Dissembled Identities: Felipe II as a Possible Character in Antonio Coello y Ochoa's Celos, honor y cordura

Courtly literature and art have long been utilized as propagandistic tools to exalt ruling dynasties, to propagate certain political interests, and even to recast historical events in order to portray a given monarch in a more favorable light. The disjunction between the private lives and public images of monarchs of the Habsburg court in Spain present a particularly compelling example. In artistic representation, we need only look at the iconographical programs crafted for public festivals celebrating the birth, death or marriages of members of the royal family for evidence of politically motivated image shaping, such as the funeral exequies for Philip IV.¹ Literary encomia of Spanish monarchs for the sake of projecting aggrandizing public images are most evident in the patronage plays, often commissioned by the dignitaries themselves. These have come to constitute a genre of their own, known as genealogical comedies, more than thirty of which were composed by Lope de Vega (Zugasti 25).² Viewed in their most positive light, such plays served as a school, "en donde al público se le hacía partícipe de una visión triunfante de la historia, mediante la exhibición de acontecimientos históricos recientes o la evocación de los hechos del pasado de la monarquía o de algún gran linaje" (Ferrer Valls, "El juego del poder" 160).

A more cynical view, however, might posit that some dramatic works depicting monarchs do not serve as a mirror of history, but rather as a distortion of it with ulterior motives. Such are those genealogical comedies by Lope de Vega that made Menéndez Pelayo irate due to their manipulations of historical facts: "Su desprecio se transformaba en cólera cuando Lope se permitía transgredir la verdad con mayúsculas, la verdad de las crónicas, en favor de cualquier apología familiar, como en La fortuna merecida" (Ferrer Valls, "Lope de Vega" 16). The extravagant staging of theatrical works that exalted the monarchy, such as those performed at Aranjuez in 1622 to celebrate the seventeenth birthday of Felipe IV, had several purposes:

Podían servir de instrumento para asentar la unión entre la corona y sus súbditos; o podían funcionar como medio muy eficaz para iniciar, o fortalecer, un viraje político, o una campaña propagandística. Pero más que nada, causaban impresión la inmensa riqueza de la Corona Real, y la magnificencia y ostentación que exigía en todas partes el ejercicio del poder. De vez en cuando un derroche extravagante podía justificarse como arma de la Realpolitik.

(Davies 71)

I wish to explore in this brief study a play by Antonio Coello, Celos, honor y cordura, that may be a rewriting of a historical episode in the private life of Felipe II and despicts him in a rather nefarious light.

Antonio Coello y Ochoa (1611-1652) is usually ascribed to the school of Calderón and is best known for his collaborations with him and other Spanish Golden Age dramatists of some renown such as Rojas Zorilla, Pérez de Montalbán, Vélez de Guevara and Solís.³ Pérez de Montalbán is one of several contemporaries to laud our dramatist in the Índice de los ingenios de Madrid that he included in his miscellany Para todos: "Don Antonio Coëllo, cuyos pocos años desmienten sus muchos aciertos, y de quien se puede dezir con verdad, que empieça por donde otros acaban, escrivió [. . .] otros muchos versos a diferentes sujetos que tiene echos de grande profundidad y valentía, y entre ellos dos o tres Comedias" (f. 228r). Of the works that Coello penned on his own, the tragedy El conde de Sex, which details the queen's complicated relationship with the young favorite Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, is the most widely-known. It is a work celebrated by critics as early as Bances Candamo⁴ for its depiction of regal decorum, as the queen steadfastly suppresses her own amorous passions and jealousy for...