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Lope de Vega’s El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano, and El castigo sin venganza are plays ostensibly concerned with questions of love and honor.1 All three comedias center upon dilemmas facing individuals in conflictive relationships that often culminate in violence and death.2 It has been argued that because Lope favors theme over action, his plays generally exhibit little psychological depth and his characterization “can strike one as perfunctory.”3 To be sure, complex issues such as existentialist problems or a character’s deep psychology were not the comedia’s primary concerns. This theatrical genre was, after all, primarily a popular form of entertainment. Lope aimed to please his audience by giving them plays that were “swift-moving and exciting... lithe in plot and both lifelike and witty in dialogue.”4 As such, his drama tends to relegate psychology and other less immediate aspects of human existence to a secondary plane, using them only to the extent that they lend themselves to a lively illustration of theme or action.5 Be that as it may, a good number of Lope’s works do reveal a metaphysical dimension and owe much of their structure and appeal to the psychological dynamics of complex love triangles. The mechanics of these triangles and the role they play in the three comedias in question constitute a promising avenue of exploration. Concepts such as Denis de Rougemont’s notion of passionate love6 and René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire7 can be used productively in an interpretation of these plays, thus affording new perspectives into the development of the intrigues so much at the heart of Golden Age comedias.
El caballero de Olmedo, published in 1641, is the story of Alonso, a knight from Olmedo, who comes to the fair of Medina and falls in love with Inés, the lovely daughter of a widowed nobleman. Unable or unwilling to approach the young woman himself, Alonso persuades Fabia, an old bawd and sorceress, to be their go-between. Due in part to Fabia’s spells and beguiling rhetoric, Inés becomes infatuated with Alonso, even though her father has already agreed to give her hand in marriage to another knight, Rodrigo. At the prospect of having to marry a man whom she does not love, Inés feigns interest in a religious vocation and asks her father for permission to enter a convent to become a nun. Surprised but at the same time pleased with the news, the father grants Inés her request and hires two teachers to prepare her for convent life. These “teachers” are none other than Fabia and one of Alonso’s servants, Tello, who have been instructed to infiltrate Inés’s household in order to maintain communication between the two lovers. During a celebration in honor of King Juan II, Alonso has an opportunity to display his courage and bullfighting skills, both of which are much admired and praised. His prowess becomes evident when he saves Rodrigo’s life, who deeply resents this humiliation at the hands of his rival. That evening, as Alonso returns home along the solitary road to Olmedo, he is ambushed and killed by Rodrigo and his cohorts.8
Although one could argue that the rivalry between Alonso and Rodrigo stems from their vying for the love of the same woman, we will see that this alone might not be a sufficient motive for Rodrigo to kill Alonso. There seems to be more at stake between these two men than just a beautiful woman. After all, either of the two could easily marry someone just as attractive as Inés. As I will argue, Alonso and Rodrigo fight over Inés for more than her personal attributes. Granted, it is possible that at first Inés became prized and wanted in the eyes of Rodrigo because of her beauty and personal qualities. Later, however, it seems that her negative response to his amorous advances and her subsequent refusal to marry him play just as important a role in stirring his desire for her and in keeping his passion alive. Later still, the appearance of another man (Alonso) vying for Inés’s love complicates matters further and helps to turn what would otherwise be a simple infatuation on the part of Rodrigo into a blind obsession. Eventually, this obsession leads Rodrigo to kill Alonso.
Rodrigo initially desires Inés for the reasons alluded to above. In the course of the comedia, this passion becomes more complex and intense because Rodrigo believes Inés to be desired by someone else, namely, Alonso. Rodrigo’s desire is mimetic, that is, it is based on and mediated by another man’s desire. This passion, Girard observes, expresses a desire defined according to another, as opposed to a desire defined according to oneself. The subject’s aim is to usurp the qualities that he associates with another whom he regards as having the spontaneity and independence that he treasures and wants for himself. Mimetic or mediated desire is never expressed as a linear, simple movement of a subject toward a desired object. The subject seeks to appropriate the greater autonomy that he perceives in this Other who becomes his role model, and he tries to accomplish this by desiring what the model desires and by possessing what the model possesses.9
There are several triangles of mimetic desire around which the action in this play is structured. The most relevant of these is the one made up by Alonso, Inés, and Rodrigo, who play the roles of mediator, object, and subject of desire respectively. The uniqueness of the object of desire, Inés in this case, is not so much an attribute of the object proper. Rather, it is predicated on and circumscribed by the position that the object occupies in the geometrical configuration of the mimetic structure. The objects that Rodrigo and Alonso fight over – whether they be a beautiful woman, the king’s favors, or bullfighting honors – may change, but the spatial metaphor of desire, the triangle, remains.
