From Comedy to Tragedy: Calderón and the New TragedyAuthor(s): Robert Ter HorstSource: MLN, Vol. 92, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1977), pp. 181-201Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2907210 .Accessed: 22/04/2011 14:35

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FROM COMEDY TO TRAGEDY: CALDERON AND THE NEW TRAGEDY i ROBERT TER HORST t In Calderon's A secreto agravio, secreta venganza as well as in El pintor de su deshonra and El midico de su honra, a major event occurs early in the plot. The female protagonist's lost lover returns at a time when she can no longer marry him. Dofia Leonor of A secreto agravio has already married Don Lope de Almeida by proxy and is on her way to join him in person when Don Luis first confronts her. The marriage between Don Juan and Serafina in El pintor de su deshonra remains only to be consummated when Serafina's true love, Don Alvaro, presumed lost at sea, returns alive. Similarly, in El midico de su honra, a mischance brings Dofia Mencia and her absent amour Enrique together not long after Mencia has married Gutierre Alfonso Solis.

I believe that the significance of these crucial encounters has largely evaded the critics. Bruce W. Wardropper, to be sure, provides a vital clue. In his fundamental "Poetry and Drama in Calderon's El midico de su honra",1 he delineates an important difference between the comedia de capa y espada and the drama de honor. The honor play involves the sacrament of marriage. If it is profaned, the consequences can be fatal. Thus the drama de honor has a tragic potential which the comedia de capa y espada lacks, since the comedia is essentially an epithalamium. The light courtship play belongs, accordingly, to the genre of comedy while the serious honor play belongs to that of tragedy. El medico de su honra is a baroque rather than a Shakespearean, Greek, or French neo-classical tragedy but in some ways resembles these counterparts.

It is not difficult, especially with such judicious assistance, to seeEl medico de su honra as a new form of tragic poesis. But to draw too sharp a distinction between light comedy and the tragic tendencies

1 Romanic Review 49 (1958), 5-1 1.

MLN 92 (1977) 181-201 Copyright ? 1977 by The Johns Hopkins University Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

182 ROBERT TER HORST

of the honor play is somewhat to rob Spanish and especially Calderonian baroque tragedy of its originality. In Golden-Age dramaturgy, light comedy is the primary genre. By light comedy I mean that progression, against obstacles, to the altar and the nuptial couch which I consider best expressed by the word epithalamium. The comedia de capa y espada is not only primary but also it is normative. As a result, seventeenth-century Spain produces a new tragedy just as Lope is said to have produced, like Menander, a new comedy. This is not to say that some older forms of tragedy, Sophoclean and Senecan, were not attempted. They were, and with success, especially by Calderon.2 However, such resurrections of tragedy have a markedly historical, even antiquarian, flavor. Contemporary tragedy in baroque Spain, the new tragedy, derives from comedy and is not an autonomous genre operating as a law unto itself.

I propose to explore the major dimensions of the new Spanish tragedy in circuit, beginning with observations on two outstanding specimens of breed, El burlador de Sevilla and El Caballero de Olmedo. From there I shall move on to the unalloyed comedy of Moreto's El desden con el desden. And I will come to focus again on Calderon's three tragedies of honor with the help of his revealing comedy, La dama duende. This is a method of conscious indirection, and I hope that my readers will find it worthwhile enough to forgive me for keeping them in suspense.

One can see how Spanish new comedy has generated the new tragedy by the persistence in tragedy of essential comedic modes. Above all, the progression to the altar endures. It sounds frivolous but is important to say of Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla that his tragic evolution is that of an over-committed bridegroom. Catalinon grasps something of the comedic overburden that is tragic devolution when he is unable to congratulate Don Juan on his imminent marriage:

CATAL. Al fin, eesta noche son las bodas?

D. JUAN Sin falta CATAL. [Si antes]

2 One fine example is Calder6n's La hija del aire, in two parts. A useful study of it is Gwynne Edwards's "Calder6n's La hija del aire and the Classical Type of Tragedy", Bulletin of Hispanic Studies XLIV (1967), 161-94.

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hubieran sido, no hubieras, sefior, engafiado a tantas, pero tu tomas esposa, senor, con cargas muy grandes.3

In the perspective of comedy, Don Juan's engagement with Don Gonzalo is a detour to hell that grimly substitutes for the ritual walk to the altar. Nonetheless, even in Don Juan's tragedy, marriage tenaciously perseveres. At the play's end, the king disposes of the survivors by pairing them off in conformity with the tatters of social decorum.

Contrasting with the theological and psychological complexity of Don Juan Tenorio and his circle is the fateful simple-mindedness of Alonso and Ines, the "beautiful people" of El Caballero de Olmedo. As personalities the ill-starred lovers of Lope's play are, for all their comeliness, almost unforgivably self-engrossed. The play's richness of texture derives not from their shallow selves but from a multiplicity of tempi implicating their destinies in diverse rhythms and conclusions.

