Feminism and the Honor Plays of Lope de Vega

Introduction

Introduction Lope de Vega, founder of Spain's national theater, wrote numerous plays between 1585 and 1631 deali~g with the theme ofconjugal honor.1 In these texts, the husband suspects that his wife is guilty of adultery, or that she is being pursued by another man. Since a Spaniard's honor depended, in part, on the sexual conduct of his wife,2 the husband must act to prevent dishonor. In the event that he has already been dishonored, he must "wash away the stain with blood," murdering rival and wife, if she is (perceived as) guilty. The ideal wife resists the advances of the rival through the cultivation of the feminine virtues of chastity, constancy, and vergiienza, or "shame." By and large, I define "honor play" as one in which the husband believes in the existence ofa rival pursuing his wife, as opposed to Donald Larson's more restrictive criteria. However, like Larson, I includeDina andFuenteovejuna, whichAlix ZuckermanIngber excludes as not dealing with conjugal honor, and deviate from both their lists in considering Toledano.3 Although in general I have excluded plays featuring single women whose honor conflicts can be resolved through marriage, I include Dina and Fuenteovejuna because this option is rejected in favor of bloody vengeance. Fuenteovejuna precludes marriage due to the difference in social status between the dishonored and the offender; in addition, Laurencia is married to Frondoso at the time of her atxluction by the commander. My decision to work with such a large pool of texts responds in part to a desire to avoid the "masterpieces" approach to the comedia, which can obscure its character as mass cultural phenomenon. Besides raising questions ofcanonicity, intentionally focusing on lesserknown plays allows certain constants in the patterning of formulas and conventions to become visible, as well as the 1 Introduction enonnous variety and flexibility in Lope's honor plays. For the same reason, I usually avoid using characters' names in favor of the generic "agents" of the honor-play narrative ("wife," "husband," "rival"). The intent is not to suggest that they are unchanging archetypes, but rather to foreground their particularly gendered and mutable functions in the plot. I have chosen to limit my study to the honor plays of Lope de Vega rather than undertake a comparative or genre-based analysis such as Matthew Stroud's recent examination of wifemurder comedias. There is merit in identifying characteristic treatments of a topic within the opus of a single dramatist before looking at the work of others in future studies, as the tradition of single":author books in comedia and honor-play studies suggests, especially when the dramatist under consideration influenced the further development of the comedia so profoundly , as in Lope's case. Within honor-play studies, I place my project in complementary dialogue with Donald Larson's and AlixZuckennan-Ingber's monographs on Lope, contributing a new perspective by focusing on issues ofgender and sexuality . Rather than examine the diachronic evolution of Lope's honor plays as Larson does, I have concentrated on a synchronic analysis of consistent patterns and variations in the gendering of honor. While the early date of Fabia seems to support Larson's division on the basis of Lope's shifting attitude towards vengeance into "early" (comic endings), "middle" (bloody vengeance), and "late" (tragic tonality), the result of my broader focus on conjugal honor, including texts that celebrate what Larson calls the "feminine value of vergiienza" (170-71), offers for consideration the possibility that Lope recycled "types" of honor plays through all phases of his career, for example, rewriting Pleitos (1598-1603) as Hungr{a as late as 1623. Ideals of masculine and feminine behavior and representations of sexual desire play prominent roles in these texts,4 yet most studies comprising the voluminous bibliography on the honor play do not foreground gender or sexuality as critical categories.5 The major focus of honor-play criticism has been the relationship between honor conflicts in the theater and the function of honor in _early modem Spanish culture, for example, Zuckennan-Ingber's exploration ofLope's implicit criticism of 2 Introduction honor. The interpretations I propose by no means exhaust the meanings of the plays; infact, they are'deCidedly partial, concentrating on the representation of sexuality and gender in relation to the unequal distribution of power in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish society. Hopefully this study may suggest possible paths for comparing and contrasting...