Literature and the Image of Man

Volume 2, Communication in Society

Leo Lowenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138527270
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351508537
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume's predominant theme is bourgeois mentality and its historical development. The works of Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, among others, are analysed within the historical framework of the decline of feudalism and the rise of the absolute regimes. Those of Moliere and Goethe are set against the background of an evolving and consolidating bourgeois society in Western Europe.

Part I

Studies on the European Drama and Novel from the Renaissance to the Threshold of Modernity

1

The Spanish Dramatists

Paradoxically, the nation that more than any other inaugurated the modern age did not long enjoy the fruits of this era but fell rapidly into economic and political decline. Spain is closely linked to the discovery of North and Central America, to the ensuing importation of colonial products, and, above all, to the increase of precious metal in Europe. But Spain’s brief period of unprecedented expansion was badly mismanaged; neither the court nor the nobility recognized that only the creation of strong national industries and a firmly centralized government could guarantee her continuance as a major world power. The ruling strata had developed a type of economic parasitism which found ample nourishment in the wealth of the old and new worlds. But with the devaluation of precious metals, what had for a brief period been a comfortable over-abundance for parasites now became a ruinous overabundance of parasites.

Although Spain played an ever more negligible role in the new order, the three most eminent Spanish writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent the three social points of view prevailing in the Europe of that time. The chronology of their appearance is, however, the reverse of what one would expect. The oldest, Cervantes, is the most critical and the most forward looking of the three while the youngest, Calderon, looks to a society that has already been superseded, Lope de Vega, as spokesman for the absolute monarchy, looks neither backward nor forward but tries to adjust to the prevailing conditions. Of the three, Cervantes is the most rewarding for the purpose of our analysis, namely, to trace the social origins of individual expectations and anxieties.

Lope de Vega, 1562–1635

Background

Lope’s life might be described as that of an intellectual entrepreneur. He was born into a family of the metropolitan aristocracy, with excellent connections at court. Educated by the Jesuits, he enjoyed the special tutelage of an uncle who, as Inquisitor, belonged to the upper bureaucracy of the Church of Spain. Then, in quick succession, Lope became active as a soldier, bishop’s page, and secretary to the Duke of Alba, a most influential political figure of his time. In early middle age he suffered the sole setback of his career when scandals about his love affairs resulted in a few years’ exile from the capital. This trouble, however, seems to have cast no shadow on Lope’s future; he returned to Madrid neither sadder, wiser nor more chaste, and there he comfortably spent the last forty years of his life still pursuing his erotic activities. After two marriages, terminated by the death of both wives, Lope was ordained a priest and assigned to one of the fashionable metropolitan churches. His deviations from the moral code did not prevent his earning many honors; he enjoyed the favor of the current power cliques, and the Pope bestowed upon him an honorary doctorate for having extolled Mary Queen of Scots as a Catholic martyr in one of his innumerable plays.

Lope participated in the proceedings of the Inquisition, and was able to reconcile his religious activities with the colorful private life to which seven illegitimate children bore witness. His literary production, too, was nearly inexhaustible. More than two thousand plays came from his pen, of which a third have been preserved. Cervantes (whom Lope snubbed all his life, only to eulogize him fourteen years after his death) with some justice called him “a monster of nature.” Lope died in 1635, in his seventy-third year. His funeral was as spectacular as his life had been; the obsequies lasted nine days, with three bishops in attendance.

Lope’s work portrayed the ambiguities in the social position of the Spanish ruling groups in his time. The Spanish monarchy and the worldly and ecclesiastical aristocracy bound up with it were able to maintain their luxuries for a while on the proceeds of the great Spanish explorations, especially on the proceeds of colonial wealth and the booty acquired in victorious campaigns. This prosperity was bound to be frustrated sooner or later, if only because the mode of production which was beginning to replace feudalism demanded not luxury but industriousness—that is, industry in both senses of the word. The internal inconsistency between the medieval and the modern ways of social life which characterized the Spanish aristocracy—its attempt to subordinate essentially capitalistic types of production and consumption to an antiquated feudal system—furnishes Lope with his underlying theme.

The Maintenance of Order: Authority

For an understanding of this inner contradiction as it manifests itself in Lope and in the group of which he was a part, the reader might refer to almost any one of the dramas. Consider, for example, The Duke of Viseo. The play begins with the triumphant return of a general of the army from his successful African campaign. He is welcomed by the king in a manner somewhat less than friendly, however, for he and his brothers have been accused by the favorite courtier of high treason. The courtier plans to marry a lady attached to the court, who makes the mistake of asking the general’s advice on the desirability of the match. The courtier’s grandmother having been discovered to be a Moor, the general thinks the marriage ill-advised, and swears the lady to secrecy in the matter of the African grandmother. Of course, the lady talks; the court circles teem with gossip and internecine quarrels break out. In these intrigues, the Duke of Viseo, brother-in-law to the king and the epitome of loyalty to his in-laws, becomes unhappily involved. The outcome for the duke is death; the king has him destroyed, along with the general who began it all, as well as the general’s brothers. A young lady, in love with the duke, dies of sorrow at his bier. The denouement, however, is the king’s acknowledgment of the duke’s innocence; to mend matters as best he can, he confers the honors due to the unjustly condemned duke upon the duke’s brother and, in fact, pronounces him heir-apparent to the throne. It is taken for granted that the king has behaved with propriety and justice and, in his eleventh-hour restitutions, has shown an ample degree of forbearance and good sportsmanship.

