Majesty and Humanity: Kings and Their Doubles in the Political Drama of the Spanish Golden Age (review)

Departing from the dual nature of the monarch's body, its natural and mystical aspects, Majesty and Humanity thematizes processes of disrobing, the humanarse of kings in two plays by Lope de Vega, El villano en su rincón and El Rey Don Pedro en Madrid o El Infanzón de Illescas. It explores what the moments when kings divest themselves of their regal dignity can tell us about the emergence of the early modern absolutist state alongside a persistent nostalgia for a past of individualistic, heroic violence, beyond the juridical constraints of monopolizing, institutionalizing state power, and the awe-inspiring but remote and deadening majesty operating through state bureaucracy, ritual, and the gaze.

The first play dramatizes the apocryphal story of a king becoming lost while hunting and being forced to confront a stubborn peasant, who does not wish to see his king but rather is content to live out his life in his "corner" beyond the reach of the courtly world. The villano of the title, Juan Labrador, insists on a human space beyond the world of majesty, a natural, idyllic retreat, a privacy in contradistinction to the public world, the hollowed-out rhetoric of court and idol ceremony. His avoidance of the royal gaze is read in relation to political thinkers from Ribadeneira and Saavedra Fajardo to Quevedo and Guevara, for whom the royal gaze bound the subject through awe to a semidivine majesty, bringing the individual into being in a political sense and providing a model for emulation, a mirror where a morally exemplary human being is reflected. Solar imagery often invoked in this regard reflected the life-giving and exemplary nature of this gaze. Gracián's version of the source story of Lope's El villano en su rincón underlines the difficulty of self-knowledge for kings and portrays the experience of the King of France, Francis I, being lost while out hunting as a philosophical awakening to the truth of his own condition, through confronting his own self without the trappings of majesty and royal business, a desengaño and self-awareness crucial in his development as a great king. Lope's play comically strips the King of dignity with Lisarda spurning his advances and refusing to pull off his boots for him. Its focus, however, is on the King's unhappiness within his role and how his descent to humanity is indispensable in the production of an ideal ruler and for him to accept the power he wields, which induces fear, unless guided by reason. Juan Labrador is a challenging double, whose final integration into the world of the court as privado and philosopher represents an alternative vision of community, rooted in humanity rather than fear. This incorporation is, of course, forced on him, so while it holds out a possibility of authenticity beyond the new social formations of the early modern state, ultimately it cannot escape the coercive power upon which they rest.

El Rey Don Pedro en Madrid o El Infanzón de Illescas plays deliberately on the dual reputation of this Trastamaran monarch as cruel or just: his violent slaughter of the horse that has thrown him at the outset of the play contrasts with the image of him reading state papers calculated to overawe his antagonist Tello or the tableau vivant with which the play ends of the monarch in state celebrated as lawgiver by the brother who will later usurp the throne through fratricide. Despite his destiny as founder of the new modern state, ultimately he is unable to submit to the repressive order of his own majesty, needing to know that he is a "man" by engaging in a prohibited duel with his opponent, a ritual representative of the historically obsolete way of life, the cult of...