Love in the "Corral": Conjugal Spirituality and Anti-theatrical Polemic in Early Modern Spain (review)

Reviews197 O'Connor, Thomas Austin. Love in the "Corral": Conjugal Spirituality and Anti-theatrical Polemic in Early Modern Spain. Serie "Ibérica," 31. New York: Peter Lang, 2000. xv + 395 pp. With the same thoroughness and lucidity of style evident in his Myth and Mythology in the Theater of Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1988) and in his introduction to the edition of Ei encanto es la hermosura (1994), Thomas O'Connor has produced a major work of criticism on the texts and contexts of the Baroque comedia nueva, divided into two major parts: 1) a tracing of the history of anti-theatrical polemic in Hapsburg Spain, and 2) a study of representative plays to analyze the attitudes toward love and marriage illustrated in them. His task is daunting, since it involves research on several fronts, but the result is impressive and consistent with the contemporary demand for "situated" analyses of literary texts. In spite of the undeniable links between Baroque theatrical texts and the virulent polemic against their performance in the seventeeenth century, the two parts of the study do not mesh quite as well as one might expect. O'Connor pits the anti-theatrical (because anti-erotic) stance of the ecclesiastical hierarchy against the "healthier" attitude of comedia playwrights toward sex and marriage. The problem is that many anti-theatrical polemicists were probably either prohibited from attending theatrical performances or from reading partes de comedias by their vows or their superiors; others may have refrained from doing so to maintain their moral purity. They were, unlike, say, Augustine and C. S. Lewis, not msightful, sharply critical readers of objectionable texts. On the contrary, in many of the excerpts that O'Connor presents, they seem to be almost proud of writing sin conocimiento de causa. To adduce these often ranting texts to support the sanity of the comedia can lead to some of the same pitfalls as, for example, using the book censorship campaigns of irate US parents' associations to enhance the reputation of Catcher in the Rye and Lolita. This reviewer is not competent to judge how much the first part contributes to the already voluminous documentation on the anti-theatrical polemic, but English- 198BCom, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002) language students of Baroque history and literature owe a great debt of gratitude to O'Connor for his translation of numerous, previously unavailable passages into English. In the second part, O'Connor, unlike the polemicists he so correctly castigates, really grapples with comedia sub-genres and individual texts, focussing on the presence of a heterosexual love that avoids both base lust and puritanical abstinence, leading to marriages that are not merely of social or political convenience. It is refreshing to see the constraints and trials of love in the comedia taken as seriously as the sex drive itself. "Love" is not "sex" misspelled in this study. Yet readers who share O'Connor's panegyrical view of marriage should be warned when approaching the Spanish comedia (caveat spectator out lector, for the following reasons: 1 ) Married life itself is generally not portrayed in the comedia except in unhappy circumstances. One could say of these plays what Kierkegaard (EitherIOr; Book 11, trans. Walter Lowrie) said of the comedies of his day: this precisely is the pernicious, the unwholesome feature of such works, that they end where they ought to begin [. . .]. [It] requires no great art to have courage and shrewdness enough to fight with all one's might for possession of the good which one regards as the only good; but on the other hand it surely requires discretion , wisdom, and patience to overcome the lassitude which often is wont to follow upon a wish fulfilled. One could add Emerson's dictum from the essay on "Love": The soul which is in the soul of each, craving for a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arises surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue : and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and re-appear, and continue to attract; but the Reviews199 regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches...