Lope de Vega, founder of Spain’s national theater, wrote numerous plays between 1585 and 1631 dealing with the theme of conjugal honor.¹ In these texts, the husband suspects that his wife is guilty of adultery, or that she is being pursued by another man. Since a Spaniard’s honor depended, in part, on the sexual conduct of his wife,² the husband must act to prevent dishonor. In the event that he has already been dishonored, he must “wash away the stain with blood,” murdering rival and wife, if she is (perceived as) guilty. The ideal wife resists the advances of the...

Historians have recently documented the relative equality with men enjoyed by Spanish women¹ from early: medieval times to the beginning of the modem age (Ortega Costa, Dillard). However, by the time Lope was writing for the theater, the situation of women had deteriorated. The growing restrictions placed on women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were in part a result of new social structures accompanying the consolidation of the early modem state.² José Antonio Maravall and other historians have demonstrated that the early modern state is characterized by the alliance between ruler and “individual” (Maravall,Estado moderno408).³ Ruth EI...

Although the wife-murder plays receive the lion’s share ofcritical attention because of their sensationalism, only a handful of plays feature wives punished for their transgressive desire:¹Carlos, Comendadores, Toledano, Discreto, Contienda(in which the conjugal-honor conflict constitutes only a small part of the action),Vitoria, Locura,andVenganza.The vast majority of the wives in the honor plays penned by Lope represent the feminine ideal. In those texts, the virtuous wife’s elaborate strategies of self-erasure, necessary to avoid becoming the object of the rival’s desire, amount to the erasure of sexuality itself. This equation of wifely virtue and the lack...

The remaining thirty-eight texts that comprise the pool of honor plays examined in this study depict wives who conform to the feminine ideal. The complexity of the sign of the “good” wife has to do with the split status of woman within the phallic economy: her use value in private ownership—physical attractiveness and procreative capacity—and her exchange value in male homosocial circulation (Sedgwick). Once the exchange between men has been transacted in the marriage contract, the wife’s beauty continues to be an asset in private ownership, but it also represents the liability that she can be put back...

Chapters One through Three discussed wives’ passive strategies of honorable resistance to adulterous desire, efforts to redeem the liability of the body that meet with qualified success or disaster, and sexual outlaws’ failed attempts to escape the feminine position. In this chapter, I examine the duplicitous strategies of ideal wives and their manipulation of the body through disguise. As I pointed out in Chapter One, sixteenth and seventeenth-century discourses enjoining (en) closure attempted to control women and confine them to the private sphere. Duplicity and disguise offer the possibility of resistance to ideological or literal containment.

Some wives resort to...

The transaction of power between the rival and the husband in the erotic triangle is channeled through the machinery of cuckoldry. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, “ ‘to cuckold’ is by definition a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man” (49). In this sense, men’s heterosexual relationships in Lope’s honor plays function chiefly as strategies of male homosocial desire, tracing the paths by which men may attempt to arrive at satisfying relationships with other men through the bodies of women. In Sedgwick’s termmale homosocial desire,the worddesiredoes not designate an emotion so much as a...

Lope’s honor plays represent various kinds of male bonding of mutuality and love: through heterosexual circulation, through the exchange of women in marriage, and through transgressive female desire. The dynamics of domination that characterize bonds of rivalry are tempered in those of mutuality in favor of a more horizontal arrangement, though a hierarchical element is rarely completely absent. In numerous plays, groups of men roam the streets looking for women. In contexts of rivalry, fighting over women is a medium for male contact, replete with competitive admiration for each other’s manly appearance.¹ Men may also form mutual as well as...

In his introduction toNation and Narration,Homi Bhabha speaks of “nation” as “an idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as symbolic force” (1).¹ The apparently cohesive and homogeneous identity of “Spanishness” depends on the simultaneous exclusion of the Other, not only woman, but Jew and Moor, feudal lord and heretic as well (El Sarfar 165).² Collapsing the orders of nationality and gender (not Woman), and nationality and ethnicity (not Jew, not Moor), the Spaniard of the early modem state defines himself in terms of what he is not. The construction of the Jewish...

What are the implications for sixteenth– and seventeenth–century spectators of the representation of gender, race, and national identity in Lope’s honor plays?¹ Recent theories of spectatorship have shifted from textual analyses favoring a rather passive notion of spectatorship to considerations of viewing context. The idea that textual nleaning changes in relation to differences in viewing situations allows for a diversity of readings among a diversity of historically and socially constituted spectators. The possibility of conceptualizing varied responses to the same text rests on a fundamental distinction be tween the textual subject and the social subject (Pribram 4), the former...