One similarity between El burlador de Sevilla and El Caballero de Olmedo is the dramatic effectiveness in both plays of marriage used as pretext and genuine goal. Don Juan seduces women by promising to marry them when he has absolutely no intention of doing so. Yet he is quite content to marry Isabel when it appears that he must. In El Caballero de Olmedo there seems no reason to doubt Don Alonso's repeated protestations that his intentions towards Ines are honorable. But his desire to marry her in fact functions as a cloak which poorly conceals their mutual delight in erotic dalliance.4

The marriage goal in El Caballero de Olmedo is something on the order of an official chronometry, a march of measures leading to social consummation. Time thus marked on the clock of custom is only too easy for Alonso and Ines to forget, much as the child, engrossed in his play, forgets the sacred hour of dinner. Rodrigo presses the official suit in the play, and his conventional

3 The edition cited is Americo Castro's in Cldsicos Castellanos (Madrid, 1963), (III, 845-50).

4 As Bruce W. Wardropper observes in his "The Criticism of the Spanish Comedia: El Caballero de Olmedo as Object Lesson," Philological Quarterly 51 (1972), p. 196: ". . Don Alonso and Doha Ines deliberately put obstacles in the path of their love so as to prolong the pleasures of the preamble to their marriage."

184 ROBERT TER HORST

employment of time-two years of fruitless manifestation-results in oblivion. Time and sacrifice mean nothing in terms of realizing his marital hopes. The self-absorption of Ines and Alonso is an inner negation of fulfilling time which has its outer counterpart in the frustration of the conventional aspirations of Rodrigo. The official, chronometric time of the usual comedia accordingly is forgotten by the lovers in El Caballero de Olmedo. This almost criminal negligence unleashes the destructive powers of the suitor who feels crushed by their obliviousness of the rhythms and schedules of conventional form.

Although, like Rodrigo's, Alonso's professed goal is marriage, his real purpose is to achieve perfection through requited love. This striving for amorous apotheosis is, I believe, the sense of the important soliloquy with which the play begins.5 Perfection is atemporal, while marriage means subjection to the many modes of time through ageing and the birth of children and the years spent together. Even courtship has its periods of waiting and its seasons. Accordingly, Don Alonso's real and professed purposes are in serious conflict with each other. Perfection implies removal from time, courtship and marriage submission to it. Therefore, Alonso's image is a blooming rather than a ripening one, precocity rather than maturity. He is the almendro that risks the early spring frost to display his complete beauty.

Consequently, the Knight of Olmedo engages time so as to escape from it. He anticipates; he accelerates. Fabia becomes more comprehensible in the light of Alonso's aversion to conventional time. Her hechicerias expedite passion, while her stratagems stave

Amor, no te Ilame amor el que no te corresponde, pues no hay materia adonde imprima forma el favor. Naturaleza, en rigor, conserv6 tantas edades correspondiendo amistades; que no hay animal perfeto si no asiste a su conceto la uni6n de dos voluntades.

Verses 1-10 in the Anaya edition of Francisco Rico (Madrid, 1967). All citations are from this text.

6 The almendro appears, so to speak, off-stage in the play. Alonso dreams that a hawk, hidden in an almond-tree, emerges to kill a yellow songbird: "sale un azor de un almendro,/adonde escondido estaba" (1772-3).

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off marriage, to Don Rodrigo, to be sure; but in effect the lovers' involvement with Fabia is inimical to their marriage prospects. The old woman feels that only friends and drink improve with age.7 Love is one of the perfections of youth and, by implication, it does not ripen. No man sets foot in Fabia's house now.

The temporal rhythms of El Caballero de Olmedo are richly and progressively varied. Rodrigo's mechanical obduracy is the basic measure. With almost incredible persistence he and Fernando press their suit under the king's sponsorship even after they have had Alonso assassinated. Through them marriage as an expression of time has become the agent of mortality, murderous marriage. At the beginning of the play the metronome of Rodrigo is embellished by Alonso's acceleration. As Fernando says in excuse of Rodrigo: " ... siempre amor/es reloj anticipado." (755-6) Fabia taking her cue from Alonso, tries to enlist Tello's help in extracting the hanged thief s tooth with: " . . . importa a la brevedad/deste amor," (595-6) a perhaps unconsciously ironic statement. But once Alonso and Ines are in secure possession of their mutual passion, and that occurs with astonishing swiftness, they are spiritually out of time, and time is against them, since they are already at the peak of their bloom. The future, as a result, can only bring metaphorical frost and its withering effects. Alonso and Ines live in a present perfection. There, it is appropriate for them to defend themselves against the intrusions of time by feverish anticipation and erotic extension. So it is that Alonso is rabid to receive Ines's letters but cannot bear to read them in haste: "Porque manjar tan silave/de una vez no se me acabe," (1672-3). Similarly, in the classic manner of lovers, they dally before parting at dawn. But the particular quality of especially Alonso's dalliance is that his temporal rhythm is out of adjustment with celestial mechanics:

ALONSO lAy, luz! lAy aurora necia, de todo amante envidiosa!

TELLO Ya no aguarddis que amanezca ALONSO Como? TELLO Porque es de dia. ALONSO Bien dices, si a Ines me muestras.

7 FABIA Cuantas cosas imagino, dos solas, en mi opini6n, son buenas, vieJas

LEONOR Y son? FABIA Hija, el amigo y el vino. (319-20)

186 ROBERT TER HORST

Pero c6mo puede ser, Tello, cuando el sol se acuesta?