Because Alonso and Rodrigo are vying for the same object (Inés), the former is unable to play the role of instigator of desire without also acting his role of obstacle to the subject he mediates. His is a dual role. Alonso is both the model whom Rodrigo secretly admires and the hated rival that stands in his way. The relationship between the two is at once ambivalent and contentious. On the one hand, Rodrigo looks up to Alonso, and remarks:
Muchas veces había reparado...
en aqueste caballero,
del corazón solícito avisado.
El talle, el grave rostro, lo severo,
celoso me obligaban a miralle.10Rodrigo reveres the model and longs for what Alonso enjoys. Yet, unable to fulfill his desire because of the obstacle that he believes the model has set in his way, Rodrigo curses Alonso and wishes him dead:
Yo he de matar, a quien vivir me cuesta
en su desgracia, porque tanto olvido
no puede proceder de honesto intento. (El caballero 205)Rodrigo sees Alonso’s love for Inés as an obstacle that is purposefully set in his way. This hurdle serves a dual purpose: it obstructs, but, by obstructing, it reveals something extremely desirable, something that would not be revealed if it were not for the presence of the obstacle.11 The obstruction in a mimetic love triangle makes the contested object all the more attractive, and it reveals, as far as the subject is concerned, the malicious intent on the part of the mediator not to allow the subject to attain what he yearns for.
Obstructions of this kind play a central role both in Girard’s model of mimetic desire and in the structure of this play. In Rodrigo’s case, Alonso is the stumbling block. Resentful of having temporarily lost Inés’s affections to his rival, Rodrigo acknowledges that “hasta casar[se] con ella [Inés], será forzoso que pase por estos inconvenientes” (El caballero 189). And, like Alonso, Rodrigo refers throughout the play to a perceived connection between his passion, the impasse arising from these “incovenientes,” and death:
Para sufrir el desdén
que me trata desta suerte,
pido al amor y a la muerte
que algún remedio me den....Entre la vida y la muerte,
no sé qué medio tener...
serás, mi muerte, señora,
pues no quieres ser mi vida. (El caballero 190)
As far as Alonso is concerned, there are no real barriers separating him from Inés that he cannot overcome. He is portrayed as a brave and strong knight, a man respected and admired by all, someone who, we suspect, would have little difficulty in attaining his goals and in leading a fulfilling life beside the woman he loves. On the other hand, this sterling portrayal is tarnished somewhat when Lope reveals another, darker, side to Alonso. He is described as a man “enfermo de amor” (El caballero 183) who is likewise haunted constantly by the thought of loss and death:
Vime sentenciado a muerte,
porque el amor me decía:
“Mañana mueres, pues hoy
te meten en la capilla.”... (El caballero 185)
Tengo, pensando perderte,
imaginación tan fuerte,
y así en ella vengo y voy,
que me parece que estoy
con las ansias de la muerte.
...aunque puedo
poner medios necesarios,
estoy entre amor y miedo
haciendo discursos varios....Ya para siempre me privo
de verte, y de suerte vivo
que mi muerte presumiendo,
parece que estoy diciendo:
“Señora, questa te escribo.” (El caballero 221)
Even though he finds himself in a very favorable position vis-à-vis the object of his desire, Alonso chooses to regard Inés’s love for him as an impossibility. He makes that clear in his first interview with Fabia:
Dos imposibles, bastantes,
Fabia, a quitarme el sentido;
que es dejarla de querer
y que ella me quiera. (El caballero 184)There is no reference in the text explaining why it is “imposible que ella [lo] quiera.” Alonso’s love is far from unrequited. On the contrary, Inés loves Alonso just as passionately as he loves her. Like Inés, Alonso hails from a noble family and is, moreover, well liked by her father and the king, both of whom would look kindly upon their union. With the possible exception of Rodrigo, who is seeking Inés’s hand in marriage but whom she despises, there are no serious obstacles in Alonso’s path. Nevertheless, he insists on regarding Inés’s love for him as an impossibility, and goes so far as to enlist the aid of the sorceress Fabia to perform the “miracle” that he does not believe can take place. When Alonso’s servant Tello questions his master’s judgment on this matter, Alonso makes light of his warning, and remarks that Fabia’s are indeed “santas manos” because “han de hacer milagros” (El caballero 186).
