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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title A Study of Antichrist Typology in Six Biblical Dramas of 17th Century Spain Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/00d7v8rw Author Wells, Jason Allen Publication Date 2014 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE A Study of Antichrist Typology in Six Biblical Dramas of 17th Century Spain A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Spanish by Jason Allen Wells December 2014 Dissertation Committee: Dr. James Parr, Chairperson Dr. David Herzberger Dr. Benjamin Liu Copyright Jason Allen Wells 2014 The Dissertation of Jason Allen Wells is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Study of Antichrist Typology in Six Biblical Dramas of 17th Century Spain by Jason Allen Wells Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Spanish University of California, Riverside, December 2014 Dr. James Parr, Chairperson This dissertation examines Antichrist types manifested in the primary antagonists of six biblical dramas of seventeenth century Spanish theater. After researching the topic of biblical typology in the works of theologians Sir Robert Anderson, G.H. Pember, Arthur W. Pink, and Peter S. Ruckman, who propose various personages of both the Old and New Testaments that adumbrate the Antichrist, I devise a reduced list based on extant plays of the Spanish Golden Age whose main characters match the scriptural counterparts of my register. These characters are Cain, Absalom, Haman, Herod the Great, Judas Iscariot, and the Antichrist himself. I consult the Bible to provide the reader with pertinent background information about these foreshadowings of the Son of Perdition and then I compare and contrast these characteristics with those provided by the playwrights in their respective works. By making these comparisons and contrasts the reader is able to observe the poets’ embellishments of the source material, artistic contributions that in many instances probably satisfy the reader’s desire for details not found in the biblical iv narratives. I take into consideration ecclesiastical demands placed on the playwrights that can account for omissions or modifications in their theatrical productions of the source material. I also analyze how the authors make use of non-scriptural sources and incorporate them into their portrayals of my proposed Antichrist types. Unlike many dissertations in the field of Spanish, which offer alternative readings to classic works of literature, this study is unique in that it examines relatively unknown biblical dramas of seventeenth century Spain by implementing the novel approach of typology, focusing not on heroes but rather anti-heroes. v A Note on the Chapter Titles Given the subject matter of my dissertation - Antichrist typology in six biblical plays of 17th century Spain - I have maintained the biblical theme in the titles of the chapters. The following is an explanation of each chapter title: 1) Genesis = to discuss the genesis of the work; how the idea came about. 2) Revelation = to reveal Antichrist's characteristics from a biblical perspective as well as from Medieval commentators' points of view. 3) Chronicles = to discuss social and historical events that people in the Middle Ages attributed to the coming Antichrist; namely, the Black Death, the Great Schism 4) Psalms = to discuss writings on Antichrist’s features from early church fathers as well as from 15th century Castilla 5) Acts = to discuss the Antichrist in medieval drama and the treatment of the figure of Satan in Golden Age Theater. Plays consist of 3 "acts," hence the heading title. However, the titles of the plays studied in this dissertation will have chapter headings under their respective names. 6) Exodus = to conclude the dissertation; to "exit" from it. vi Table of Contents Genesis …………………………………………………………………………..………. 1 Revelation ………………………………………………………………………..……… 5 Chronicles …………………………………………...…………………………..……... 28 Psalms …………………………………………………...……………………..………. 36 Acts ………………………………………………………….…………………...……... 47 La creación del mundo y primera culpa del hombre……………………………...70 Los cabellos de Absalón……………………………………………….….…….125 La hermosa Ester………………………………………………………..……...144 La vida y muerte de Herodes……………………………………………..…….173 La vida y muerte de Judas………………………………………………..……...211 El Anticristo……………………………………………………………..……...240 Exodus. .……………………………………………………………………..…..….......281 Works Cited ……………..……………………………………………………..