Ermanno Caldera: Il teatro di Moreto (review)

que represente su sombra, en mirando en él su imagen se templa y desapasiona (p. 59) When lovemaking is seen as a learning process , a preparation in deceptive conditions for a married life in which deceit may have no place, it is natural that the role of teacher should be assigned to love itself: "que es luz del entendimiento/amor" (p. 45). Laurencio , invoking the authority of Aristotle and Plato, declares that love is the professor of all knowledge porque sólo con amor aprende un hombre mejor sus divinas diferencias (p. 62). Thanks to love, he says, the desire for knowledge is inherent in man. Even Octavio , Finea's father, believes in the efficacy of love's pedagogy. He says of his daughter: luz va tomando ya; por cierto creo que si amor la enseñase, aprendería (p. 100). This "catedrático divino" (p. 115) finally imparts wisdom to Finea; the learning she has acquired is the continuing study of the man who is to be her husband: amor me ha enseñado; tú eres la ciencia que aprendo (p. 129). Through love's teaching Finea, the silly lady of a shadowy unreal comedy, is transformed into the potential wife of a serious honor play, a woman about to be devoted to her husband's good name and to the principles set forth in our first quotation: rule over her family and holy silence. She may expect now to progress from the world of appearances to the world of reality, from becoming to being. This, then, is how I propose we should regard the comedies of the Golden Age. The world of comedy, like the world of the serious play, is unstable and illusory. But in each of the two genres the characters are made to handle the problems of deceptive reality in quite different ways. A Segismundo , apprehending the world's engaño, learns to despise it, to probe beneath it until he finds the certainty of moral rectitude, and to live as if the deceitful world did not exist, sub specie aeternitatis. A Finea, apprehending this same engaño, learns to accept it, to live with it in human time, recognizing that it is but a transitory stage on the road to the moral rectitude that will be hers with marriage. The serious play requires its protagonist to seek the eternal essence underlying the illusion; the comedy requires him to seek his personal truth in the midst of the temporal illusion, to find grace in the sacramental life of worldly marriage. Ermanno Caldera: // teatro di Moreto Pisa: Editrice libreria goliardica, 1960. Pp. 236. Joseph Fucilla, Northwestern University. Mr. Caldera opens his discussion by showing how the political policy of Olivares and the moral philosophy of Gracián and the moralists of the day tried to transform reality by the creation of a world constructed according to the universal categories of reason . This is the climate in which Moreto works and moves. "La diffidenza verso gli impeti sensuali e sentimentali, la fiducia nella razionalità, Ia predilezione d'ogni forma di raffinatezza, il rispetto delle apparenze , la creazione di personaggi equilibrati e composti . . . fanno di Moreto un personaggio fortemente rappresentativo dell- 'epoca di Filippo IV" (op. cit. p. 23). In chapter I—"Atteggiamento revisionista nei confronti del teatro precedente," Mr. Caldera brings out that Moreto recognized Lope as the master of the Spanish stage. But from the viewpoint of the new generation his plays portrayed situations that clashed with the ideals of the times, and in his refundiciones he aimed at the removal of these objectionable traits. Comparison of El desdén con el desdén, Como se vengan los nobles, De fuera vendrá with the Lopean sources, and El lindo de Don Diego with its source, El Narciso en su opinion of Guillen de Castro, the drammatist closest to Lope, show how the tension between virtue and vice is eliminated or attenuated, with virtue, al- ways strictly rational in its manifestations, dominating the action. Much of this material could have been fused into the subsequent chapters and, in fact, some of the arguments re-appear in them a number of times. Nevertheless, the critic's comparative analysis...