The play is typical of Lope, its authoritarian structure reconciling social values of the medieval type with the emerging values of monarchical absolutism. At no point is there doubt that Lope sides with the principle of absolute authority. The matter could not be pinpointed more specifically than it is in a conversation between the duke and one of his peers, a member of the duke’s camarilla, both of whom are eventually put to death by the king whose praises are being sung:

Guimarans: Viseo,

Such honorable thought in you’s the issue

That we and you in war and peace were both

Restrained by law, and by the law impell’d

To hold in high esteem our king, for that

He stands for God in our country. As for ourselves,

We princes are on earth what in the heavens above

The Angels are unto God’s countenance.

Therefore we owe him all obedience

And thanks for aught he does.¹

And the duke takes it up from there:

Viseo:	It is a lofty and a noble thought
	That you observe in our earthly hierarchy
	An image of the heavenly.^2

Sublime or banal, the observation is commonplace enough to the Renaissance with its highly schematic system of analogues. But what is of interest is that this respect for the traditional order, for authoritarian force, is an absolute for Lope; the king is respected even when he is transparently in the wrong. Once he has his grandees murdered, he need only appoint the murdered man’s brother to be his successor to set everything straight again. Similarly, in another of Lope’s dramas, the well-known Jewess of Toledo,³ a Spanish king falls in love with a beautiful young Jewish girl; the innocent heroine is put to death and, although the king causes her downfall, the murder is justified because it recalls the king to his duties as ruler and father.

One need only compare, for instance, Viseo’s ethos with Don Quixote’s to recognize the degree of Lope’s conformism. Don Quixote symbolizes a conflict in which the individual is finally shattered by the authority of social facts. This conflict is to become a pervasive motif in literature throughout the ensuing modern era. But Lope’s theme is one which plays on the potential compatibility of the individual’s private and public life; in case of doubt, however, it is society that has the final say. When the Jewess is put to death, the state benefits by her removal; and what is the death of one Jewess, no matter how innocent, when measured against the welfare of the state?

In Lope’s glorification of the absolute monarchy we do not find any longer the moralistic compulsion of the Middle Ages, nor do we, on the other hand, find the artist a spokesman for individual freedom. Like Corneille in France, Lope is a poet of the new nationalism. The medieval sense of inner duty is replaced by an attitude of dependence on a secular power from without. In another of Lope’s plays, The Sheep Well, the king is shown as coming to the aid of the people against the depredations of a feudal lord. Here, as elsewhere in the plays, we get a picture of a society in which almost anything can happen, and it is the will of the king that imposes a pattern on events, insures order and, occasionally, promotes justice. It has been thought by some that Lope was indirectly giving lectures to kings on justice and on reparations for injustice. However that may be, it is just as certain that he was equally concerned with absolute allegiance to the monarch.

But while Lope raises the issue of conformism, he at the same time obscures the conflict between individual wishes and the claims of the state. He persistently portrays victory as on the side of the ruler in the struggle between good and evil, right and wrong, honor and caprice, virtue and vice. With the dice thus loaded, we can do no more than infer the price of conformity to his protagonists; Lope is too rigid a monarchist to display it at any length.

The Threat to Order: Passion

The concern of Lope’s protagonists is to placate the powers-that-be in order to stave off complete destruction. The realities of the social world, however, tend constantly to be veiled by metaphysics. The essential characteristics of the modern era—industriousness, professional concerns, the conflict between rich and poor, the importance of private property and competition in trade and industry—all are absent, or appear only incidentally, in his work. All those aspects of social observation which in Cervantes’ novels are so rich are either left out of account or made part of an inscrutable human destiny. Accidents of every description, even miracles and magic tricks, recur repeatedly.

Lope’s fatalism was a response to the mobility of seventeenth-century society, with its chance meetings and its possibilities for accidents, including sudden downward movements on the social ladder; it is a fatalism that has more in common with Calvin’s doctrine of predesti-nation than with medieval Catholic dogma. Yet Lope’s fatalism proves remarkably inconsistent. At times, tragic human events are viewed as the unfor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface: Social Meanings in Literature
• Part I: Studies on the European Drama and Novel from the Renaissance to the Threshold of Modernity
• Part II: Studies on the German Novel in the Nineteenth Century
• Afterword From Helmut Dubiel, Editor of the German Edition of This Volume