Abstract

In El laberinto de Creta Lope proposes a world in which the equivalency of acting and being calls attention to the basic workings of the dramatic medium in the process of its unfolding. The play reinscribes the desires found in its Ovidian source (Met. 8.152-82) into the context of the Spanish honor code of the seventeenth century in a way that questions the logic of honor by revealing its artificial, fictive constitution. Lope portrays Teseo as a negative and antiheroic figure whose inability to resist his erotic desires undermines the viability of the honor code and threatens to send the play toward a tragic end. In this and other crucial junctures of the piece where honor undergoes crisis, performance appears thematized, as in Jupiter's alleged transformation into the bull that seduces Pasife and Ariadna's disguise of a man playing a woman. By consciously invoking the play as play in this manner, Lope signals the highly theatrical nature of the conflict between love and honor and directly challenges the convention that says dishonor equals loss equals tragedy. The result is the "monstrous" blending of the tragic and the comic—tragicomedy—in which desire disengages honor and love from the rhetoric of presence. (MK)

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