Lope De Vega and Calderón
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Joachim Küpper Discursive Renovatio in Lope de Vega and Calderón Joachim Küpper Discursive Renovatio in Lope de Vega and Calderón Studies on Spanish Baroque Drama. With an Excursus on the Evolution of Discourse in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and Mannerism ISBN 978-3-11-055608-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-055609-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-056357-3 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. 6 2017 Joachim Küpper, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: RoyalStandard, Hong Kong Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com Acknowledgments This book first appeared in German, in 1990. Since its argument touches upon questions of a more comprehensive nature, exceeding the specialist framework of scholarship pertaining to the Spanish Golden Age, it found readers from other disciplines – and from outside the German academic context – right from the start. Time and again, a number of international colleagues encouraged me to have it translated, so as to facilitate a reception beyond the confines of what has become a langue mineure in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet there were more urgent things to do; and then two attempts failed, because the translators capitulated before the task of rendering my German academic prose into the lingua franca of the present-day world. DS Mayfield, to whom I am deeply indebted, finally produced the text which is at the basis of the present edition. Let me also thank the copyeditor Samuel Walker, who took care of all the details that still required revision. The study here submitted is not a translation in the strict sense. I tried to preserve the essence of the original, while deleting from the notes all those passages not immediately pertinent to the argument, since they refer particu- larly to scholarly discussions conducted within German Romance studies. The main text has been revised with the aim of disencumbering it from details that seemed inessential in retrospect; some of this material has been transferred to the notes, but most of it has been deleted. I retained the title, including the Latin term renovatio, which might seem somewhat unconventional at first sight. It alludes to the political program of the first Roman Emperor, Augustus. His attempts at re-stabilizing a society dis- integrated by decades of internal strife were characterized by the propagation of a renewal of “traditional” Roman virtus. In its first phase, the success of this restorative strategy was impressive; but, as is the case in sixteenth and seven- teenth century Spain, the renewal of philosophical, conduct-related, and literary paradigms from former times was finally not able to bring historical processes to a standstill. As in the German original, I make ample use of neologisms based on Latin or Greek etyma that have already made their way into Western vernaculars. Moreover, I have preserved numerous single quotation marks, which are much more common in German than in English; these are used whenever I refer to expressions, concepts, or terms as they are generally understood in the textual corpora under scrutiny, seeing that it would be nonsensical to indicate a single specific reference. In order to avoid redundancy, I do not provide translations of DOI 10.1515/9783110556094-202 vi Joachim Küpper quotes from Iberian texts; my reading is always (very) ‘close to the text’. Quotes from Latin (and occasional ones from Greek) are taken from well-known sources, the translations of which are easily accessible, if needed. This book will be difficult to receive for readers who do not have any knowl- edge of the Christian tradition. It does not contain many passages that do not, in some way or another, refer to the Old and New Testaments (and specifically the Pauline epistles), to Origen and Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, to William of Ockham, or to Erasmus of Rotterdam, Luther, and Descartes. I have come to realize, however, that the notion of central dogmatic concepts of this religion (such as original sin, for instance) has become more and more imprecise in recent decades – even in Western scholarly contexts. For this reason, I have added a considerable number of explanatory notes not contained in the original version. Although already implied in the above paragraph, it should be stated ex- plicitly that the light cast on an epoch separated from the present by at least 350 years is not informed – as has been customary in the humanities since the beginning of the nineteenth century – by an attempt at conceiving of the past as a stage in the development towards the present. Legitimizing the present by modeling it as the ‘consequential’ result of what was already latently ‘there’ (in more erudite terms: teleology) is an important approach to writing history; but such an identificatory attitude should not obstruct the comprehension of the past’s possible alterity. The worldview that is given expression to in Spanish Baroque dramas is certainly not apt to serve as a basis for present-day conceptu- alizations; but it may be highly useful, specifically in a period of rapid globali- zation and various ‘culture clashes’ linked to this process, for becoming aware of the extent to which the premodern stages of our own Western history differ from what we are used to taking for granted, from what we tend to consider ‘reasonable’ or to accept as ‘ethical’. I have not incorporated a discussion of the research performed during the 25 years since the first edition; for, in substance, not much seems to have changed in this field over the last decades. This said, there are some very occasional hints at publications that appeared after the first edition of this book. As was the case for almost all German Romanists of my generation, my first field was French studies; my doctoral dissertation deals with Balzac and the question of realism. My second field was Italian literature; I published two books and a few articles on some classical texts written in that language. It was at the university of Munich where I – already an assistant professor as per the American nomenclature – was trained in Spanish literature. At that time, Ilse Nolting-Hauff, who taught in Munich, was the most eminent Hispanist Discursive Renovatio in Lope de Vega and Calderón vii in Germany; and she was an incredibly beautiful woman. Her fields were medi- eval courtly literature, conceptism, and Mannerism, including its manifestations in twentieth century literature. Ilse was an utterly worldly person; problems pertaining to theology and the history of religion were of minor interest to her. Yet, besides introducing me to the treasures of Iberian literature, she regarded my activities with favor and supported my research, although she was aware that I was writing a book whose focus was far removed from her own mindset; and she taught me a scholar’s single most important virtue: the love of working hard. I dedicate this edition to her memory. Berlin, November 2016 Table of contents Acknowledgments v 1Defining the Baroque: Overview of Research, Outline of the Study’s Thesis 1 2 Typologizing Remodeling and Restoration of the exemplum: Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza 28 3 Religious Drama as Corpus Christi Play: The auto sacramental as Condensed Manifestation of the Restored Discourse 85 3.1 The Genre’s Background 85 3.2 The Patterns of Medieval Allegorism Hybridized: Lope de Vega’s El viaje del alma 91 3.3 The Calderonian auto: Concretization of the Material and Schematism of the Modeling 116 3.3.1 Introductory Remarks: Calderón’s autos qua Corpus 116 3.3.2 The Re-Subjugation of Pagan Myth: El divino Orfeo 121 3.3.3 The Incorporation of Post-History: La lepra de Constantino 161 4 Excursus: Ruptures, Changes, and Evolutions. Outline of the Medieval, the Renaissance, and the Mannerist Discourse 222 4.1 Introductory Remarks 222 4.2 Medieval Discourse as Analogism’s Stage of Order 223 4.3 Renaissance Discourse and Mannerism as Manifestations of the Stage of Disintegration 253 4.3.1 Renaissance 253 4.3.2 Mannerism 280 5 The Colonization of the New Worlds: Calderón’s El príncipe constante 293 6 The Honor Case as ‘Emblem’ of a Damaged World: Calderón’s El médico de su honra 376 7 Concluding Remarks 455 References 464 Index 479 1Defining the Baroque: Overview of Research, Outline of the Study’s Thesis I To situate the dramatic works of Félix Lope de Vega Carpio and Pedro Calderón de la Barca within the concept of the Baroque would – at first glance – hardly seem problematic. Yet the fact that R. Wellek’s conclusion from 1945 – that the category ‘literary Baroque’ is as indispensable as it is vague1 – need not be corrected substantially even today, does raise several questions as to the seem- ingly self-evident classification of the works of Lope and Calderón as ‘Baroque’. These queries pertain to the category’s adequacy for the designated object, that is to the problem as to what the notion of the Baroque may contribute to a description of drama in the siglo de oro. Moreover, they affect the concept itself and its delineation, that is to say the question of which specifications and rela- tivizations of the customary definitions one may hope to obtain by studying a selection of comedias and autos sacramentales.