……… 286 vii GENESIS The concept for this study began while I was undertaking an independent study on various plays written by twentieth century playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo. One work in particular, En la ardiente oscuridad, was especially appealing for its depiction of the militant Christ figure Ignacio, a new student whose arrival at the school for the blind immediately disrupts and rejects the apparent optimism enjoyed by his peers. Through this rejection of the pupils’ happy world the protagonist emphatically insists they are unwilling to face reality and succeeds in demonstrating the impracticality of their collective delusion. Like Jesus, who recognized that his teachings would clash with the accepted philosophies and ideologies of his time and thus warned his disciples: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34), Ignacio so advises his new classmates: “Yo os voy a traer guerra y no paz” (74). This paraphrasing of the verse from Matthew’s gospel emphasizes that the messianic role of Ignacio is also militant, alluding to an aspect of Christ that is often ignored. It is this neglected feature that prompted me to write a paper titled “Ignacio and the Power of Negative Thinking in Buero Vallejo’s En la ardiente oscuridad.” Interested in biblical themes and the Bible itself, I wanted to know if Buero Vallejo had ever written a biblical drama; that is, a dramatic representation of a story rooted in the Scriptures and one that took place in biblical times. I soon discovered and became immediately fascinated with Las palabras en la arena, a play consisting of only one act yet the first of the playwright’s works to receive critical acclaim (Pennington 56). 1 The work is based on the text of John 8:1-1, the story of the adulterous woman forgiven by Jesus just prior to being stoned to death. Buero Vallejo maintains the basic premise of the gospel account yet embellishes it by adding depth to the characters of the Pharisees, assigning proper names to them and giving each a distinct personality. However, the apogee of the playwright’s creativity in this brief yet powerful drama can be observed in the words that el Rabí writes in the sand, words that directly address the specific sins of the five men who had accused the woman. This detail is not found in the scriptural episode. After some investigation it was determined rather quickly that there really were not any known or at least accessible biblical plays from the same time period in which Buero Vallejo wrote. It was not until winter quarter 2012, when researching a topic for my final paper in a course on Golden Age Theater that I realized that the corpus of comedias bíblicas resided in this epoch of Spanish literature in drama. Now there was material out there from which to work, and based on my independent study of the Bible, specifically the prophecies of Daniel and the book of Revelation, I began to formulate a topic for the Long Paper and eventually, the doctoral dissertation. The study of typology in the Bible has always intrigued me and thus, given the extant plays that were available I was able to develop the concept of types of the Antichrist in seventeenth century Spanish drama, selecting three works based on Old Testament stories and two from the New Testament, plus a play on the Antichrist himself. The subgenre of the comedia bíblica constitutes somewhat of an anomaly in my opinion, the reason for which probably has to do with the religious culture that existed in 2 Spain at the time the respective poets developed their plays. Since the Roman Catholic Church discouraged the masses from reading the Bible, regarding itself as the interpreter of the Scriptures, many people would not have had the proper frame of reference to maneuver through a work such as Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s El Anticristo or Lope de Vega’s La hermosa Ester. In an article about the latter play, Edward Glaser writes that the reader’s private knowledge of the source story (in this case the biblical book of Esther) enables him or her to grasp the significance of the unfolding of events in the theatrical version of the scriptural account. Glaser’s observation can obviously be applied to other books of the Bible and their literary counterparts, and so this is precisely the contribution that I believe I can make to the study of the subgenre of the comedia bíblica: my knowledge and study of various books of the Bible offers an insight not often encountered in the field of Golden Age drama, and combining this feature with literary criticism I am able to provide a unique analysis of the topics of seventeenth Spanish theater in general and Antichrist typology in biblical plays in particular. For example, my familiarity with passages from Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14, both describing Satan/Lucifer before his fall, allow me to identify and explain the significance of the opening scene in Lope de Vega’s La creación del mundo y primera culpa del hombre. Likewise, believing that the fourth beast of Daniel 7 is the same beast as that of Revelation 13, I am able to detect how exactly Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, through his character Elías Falso, weaves together a composite picture of the main character coming up out of the sea in El Anticristo. Something that makes my approach unique is that I am able to support my arguments by consulting scriptures and secondary sources.