TELLO Tu vas de espacio, el aprisa; apostar6 que te quedas. (1324-30)

Like so many linguistic phenomena in El Caballero de Olmedo, the conceit of the slow lover at variance with the rapid sun is, when it first occurs, at best a slightly novel variation on a well-worn theme. However, the disfunction which it brings to light achieves ominous force when the variance comes to condition the circumstances of Alonso's death. When Alonso takes his final leave of Ines, precipitation and retardation fatefully combine. As they frequently do elsewhere in the play, Alonso and Tello exchange awarenesses. Now it is Alonso who is conscious of the proximity of dawn, while Tello, confident that he will be able to overtake his master, lingers forgetfully on past the time of departure for Olmedo. In terms of his usual behavior while courting Ines, Alonso's decision to leave well before dawn is precipitate. On the other hand, for those who do not devote their nights to courtship and love, Alonso sets out for Medina at a very late hour, so late that his abnormal schedule infringes upon normal daytime occupation. Thus he encounters the peasant on his way to his field in the dark so that he can arrive and begin work at first light. Thus Don Alonso returns to Medina so late in the night that Rodrigo and Fernando can get up very early in the morning to have him shot. His delay and their haste create the schedule for his death. Lope's art transposes a wan conceit into a magnificently murderous aubade.

Ines's timing in the scene immediately following Alonso's death is equally as bad as his. Ines has failed to heed her sister's advice to slow passion down by fleeing from love. On the contrary, she has revealed her feelings too soon and too completely to Alonso. Time cannot in consequence mold and ripen them. Yet she confesses her love for Alonso to Don Pedro, her father, too late for his immediate approval to stay the course of tragedy. And that scene in which Don Pedro gives his blessing to a rapturous Ines, which is where the comedy of Alonso and Ines ought to have ended, functions in fact as a cruel preface to their joint tragedy. Moreover, this mutual tragedy has come about in an unprecedented fashion. Two forces that customarily favor lovers in comedy-their socially acceptable desire to marry and time as an agent of overcoming the obstacles to marriage-have turned hostile and destroyed them. This, I submit,

M L N 187

is new tragedy. It can be called tragi-comedy only with the understanding that comedy is a positive factor in the tragic evolution, that comedy helps to form tragedy as Lope practices it in El Caballero de Olmedo. Fundamentally, Alonso and Ines make the mistake of assuming that the presumptions of comedy govern their destiny, that the impetus towards felicity which in the theatre overrides every difficulty and danger will also see them safely through in their lives. Life is, however, for them a tragic disobedience to the rules that ordinarily inform art and make it delightful. The unhappy fate of Ines and Alonso is, then, the product of a non-conformity of their rather narrow comedic vision of themselves with the play's final events. The tragic outcome gives fuller stature to the original cast, which had hoped to be in an eternal comedy. It also moves the play out from literature into the area of life, legend, and history from which it first grew.

In contrast with El Caballero de Olmedo's almost involuntary disobedience to the hypotheses of art, pure comedy is a game played by rule and consensus. Of course, the system does not go unchallenged. Rather, it thrives on tests, which it invariably survives. If the hallmarks of comedy are the inevitable approach to marriage and time as an ultimately favorable element in lovers' marriage plans, then Moreto's El desdin con el desdin is an excellent model of unalloyed comedy. The consensus of the play is that Diana, Countess of Barcelona, should marry, not only because she is an attractive young woman but also because she is the only heir to the County, and thus it is important politically for her to have children. Both the physical and the political motives are compelling. Diana challenges the system by being a bachillera, philosophically averse to love and marriage. Nonetheless, she is very much drawn to men, whom she likes to humble by rejecting their advances with contempt. Diana's disdain, in a complicated and almost perverse psychological maneuver, kindles love in Carlos, Count of Urgel. The whole action of the play consists in Carlos's affecting an indifference for Diana like that which she believes she feels for men in general so as to arouse in her a love kindred to his. Pique and vanity are powerful factors in their relationship, and one is reminded of the painful growth of love between Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la Mole in Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir, where Julien's feigned indifference to Mathilde is essential to the crystallization of their passion. But there also is the

188 ROBERT TER HORST

fundamental difference, because Stendhal treats of a grand and illicit passion between social unequals, whereas Moreto explores the birth of love from vanity between social equals whose sole aim is either marriage or anti-marriage. Besieged and tormented by Carlos's apparent invulnerability to her charms, Diana at length succumbs to Carlos. In the struggle between them, time is the essential element in Carlos' victory.8 Polilla, Carlos's servant and the engineer of his triumph, explains the alliance between time and Carlos's aspirations to marry Diana with a striking simile. Diana is like an unripe fig which at first resists all efforts to bring it down but which, as it ripens, finally does fall into the hands of those trying to get it:

cviste una breva en la cima de una higuera, y los muchachos que en alcanzarla porfian, piedras la tiran a pares; y aunque alguna se resista, al cabo, de aporreada con las piedras que la tiran, viene a caer mds madura? ..........................................

luego, por mas que resista, [Diana] ha de venir a caer, de una y otra a la porfia, mas madura que una breva.9

Even though there is a disturbing quality of calculation and cynicism about this governing image, it does show that time abets the lover who can persevere and keep his emotions under control. Carlos masters Diana because, with Polilla's assistance, he masters himself. In this comedy, then, time promises a plenitude through calculation which it fulfills. In El Caballero de Olmedo the lovers, in

8 The insight is Bruce W. Wardropper's, first in "The Comedia Secularized", Bulletin of Hispanic Studies XXXIV (1957), p. 4: "This is the point of Polilla's parable of the fig-tree on which the play is based. The fig, out of reach at the top of the tree, despite its altivez-altitude or pride-will inevitably fall when it is ripe . . . But the one who has the porfia represents the effect of time." And later in "The Dramatization of Figurative Language in the Spanish Theatre," Yale French Studies 47 (1972), p. 195: "Polilla, the fool in Moreto's El desdin con el desdin, likens the bluestocking Diana to an unattainable fig on a tree; left to its own devices, the fig will eventually ripen and fall into the waiting of the patient boy who is longing to eat it. Since this is-more or less-what happens to Diana, the obliquely introduced metaphor may be said to emerge as a part of the action."

