Lope de Rueda's Comedia Eufemia: A Prelude to Criticism

Lope de Rueda's Comedia Eufemia: A Prelude to Criticism Carroll B. Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles Marshall McLuhan, commenting on the relation which exists between drama and other forms of public art and the society to which they play, has remarked that any American movie, if seen outside the United States, takes on the appearance of subtle political propaganda. He sums up a series of observations by saying that acceptable entertainment has to flatter and exploit the cultural and political assumptions of the land of its origin.1 What McLuhan says about place, Ernest Martin- ènche once applied to the drama and its time. "The drama," he says, "is above all the expression of the ideas a given period holds concerning its past and its present life."2 As literary critics concerned with the drama of a foreign society, separated from our own by time as well as by place, we must be fully aware of the relation between a given play and the society in which it was produced, which is to say we must take into account the pre-eminently public character of the genre called "drama" before we can consider its merits as literature . By this nebulous term "relation of the play to society" is meant the way in which the play projects on to the members of the society the consciousness of being alive at a particular time and place, in a society where life is lived according to certain values and assumptions which comprise the "ground rules" of the game. The play may reassure the audience and flatter their assumptions about themselves, or it may seek to needle them out of their complacency by calling those assumptions into question. It is this sort of reflection of values in Lope de Rueda's Eufemia which I propose to discuss. The critics have unanimously identified Boccaccio's ninth story of the second day as Lope de Rueda's source. This fact, besides allowing us to compare the two works and isolate Rueda's original contributions, allows us to address the more general, and for our purposes more important, question of "the hispanization of Italian works." Contrary to a well-established belief, this is not simply a matter of changing the Tiber into the Tagus and simplifying the plot. The pertinent question may be formulated in this way: "What values and assumptions caused a particular presentation of a given set of events to succeed in Italy, and how had those values to be modified and substituted in order for a presentation of the same set of events to succeed in Spain?" The events common to both Eufemia and its Italian source are these: A woman is falsely maligned and her honor impugned. Instead of actually sleeping with her, the slandered gathers some circumstantial evidence — the arrangement of furniture in her bedroom , the location of a mole on her body — which he presents as proof that illicit sexual relations have taken place. Later, the slandered woman confronts her accuser in the presence of an authority figure and forces him to confess, with the resultant restoration of her honor.3 As always, the differences between the two works are more significant than the similarities. To begin, Lope de Rueda is concerned with his protagonists ' lineage. Before the play begins we learn from the "Introito" that: "En un lugar de la Calabria, auditores, hubo dos hermanos, de ilustre sangre nacidos, un varón y una hembra."4 In addition, there are two comments later in the play to the effect that Eufemia and her brother Leonardo are "more than they seem" — a standard sort of euphemism which may be translated "of noble blood but disguised for the time being." For his part, Boccaccio is unconcerned with this aspect of any of his characters. In Bernabò and Ginevra, Boccaccio gives us husband and wife. Lope de Rueda changes this contractual relationship into one of blood, which confers on it an entirely different significance . Boccaccio's villain, Ambrogiuolo, is motivated to slander Ginevra not because he bears her or her husband any particular ill-will, but simply in order to win a bet. In Rueda's play, Paulo's slander of...