Perhaps the real problem facing Alonso is precisely the absence of obstacles. By choosing to see his liaison with Inés as an impossibility when everything tells him otherwise, he in effect creates a barrier between himself and the object of his passion where there was none before. According to Rougemont, the subject of desire becomes more passionate about those objects that are denied him than about those that are not. The more difficult for the subject to get to the object of his desire, the more ardently he will want it. Ultimately he will strive toward an object infinitely removed from him, because only there can such an object shine in its infinite splendor. But that infinite distance is at the same time an infinite obstruction. The insurmountable obstacle that the subject seeks – or, when he cannot find one, creates – is the one most suited to intensifying passion. At this extreme, the lover’s wish to be parted from the object of his desire assumes an emotional value greater than passion itself.12 Like Rougemont, Freud also sees a connection between passion and the obstacle that at once intensifies desire and hinders its fulfillment. Freud observes:
The value the mind sets on erotic needs instantly sinks as soon as satisfaction becomes readily obtainable. Some obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of libido to its height; and at all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones in order to enjoy love. This is true of both individuals and nations. In times during which no obstacles to sexual satisfaction existed, such as... during the decline of the civilizations of antiquity, love became worthless, life became empty, and strong reaction formations were necessary before the indispensable emotional value of love could be recovered.13
Like the individual in Freud’s analysis who feels compelled to “erect barriers in order to enjoy love” to its fullest, Alonso deliberately seeks out obstacles that will heighten his passion. His desire thrives on postponement and incompletion, for it requires the absence of the beloved as much as her presence. Yet, the obstruction separating Alonso from Inés is arbitrary; it is only a fictional contrivance created by him. Rougemont contends that it is the arbitrary character of the obstructions introduced in a work of fiction that reveals what that work is really about. The events narrated are but images or projections of a longing and of whatever runs counter to that longing. Alonso’s actions reveal that he acts out of a necessity that is stronger than his need to fulfill his desire and be happy. Objectively, the barrier that separates him from Inés is perfectly surmountable, but he never seems to be able, or willing, to overcome it. Since the intensity of his passion is directly proportional to the magnitude of the obstacle that he sets in his own way, it would not be unreasonable to say that Alonso purposely seeks deterrents to the fulfillment of his desire. And when there are no deterrents to be found, he invents them. He creates obstructions as if he were compelled to do so, despite the fact that the impasse generated by such barriers eventually causes his death.
There is a point in the development of this kind of desire in which the obstruction that the lover creates no longer is used simply to stir up passion, but becomes in itself the goal pursued for its own sake. Viewed from this angle, we can argue that the obstacle deliberately created by Alonso – against which he struggles and by which his desire is intensified – points to an implicit desire to die. Death, more than any other stumbling block, is the insurmountable obstacle par excellence. According to Rougemont, it represents the absolute obstruction and holds the irresistible promise of total passionate bliss and transfiguration. Death, also, in being the goal of desire, kills passion in a final act of fulfillment and destruction.14
The real tragedy in El caballero de Olmedo is not that Alonso is killed, but that his efforts were unnecessary, since Inés’s father would willingly have given him the hand of his daughter in marriage, as he states at the end of the play. The obstacle, therefore, never really existed, and the predicament was totally arbitrary. The crisis was the product of a desire that transfixes and prompts the lover to act against the dictates of reason at the cost of his happiness and ultimately of his own life.
El perro del hortelano, published in 1618, is a lighthearted comedy about Diana, a countess who falls in love with her secretary, Teodoro, but whose noble rank and sense of honor prevent her from admitting her infatuation. Whenever she sees Teodoro courting her chambermaid, Marcela, she becomes jealous, her reserve and self-control wane, and she begins to show her love for him. However, the countess’s affection turns to disdain as soon as he responds to her half-hinted courtship. Hence the title, El perro del hortelano, which refers to the gardener’s dog that “ni come ni comer deja, ni está fuera ni está dentro.”15 The play chronicles Diana’s growing love, and ends with the invention of a noble pedigree for Teodoro, a pedigree that the countess knows to be false, but which allows her to marry him without jeopardizing her social status.16
Diana is described as “una mujer vana, altiva y desdeñosa” (El perro 40), “[tan] incansable cuanto hermosa” (El perro 14), who enjoys the attention of “mil señores que están ciegos de amor para casarse con [ella]” (El perro 13). When she learns that a man has illicitly entered her room, she becomes enraged, fearing that her honor has been compromised. She suspects the intruder to be one of several noblemen who are vying for her hand in marriage. However, when she learns that the trespasser had not come to see her, she becomes curious, wondering whom he could have possibly come to visit. Her curiosity is further piqued when she learns that the intruder is not even a nobleman. At this point in the play, Teodoro’s affair with Diana’s chambermaid Marcela is brought out in the open.
