842262642X

After reading a pair of plays in which rural vassals topple their unjust feudal lords, I finished a short cycle of some of the most famous and noteworthy Lope de Vega comedias with El caballero de Olmedo, a play that does not end as happily as the others I read. Here don Alonso, caballero par excellence, rolls into Medina and falls in love with Inés. For one reason or another (and critics have a wide range of opinions on this), he decides that he needs some help in winning her love (he doesn't: she's just as smitten with him) and sends his squire Tello to go call on the procuress Fabia. She's more than glad to lend a hand, and Inés responds to Alonso's love sonnet with a message of her own, requesting that he swing by her family's property to pick up a ribbon she's going to leave tied to the railing of the fence that surrounds the garden. Unfortunately, the ribbon is intercepted by don Rodrigo and don Fernando, who are pursuing Inés and her sister and consider it to be a signal of at least one of the ladies' favor. Alonso confronts the two men and scares them off, and Rodrigo sheds his cloak in the process (Tello picks it up: what servant is going to pass on a fine, nobleman's garment?). This first confrontation between the two men who are pursuing Inés, Alonso and Rodrigo, sets the stage for later interactions in which the initial pattern repeats itself: Alonso is just better than Rodrigo, and Rodrigo's not happy about it. Rodrigo has, however, obtained a promise of future marriage from Inés' father, which forces the lady and her preferred suitor to form a plot in which she will abandon Medina and get herself to a monastery, where she'll be able to assert her own will and undo the promise her father has made. They need the help of Fabia and Tello, and as they're scheming and deceiving, and as Alonso's proving his superiority over Rodrigo time and again, doubts start to seep into his mind about whether things will end happily.

The play is constructed around two intertexts. The first are the coplas that give title to the play, that relate the story of the original caballero de Olmedo, Juan de Vivero, who was killed unjustly on the road from Medina to Olmedo by a man named Miguel Ruiz in 1520. The death of Vivero inspired multiple popular retellings, and by naming his play after the victim of a historical tragedy, Lope signals the eventual fate of his hero from the beginning. The other prominent intertext is Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina. There are numerous parallels between the two plays, with Fabia often being depicted and alluded to in a manner that clearly relates her to Rojas' procuress Celestina. The clear allusions to the tragecomedy of Calixto and Melibea (the ill-fated lovers of La Celestina) also invite comparisons between Alfonso and his tragic literary antecedent. While reading the play you have to ask yourself constantly, is it fair to compare him to Calixto? At one point the connection is made entirely explicit, when Tello asks a servant at Inés' house if Melibea is home, since Calixto's here to see her. The servant asks him to wait a minute, but she calls him Sempronio (one of Calixto's squires in Rojas' play). Through the incorporation of coplas concerning the unjust death of a man whose fame lived on in the popular tradition and constant allusions to the tragic story of a less-than-exemplary lover, the play presents an interesting question: why exactly does Alonso die?

Alonso's death has traditionally been interpreted in two very different ways. Maybe he's a model gentleman, a perfect caballero whose death represents the fulfillment of a tragic destiny. Or maybe he's not so perfect after all: he called on the procuress, he doesn't listen to the warnings of Tello, and his indirect pursuit of Inés is rather silly when all he really needed to do was knock on the front door and do things the right and honorable way. If this is the case, his death is a punishment for his sins. I don't like either of these choices. He makes mistakes, but to me they're not presented as crimes punishable by a justified death. I agree with the destiny angle to a greater extent, but I don't find Alonso's death to be particularly heroic, and his tragic death doesn't seem like an appropriate fulfillment of a hero's destiny. I'd like to look at it a different way. I think what makes the final scenes of Alonso's life so powerful is that they represent a human being proceeding toward a very human death. He's on the road at night, alone, and he starts to get scared. People are warning him left and right about the possibility that he's proceeding toward his death, and he starts to believe them. He wonders whether he should have listened to Fabia's warnings, he wonders whether he's misinterpreted a series of signs that have been presented to him from above (or below), and he wonders whether he's made the right choices. After living with such confidence, his final moments are filled with fear and doubt. His death is pathetic, coming at the hands of an enemy whose powers are far beneath his own. I'd like to see his death as more of a tragic misfortune, the culmination of a series of minor mishaps and slight missteps that turned out as badly as possible. I think that's why it's so powerful: the play uses the death of a good (if not perfect) human being to show how one's fortunes can shift so suddenly and completely. ( )

8432038679

8467004460