9 Verses 404-19, in the Espasa edition of Narciso Alonso Cortes (Madrid, 1966).

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the self-centeredness of a precocious passion, tragically miscalculate their prospects. Their governing image is the blooming almond tree.

Calderon's La dama duende is a play which in summary has every appearance of being a light comedy. It is an interlude. Don Manuel is between two stages of a successful career. He has finished a long term of military service in Italy and is temporarily in Madrid before taking up new political duties, a gobierno. In Madrid Don Manuel has accepted the hospitality of an old and intimate friend, Don Juan de Toledo. The play opens with Don Manuel's expression of regret that he has missed the celebrations of Prince Baltasar Carlos's baptism. The mention of Carlos IV's infant heir-presumptive is suggestive. The lingering holiday atmosphere of Madrid heightens the sense of interlude. The baptism of one who may be the future sovereign creates a feeling of auspiciousness and hope. Moreover, the political nature of the capital's festive mood points publicly to a theme which, largely in the private sphere, seems to me to be a central concern of La dama duende: governance.

Even though Don Manuel did not know of the festivities which he missed, his missing them introduces a revealing aspect of his character, his cautious prudence. Appropriately, Don Juan has already sent his friend directions to his house. But Manuel, rather than arouse the curiosity of the neighborhood by appearing on horseback to confirm them, prefers to reconnoiter on foot. Sensible though the tactic is, it exposes him to considerable risk. Don Manuel's presence and his reliable appearance make him the subject of a plea from Dofia Angela that he stop Don Luis, her pursuer, from following and recognizing her. To show her this service will, she insists, save her from a terrible misfortune. In an unfinished sentence she hints at some future recompense for his help: "que podra ser que alguin dia . . . " (I, 11 1).1O

Dofia Angela appeals to those qualities in Don Manuel which make him, in the view of the times at least, an excellent governor:

Si, como lo muestra el traje, sois caballero de obligaciones y prendas,

1O All citations are from the Valbuena Briones edition in Cldsicos Castellanos (Madrid, 1962). I have on occasion altered the punctuation.

190 ROBERT TER HORST

amparad a una mujer que a valerse de vos llega. (I, 100-105)

He is a nobleman of distinction (prendas) with a strong sense of duty (obligaciones) and with a protective attitude (amparad). Manuel accepts the challenge unhesitatingly. But his generous alacrity has qualifications. The job he is asked to do involves detaining and stopping another man so as to avoid serious consequences. Don Manuel has noble brz'o, but it is happily alloyed with a phlegmatic habit of approach to difficulties. Accordingly, he is well suited to this kind of task. Also, even under the pressure to act immediately, he proceeds cautiously, prepared for the ultimate recourse, but reluctant to resort to it unnecessarily. Thus Don Manuel replies to Cosme's question as to how he plans to act with:

Detenerle con alguna industria; mas si con ella no puedo, serd forzoso el valerme de la fuerza sin que 61 entienda la causa. (I, 121-125)

When Cosme's ruse fails to keep Don Luis long enough for Angela to disappear down the street, Manuel is obliged to intervene: "acabe el valor/ lo que empezo la cautela". (I, 151-152) However, even Manuel's valor is judicious. The quarrel he picks with Luis is over Luis's lack of courtesy in refusing to answer the question put to him. The same unfailing equilibrium carries over into the duel. Don Manuel refuses to fight unfairly by using Cosme against Don Luis. Consequently, when Don Juan intervenes on Luis's behalf, Luis immediately stops the affair because of the potential imbalance now on his side. The quarrel between Manuel and Luis is, as Cosme remarks, a cortesana pendencia, in which respect for one's opponent overrides one's dissatisfaction with him. This reluctance to sacrifice humanity and good judgment to the chaos of passion keeps La dama duende on course as comedy. In the play's closing scenes, Luis and Manuel resume their duel, which was never truly resolved in the first place. But now the cause of their misunderstanding is known. It is Angela. As they fight, Luis's sword becomes useless. Manuel forbears to profit from his advantage and sends Luis off to get another sword. During this hiatus occur the explanations and changes of attitude necessary for a tolerable solution to the differences which have developed. The solution, of course, is for Don Manuel to marry Angela.