The main triangle of mimetic desire in El perro del hortelano consists of Diana, Marcela, and Teodoro. Marcela’s open expression of love for Teodoro and Teodoro’s initial indifference toward Diana are enough to set in motion the mechanism of mimetic desire. The countess sees her chambermaid as someone capable of genuine passion, a feeling that Diana treasures and wants to experience for herself. Diana’s desire is awakened when she hears Marcela speak of her love for Teodoro:
Te aseguro que le adoro [a Teodoro],
porque es el mozo más cuerdo,
más prudente y entendido,
más amoroso y discreto,
que tiene aquesta ciudad. (El perro 18)Marcela functions as a mediator to Diana, stirring in the countess the desire for objects that otherwise might have little or no appeal. Diana herself acknowledges Marcela’s mediating role, and states:
...esta dama [Diana], sospecho
que se agradaba de ver
este galán [Teodoro], sin deseo;
y viéndole ya empleado
en otro amor [Marcela], con los celos
vino a amar y a desear. (El perro 24)The social barrier separating Diana from Teodoro plays as important a role in stirring desire in the aloof countess as does the passion that Marcela nurtures for him. Diana pays little attention to the suitors who come from her own socioeconomic class. She covets the love and attention of a commoner, something that is forbidden to her. She is well aware of her predicament, and wishes things could be different, at least insofar as their social ranks are concerned:
Mil veces he advertido en la belleza,
gracia y entendimiento de Teodoro,
que a no ser desigual a mi decoro,
estimara su ingenio y gentileza.
...quisiera yo que, por lo menos,
Teodoro fuera más, para igualarme,
o yo, para igualarle, fuera menos. (El perro 19)
Unlike Alonso in El caballero de Olmedo, Diana does not need to create any obstacles because there is already one in place, and her desire is visibly affected by it. El perro del hortelano revolves around Diana's desire for Teodoro, yet even at her weakest, when her reason is overwhelmed by her passion for him, she never gives in to the advances of the man she loves. On the surface, this ebb and flow can be explained in one of two ways: either Diana is trying her best to protect her honor, or she is simply "playing hard to get." Honor, however, may not necessarily be the countess's main concern here because at the end of the play she conveniently disregards the strict honor code in order to marry a man whose title of nobility she knows to be false. This leaves us the other alternative – perhaps Diana is only playing hard to get. That may be the perception afforded by a casual analysis of the situation. On another level, the teasing on her part may point to something less simplistic. Teodoro resents the game he is being forced to play and complains about the difficult position in which Diana has placed him:
¿Para qué puede ser bueno
haberme dado esperanzas
que en tal estado me han puesto,
pues del peso de mis dichas
caí, como sabe, enfermo
...cuando [Diana] ve que me enfrío
se abrasa de vivo fuego,
y cuando ve que me abraso
se hiela de puro hielo? (El perro 62-63)Diana's behavior is like that of the coquette, whom Girard describes as someone who is not willing to surrender her precious self to the desire that she stirs up in Others. However, the coquette would not feel so precious if she were not able to arouse such passion in her admirers. The worth that she sees in herself is directly proportional to the degree that Others regard her as something desirable.17 This accounts for why the countess constantly looks for proofs of this favor. She encourages Teodoro, not in order to give herself to him (which she does not) but to enable her the better to refuse him (which she does repeatedly). To be sure, Diana eventually marries Teodoro, but only after a noble title is invented for him. This unexpected plot twist is possible because of a deus ex machina that is not altogether consonant with the action or mood of the play.
We should not take the relatively happy ending of El perro del hortelano to be representative of mimetic relationships as a whole. On the contrary, works of fiction portray mimetic desire more often than not as a passion that originates and thrives in rivalry, conflict, and violence. The denouement in this comedia appears peaceful because of the contrived manner in which Diana's predicament is resolved. If the mimetic conflict in this play were allowed to run its full course and work itself out naturally, its ending might resemble more that of El caballero de Olmedo and El castigo sin venganza.
