The Role of King Pedro in Calderon's El Medico de Su Honra

THE ROLE OF KING PEDRO IN CALDERÓN'S EL MEDICO DE SU HONRA Lloyd King, University of the West Indies (St. Augustine, Trinidad) In post-Lopean drama, the playwright who turned his attention to a "caso de honor" involving a married woman had a quite limited number of possibilities at his disposal. Either the woman was guilty and had to be killed along with her lover, or she was not guilty and her husband, luckily for her, found out in time, or most terrifying of all, the wife was innocent but was so compromised by circumstance, that she met a tragic end. In terms of characters , the dramatist also found himself forced to deal with certain stereotypes, the chief being the figure of the injured husband himself, who, once his wife's fidelity was suspect, was committed to plotting a course of action and to adopting tactics which would almost certainly lead to an act of homicide. To deal with the fact that husband-protagonists are generally only circumstantially distinguishable , Calderón sought to associate his husband-heroes with some specific image which was suitably interwoven into the fabric of the play as a conditioning factor. This is the case with El pintor de su deshonra and El médico de su honra. In the latter play, Calderón, for his dramatic ends, exploited certain possibilities in another stock character, the "rey de comedia", and his conventionsanctioned intervention in the domestic life of his subjects, as the fount of honour and justice. The principle from which he operated was that which linked the interests of the nuclear family with the health of the body politic. Alfonso Garcia Valdecasas has summed up this principle in his statement "el honor femenino es el centro de gravedad , el cimiento de la cohesión social. En el honor de la mujer descansa la comunidad de la familia, la de las casas y linajes, la del cuerpo político entero."' A woman's honour could affect the body politic and therefore, according to this conception, was the king's business . In the case of El medico de su honra King Pedro has always been considered essentially a secondary character who provides evidence to help us judge Gutierre and the morality of his actions . The views of British hispanists on this are neatly summarized by C. A. Jones in the introduction to his edition of the play, where he expounds the opinions and arguments of A. A. Parker, E. M. Wilson, A. E. Sloman and others. For Jones, Pedro "is certainly an odd mixture: cruel, just and recklessly generous by turns, the overall impression left by Pedro is of his unstable and unpredictable character; and these things lead one to question the value of the authority with which he supports don Gutierre's action."2 We would, however , contend that to see the king merely as an accessory to an atrocious deed is to undervalue his significance in the play. In the process of so arguing we hope to show that Calderón wished to discuss far more than a local set of ground rules for the operation of group relationships. When Calderón set out to write his version of El Médico de su honra he had at hand three plays featuring King Pedro, El rey Don Pedro en Madrid y el infanzón de lllescas, Audiencias del rey Don Pedro, and the earlier version of El médico de su honra, all plays which have ben attributed to Lope de Vega.3 What I hope to show, among 44 other things, is that we gain added insight into Calderón's play by referring to plays other than the earlier El médico de su honra, expanding on the method used by A. E. Sloman in his book The Dramatic Craftsmanship of Calder ón.4 In the three plays under discussion it is fair to say that Pedro is intended to be seen in a favorable light, quite well summed up in the King's assessment of himself in El rey Don Pedro en Madrid y el infanzón de lllescas: No todas las verdades son las que acredita la fama; y...