"Entre verdad y mentira": Woman and Metatheater in Lope de Vega's Los amantes sin amor

As Everett W. Hesse has pointed out, the comedia frequently shows that "men and women are tricksters who try to manipulate one another to gain an advantage" (44). While this is the case in Los amantes sin amor, Lope's Octavia is by far the mother of all dissemblers. She is the embodiment of fictional fabrication, the sign and maker of every "fábula fingida" (165a). This definition accentuates the interplay between "reality" and "falsehood" in all human activity. Taken to the realm of theatrical and literary production this relationship would fall under the general rubric of metafiction. Thus seen, metafiction occurs when the text or the spectacle advertise their "false appearance," their artefactual condition, that is, their literariness or theatricality, in order to point towards a "real purpose." That the said purpose is inevitably literary or theatrical, and, consequently, equally contrived, matters not in metafictional discourse. It is the emergence of self reflexiveness, the gesture towards the recognition of the fiction within the fiction that is of import here. The comedia is prone to that gesture, thus underscoring the elusiveness of dramatic texts. I propose that we understand Octavia's role in Los amantes sin amor as that of exposing the comedia's very being as artefact, that is, its metafictional constitution.