El castigo sin venganza, written in 1631 and published in 1634, portrays the events that lead up to the gory denouement referred to in the title. One of the central characters is the Duke of Ferrara, a wealthy womanizer who marries a young noblewoman, Casandra, not for love but in hopes of providing himself with a legitimate heir. He frequently neglects her for other women, and she falls in love with the duke's illegitimate son, Federico. The duke goes off to war, and the affair has time to develop. Upon returning, the duke learns of what has taken place during his absence. Enraged at having been betrayed and fearful of the dishonor that might ensue should the story become public, the duke devises a plot that involves Federico's unwitting murder of Casandra so that his son can be put to death for killing his stepmother. The illegitimate son is thus punished for a crime of which he is innocent in revenge for a transgression that he did commit.18
In El caballero de Olmedo, we saw Alonso create a formidable obstacle where previously there was none. Conversely, in El castigo sin venganza Federico and Casandra deliberately ignore real barriers in order to pursue the object of their desire. In both plays there is a fatal misapprehension of reality. The lovers act irrationally, as though afflicted by a madness that prompts them to act against reason. This distortion becomes apparent in the way the major characters in these two plays, especially the lovers, describe each other. They refer to one another as having god-like qualities, as deities, supernatural beings, thus creating an unreal, spectral ambience in which even the sullied hands of a debauched procuress like Fabia can be described as "santas manos."
It is no accident that the lover should refer to the object of his passion as a divine being. By placing his beloved on a pedestal, much as one would a god or goddess, the lover ensures the presence of an insurmountable distance separating the two. The further removed the object is from the lover, the more passionately he will desire it. And the more he desires it, the greater his need to maintain his beloved on the rarefied and inaccessible altar on which he has placed her.
The lovers in El castigo sin venganza, however, are not the only ones responsible for the ordeal that they must endure. By continuing his philandering and neglecting his wife after his marriage, the duke contributes in a significant way to the development of the love affair between his son and Casandra. The duke's role in their dangerous entanglement is clearly not limited to that of a disinterested third party. Besides being the actual promoter of his own dishonor, the duke occupies the third corner in this triangle of mimetic desire.
The duke plays an ambivalent role in this comedia and contributes to its tragic denouement just as much as Federico and Casandra. He functions both as an obstacle to the lovers and as the instigator of their desire. For example, he remarks that “en [su] casa hoy dos victorias se cuentan la que de la guerra [él trae], y la de Casandra bella, conquistando a Federico.”19 Yet, the duke incites his son and young wife's desire for each other while at the same time playing his role as the terzo incomodo [the unwelcome third party in a love triangle] that keeps the two apart. He is, after all, married to the woman whom Federico wants. The duke is a very real obstacle in the lovers' path, an essential ingredient in this type of desire, just as Federico is a threat and an obstruction to his father. The duke and his son share a great deal more than just an uneasy father-son relationship. They suffer the effects and contribute to the potentially tragic resolution of their problem. As the duke's only son, Federico is in a biological, psychological, and social sense the surrogate of his father, “su propia sangre y semejanza” (El castigo 89). The son reflects both the empirical person of the duke and the power of his father's position. Casandra might not have become fascinated by Federico if he had never stood in place of his father. Both the duke and Casandra recognize this. Upon the duke's return from the war, she remarks that Federico “un retrato vuestro [del duque] ha sido” because he, like his father, “tiene heroico valor, en toda acción superior, gallardo como discreto” (El castigo 98-99), to which the duke replies, not without a hint of sarcasm:
Ya sé que [Federico] me ha retratado
tan igual en todo estado,
que por mí le habéis tenido; (El castigo 99)The duke's voracious libido, which is never brought under control, frustrates and at the same time challenges Casandra. His philandering constitutes an obstacle in the way of her marital happiness and contributes to the displacement and projection of her passion from father onto son. The fact that there is a displacement at all points to the presence of a desire that Casandra must have had for the duke, or for what his position represents, but which has been redirected to Federico. However, this desire might not have fascinated her if the son had not stood as a surrogate of his father. As the duke's substitute, Federico plays a dual role. Having taken the place of his father in his stepmother's bed, he fills the void left by the duke while at the same time standing in the way of a possible reconciliation of the estranged couple. Thus, Federico stands in Casandra's way, reflecting and pointing to the radiant source of power and unbridled energy that his father represents, yet with the same gesture he blocks her access. After all, the son's sexual involvement with his stepmother constitutes the greatest obstacle keeping the duke and his wife apart.
The duke's desire only fascinates to the extent that it is displaced and usurped by the son. Behind that fascination hides Federico's wish to usurp his father's place beside his stepmother. For the time being, Federico has achieved his goal, but ultimately his intent may be to occupy that position permanently. One way this could be accomplished would be if the duke were to die. Although Federico does not acknowledge or even recognize it explicitly, the desire that he nurtures for his stepmother is essentially oedipal. If this desire were allowed to run its full course, it would ultimately involve the fulfillment of the unacknowledged wish on the part of the son to have the father killed.20
The incestuous story of Federico and Casandra expresses the tensions and anxiety faced by the son who fails to overcome his oedipal drive. Even though Casandra is not Federico's real mother, the basic elements of the classical mother-son relationship are present here, and to a large extent their story is developed along the lines of the primal oedipal drama. The tragic configuration of this comedia becomes apparent as we learn of Federico's erotic attachment to Casandra, the woman who has legally taken the place of his mother, and as we come to know about Federico's hostility toward the duke, whom Federico regards as a rival.