M L N 191

But Calderon arrives at the classic denouement by a very different method from Moreto's. In La dama duende the principle of order is not the institution of marriage. It is male friendship. Marriage is very much of apis aller, an inferior accommodation. The genesis of the play is in the enduring affection between Don Juan and Manuel:

Don Juan de Toledo es, Cosme, el hombre que mds profesa mi amistad, siendo los dos envidia, ya que no afrenta, de cuantos la antigtiedad por tantos siglos celebra. (I, 51-56)

If the primary male occupation is warfare and its essential prerequisite valor, then the secondary male calling is government, where courage is vital too, but which also requires a talent for sympathy and reconciliation. Manuel is a sound basic male. Yet he has abilities of a higher order. Thus his friendship with Don Juan is hierarchical rather than equal. Manuel makes Juan his ensign, nurses him back to health in his own bed; Don Manuel's generosity makes the relationship avuncular and paternal-"la vida, despues de Dios,/me debe." (I, 69-70)-rather than simply fraternal.

Unwittingly, then, Don Manuel, on his temporary visit in Madrid just before assuming his new post, comes to perform governmental duties in the small state of Don Juan's family. With both parents presumably dead, control rests in Don Juan's hands, legally and morally. Don Juan's values are the same as Don Manuel's. Both place the principle of order-amistad-above the attractive chaos of love. Thus when Juan recognizes Manuel and sees that he is slightly wounded, he does not hesitate to leave Dofia Beatriz, whom he was accompanying, to conduct his friend to his house. Luis is ordered to make his brother's excuses. Luis is smitten with Beatriz and is chagrined when the lady makes it excessively clear that her only interest is Juan.

One reason that Don Juan cannot govern his small kingdom well is that his two subjects are seditious. They resent his power over them, even while they are totally dependent upon him. Angela counsels submission:

Pues deja los sentimientos, que, al fin, sufrirle es mejor, que es nuestro hermano mayor y comemos de alimento. (I, 533-536)

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This advice enrages Luis, who walks out on his sister. Despite this quarrel, Angela and Luis understand each other all too well. They tend to create disorder because neither wants interference with the propensity to passion that they share. One wonders what kind of supervision Angela's dead husband exercised over her when he was unable to manage his own affairs:

Ya se que su esposo era administrador en puertos de mar de unas reales rentas y qued6 debiendo al rey grande cantidad de hacienda. (I, 330-334)

Judging Manuel by his own standards, Luis confesses to Rodrigo that his greatest worry is Angela's virtue:

lo que mds siento es que sea mi hermano tan poco atento que llevar a casa quiera un hombre mozo, teniendo, Rodrigo, una hermana bella, viuda y moza ... (I, 320-325)

That her virtue is, indeed, far from secure is firmly stated by Isabel, Angela's maid, who answers her mistress's complaints about her brothers' close supervision with:

Sefiora, no tiene duda de que mirandote viuda, tan moza, bizarra y bella tus hermanos cuidadosos te celen, porque este estado es el mas ocasionado a delitos amorosos y mas en la corte hoy (I, 402-408)

Further, there is a delicious dual portrait of Angela as a demi-mondaine and of Luis as a sexual adventurer in the wonderfully disingenuous piece of advice she gives her brother when he recounts the day's near-disastrous events:

Miren la mala mujer en que ocasi6n te habia puesto, que hay mujeres tramoyeras ... Pondre que no conocia s6lo porque la siguieras. Por eso estoy harta yo de decir . . .

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que mires que no te pierdas por mujercillas, que no saben mds que aventurar los hombres. (I, 515-526)

The younger brother and sister are thus two of a kind, each of whom detects dangerous tendencies in the other without recognizing the same problem in the self. Their bond is passionate precipitateness in affairs with potential lovers outside the family, not incest.1" Luis's pursuit of Angela in the first act shows Angela's younger brother to be not so much ignorant of the identity of the woman he follows as unenlightened concerning an important aspect of his own character. Since Don Luis knows himself imperfectly, he governs himself imperfectly. In Angela Luis is revealed. But brother and sister suppress no dark Byronic impulse.

This heedlessness is stronger and more mindless in Angela, the play's elemental force: "eEs dama o es torbellino?" (I, 113). She is a chaos of conflicting tendencies and her character might well have been portrayed symbolically by Calderon in terms of the familiar four elements. Her name is ironic. Although she is sublime to the extent that she recalls her creator, as ignorance in action she exposes others to near perdition. Angela herself pitilessly exposes her own almost criminal indifference to consequences: "Yo fui/necia en empefiarle asi;/mas una mujer turbada/hque mira o que considera?" (I, 438-441)

The vital encounter, then, in La dama duende is a meeting of two characterological humors. Angela and Luis are sanguine: ardent and rash. Don Manuel is phlegmatic. Cosme amusingly describes this temperamental opposition when he replies to Luis' protestation "No voy agora con flema," with "Pues si flema solo os falta,/yo tengo cantidad de ella/y podre partir con vos." (I, 138-140) But his wit alludes as well to a basic element in the play's architecture. Its action constructs a fragile tempering of the mainly precipitate Angela-Luis complexion with the Manuel-Juan blend, in which phlegm predominates. As the play proceeds its comic

11 My understanding of this play runs directly counter to Edwin Honig's in his "Flickers of Incest on the Face of Honor. Calder6n's Phantom Lady," Tulane Drama Review 6 (1962), 69-105; and again as chapter 7 of Calder6n and the Seizures of Honor (Cambridge, 1972). Both he and Barbara Mujica, in her "Tragic Elements in Calder6n's La dama duende," Kentucky Romance Quarterly 16 (1969), 303-26, tend to see the play as a victory for Angela.

