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Spain  Love  Stephen Rupp The canonical texts of Renaissance and baroque literature in Spain create the impression that few people would have lived in the burgeoning cities of the time by choice. Descriptions of urban life draw on conventional images and attitudes that contrast its confusion and complexity with a candor that is displaced temporally into the past or spatially into the countryside. In this literary world the city offends through an excess of sensations and worldly goods, and urban existence is presented as a vale of tears that demands dissimulation and adjustment to circumstances. Such practices extend to all aspects of social life, including love. The city is the site of amorous exchanges between ladies (damas) and young gentlemen (galanes); honest matrons (matronas), more honored by valorous acts than by courtly flattery, can be found only in the countryside. Spanish pastoral romance plays on the opposition of urban amours to country love, projecting an idealized space where shepherds pursue honest courtship and visitors from the court can lament the loves they have lost. The women of the pastoral world can nonetheless be as distant and disdainful as ladies at court, and their frustrated suitors often echo the language of amorous lament. Pastoral romance explores the mutual implication of the country and the city, revealing the dependence of rural simplicity on the tangible attractions of city life. Despite the unfavorable literary image of crowding and excess, urban life drew commoners in large numbers to its attractions and members of the nobility to the courts often in residence there. Official efforts to discourage laborers from abandoning the countryside and to require the landed aristocracy to maintain at least partial residence on their ancestral holdings created an endemic tension in Spanish society, for cities were alluring in part because they were cultural centers. Royal and aristocratic courts fostered a culture of poetic production, literary reflection, and conspicuous wit. The canonical corpus of the love lyric is in large measure the product of an urban court culture, literate in conception and self-­ conscious in expression. Drawing on conventions that can be traced through Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance lyric to the Latin love elegy, the poets of the Spanish Baroque describe male desire in opposition to female detachment. In the typical pattern a male lyric speaker recounts the repetitive effects of his passion to a female beloved who is disdainful, indifferent, or simply absent. Emphasis falls on the internalized experienceof the male subject, described through conventions of contradiction and paradox (techniques of formal variation and intensification that E. R. Curtius identified as features of mannerist style).1 In addition, love poetry represents the male subject as experiencing the forms of uncertainty and dislocation that J. A. Maravall associates with baroque culture.2 The rhetorical and mental world of baroque love poetry asserts itself in two parallel sonnets by canonical poets of the period: Francisco de Quevedo’s “¡Ay Floralba! Soñé que te . . . ¿Dirélo?” and Luis de Góngora’s “La dulce boca que a gustar convida.”3 In each of these poems Amor appears in the guise of Cupid, wounding unwary victims with his arrows and his venom, as a male speaker reflects on the disconcerting effects of passion. Each sonnet also presents a range of mannerist variations. Quevedo intensifies to striking effect the conventional oppositions that define the experience of male desire, while Góngora exploits a complex of images drawn from classical mythology to describe the appearance and the effects of female beauty. Quevedo’s sonnet engages a situation encountered more frequently in Latin elegy than in Spanish court poetry: an erotic encounter with the beloved. In the first line—“Shall I speak of this?”—the speaker displays his reticence to address a subject that is unusual and that may exceed the bounds of propriety. The speaker’s answer appeals to his own erotic experience: he did not enjoy his beloved in reality but simply dreamed of her. The separation of the encounter from waking life (“it was a dream”) makes it appropriate for him to describe the experience (“I was making love to you”). He frames his dream-­ account of erotic love entirely in the conventional oppositions of Petrarchan love lyric, combining the “hell” of male passion with the “heaven” of female beauty and serenity. The “flames” of his desire mingle with the “snow” and “ice” of his beloved, terms that evoke both a white, idealized female body and the beloved’s indifference to the speaker’s desire and...

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