Dramatic Perspective in Calderon's El mayor monstruo los celos

DRAMATIC PERSPECTIVE IN CALDERÓN'S EL MAYOR MONSTRUO LOS CELOS Edward H. Friedman, Johns Hopkins University Calderón's El mayor monstruo los celos has divided critics and classifiers, possibly because the world picture which frames the work is not as complex as the theatrical representation of that world. Man's passionate nature is more easily analyzed against the background of a social order imposed by man (as in the so-called honor tragedies ) than against that of an extraterrestrial , fixed order. Calderón's Herodes cherishes his will in a universe denying him freedom, and the events of the play must be judged within the perspective of irreconcilability. If Calder ón is indebted to the historian Flavius Josephus and his successors for his dramatic material,' he owes his formal structure to Lope de Vega as initiator of the Golden Age comedia. Another influence, equally significant but by its nature less easily discernible, seems to be the spirit of classical tragedy and specifically its view of man in the universe. El mayor monstruo los celos does not have to be justified as a tragedy in the same way that A. A. Parker has chosen to justify La devoción de la Cruz and A. Irvine Watson and Arnold Reichenberger El pintor de su deshonra.2 Nor, uniquely, does the Christian ethic play a substantial role in its interpretation. If not the most tragic of Calderón's plays in the modern, more inclusive sense, it may be by virtue of its proximity to Greek and Roman models the work most closely in line with archetypal canons for tragedy. Gwynne Edwards relates the central intrigue of the two parts of La hija del aire to the form of classical tragedy. He distinguishes the principal figures (Semiramis, Nino, Menón) and their suppression by a preordained fate from characters whose successes and frustrations are determined by their ability to govern their passions.3 In El mayor monstruo los celos the dominant atmosphere , that of the ineluctability of fate, allows no one to control his destiny . The affinity with classical tragedy derives from the dual role of fate as the primum mobile of the dramatic action and an omnipresent force which renders ineffective man's assertion of his will. At the opening of the play the Tetrarch feels assured of military victory and willingly enters combat in an attempt to make Mariene queen of the world. Mariene is disturbed by the prediction of a Hebrew astrologer that the Tetrarch's dagger will kill that which he most loves. Mariene's consequent obsession with death and Herodes ' increasing jealousy overshadow the mutual love and eventuate the prophecy . That the circumstances do not accidentally lead to the denouement — in spite of Herodes' stabbing his wife while intending to kill Otaviano — seems obvious from Calderón's repeated préfiguration of Mariene's death. The Tetrarch's immediate reaction to the prediction is disbelief, real or feigned, and he discredits astrology in order to dissuade Mariene from heeding the prophecy. Casting the dagger from a window to free his wife from the mental burden, he wounds his general , Tolomeo (I, i-ii);4 the dagger is thus established as an agent of destruction . When Otaviano discovers a portrait of Mariene, the queen's brother Aristóbolo calls the subject a dead 43 beauty (I, viii), an ironically accurate statement since fate has condemned her to die. Calderón unites the concrete presages of death (the dagger and the portrait) in a figurative enactment of the play's culminating scene: Herodes, trying to murder Otaviano, thrusts his dagger into the portrait of Mariene as it falls from the wall (II, iv). Now, as later, Herodes is defenseless not against his human enemy but against the force whose existence he has denied, the force which directs the signs of the stars and which causes the portrait to drop. The air of impending death heightens with the entrance of the queen and her ladies-in-waiting, dressed in mourning on the entrance of Otaviano into Jerusalem (III, ii). Through the paradoxical deliberate chance which marks the events of the work, Mariene intercepts the Tetrarch's letter with instructions...