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  • Life is a Dream and the Fractures of Reason
  • Ana Laguna

Virtue! a fig! . . . If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions: but we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts.

(emphasis added, Othello I.1.3)

Although, as one of the most unreliable characters in literature, Iago can seldom be trusted when articulating his intentions, his speech often conveys fascinating insights into the competing arguments of the early 1600s. In the above quote, the ensign holds the common view that "virtue" as a transformative attribute can be negated and substituted by the individual power of reason, which alone is capable of determining and altering human behavior. This idea was not new and had become somewhat common at the turn of the century, as writers of every genre and religious creed—perhaps less emphatically than Iago—increasingly invoked the glorifying power of reason to escape the constraints of passion. But now, this substitution conveyed an entire cultural shift: the displacement of a moral framework by a rational one, a process that would arouse and reenergize an old (and powerful) philosophical friction: the debate over the limits of human capacities, either to obtain a true knowledge of this world and/or to achieve ultimate salvation in the other. Situated within the [End Page 238] asymmetric axes of theology and natural philosophy, Iago’s reasoning—and the secular line of inquiry it implies—would prove to be an idiosyncratic and progressively perilous contention for Renaissance thinkers. The experiments and theories of Galileo (1564–1642), Descartes (1596–1650), Kepler (1571–1630), Hobbes (1588–1679), and Bacon (1561–1626) anticipated a mindset that would alter "universal" orders and cosmologies, thus becoming a threat to both the State and Church of Christians and Reformists alike. Soon, the awakening of man’s rational and scientific capacities would decenter and desanctify heavenly realms by subjecting the skies to very human and material laws and experiments.

While European philosophers, theorists, and empiricists reversed traditional worldviews or reflected, like Shakespeare or Racine, on newly emerging paradigms, writers of the Spanish Baroque have been traditionally considered to be too entrenched in their Catholic dogmas to participate in or even consider such transformative discussions. However, critical works of the last three decades have challenged this perception by revealing the extent to which the Spanish literary tradition—even with its inquisitorial constraints and honor-code pledges—also took part in the moral and philosophical frictions that preceded the paradigm shifts of modernity. Even a play as emblematic as La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) (1635), heralded once as the icon of conservatism, might also expose the attrition between moral and rational (pre-scientific) frameworks. Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), often considered a representative of the Spanish honor paradigm as the "dramatist who authoritatively answers all the questions that he poses"1 is now approached as an author of questionable assumptions rather than universal principles, and this emphasis on instability is now allowing us to draw new or, at least, stimulating implications from his work.

It is from this more open perspective that this reading of La vida es sueño explores the role of reason in the main protagonist’s thought and restitution process. Dispelling the cynicism of Iago’s view, Segismundo—a prince abandoned and unjustly imprisoned by [End Page 239] his father—regains his natural and symbolic order through a lengthy negotiation between rational thought and the moral, virtuous prerogative of "obrar bien" (do the right thing). The play, this paper contends, might include an encompassing exploration of the limits of such a moral compass when inserted in the overtly rational mind of Segismundo or the scientific mindset of his father, Basilio. At the heart of this exploration lies the triad of reason, virtue, and science, the great tenets of Scholasticism, suggesting a deep influence of this line of thought in the play. There is a good cause for such influence, since the antithetical negotiations between the opposites of virtue and reason had found in...

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