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course, the humors mingle until the proportions are finally fixed in the marriage between Don Manuel and Angela, attained at the cost of so many dangers.

But one reaches the end of La dama duende with a feeling of fearful relief rather than delight, amusement or satisfaction. The worst consequences have been avoided. "Sacamos en conclusion/las espadas. Todo es esto,/pero ma's pudiera ser." (I, 512-514) However, the positive result is something considerably less than perfect. One reason for this troubling uneasiness, and it is one of Calderon's most true and brilliant of dramatic constants, is that the play's original vision is different from its conclusion. An exemplary friendship leads to a risky marriage. Generically speaking, the original focus of the play is on tragedy. Cosine, commenting on Don Manuel's regret at having missed the Madrid excitement by an hour, constructs a list of classical tragic pairs: Pyramus and Thisbe, Tarquin and Lucretia, Hero and Leander. He then amusingly contends that if these couples had used time better, their tragedies would not have completely occured. If Pyramus had arrived an hour earlier, if Tarquin had gone to Lucretia an hour later, if Hero had thought over for an hour her decision to commit suicide ...

Cosine's wit is revealing. It helps to define an aspect of Calderonian comedy. Tragedy is impulsive. Comedy is reflective. Time as a deterrent force, if it is allowed to operate, works in the interest of comedy. Time as delay, por un hora, denatures tragedy. Don Manuel, unlike Cosine has a tragic cast of mind. It leaps instinctively to the worst conclusion:

C6rmo puede mi nobleza excusarse de estorbar una desdicha, una afrenta? Que, segun muestra, sin duda es su marido. (I, 116-120)

But at the same time he has a phlegmatic temperament. Accordingly, his character impels him to ward off what his mind so resolutely confronts. He is both a good intelligence officer and a good field commander. True, he overestimates the enemy. She is not so bad as he imagines. She is neither an unfaithful wife nor a mistress. Rather, the miscaluculation leads Doh Juan to assemble stronger forces and helps assure his victory. And that victory is a triumph of interference, deflection, and deceleration. Consequently, one form of Calderonian comedy is what we find in

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La dama duende, a miscarriage of tragedy. That same comedic time which in El desden con el desde'n helped to mature the Count's marital goal now interposes itself between the vision and the realization of tragedy. If the governing image of El Caballero de Olmedo is the flowering almond tree, that of El desden the slowly ripening figs, then La dama duende's dominant symbol is the mulberry tree, the moral, tragically connected with the story of Pyramus and Thisbe,12 but, like that same fable, here transfigured into comedy as in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

por un hora que fuera antes Piramo a la fuente, no hallara a su Tisbe muerta y las moras no mancharan porque dicen los poetas que con arrope de moras se escribi6 aquella tragedia. (I, 8-14)

Covarrubias explains that this tree symbolizes prudence,-"por ser este airbol discreto y sabio"-which in its case consists in "esperar a que passen los frios para brotar y echar sus pimpollos quando los yelos y frios no le pueden ofender." He also mentions the Alciati emblem 209, which contrasts the mulberry and the almond. Covarrubias closes his discussion of almendro with a proverb: "Antes moral tardio que almendro florido."

And despite invidious comparisons, La dama duende does produce a positive result. The Madrid interlude in Don Manuel's promising career has turned out to be not leisure but a test. The chaotic and rebellious family of Don Juan have, implicitly and explicitly, called upon and tried their guest's powers of command. So successfully has he met the challenge and its obligations that the situation has molded him into a paterfamilias. His capacity to rule having been threatened and confirmed, and accompanied by a more or less suitable bride, the governor-designate may now proceed with considerable assurance to his new post. The thrust of the chaotic and calamitous forces that have so gravely tried Don Manuel is tragic. That he has survived their menace is comic. But the nearness of everyone's escape leaves the audience shaken.

Towards the end of Act I of Calderon's A secreto agravio, secreta venganza, Manrique, the play's gracioso, makes a startling statement:

12 Pyramus and Thisbe were a favorite tragic subject in the Renaissance, as in the case of Theophile de Viau's Amours Tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbi, of around 1620.

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Y pues que con tanta gloria dama y galkn se han casado, perdonad, noble Senado, que aqui se acaba la historia. (I, 779-82)13

Superficially, of course, the joke is obvious. The marriage by proxy between Don Lope and Dofia Leonor is fulfilled when they meet physically as they ought already to have met spiritually. This is their happy ending, after which, as in the theatre, the lovers united in marriage disappear from public view. More subtly, La dama duende also exploits the parallels between life and the stage. La dama likens itself to an entreme's performed as comic relief between the acts of a serious play, such as the "tan bien escrita comedia" (I, 30) referred to in Cosine's first speech. Don Manuel is between two serious phases of a career as he passes from soldiering in Italy to government elsewhere. If these occupations are acts in the play of a life of devotion to the ideals of upper-class male morality, then the domestic confusions in Don Juan's house are a comic interlude that contrasts with the larger, graver structure of events. But those more serious events contaminate as well as frame the ostensibly light episode that is the play. Maleness and male friendship dominate La dama duende. And the relationship between Don Juan and Don Manuel is serious also, a matter of life-and-death obligations. With its balance achieved through a series of near falls and close calls, La dama duende walks a comic tightrope over a tragic abyss. The effect on the spectator is to make him gasp with horror at the thought of what might have been. Cosine uses precisely the metaphor of the tightrope walker when he praises the accuracy of Amarilis' performance in Mira's play:

y haberla representado Amarilis tan de veras que, volatin del carnal, (si otros lo son de la cuaresma), sac6 mas de alguna vez las manos en la cabeza. (I, 31-6)

The metaphor applies equally well to La dama duende. Just as tragedy encompasses the comedy of Don Manuel so that

his escape from it into a measure of felicity is a near-miracle, so now

13 All citations of the three honor tragedies are from the Valbuena Briones edition of the Dramas de Honor, I (Madrid, 1967) and II (Madrid, 1965). I have changed some of the punctuation.