The rotten conditions of the world in which Federico comes of age in part explain his behavior. A certain chaotic state of affairs exists because of the duke's conduct. His rejection of his illegitimate son, his marriage of convenience to Casandra, and his constant philandering help to shed light onto, even if they do not justify, Federico's actions. Painfully aware of his illegitimate status and resentful of the cruel treatment at the hands of his father, Federico lashes back self-destructively at the duke. He acts out his anger by usurping arguably his father's most treasured possession (i.e., the duke's wife) and by giving in to a desire for his stepmother that hurls him down the path of ruin, ultimately costing him his life. Like the young prince in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Federico acts in a way that is in keeping with the intolerable conditions of the decadent world of which he is part and in which he must fight for survival.
The love affair between stepmother and son is motivated in part by Federico's desire to compete with his father for Casandra's affection. The duke, being the lawful husband of the woman whom Federico desires, functions as the obstacle that the son must remove in order to enjoy sole possession of the object of his desire. By allowing his desire for his stepmother to grow unchecked, Federico acts against the dictates of reason and rushes headlong into the path of a passion that eventually takes him to his death. Because he does little to keep his affair with Casandra secret, it would not be an exaggeration to say that his desire for his stepmother and his hostile feelings toward his father are accompanied by an unconscious desire to be caught and punished for having desired and enjoyed something forbidden. And indeed, he is caught and put to death for his transgression.
El castigo sin venganza embodies the destructive dynamics of the classical oedipal drama. Therefore, the fate that ultimately befalls Federico should not come as a surprise. In such inherently pernicious situations, Bruno Bettelheim observes, it seems that the only characters who manage to survive are those who have not attached themselves too deeply to any member of the immediate oedipal family and consequently are not affected by the violence that threatens to destroy its members. The duke is clearly involved in the love triangle at the heart of this play, but by rejecting and distancing himself from both his son and his wife, he manages to remain just out of reach of the fire that consumes the two lovers. Nevertheless, according to Bettelheim, there seems to be no way out: whoever by chance or by choice remains entangled in an oedipal relationship is bound to be destroyed.21
In the three plays examined here, Lope de Vega offers some penetrating insights into the nature of human desire. While many of these views apply to real people in real situations, they cannot be regarded as scientific facts. We are dealing, after all, with literary fiction. As such, we must acknowledge that we have no real basis for psychoanalyzing the characters through whom these insights are conveyed the way a psychoanalyst analyzes individuals in the real world. Works of fiction, Meredith Skura observes, are not like case histories. The “reality” of an author's characters is very different from that of an analyst's patients. To be sure, both the poet and the analyst deal with human nature, but each does so in a different way. As Skura observes:
Like the poet, the analyst asks about [an individual's] unacknowledged motives; but unlike the poet, [the analyst] traces these back to other thoughts, other experiences, other contexts, which give rise to motives and give them... meaning. Psychoanalysis [not only] identifies strange behavior but also locates a source for behavior in something besides current experience.... The experiences the analyst deals with are independent of and often alien to current experience.22
Unlike the analyst, the literary critic cannot escape into a realm unrelated to or removed from the work under scrutiny. The critic can account for a character's behavior and find meaning in it only in those contexts that the work of fiction makes explicit and immediate. A work of fiction, Skura notes, can shed light on the actions of its characters and on the motives behind these actions only when the characters' behavior is externalized. Skura continues:
The causes of [a character's] behavior work on divine, natural, and social levels, as well as on the level of the individual divided will. The explanation lies in the context, not in some additional unseen shaper of the will, and certainly not in offstage, never-mentioned past events.
