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Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision: Phantasm, Melancholy, and Didacticism in "Celestina"

2002; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3247216

1553-0639

Charles F. Fraker, Ricardo Castells,

Hispanic-African Historical Relations

Fernando de Rojas and the Renaissance Vision: Phantasm, Melancholy, and Didacticism in Celestina. By Ricardo Castells. University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 2000. 122 pages. The first three chapters of Castells's book are in effect glosses of certain writings on Celestina by Manuel Garcia G6mez. The first chapter sets out to vindicate Garcia's claim that the very first scene of the play represents not a dialogue between the lovers, but simply Calisto's dream. The young man is shown as suffering from lovers' malady; medical theory makes much of the role of the imagination and of dreams in the development of the disease, hence this hypothesis. The second chapter is a survey of authorities on dreams from Plato and Aristotle to Ficino; each theory is brought to bear on Garcia Gomez's views. The third chapter is a review of the literature on the text in the Comedia version of the first auto in which Calisto cites the medical authorities Eras and Crato; Castells ends supporting Garcia's view that the two names refer to real persons and that the allusions are thematically significant in their context. Chapter iv is a long paraphrase of the passages on lovers' malady in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and is also an exhaustive review of the places where Burton refers explicitly to Celestina. Chapter v draws on Castiglione's Corteggiano to shed new light on the character of Calisto. The final chapter revisits the question of didacticism in Celestina: Castells's own view is that there is a humoral link between Rojas himself and the fictional Pleberio, and that at the end of the play the latter speaks directly for the author. I must say that I find the Garcia-Castells hypothesis about the first act arbitrary and inverisimilar; the supposed literary parallels that Castells cites to my mind prove little. His survey in the next chapter of the authorities on dreams is useful in a way but is relevant to Celestina only if we accept Garcia Gomez's strange interpretation. The chapter on Eras and Crato poses special difficulties. The passage containing these names has been a matter of discussion for decades, and Garcia and Castells are not the first to maintain that the passage is not a simple misreading and that these two names refer to genuine authorities. What is distinctive about Garcia's claim is that Eras's supposed association in literature with the maladies of vision and Crato's with those of hearing are related thematically to la tiniebla and la ceguedad that Calisto describes in this passage in Act i as well as the piedad de silencio that he requests a short time after (Castells 55; as is well known, piedad de silencio, as well as the two names, belongs only to the two editions of the Comedia and disappears in all the printings of the twenty-one act play). …