Fatal Union: Pluralistic Approach to the Spanish Wife-Murder Comedias (review)

Reviews277 Gutierre. Fischer reasons that since neither Avero nor Arden is a pastoral paradise, they share some basic likeness. The fact is, however, that a Shakesperean "green world" like Arden is not so much a place as a morally rejuvenating spiritual process; Avero has no comparable function. Golden squeezes drama's most massive character into the relatively small and ill-fitting costume of an honor hero when he asserts that the problems which (in Golden's view) plague Don Gutierre—the need to "maintain his masculine ego" a fear that the code which demands he commit murder is "barbaric," and an impulse to "rationalize" an "irrational anger"—are also at the core of Hamlet's agonized soul. This volume is obviously and directly influenced by recent trends in criticism . In Cohen's words, it seems to be a "settling of accounts with the prior generation of critics of the comedia." Some contributors focus on the linguistic tensions in plays which, they claim, expose rents in the seventeenth century social and philosophical fabric. William Blue argues that, in the comedies of Calderón and Shakespeare, order is undercut by the estrangement of language from the ideas it is supposed to communicate. Denise Dipuccio continues in a similar vein, asserting that these two dramatists "lay bare examples of the arbitrary nature of language and its effects on comprehension of cosmic harmony .' ' Lope's El ganso de oro and As You Like It, according to Frederick de Armas, challenge traditions "questioning classical examples," "breaking boundaries" in order "to lead the audience to more readily accept the mythification of theatrical space. An especially successful article in this collection is Edward Friedman's comparing Romeo and Juliet to two Spanish plays employing the same theme. The comparison here raises important questions about generic differences between Elizabethan and Golden Age theatres and the expectations of Spanish and English audiences. Finally, Muir's piece offers a useful revisiting of the debate about modernizing translations of older works, here focusing on Calder ón. Raymond Conlon St. Peter's College Stroud, Matthew. D. Fatal Union: Pluralistic Approach to the Spanish WifeMurder Comedias. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1990. Hardbound. 188 pp. $31.50 In this book, Professor Stroud offers a thorough and provocative discus- 278BCom, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Winter 1992) sion of the wife-killer plays of the Spanish Comedia. He has been led to a reformulation of the problem by what he views as an unfortunate propensity on the part of critics to search for hidden meanings in order to uncover the single truth that would explain the significance of the works. He argues that in order to unfold their theories, critics have either dismissed inconvenient contradictions or have consulted a reduced number of plays. In his study, he rejects both the monistic view that advances a single interpretation and the skeptical approach that despairs at the possibility of arriving at any conclusion at all. He opts, therefore, for what he calls a dispersion of meaning or a pluralistic view of these dramas (21). In an effort to explain the unfeasibility or undesirability of single interpretations , he searches through previous treatments of the theme. He finds that these sources provide many reasons for the killing of the wife: adultery, misogyny, a need to exercise control over the woman, the desire to mete out punishment for defying authority, a way to resolve unhappy or uneven marriages . Thus, Golden Age plays are beholden to many traditions and often retain the multiplicity of themes inherited from their sources (54-57). Stroud suggests that uxoricide plays should not be seen as moral or social treatises but as "awe-inspiring plots intended to please audiences that demanded more and more complication, spectacle, and rhetoric." In order to "please the audiences " the plays are shrouded in ambivalence and the protagonists are judged positively or negatively depending on the point of view of the spectator (75). He also denies the appropriateness of interpreting these plays from a religious point of view, since the discourse herb presented is more pagan than religious (94-95). Stroud argues that the great variety of situations present in these plays renders single judgements impossible: there are varying degrees of responsibility and...