The Marriage of Art and Honor: Anamorphosis and Control in Calderón's La dama duende
Anamorphosis, broadly speaking, refers to visual tricks and conceits that arise with the invention and development of Renaissance single point perspective. The plays of Calderón de la Barca not only make generous use of visually anamorphic strategies to simultaneously illuminate and hide the progress of their intriguing plots, the language of painting and baroque theories of representation are important structural and narrative elements in his dramatic practice. This study examines Calderón's use of anamorphosis in his drama of intrigue La dama duende, concluding that the playwright dramatizes the relationship between art and the human faculties of the imagination and judgment in order to circumscribe the production of marvelous artistic spectacles within the social and political arena of honor. (BJN)
The Performance of Justice: Good Natured Rule Breaking in Calderón's 'El Alcalde de Zalamea'
This essay argues that the existence of a written canon of legal precedents concerning the rape of lower class women by nobles (Barahona), framed by a confusing matrix of competing juridical procedures and rituals (Susan Byrne), offers Calderon the opportunity to reimagine juridical practices and the role of the letrado in their interpretation and use. As such, Pedro Crespo may be viewed as Calderon’s authorial avatar, one who models a witty mimetic praxis in the interest of creating a legitimate social and, more importantly, juridical space for his peasant family. This enterprise—empresa, in emblematic terms—is, in turn, analogous to efforts by early modern writers and painters to assemble honourable occupations out of what traditionally were considered to be artisanal activities. My primary theoretical tools for carrying out this analysis are Catherine Bell’s notions of ritual agency and redemptive hegemony, which provide useful concepts for identifying and analyzing Calderon’s authorial performance and its aesthetic and historical implications. The paper ends with a reflection on the implications of this reading for current debates concerning Jose Antonio Maravall’s notion of baroque guided culture.
Shoeless Joe: Fantasy and the Humor of Fellow-Feeling
In his essay on Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Thomas Carlyle writes of a humor that manifests itself in smile rather than laughter. "Richter is a man of mirth," says Carlyle, whose humor is "capricious . . . quaint . . . [and] heartfelt" (15). The three adjectives represent for Carlyle the essence of what he terms "true humor" because they suggest Richter's enormous respect for humanity. "True humor," he goes on to say, "springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper" (17). These smiles are not Hobbesian smirks of superiority1 but genuine signs of compassion for, sympathy toward, and empathy with the object of the humor. Carlyle further provides a direct link between humor and both pathos and nobility; the link is the smile of the caring man. For Carlyle, this smile is one of "fellow-feeling":