Calderón and the Seizures of Honor (review)

239-44) that L.F. was not entirely successful in having his shepherds speak in local dialect, because his own Hterary education, as well as his desire for acceptance by a wide public, forced him to compromise with a mélange of Salamanca dialect and Hterary Castillan . Thus, by selecting only the sayagu és elements for study, Professor Lihani does not show how they function in a complex interweaving of speech patterns which characterizes the plays. Another infelicity in this method is the concomitant duplication of much of Menéndez Pidal's Manual de gramática histórica española, in order to contrast divergent developments in sayagués and CastiHan. The result is a generally accurate, but for the most part redundant , summary of Spanish historical grammar. A descriptive presentation of sayagués would have made this study more acceptable to the linguist and more accessible to the literary scholar. The second part, "Glosario," includes "todas las voces que nos parecen especialmente llamativas por su forma rústica " (p. 335). Again, this subjectively selective criterion is often self-defeating. An archaic, non-dialectal agora finds a berth near alemana, dialectal but not exclusively sayagués; the enigmatic and typically Leonese soncos is duly registered , but so are the unremarkable sospiro and toste, an early GalHcism. With this heterogenous lexicon, the glossary, despite its admirable documentation , still leaves unanswered the initial question: what is sayagués? Perhaps the book would have been more definitive had the author distinguished between the totality of L.F.'s language and its sayagués component. If the latter was nothing more than a conventionalized rendering of pastoral dialogue, it should not be accorded the status of a full-fledged dialect. On the other hand, if L. F. really attempted to write in the Leonese of his native region, then one would have to challenge the established view that Leonese , unlike Aragonese, was not used as a vehicle for literary expression beyond the thirteenth century. Problems of this type are not sufficiently clarified, despite the copious, often minute, data. Still, the author has undertaken an unusually thorough exploration of the language of a neglected author which can serve as a stimulus for stylistically-oriented appraisals of the function of sayagués in the pastoral drama. University of Pittsburgh Steven Hess ít¿^ HONIG, EDWIN. Calderón and the Seizures of Honor. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972. 271 pages. $11.50. Edwin Honig is a remarkably versatile individual: poet, playwright, translator , professor of English and comparative literature at Brown, and, as Hispanophile , author of important critical commentaries on Lorca and Calderón. The chapters included here grew out of two books of his translations, Calderón: Four Phys (1961) and Life is a Dream (1970). "The practical problems of translating the plays touched off speculations about their meaning and intention , . . ." (p. vu)—an uncommon preliminary to criticism, but a most fruitful one. The audience Honig addresses is the educated EngHsh-speaking student of drama, and his aim is the admirable one of making Calderón better known to that pubHc. There are thus no overt polemics in the body of the study, but some pointed comments on poetics— obviously aimed at Comediantes—are 85 found in the introductory and concluding chapters. The plays studied in detail are A secreto agravio, secreta venganza , La devoción de la cruz, El al· calde de Zalamea, La dama duende, and La vida es sueño. A brief biographical note on Calderón follows, and in a disproportionate (58 pp.) appendix all passages quoted in the text in EngHsh are given in the original. Notes are placed at the end, preceding the index. The bulk of this material has appeared previously, either as introductions to the volumes mentioned above, as articles in TDR and other journals, or, in the case of chapter 4, in the Fichter Homenaje. Calderonian honor is presented here as "a universal figure for invincible necessity (p. 18), as "less a profession of belief in a theme for cautionary morality than an aspect of method and development in dramatization" (p. 19), and "as generating certain timeless instances of the conscience battling to emerge into fuller self-awareness" (p...