To invoke unconscious motives in such a fictional world is similar to invoking tragic flaws to explain tragedy – blaming a comfortably flawed agent who does not fit in with his environment instead of realizing that the agent is an essential part of it.23The intrigues that we have come to associate with Spanish Golden Age drama – indeed with most works of fiction – are central to the appeal of literature. Unlike the conflicts of real people, these intrigues can be explained and resolved only with reference to the fictional context that gives body and meaning to them. They cannot be traced back to other contexts outside the text nor can they refer to experiences other than those that the text makes immediate. Furthermore, these intrigues, and the desire that gives rise to them, constitute a, if not the, central topic of most literature and are closely linked to the literary imagination and the process of fiction-making itself. Some critics have gone as far as to say that “literary fiction would not exist without a mimetic desire that implicitly or explicitly can only be a source of rivalry and conflict.”24 While not going that far, Tony Tanner does nevertheless acknowledge the central role of desire in literature and society:
Since desire, which is always involved in some way with the sense of incompletion, is an essential source of action in any social structure, which by its very nature tends toward a self-perpetuating stasis, it is necessarily a central topic of literature. Desire in action reveals itself as energy, and energy encountering structure is the paradigmatic tension of much of our literature.25
The “energy” and “tension” discussed by Tanner are manifested in the passions and attendant conflicts at the heart of El caballero de Olmedo, El perro del hortelano, and El castigo sin venganza. The love triangles and ensuing complications in these three comedias can all be traced back to a mimetic desire whose effects the text makes explicit and immediate. These disclosures, and the appeal that they have on the audience, result from Lope's creation of verisimilar psychological contexts that give body and meaning to the conflicts around which the plays in question are structured.
In the three comedias examined in this article, desire – the entity that Plato refers to in the Republic and the Phaedrus as a “divine madness” – steers the direction of the drama either toward comedy, as in El perro del hortelano, or toward tragedy as in El caballero de Olmedo and El castigo sin venganza. There is, moreover, an important structural correlation between the concept of transfiguring passion and destruction that contributes thematically to the dramatic unity of all three plays, especially the ones that end in death. The models proposed by Rougemont and Girard lend themselves particularly well to the reading of comedias such as El caballero de Olmedo and El castigo sin venganza because they address and formalize the fascination that the lovers have for each other and, more importantly, for the passion that takes control of their lives. In all three plays, we witness the ordeals of lovers affected by a “madness” that causes them to disregard real obstacles, to create barriers where there are none, and to be forever fascinated with the idea of loving love more than the object of love itself. “To love passion for its own sake,” Rougemont observes, “has been to love to suffer and to court suffering.... Hardly anything could be more tragic [than a love that] sears us and annihilates us in its triumph.”26
Why do Alonso, Federico, and Casandra wish to suffer this passion that lacerates them and eventually takes them to their death, and which common sense rejects? Why do they yearn for this particular kind of love despite the fact that its splendor also represents their self-destruction? The answer may be that they all reach self-awareness and test themselves only by risking their lives, in suffering and on the verge of death, whether it be fighting bulls in the ring, confronting enemies on a dark road, or challenging the authority of a superior or the code of honor beyond the dictates of reason. The denouements of El caballero de Olmedo and El castigo sin venganza represent far more than merely a romantic catastrophe. They embody the essential disaster of what Rougemont calls “our sadistic genius,” and reveal the lovers' tragic longing for self-experience of the utmost and their repressed desire for the annihilation of the self, a death wish that ultimately is realized in both plays.
Notes
1 Donald R. Larson, The Honor Plays of Lope de Vega (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977).
Alix Zuckerman-Ingber, El bien más alto: A Reconsideration of Lope de Vega's Honor Plays (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984).
Margaret R. Hicks, Honor Conflicts (New York: Garland, 1990).2 The connection between love and death has been studied by other students of Lope, although never in the light of the Rougemont-Girard model as it is applied here. Recent studies on Lope de Vega that deal with questions of love and death include:
Helmy F. Giacoman, “Eros y Thanatos: Una interpretación de El caballero de Olmedo,” Hispanófila 10 (1966): 9-16.
Thomas A. O'Connor, “The Knight of Olmedo and Oedipus: Perspectives on a Spanish Tragedy,” Hispanic Review 48 (1980): 391-413.
Anne M. Pasero, “Amor y muerte en la comedia renacentista: Una reinterpretación freudiana,” Selecta: Journal of the Pacific Northwest Council on Foreign Languages 2 (1981): 124-128.
Laura Ana Leo de Belmont, “La tragedia de Romeo y Julieta y El caballero de Olmedo,” Revista de literaturas modernas 17 (1984): 143-156.
Bert Cardullo, “Love and Death in Lope de Vega's El caballero de Olmedo,” The Language Quarterly 27 (1988): 6-8.
Debra Andrist, Deceit Plus Desire Equals Violence: A Girardian Study of the Spanish “Comedia” (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).
3 R. D. F. Pring-Mill, ed., introduction, Lope de Vega: Five Plays (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961) xiv.
4 Pring-Mill, introduction xiv.
5 Pring-Mill, introduction xiv-xvi. See also Heinz Gerstinger, Lope de Vega and Spanish Drama, trans. Samuel Rosenbaum (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1974) 55.
