Juan de Grajales’s El bastardo de Ceuta: A Wife-Murder Comedia Gone Wrong?

By virtue of its serious tone throughout and its central focus on conjugal honour, Juan de Grajales’s (c. 1570?-c.1633) little-known El bastardo de Ceuta extends the trajectory of the early modern Spanish wife-murder plays. This is particularly significant, given that the punishment for the wife suspected of adultery can be plotted along axes that allow for a dénouement other than a violent and calculated murder, for a tragic end is the sensational norm. From this perspective, then, the comedia by Grajales, a playwright and professional actor, stands as one of the earliest among the group. Moreover, El bastardo is unique in the portrayal of not one but two female characters—both the sacrosanct figure of the mother and both guilty of adultery—whose lives are ultimately spared in the justice administered. In this play, what separates the violence of the passions from measured reason is traced through the comedia’s leitmotif of memory, evidenced through the images of paintings, portraits, and symbolic mirrors that abound, in addition to other key references. Likewise, the play serves to underscore the Thomistic doctrine of memory, cognitive understanding, and appetitive will as the excellence upon which prudence, the highest virtue, is founded, and which leads to truth and morally appropriate actions based on universal good and mitigating particular situations.