, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1968), 298–305 distinguishes Lope's more successful epics—artistically speaking—from his more derivative, less successful ones. Pierce defends Isidro: ‘El Isidro (su obra narrativa más popular, a juzgar por el número de ediciones) se lee todavía con gusto, buena prueba de que Lope triunfaba plenamente en el género cuando se decidía a adoptar la técnica e incluso los asuntos del octosílabo tradicional’ (299). He adds: ‘Lope logra sus mejores efectos épicos cuando rehuye amarrarse a los límites de las formas establecidas. Así ocurre en el Isidro y en la Gatomaquia, que evitan casi por completo el exceso verbal y el desequilibrio de construcción’ (305). See Wright, ‘Virtuous Labor’, 226–27 on the dovetailing of Lope's and Madrid's ambitions. 36Tanner, Last Descendant, 109. On the Spanish monarchy's devotion to the cult of the Virgin, see Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1994). Christian Jr, Local Religion, 93–125 discusses the prevalence of Marian shrines and devotion in New Castile. 37Christian Jr., Local Religion, 147. 38Christian Jr., Local Religion, 153. 39Christian Jr., Local Religion, 157. 40Márquez Villanueva, Lope: vida y valores, 52 notes the source of the plough-sceptre metaphor as ancient Roman tradition. Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), writes of ‘the long-standing Western relation between poetry and plowing’ (85). Aurora Egido, ‘Escritura y poesía. Lope al pie de la letra’, Edad de Oro, 14 (1995), 121–49 (p. 125, n. 12) mentions the quill-plough analogy as one variation of the many ‘quill metaphors’ in Lope's writing. In Isidro, Lope thus establishes a plough-sceptre-quill metaphorical system. 41Noël Salomon, La Campagne de Nouvelle Castille à la fin du XVI e siècle d'après les ‘Relaciones topográficas’ (Paris: SEVPEN, 1964), 130–32, 279–88 describes the primarily rural, agrarian economy of New Castile. 42On the Hapsburgs and the legend of a new world emperor, see Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), Chap. 1, and Tanner, Last Descendant, Chaps 6, 7 and 9. On the Hapsburg cult of the Eucharist, see Tanner's Chapter 11. Barbara E. Kurtz, The Play of Allegory in the ‘Autos Sacramentales’ of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (Washington, DC: The Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1991), 131–63 discusses a similar pattern in Calderón's historical autos in which the playwright creates analogies linking together history in all its forms, sacred and contemporary, universal and particular, etc. 43Kurtz, Play of Allegory, 24 notes the identification of the pagan god Pan with the Good Shepherd and Eucharistic bread in Calderón's El verdadero dios Pan. Kurtz, 75–77 also describes the etymological analysis that supports this complex analogizing process. For more on etymology as interpretive instrument for typology and allegory, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1973), 495–500. 44Escobar, Plaza Mayor, 142. Escobar describes the origins and symbolism of the panadería in Chap. 4. Kamen, Philip, 276, 294, 300, 309 describes how the seemingly unending calamities (drought, plague, failed wheat harvests, diminishing food supplies) contributed to the tragic nature of the end of Philip II's reign, and brought legions of hungry people to Madrid in search of basic sustenance. 45On the caridades, and the corruption over time of their original celebration of Christian charity, consult Christian Jr., Local Religion, 57–59, 120–21. 46Rennert and Castro, Vida, 264–66. On the commissioned plays, see Canning, Lope de Vega's ‘Comedias’, Chap. 2.