6 Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). See also Denis de Rougemont, Love Declared: Essays on the Myths of Love, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963).
7 René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
For a critique of Girard's theoretical constructs, see my The Naturalistic Novel of the New World: A Comparative Study of Stephen Crane, Aluísio Azevedo, and Federico Gamboa (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1993) 107-129. The interpretive model used in the present study is derived from Girard's first book on mimetic desire, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1965).
For a Girardian interpretation of Spanish Golden Age drama, see Debra Andrist, Deceit Plus Desire Equals Violence: A Girardian Study of the Spanish Comedia (New York: Peter Lang, 1989). Like Girard, Andrist centers much of her criticism around the concept of mimetic desire, but she uses this literary construct mostly as a point of departure to address questions regarding culture, especially the conflicts between men and women, and violence as reflected in the Spanish comedia. As I note in The Naturalistic Novel of the New World, Girard has been criticized by literary theoreticians such as Hayden White for turning wistfully to a supposedly more stable 'scientific' foothold in his attempt to legitimize the historical and anthropological applications of certain key theoretical constructs expounded in Violence and the Sacred, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, To Double Business Bound, and The Scapegoat. Along with Hans Kellner, Toril Moi, and Ruth El Saffar, Hayden White has provided a particularly exacting and insightful reading of Girardian criticism. White criticizes Girard for assuming that history or science can afford a secure base for the interpretation of literary texts. History, White contends, cannot be used legitimately as background or context by the literary critic, just as the 'truths' gleaned from literary texts do not provide sufficiently solid grounds from which to launch an authoritative commentary on anthropology, history, human behavior, or politics, as Girard and his followers have attempted to do. However, this is not to say that literary fiction is produced and survives in a vacuum, without any connection to the culture, life, and times of the author. On the contrary, literature reflects certain relevant aspects of the personal and cultural milieus out of which it is born. Conversely, history, anthropology, and psychology can aid in our understanding of literary texts, but not to the extent that Girard boldly claims in his later work. See João Sedycias, The Naturalistic Novel of the New World: A Comparative Study of Stephen Crane, Aluísio Azevedo, and Federico Gamboa (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1993) 125-127.
Hayden White, “Ethnological 'Lie' and Mythological 'Truth',” Diacritics 8 (1978): 2-9.
Hans Kellner, “Triangular Anxieties: The Present State of European Intellectual History,” in Modern European Intellectual History, ed. Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 111-136.
Toril Moi, “The Missing Mother: The Oedipal Rivalries of René Girard,” Diacritics 12 (1982): 21-31.
Ruth El Saffar, “Unbinding the Doubles: Reflections on Love and Culture in the Work of René Girard,” Denver Quarterly 18 (1984): 6-22.
Paul Dumouchel, ed., Violence and Truth: On the Work of René Girard (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988).
Paisley Livingston, Models of Desire: René Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).8 “El caballero de Olmedo,” The Oxford Companion to Spanish Literature, 1978 ed.
9 Girard, Deceit 19-20.
10 Lope de Vega Carpio, El caballero de Olmedo, ed. J. M. Lope Blanch (México: Editorial Porrúa, 1987) 205. All subsequent quotations from El caballero de Olmedo are from this edition. Citations by page number appear in parentheses in the text.
11 Cesáreo Bandera, “Literature and Desire: Poetic Frenzy and the Love Potion,” Mosaic 8 (1975): 50.
12 Rougemont, Love in the Western World 44.
13 Sigmund Freud, “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” in Collected Papers, vol.4, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1950) 213.
14 Rougemont, Love in the Western World 46.
15 Lope de Vega Carpio, El perro del hortelano (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1983) 65. All subsequent quotations from El perro del hortelano are from this edition. Citations by page number appear in parentheses in the text.
16 Pring-Mill, introduction xxvii.
17 Girard, Deceit 105.
18 Pring-Mill, introduction xxxii.
19 Lope de Vega Carpio, El castigo sin venganza, ed. Alfredo Rodríguez (Madrid: Editorial Ebro, 1966) 93. All subsequent quotations from El castigo sin venganza are from this edition. Citations by page number appear in parentheses in the text.
20 Bandera, “Literature” 51.
21 Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Random House, 1977) 198.
22 Meredith Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1981) 39.
23 Skura, Literary 40-41.
24 Cesáreo Bandera, “Conflictive Versus Cooperative Mimesis: A Reply to Ciriaco Morón-Arroyo,” Diacritics 9 (1979): 62.
25 Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) 87.
26 Rougemont, Love in the Western World 50.
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