Theater and the Quest for Anointment in El rey don Pedro en Madrid

THEATER AND THE QUEST FOR ANOINTMENT IN EL REYDON PEDRO EN MADRID CAROL BINGHAM KIRBY Purdue University Among the eighteen extant comedias which include Pedro I de Castilla as a dramatic personage, only Calderón's El médico de su honra has received substantial critical attention. ' The work which best equals El médico in its portrayal of D. Pedro as man and monarch, El rey don Pedro en Madridy el infanz ón de Illescas, has been largely neglected/ A recent study by William C. McCrary has demonstrated the appropriateness of the application of metatheater in explicating the nature of D. Pedro as protagonist in El rey don Pedro en Madrid. 3 This essay will also employ the postulates of metatheater to elucidate further the action of this comedia. * Metatheater, as the term is used herein, derives from the original premises of Abel (the world is a stage and life is a dream) and the further refinements of McCrary on the topoi. s McCrary's terminology (the concepts of part and role, role models, and role execution) have provided the critic useful tools with which to analyze the behavior of personages who are portrayed in particular as theatrical beings. Roles are public images, or masks, which one adopts in response to a given part as one functions in society. To adopt a role, then, is to become an actor in the great theater of the world. On the quality of this theatricalization depends the social, psychological, and spiritual completion of the individual, which is precisely why Abel's topoi, so interrelated in the Spanish classical theater, are pertinent to numerous comedias. As El rey don Pedro en Madrid centers totally on King Pedro, two further premises related to monarchy and history will be considered. The first is the political-theological doctrine of the King's two bodies, according to which a monarch possessed both a finite, human essence which linked him to his fellow men in sinfulness and physical corruptibility (the body personal), and a 149 150Bulletin of the Comediantes spiritual nature (the body mystical) through which God invested in him the office of the monarchy as a continuing social institution. The ideal ruler, in theory, harmoniously incorporated both bodies/ The second postulate is the proposition that history itself is a world theater; that is, that history is the external record of individual and collective dramas/ Related to this second construct , then, is the necessity to determine in what manner and to what purpose the dramatist has constructed his entire work around the figure of D. Pedro. El rey don Pedro en Madrid begins in the village of Illescas, where disharmony among the villanos and the women's distrust of men are the result of the evil perpetrated by the local overlord. The common solution to such a situation in the comedia is the recourse to established authority, generally that of the monarchy. In this instance, however, the peasants need not go to God's vicegerent for justice, for he has come to them as a rider of obscure identity and of shadowy motivations. Only by the middle of Act I (v. 547) is the audience certain that this man is the King. The peasants' short commentary on the circumstances of the rider's presence amidst them suggests that this is an ordinary instance of the caballo desbocado motif, whereby the brute force of an animal is controlled by the superior moral power of a rational being. The actual appearance of the rider, however, communicates that this may not be so; for he enters, sweaty and disheveled, and with a bloodied sword. As we learn the details of the incident, the traditional differentiation between man and beast becomes increasingly indistinct. The rider forced the horse to perform a feat which the animal, out of fear, instinctively refused to do; and in response the former turned the horse's defiance into a motive not only to humble , but also to destroy it. Because he discerns no relationship between the provocation of the animal and the possible projection of his own lower instincts, the audience views with suspicion the rider's certainty that he has successfully avoided the error of his...