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Tirso de Molina and the Androgyne: El Aquiles and La dama del olivar

1993; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 70; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/1475382932000370105

1469-3550

Alan K. G. Paterson,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Tirso de Molina, Obras dramáticas completas. Edición crítica por Blanca de los Ríos, Tomo I (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), 1909. All quotations are from this edition.2. MarÍa José del Río, ‘Representaciones dramáticas en casa de un artesano de Madrid de principios del siglo XVII, in Teatros y vida teatral en el siglo de oro a través de las fuentes documentales, ed. Luciano García Gómez y J. E. Varey (London: Tamesis, 1991), 245–58. This fascinating piece of social history deals only marginally with acting and cross-dressing, but the cue is worth taking up.3. Thus El Aquiles shares a repertoire with Calderón's La vida es sueño; for greater detail on Orlando and the Wild Man as types, see my article ‘The Traffic of the Stage in Calderón's La vida es sueño’, Renaissance Drama, New Series IV (1971), 170.4. The proof for this rests in the stage-direction to Aquiles’ first entrance, as the Wild Man: ‘Salen Aquiles, que ha de hacer la mujer vestida de pieles, y Quirón, viejo, también de pieles, y Tetis, bizarramente vestida de campo’ (1912). There are no extra-textual documents about this play, as far as I know.5. In his Shakespeare and the Art of Humankindness (New Jersey/London: Humanistic Press International, 1990), 40, Robert Kimbrough reminds us of Dustin Hoffman's lines to his girl at the end of Tootsie, when Hoffman is no longer dressed female: ‘I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was a man with a woman as a man’. Tirso achieves a similarly epigrammatic effect, though the conundrum is deepened; whereas Tootsie does not make love with his/her partner, Aquiles/ Nereida does. Thus Deidamia enters into complicity with the bisexuality of her partner. Tirso does not abandon this feature for, at the end of Act III, Deidamia cross-dresses de hombre in pursuit of her now male Aquiles. The promised second part, which presumably took up the sequel, does not exist.6. The question of what these ‘other possibilities of desire and fantasy’ are is left open. But one answer may lie in Cristina Peri Rossi's ‘Nochevieja en el Daniel's’, the preamble to her Fantasías eróticas (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1991). There the coincidence of aesthetic, histrionic and erotic experiences in the presence of a female couple cross-dressed to appear heterosexual is described. The social and moral distance between Peri Rossi and Tirso de Molina is great, but the other elements are comparable.7. A. K. G. Paterson, ‘Teatro para canonizar: Tirso de Molina y Sor Juana de la Cruz’, in Tirso de Molina. Immagine e Rappresentazione. Segundo Coloquio Internacional, a cura di Laura Dolfi (Napoli: Edizione Scientifiche Italiane, 1991), 53–63.8. Ronald E. Surtz, The Guitar of God. Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534) (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). My own article on the posthumous identity of Sor Juana in the seventeenth century was unable to take advantage of this important study on the life of the Sister. I extend my views on the posthumous Sor Juana in the light of Surtz's biographical account in an article due to appear in Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico. 9. Fray Gabriel Téllez (Mercedario) (Tirso de Molina). Historia general de la orden de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes (Madrid: Colección ‘Revista Estudios’, 1973), I, 36. 10. The title-page of Bvlla Smi. D. N. Pavli Divina prouidentia Papae V. Confirmacionis et Innovationis Privilegiorvm, et Bvllarum Ordinis Beatae Mariae de Mercede Redemptionis cap-tiuorum . . . Ad preces Philippi III… [no place, no date]. The British Library has a copy, 4783.e.l.11. Op. cit., Vol. II, 546.12. Tirso de Molina, Obras dramáticas completas, edición crítica por Blanca de los Ríos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1946), I, 1173–1218. All quotations are from this edition.13. J. A. Drinkwater, ‘La serrana de la Vera and the “Mystifying Charms of Fiction” ‘, Forum for Modern Language Studies, XXVIII (1992), 75–85.14. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. The Daughter's Seduction (London: Macmillan, 1982), in particular the chapter entitled ‘The Father's Seduction’.15. In the general poetics of gender, the notions of liquid, liquefaction, flow, etc. can be said to characterize the feminine textual economy. See V. A. Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska), 1984, throughout.16. H. W. Sullivan, ‘El motivo del incesto en el drama de Tirso de Molina: una orientación lacaniana’, Tirso de Molina. Immagine e Rappresentazione, 207–17.17. R. Kimbrough, Shakespeare and the Art of Humankindness (New Jersey/London: Humanistic Press International, 1990).