The Honor Plays of Lope de Vega by Donald R. Larson (review)

Reviews 365 relevant in performed drama, that the visual dimension is prominent wholly at the expense of the aural. As I noted in my own theoretical essay on the subject (“Visual and Aural Signs in the Performed English Renaissance Play,” RenD, N.S. 5 [1972], 143-69), the complex episte­ mology of a performed play involves every mode of theatrical sign and symbol: language, vocal tone, gesture, stage movement, make-up, cos­ tumes, hand props, decor/scenic devices, lighting, music, and sound effects. Dessen limits his examples to movement (his largest category, which includes symbolic entrances and exits, and stage positionings), gestures, costumes, and hand props; a chair in Thomas Lupton’s All for Money is the one scenic device discussed. Experiencing drama must call upon the auditor’s ear as well as the viewer’s eye. For another matter, the large number of examples used to prove rather obvious critical points (the linking analogue, say) does tire after a while, provoking the reader to suspect the author of having lengthened two or three longish essays to fill out a book. A case in point is the last and, to my mind, the least successful chapter, “The Stage Psychomachia .” Here is example-packed historicism with a vengeance—nothing less than a catalogue of the psychomachic device in fourteen Tudor and Stuart plays (six by Shakespeare), in five other plays where its use is problematic, and in two more for the sake of negative examples. This chapter may be unfavorably compared with one in Dessen’s first book, in which psychomachia and the morality play tradition were germane to a full reading of The Alchemist; but, lacking such critical development in the present book, the multiple examples make for pale reading. An exception to that type of writing is a little gem of an analysis (pp. 8891 ) of the anonymous Woodstock in terms of the gestural and imagistic idea of whispering. This is the first attempt ever at a close reading of that play, and it reminds us that Dessen can be a most effective inter­ preter. His explications of Jonson’s plays in his first book, for instance (even though the too-moralistic stance toward Bartholomew Fair con­ vinces few), remain among the leading analyses of those works. Similarly, the merits of the Viewer’s Eye far outweigh its demerits, for the book solidly enhances our awareness of the visual element in Elizabethan drama. BROWNELL SALOMON Bowling Green State University Donald R. Larson. The Honor Plays of Lope de Vega. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. Pp. 228. $14.00. Hispanic scholarship has produced a number of excellent studies on the role of honor in seventeenth-century Spanish society and, more particularly, in Lope de Vega’s enormous dramatic corpus. The mono­ graphs of Américo Castro, W. L. Fichter, R. Menéndez Pidal, A. García Valdecasas, and A. A. van Beysterveldt are especially rewarding. Lar­ son’s book treats the same subject, yet escapes repetition by approaching the topic as a dramatic theme in nine works, specifically: El castigo 366 Comparative Drama del discreto, La bella malmaridada, Las ferias de Madrid, Los comend­ adores de Córdoba, Peribáñez, Fuenteovejuna, La victoria de la honra, Porfiar hasta morir, and El castigo sin venganza. The first three are from Lope’s early period of creativity before 1600. Comendadores, Peribáñez, and Fuenteovejuna are from a middle period (1600-1620); and the last three plays come after 1620. A brief introduction concerning honor as a dramatic theme precedes the analyses of the plays. Therein Larson determines honor to be “not fame or glory, but simply the esteem and respect of one’s peers. . . . Honor is something external to the individual” (p. 5). The dramas utilize this externality of the esteem by always directing the threat to the in­ tegrity of a female member of the protagonist’s family rather than to the reputation of the protagonist himself. The typical honor play thus evolves around three main characters: (1) an intruder who lusts for (2) the wife (who may or may not remain faithful) of (3) a jealous husband whose actions are dictated by what he supposes others will think of him...