Capital Accumulation and Canon Formation in Lope de Vega's De cosario a cosario

This article follows the threads of literary and topical allusions to interpret an underappreciated comedia madrileña, De cosario a cosario. Its action turns on two young nobles who set out to trick one another, each understating a large fortune and pretending to undergo bloodlettings to cure lovesickness. Their eventual marriage gives life to the play's title, a recycled refrán whose provenance infuses the love plot and concluding marriage with irony: Celestina declares that "de cosario a cosario no se pierden sino los barriles" when she cajoles Areúsa with a reminder of the "professional courtesy" that binds dishonest negotiators. In addition to this literary allusion, the comedia's title signifier invites readings that take into account the other symbolic dimensions of the "corsario/cosario." Lope himself chronicled the life of one such antihero in his La Dragontea, a work that suffered censorship because its account of Francis Drake's death ran afoul of prohibitions against writing about recent, American history. Despite limitations due to censorship, Lope continued to write about the New World's impact on his own society. Though it does not narrate recent, American history in the manner of La Dragontea, De cosario a cosario skips ahead one step, portraying the social consequences of early-modern globalization. That is, the court city that lives on the frenetic extraction of American silver will find its systems of values irrevocably distorted in favor of the cosario/corsario, who lives and trades on the spoils of empire without working.