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the rite of the comedic conclusion appears inopportunely in the first act of A secreto agravio. There is a deeper dimension to its technique of surprise. The happy ending that comes two acts before it should suggests by its precipitation a tragic impulsiveness rather than a comic maturation. In the ripening of comedy the lovers' duty to the genre is to persist, porfiar. When, however, as in A secreto agravio, secreta venganza, an old love confronts a new marriage, love's absolute obligation is to desist. Dofia Leonor strongly states this incompatibility between past passion and present duty:

Hasta las aras, amor, te acompafi6; aqui te quedas, porque atreverte no puedas a las aras del honor. (I, 504-7)

Similarly, Don Luis's servant, Celio, sees Leonor's marriage as absolutely conclusive:

Sefior, pues que desta suerte hallaste tu desengafio, vuelve en ti; repara el dafio de tu vida y tu muerte: ya no hay estilo ni medio que tu debas elegir. (I, 783-8)

Nonetheless, Don Luis does choose to persist in his love for Leonor. This is a clear and conscious decision. It leads, exactly as Luis senses that it will, to his death, and to Leonor's:

Siga mi suerte atrevida su fin contra tanto honor, porque he de amar a Leonor, aunque me cueste la vida. (I, 829-32)

The conflict between love and honor is basic to all three of Calder6n's tragedies of honor. Its peculiar force comes not so much from obvious opposition as from the poetic nature of the struggle. The total, passionate, and reckless devotion of the doomed extramarital partners in these plays asserts their eternity in terms of a single over-powering emotion. Indeed, love is so powerful that it thinks it can conquer death. The conviction draws much of its strength from the fact that the enamored males have succeeded in escaping destruction or oblivion. They have crossed the Lethe, have remembered and been remembered, and have

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returned to their mistresses alive. Quevedo's great sonnet inevitably comes to mind:

mas no de esotra parte en la ribera dejard la memoria, en donde ardia; nadar sabe mi llama la agua fria y perder el respeto a ley severa.

The myth of Hero and Leander is the latent metaphor of these impressive lines. It is also one of the models for A secreto agravio and El pintor de su deshonra. Both plays are river and seascapes in which the lovers venture upon the shifting waters of their passion. At first love appears to perish in the death or disappearance of the male. But he miraculously survives and returns. This redemption lessens the lovers' deep and well-grounded consciousness of their fragile mortality. They embark on a second career of mutual devotion, and are lost. Don Lope drowns Don Luis in A secreto agravio. The husband is an artistic executioner who remains faithful in murder to the classical poetic model.

Calderon's great technical achievement in the three tragedies is to warp comedy into a vessel for tragedy. What is productive in the usual comedy becomes destructive in Calderon's alienated comedy, which is to say his tragedy. Time and conventional morality favor the standard dama y galdn, who amount to an acceptable match and simply need to get by the obstacles which usually their elders, in their unwisdom, have put in their path.

Calderonian tragedy uses this scheme. The embryonic comedy, however, miscarries. Shipwreck in El pintor and Luis's reported death in A secreto agravio blight the budding plot. In El medico de su honra the wasting factor is even stronger. Enrique and Mencia cannot ever hope to marry because of disparity in rank. However, just as Luis and Alvaro reportedly die in their plays, Enrique disappears from Sevilla in his. Their "widows" unfortunately do not behave as the legitimately bereaved figures of comedy do. Diana in Lope's El perro del hortelano and Angela in Calderon's La dama duende have recovered quite nicely from whatever grief they may have felt and are ready for new adventures that terminate, of course, in a second marriage for each. But Serafina in El pintor, Leonor in A secreto agravio, and Mencia in El medico all approach what is tantamount to a second marriage with grief and dismay. They consider themselves sacrificial victims who give themselves over to another's will in expiation for their Freudian complicity in

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the lover's death; "pues forzada me case/solo por vengarme en mf!" (I, 501-2), is Leonor's explanation.

The tragic warping comes from a shattering intensification of useful modes of comedy. There, the lovers need to persist, and their persistence is moral since it finally integrates them into society. But the lovers in Calderonian tragedy persist into and past forbidden zones. Comedy stops at the altar. One major new form of Calderonian tragedy has its genesis in the unwillingness of lovers in light comedy to change their ways when they find themselves transported to the terra incognita of marriage and honor. In these circumstances, the real conflict between love and honor is temporal and situational rather than philosophical. The love that was acceptable for Leonor in A secreto agravio when she was in Spain is taboo when she reaches Portugal. Or, to express the problem in terms of time, lovers suppose, especially if neo-Platonism conditions their thought, that they will go on loving each other forever, perhaps even beyond this life. Unconditioned love in comedy thus tends to be atemporal and even anti-temporal. But marital love is a temporally conditioned moral love, and its concept of time is that it destroys as it progresses. The past, in its perspective, is suppressed and irretrievable.

