Scripted Oralities circa 1607-1610: Language and Intention in Góngora's Las firmezas de Isabela and Lope's Lo fingido verdadero

This essay compares the interplay between orality and writing in Góngora's Las firmezas de Isabela and Lope's Lo fingido verdadero and describes the divergent consciousness of scripted orality evident in these works. The popularity of the volume entitled Quatro comedias de diversos autores, first published in 1613, provides evidence that there was an appetite for reading Góngora's and Lope's comedias alongside each other during the period in which print culture, with its inward turn of the psyche towards analysis and abstraction, coexisted with the practice of reading aloud. Both works use the orality associated with the comedia to define the slippage of human control over language's allusiveness and representational powers. But whereas Góngora's characters build (and lose) their self-definitions in an inherited language which they navigate like a sea of fragmented allusions and citations, in Lo fingido verdadero, attention is focused upon characters' desire for power in and over language, and their sense of the sublime upon realizing that originality and meaning are located elsewhere. (DB)