Eunuchs and Empty Houses: Coquíns Tragic Joke in El médico de su honra

Abstract

When the ill-fated King Pedro demands that the gracioso make him laugh in El médico de su honra , Coquín relates instead a most unfunny joke about a eunuch who tries to hide his lack under a mustache-guard. What the king does not know-and critics have not investigated-is that, rather than make Pedro laugh, the joke's tale of hairless eunuchs and empty houses is meant to make him think. Just as the play's imagery of daggers and bloodied hands imbues it with its sense of tragedy, the signifiers of Coquín's puzzling joke constitute an integral part of its structural logic by what they instead repress. My essay intends a Lacanian reading of the subversive function of the joke's signifiers to uncover their censored meaning within the textual unconscious. In voicing the castration symptom, Coquín gives expression to the play's unconscious message, its warning to the king, as to Gutierre, of their impending loss. (AJC)