In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Prologue
  • Elizabeth R. Wright*

Theater, Court, and Community

The cover illustration with which we mark the milestone that is volume 70, number 1, is the title page of the only known manuscript copy of Obligar con el agravio (see cover and fig. 1). Francisco de Vitoria (fl.1648–58) presented a comedia de capay espada set in Madrid as a calling card in the negotiation of that decidedly Spanish duality of local belonging and courtly affiliation. What did it mean to be a natural of Toro? This castilian city's prestige stemmed from its historical connections to the realm's emergence in the late fifteenth century as the fulcrum of the Spanish Monarchy. In seventeenth-century Castile, belonging to a local community depended on the status of natural (native) and vecino (citizen). As a natural of Toro, Vitoria would have enjoyed access to public office and ecclesiastical benefices. Prior to the legal codification of local citizenship in the early 1800s, Tamar Herzog describes "citizens by performance," where men—and occasionally women—in cities and towns of all sizes negotiated citizenship through a range of actions rather than with formal declarations before notaries (42).We know, moreover, that Vitoria associated with a circle of poets linked to the Count-Duke of Olivares in the years just before his fall from royal favor in 1643. Biographical information about Vitoria compiled in the classic reference manuals takes us no further than these tantalizing clues of the nexus where poetic sophistication met local identity.1

The frequent use of vecino and natural to identify playwrights in the seventeenth century hardly erases their power as signifiers. On the contrary, Vitoria's poetry and plot make palpable a facet of the comedia's social cachet that Barbara Fuchs underscores in her introduction to The Golden Age Drama of Spain: "[t]he comedia was an urban phenomenon that also staged urbanity: wit, rather than force, frequently carried the day" (vii). Epitomizing a mid-seventeenth-century conception of this urbanity, Obligar con el agravio emulates Pedro Calderón de la Barca, then the undisputed master of the comedia de capa y espada. Its myriad plot twists emerge from a house with two entrances. As ruses and tricks endanger honor, galanes vacillating between loyal friendship and deadly rivalry face off on the Prado, long a setting for duels in the comedia urbana. Through the title, Vitoria explores—and ironizes—the hyperbolic conception of the aristocratic [End Page 5] honor code that anchors the comedia de capay espada subgenre, emulating Calderonian dramaturgy in the "reinterpretación del saber provisional e incierto del refranero" (Vitse xxvii). In particular, Don Diego—one of the three galanes whose shifting allegiances drive the plot—tests his ability to "oblige with affront," and thus, restore family honor. Ultimately, the sluggish third act reminds one of the delicate equilibrium between timing and plot twists that Calderón wrought in such masterpieces as La dama duende and Casa de dos puertas mala es de guardar.

No sources tell us whether Obligar con el agravio was performed at the time of its likely composition circa 1640. In 1653, the compilers of the fourth installment of the Escogidas anthology, the Laurel de comedias: cuarta parte de diferentes autores, included it as the second of twelve anthologized comedias. Here, print circulation confers or confirms membership in a literary elite metaphorized as leaves of a laurel branch and, thus, worthy of Apollo, god of poetry. Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, Vitoria's play was selected for a volumen facticio titled Libro extravagante de comedias de varios autores, recogidas por I. R. C. (London, 1865). Here, the compiler construed the allure of Vitoria's comedia in terms of the Flores Sanctorum, where extravagante refers to saints at the margins of the canon. Whether we incline to its markers of courtly urbanity or find its allure as an extravagant outlier, Obligar con el agravio—like hundreds of other still mysterious plays—awaits our attention, whether through the Manos Teatrales database, the two versions on the Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, or, better still, in on-site examination in the Sala Cervantes of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.2

The library's vault...

pdf

Share