The kind of Calderonian tragedy we are attempting to define comes into effective being when one individual with supreme moral control allows the ghost of the past to revive and become real. In El midico de su honra, Mencia breathes life into the tragedy that involves herself, Enrique, and Gutierre by permitting her past with Enrique to become a real and present force in her marriage, with which it is totally incompatible under the moral law. She madly assumes that she can manage a past and a present that are in absolute conflict. This is her crime.14 The persistent poetry of her past threatens the moral continuum of her marriage. As a result,

14 This concept of guilt as a sublime failure to understand obviously differs from A. A. Parker's dictum that "This conception of diffused responsibility, of the impossibility of confining the guilt of wrongdoing to any one individual, lies at the heart of the Calderonian sense of tragedy", in "Towards A Definition of Calderonian Tragedy," "Bulletin of Hispanic Studies XXXIX (1962), p. 228.

Readers of El medico de su honra especially have a distressing tendency to want to fix all the blame on Mencfa and so rob her play of much of its awful majesty. Against this and other such narrowing critical proclivities, Parker's view is a positive liberation. He also observes, in the same article, that "All dramatic theory is, or should be, a deduction from dramatic practice. . .", p. 225.

200 ROBIERI' [ER HIORST1

her husband is forced to become the agent and executioner of Time. He kills not with sudden but with a slow, exhaustive murderousness. Mencia's blood flows out like sand in the glass, like minutes on the clock. Gutierre's method of executing Mencia imitates the manner in which time lays most of us waste, gradually. His reply to his wife's idolization of the past is that all human futures ultimately fade into an unreal past, from out of which the only thing that persists is one's future beyond this life. Mencia's crime is to fail to see the future as past. This failure invites and compels Gutierre to represent the deadly effects of time in an artistic and murderous intensification of them. The tragedy of El midico de su honra is probably the most powerful of the three under discussion, but the other two pattern themselves along its basic lines of conflict; sublimely, cruelly expressed by Mencia with: "tuve amor, y tengo honor./Esto es cuanto se' de ml." (I, 573-74).

Of Calderon's 118 or so non-allegorical plays, astonishingly few would fit any theory or practice of tragedy. The failure of the Spanish stage to evolve tragedy as an autonomous genre in part explains the scantness in Calderon of the drama's most prestigious form.15. But the deeper cause is that Calderon is the fabricator of a fundamentally hybrid kind of theatre, a monstruo, to use his favorite term. Conflict is the essence of his vision, and without the hybridization of unity into dual oppositions, the essential construct of his perspective would be lost. Consequently, pure comedy and pure tragedy are largely out of the question for him. Calderon's basic material is a mix of tragic and comic tendencies locked in struggle, with the usual finale a tentative decision in favor of the non-tragic, of the comedic. But the tragic recollection and future potential are never out of sight or mind.

One striking formulation of this essential dualism is to be found in a passage from Casa con dos puertas mala es de guardar. Felix is describing his first sight of Marcela, the woman he loves, in the gardens of Aranjuez. Recumbent, she stares into a reflecting pool and is so beautifully immobile that Felix is in doubt as to whether she is flesh or stone: " . . . que puse duda/sobre si es mujer o imagen." Then Felix allegorically interprets this aesthetic experience as a debate between nature and art:

15 In contrast to French Theatre, in which tragedy gradually, unevenly, but decisively disassociated itself from other kinds of drama in the period between 1620-1640. See Geoffrey Brereton, French Tragic Drama in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1973), p. 101.

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La naturaleza al arte me pareci6 que decia: "No blasones, no te alabes de que lo muerto desmientes con mds fuerza en esta parte, que yo desmiento lo vivo, pues, en lo contrario iguales, se hacer una estatua yo, si hacer ti una mujer sabes: 1O mira un alma sin vida donde esta con vida unjaspe!16

Nature tends toward and has a talent for death while the genius of art is resurrective. Marcela's trance-like immobility brings combative art and nature so close together that one cannot for the moment be sure whether nature feigns death or art life. Even so, their modes in time are opposed, and in Calderon's dramatic art the overwhelming preference is for drawing victory from defeat through the civilized craft of resurrection. Death has, as it must, its due. But life largely triumphs, the second life of intellect, religion, civilization, and art. Comedy in this sense is vastly superior to tragedy understood as death unchecked and uncorrected.

Nonetheless, in three rare and horrific instances in Calderon's drama, art and nature put aside their quarrel and join forces to conduct a murderous and sublimely artistic assault on their victims. Each play expresses itself in a different medium. In A secreto agravio, secreta venganza Don Lope de Almeida is the poet of death who finds his voice in secrecy. A deadly portraiture is the method of the failed painter Don Juan Roca in El pintor de su deshonra. And, most terrible of all, Don Gutierre Alfonso Solis carves the very image of death upon his wife's living body in El medico de su honra. This is art in the service of death, a prodigious anomaly in the conflictive theatre of Calderon.

University of Arizona

16 I cite volume II of the Aguilar edition of Obras completas (Madrid, 1973), p. 279.