Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, letrado y dramaturgo. Su mundo mexicano y español (review)

Reviews179 Willard F. King. Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, letrado y dramaturgo. Su mundo mexicano y español, México: El Colegio de México, 1989. 290 pp. Occasionally the venerable criteria for the estimation of literary works, the Human Group, the Moment, the Ambience, are vindicated in our days, and sometimes magisterially. This is one of those occasions, with the appearance of the splendid book of Willard F. King on Ruiz de Alarcón, the fruit of 23 years of study. Few readers, on finishing it, will not be in agreement with the author when she declares that Alarcón is now to be contemplated as worthy to stand among the greatest masters of Golden Age literature. She bringsforward all the evidence : internal, from his works, and external, from his successive scenes of activity, from the conduct of his life, and from his lineage. King traces very properly, sine ira et studio, the ups and downs of the polemic concerning the mexicanidad of her author. The indispensable evidence to help conduct that polemic, from the study of the social impact of indianos in Spain, and the difficulties they found there, is at last to hand in this book. King evokes the physical and spiritual ambience of Mexico, and of that other solar of the Alarcón family, Taxco, during the years of the dramatist's boyhood and student days. She attributes the path of his subsequent interests to his experiences in New Spain: the phenomenon of the castas, religious heterodoxy, and social criticism with a true point to make. She also explores the literary results of Alarcón's physical handicap—his celebrated humps— and of his inordinately fine talents as a lawyer. The meticulousness of legal procedure, King assures us, can be perceived in the grain of all the best dramatic works of Alarcón. Also we are informed, in connection with this Mexican period in the playwright's life, of his indifference toward the often tumultuous politics of his country, as well as of his adherence to the ultra-monarchical group among the criollos, among them the clan of Velasco (que de nada tienen asco, according to the proverb). For the first time there is a serious investigation of the ancestry of Alarcón, among the cristianos nuevos of La Mancha, near where the large Alarcón Reservoir now sits, and those of New Spain. In her Appendix C, King traces the entire paternal lineage of the dramatist, to show that nobody in it has any real limpieza de sangre, but that with increments of land and capital in the region of Cuenca there tends to disappear from the pages of the archive all mention of the conversos and judaizantes of the fifteenth century among the landowners' forefathers. The chapter on the formation of a letrado in Salamanca at that time is excellent . Alarcón followed his law studies there in the company of the future Conde-Duque de Olivares, though more importantly in that of a troop of 180BCom, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Summer 1991) aspirants, great and small, to celebrity in literature. King demonstrates how important it is to know about the content of the law courses of the time; so often the progress of juridical argument structures a play. The first of her analyses of plays is that of La cueva de Salamanca (1623), and here she draws attention to probable hints of a reading oíDon Quijote and of a self-presentation under the disguise of the character Don Juan de Mendoza. The next phase of Alarcón's career unfolds in Seville, then a city undergoing interesting changes, and especially with regard to the mixture of populations . Though there were no Indians, there were Moriscos instead. King does well to single out one episode, when Alarcón willingly played the fool in a mock joust (1606). She selects for analysis the text of El semejante a símismo, a kind of reenactment of "El curioso impertinente," and a unique study of the mentalities of members of the merchant class (145). Next comes the better known Ganar amigos (1622), a "historical" drama, but full of characters bearing names of people living at the...