El Hércules de Ocaña (review)

Luis Vélez de Guevara's El Hércules de Ocaña, a reworking of Lope's El valiente Céspedes (1612-1615), is about heroism and love, two themes that infuse the play in a variety of contexts and ways. The play is structured around three principal episodes in the life of Céspedes, a historical figure from Ocaña: the defense of his sister María's honor against Rodrigo; his military accomplishments in Flanders; and his determination that his military achievements abroad be duly recognized by Felipe II, with whom he eventually meets upon his return and who fittingly accords him the honor he deserves. The action evolves logically from presentation to complication, climax, denouement, and resolution. Typical of plays of the time, what transpires in El Hércules de Ocaña reaffirms contemporary political and social ideology and art's ability to mirror reality. To achieve his intended goal, Vélez de Guevara relies on the complementary combination of text, context, form, and language.

In his introductory study, Antonio Carreño explains the mythological genesis of Hercules and his archetypal significance. He also provides a summary of the figure's role in the classical literature of Greece and Rome and its reappearance as a mimetic variant of Samson in works written during the resurgence of biblical exegesis in the Renaissance. Carreño shows how the play's structure and action builds on Céspedes's heroic stature and portrays him as a character who epitomizes virtue, honor, loyalty, and courage. He illustrates how the evolution of the play's secondary action is contextualized by the central themes of heroism and love and how the secondary characters, both men and women, mirror Céspedes's noble character. Carreño compares Vélez de Guevara's play with those of other Golden Age authors who characteristically integrate historical reality into their theatrical works and rely on an identifiable system of language use and social mores and expectations to make the heroic accomplishments of their protagonists believable. Céspedes's achievements on the home front and abroad, as Carreño points out, bring to mind Spain's own national and international exploits of the period. Carreño does an excellent job of showing how Vélez de Guevara melds real life heroism and the heroic archetype within a national context.

Following Carreño's analytical study, C. George Peale reviews the preparation of the present edition, which is based on three different versions of the text. He explains how the three extant versions of the play vary and illustrates in detail why it is possible to conclude that Vélez de Guevara's text dates from 1621. Textual discrepancies between the three versions are noted at the bottom of each page. Questions of vocabulary, historical allusions, idiomatic expressions, grammar, and syntax are addressed in detail in the notes that appear at the end of the play. These are followed by a list of words and proper names that warrant explanation and the verse in which they appear.

Manson and Peale succeed in making Vélez de Guevara's play accessible to a wide reading audience. Although this reviewer would have preferred that the list of works cited by Carreño and Peale be listed immediately after their respective studies rather than at the end of the latter's, this edition of El Hércules de Ocaña is a welcome addition to the works and studies of Spanish Golden Age theatre.