Fatal Union: A Pluralistic Approach to the Spanish Wife-Murder "Comedias"

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)

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Defining the Comedia : On Generalizations Once Widely Accepted That Are No Longer Accepted So Widely

Stroud¹

2006

boc

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How we think about the Spanish comedia as a genre has changed dramatically over the past thirty years. Informed as we are today by a multitude of decentralizing theories, it is hard to believe that so much time and energy was spent, just a generation ago, on trying to establish a list of characteristics and generalizations that would not just define all comedias and exclude those that one would intuitively not include in the genre, but would provide the singular, monolithic approach to understanding the comedia . The assertions reconsidered here include the claims that the comedia was monolithic and conventional, that it faithfully reflected Spanish society, that it was profoundly conservative from social, political, and moral points of view, and that comedia plots uniformly followed a trajectory from order disturbed to order restored. Since many of those assertions are no longer held to be so incontrovertibly true, it is tempting to ask, "Were we wrong then or are we wrong now?" Such a question falls into the trap of assuming that one interpretation or one approach to literature is right and all others are wrong. Ultimately every generation must reconsider everything it knows about the literature that is handed down to it and come to its own conclusions, its own generalizations, and its own definitions. Otherwise, literature, especially that produced centuries ago, runs the risk of becoming irrelevant to readers of future generations.

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Fatal Union: A Pluralistic Approach to the Spanish Wife-Murder "Comedias"

Cited by 10 publications

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Bibliography of Publications on the Comedia (1990-1991)

Bibliography of Publications on the Comedia (1990-1991)

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

Defining the Comedia : On Generalizations Once Widely Accepted That Are No Longer Accepted So Widely

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