“Drowned in Blood”: Honor, Bloodline, and Domestic Ideology in The Duchess of Malfi and El médico de su honra

The family bloodline was a crucial metaphor within the dramatic literatures of early modern England and Spain; again and again, English tragedy and Spanish tragicomedy depicted blood as the manifestation of competing discourses on race, class, sexuality, and gender. At first glance, the emblematic character of the bloodline—steeped, as was often the case, in the imaginative mythologies associated with those competing discourses—might appear too abstract and stylized to significantly shape our understanding of the more specific concerns of domesticity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In fact, the language of bloodline points distinctively to domestic ideology in the early modern drama of England and Spain. Both traditions emphasized the home space during this time, and both staged the home in terms of bloody violence—literalizing threats to and preservation of the family bloodline. This article argues that a comparison of bloodline in English and Spanish drama reveals that the negotiation of domestic ideology through physical violence was divided along gender lines between the two traditions. While the small but popular genre of Spanish wife-murder plays manifested corrupt or threatened bloodlines in the bodies of women, English domestic tragedy located such hazards in the bodies of men. Ultimately, early modern English drama suggested that the male body was uniquely susceptible to domestic threats; on the post-Reformation English stage, the bloodline was at its most vulnerable when embodied by the head of household.

The degree to which the familial bloodline was materially understood in Siglo de Oro Spain has garnered significant critical attention, due in large part to the fifteenth-century limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) statutes that decreed Jewish and Moorish ancestry a “taint” to the purity of a family’s Christian blood. By the seventeenth century, the Spanish corrales featured plays that embraced the rhetoric of limpieza de sangre to frame a broad range of social and familial conflict while at the same time pointing up the flaws inherent to the Inquisitorial epistemology that had authored and validated the blood purity statutes. The concepts of familial and sexual honor especially were annexed to limpieza de sangre on the Spanish stage, as ideals of masculine and feminine honor were articulated in terms of blood purity and the shame of social dishonor met its “cure” through the purging of diseased, impure blood. Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El médico de su honra (The Physician of His Honor), published in 1637 but probably first performed 1628–1629, is perhaps the best example of the dramatic conflation of familial dishonor and tainted blood. In it, the jealous husband Don Gutierre, thinking his wife, Mencía, has been unfaithful, determines to bleed her to death in order to “cure” his diseased honor:

Médico soy de mi honor, la vida pretendo darle con una sangría; que todos curan a costa de sangre.

(I am the physician of my honour, I intend to give it life with a bleeding, for everyone cures at the expense of blood.)¹

Although Gutierre’s murderous actions to protect his honor are kept secret and are nominally sanctioned by the complicit King Pedro, the play ends with a series of profound ironies—Mencía was never unfaithful, and King Pedro forces the jealous husband to marry his former love Leonor, whose honor was compromised by Gutierre himself—that reveal the absurdity of the social codes of blood and honor. While the familial bloodline was most prominently rendered in terms of limpieza de sangre and sexual honor, the enforcement of such codes (and the literalization of the blood purity metaphor) onstage regularly took the form of a powerful social critique.²

In Renaissance England, however, the language of blood had a distinctly different history. The use of blood as a metonym for lineage, of course, was common.³ England’s relationship to blood was also deeply connected to the Protestant Reformation’s transformation of ritual and sacrament as well as its distrust of theater.⁴ The most hotly contested revision of blood in...