The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Theater (review)

Although at his book's conclusion Robert Bayliss modestly states that the work is "perhaps focused disproportionately on only one instrument" (163), the study is much broader and more ambitious than the title would indicate. The challenges before the author are twofold: first, to trace a literary tradition across cultures and several centuries from medieval Occitan courts to the corrales of early modern Spain; second, to explain how the essence of the tradition (or the usefulness of the expression "courtly love") can remain intact given such severe changes in social circumstances over time and space and given the significant generic distinctions between troubadour poetry and the comedia. Bayliss clearly sees the work that is cut out for him, laying out lucid and thoughtfully prepared arguments and explanations that appear to anticipate almost all possible objections or requests for clarification. The book's main duty, admirably fulfilled, is to prepare a new set of analytical tools, replacing enduring yet outmoded notions of courtly love that "assign an arbitrary limit to troubadour influence that has more to do with conventional literary historiography than with the literary traditions it describes" (13). The author replaces the stereotypical essence of courtly love, that of devotion, with two new essential ingredients, namely, male self-absorption and female exclusion. Because these ingredients are constant over time, yet can be freely manipulated and reflected upon in numerous ways, courtly love as a discourse can be precisely tracked and analyzed through authors as varied as Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Chapter 1 tests out the idea of courtly love as an "ideolect" and gives the troubadours even greater credit than has been granted to them by most literary historians. For Bayliss, the open-endedness of the discourse started with the troubadour's own playful games of love, and this flexibility made it possible for Golden Age playwrights to continue in the same vein. Bolstered by arguments from scholars such as Meg Bogin and Laura Kendrick, the author examines the interplay between the freedom granted by performance culture and the more constant desire among poets for male linguistic mastery that lead to the exclusion of the female subject. At the same time, the book looks at the trobairitz (female troubadour) tradition and how women poets responded in kind within the same genre. The tenso or exchange between troubadours of opposite genders serves as an analytical model for discovering how later dramaturgas would manipulate the discourse of courtly love while keeping its key elements intact. Although Bayliss admits that early modern playwrights, male or female, would not have had trobairitz poetry in their hands, his assertion that "the discourse of courtly love is invariably gender-inflected" sums up his cogent arguments of how the tradition spread and continued.

Chapter 2 connects the staple comedia theme of honor to courtly love by way of medieval romances of chivalry and how both genres reflect a social order threatened by individual desire. This threat thus relates to a "conflict between the ideological legacy of the classical tradition and the interest of medieval romance authors in representing a desiring male hero" (71). A testament to Bayliss's attempt to cover all the angles is his comparison between courtly love in the Celestina that "is all-consuming and socially destructive" (87) and the Neoplatonic love tradition that came afterwards. Measuring the impact of each, he affirms, "Neoplatonism may therefore add to the complexity and tenor of love's representation in the Comedia, but the legacy of the troubadours maintains its decisive influence on the terms through which desire is performed" (88).

The thesis of The Discourse of Courtly Love has been put through many stringent tests of the author's own device and proven itself very robust. Throughout the book, Bayliss is careful not to lose sight of the comedia when citing his many examples. In the first two thirds of Chapter 3 he cites the Arte nuevo, Don Quijote...