Three Major Plays (5 page)

which is not present in the source, and which, when in Act Two
Casandra has been abandoned by the Duke, makes her relationship with
Federico much more than an act of revenge. Again, the Duke's absence
from home at this vital juncture occurs in different circumstances, for
here he is not called away for reasons of business but summoned by the
Pope to assist him in the war against his enemies -- a vital change
which anticipates the Duke's return in Act Three as a reformed
character, resolved to abandon his former way of life and to prove
himself a good husband. Given his change of heart, the discovery of
his wife's infidelity is the more ironic, and it is also brought about
in the play in a more striking way -- not through a servant but by
the receipt of an anonymous note. And what happens subsequently is very
different from the source material. There the Marquis has the young
couple arrested, and they are executed after the Court has been made
aware of their crime. In Lope's play the Duke secretly verifies their
guilt and, having done so, incites Federico to murder an 'enemy' who
is held prisoner in the next room and whose face is concealed. The
enemy, unknown to Federico, is Casandra, and when the murder has been
carried out the Duke summons his courtiers, accusing Federico of
having killed Casandra because she is pregnant with the Duke's child
and because he, being illegitimate, fears the loss of his inheritance.
Federico is immediately seized and killed, therefore, without the
incestuous relationship becoming public knowledge, and consequently
without the Duke's honour and reputation being publicly damaged. To
himself the Duke justifies the action not in terms of honour avenged
but as a divine punishment which he, given his religious conversion,
has been called upon to administer.

The punishment -- revenge issue -- its importance encapsulated in the
play's title -- is one which requires close consideration. Indeed,
Lope himself seems to have hesitated over what to call his play, and
to have made up his mind only when he had finished writing it. It has
been suggested, for example, that the title is unsatisfactory because
the punishment imposed on Casandra and Federico by the Duke is not
without a strong element of personal revenge on his part.
²²
On the other hand, it has been pointed out that Casandra and Federico
deserve to be punished for the sin they have committed,

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and to that extent the Duke's argument that he is acting as God's representative on earth is justified.
²³
Accordingly, the title of the play points not to human revenge but to
divine punishment, though it is perfectly true that the Duke's
soliloquies are not devoid of 'thoughts of private vengeance and the
laws of honour'.
²⁴
The latter,
demanding that an offence against one's honour and reputation be
avenged, required too that, if the offence became public knowledge,
the vengeance should be a public one, and that, if the offence remained
secret, the vengeance should also be secret, thereby avoiding public
disgrace. Indeed, no sooner has the Duke claimed that his actions will
be a divine punishment than he refers specifically to the kind of
revenge which honour demanded. In bringing about the deaths of
Casandra and Federico in the way he does -- a truly cunning and
Machiavellian deception in both cases -- the Duke effectively prevents
their incestuous relationship and his own dishonour from becoming
public knowledge, avenges the offence against himself, and at the same
time leads the public at large to believe that the offence for which
Federico dies is purely his murder of an innocent Casandra. In short,
he is unable to separate punishment from revenge in spite of his
attempts to do so. The argument has therefore been put forward that
Lope's title was forced upon him by the contemporary Spanish concern
with honour. Attracted by the Bandello story, Lope could not present
the Duke's actions against the erring couple simply as a punishment --
which is the case in the original -for their behaviour offends not
merely against public morality but also against his personal honour.
On the other hand, Lope did not wish the Duke's actions to be seen
merely as a private revenge for lost honour when larger moral
questions were involved. The title points to his concern with both
issues.
²⁵

Another aspect of the play which requires comment is Lope's
designation of it as a tragedy on the first page of the autograph
manuscript. In the light of this, the question has often been asked:

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who is the tragic hero or heroine? One suggestion is that Casandra
deserves to be regarded as such, for it is she who, slighted by the
Duke, becomes entangled in a powerful but illicit relationship which
brings upon her the most terrible consequences.
²⁶
A different view is that the Duke should be regarded as the tragic
protagonist, for all the events of the play stem from his actions and,
although he does not die, he is left at the end with his life in
ruins.
²⁷
Against this, it can be
argued that Lope's conception of tragedy did not, perhaps, demand a
single tragic hero or heroine, and that the tragedy of the play
consists of the situation itself, 'in which all the main characters
are implicated, and in which all share in both guilt and loss, whether
the loss be of life or of what makes life worth while'.
²⁸

This view of the play, with its emphasis on guilt, suggests, of
course, that the play's tragic outcome stems purely from the moral
defects and wrongdoing of its principal characters. Thus, the Duke is a
libertine who, unwilling to put up with an arranged marriage to
Casandra, shamelessly neglects her and quickly returns to his former
way of life. She, upset by his callous treatment of her, seeks revenge
on him and compensation for herself in an affair with her stepson
Federico, while he, the illegitimate child of one of his father's
innumerable escapades, and cast into deep depression by the thought
that the marriage will deprive him of his inheritance, is not
sufficiently strong-willed to reject his stepmother's advances. When the
Duke learns of the incestuous affair he devises the cunning plan to
punish the guilty couple for their crime and simultaneously avenge
his honour, and in so doing is motivated in no small measure by an
awareness of his own contribution to all that has happened. Thus, all
the events of the play, each dependent on the other, are seen to
involve selfish and imprudent motives. This is not, though, the only
way of considering Lope's tragedy, for a closer examination will
reveal that various factors outside the control of the characters -other
people, social pressures, chance events -- also play an important and
even crucial part in the shaping of events.

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It cannot be denied that to a considerable degree each of the major
characters' lives is influenced by other people to the point where
their own choices count for little. The Duke, having sought to avoid
marriage, is forced into it by his subjects, who will not accept the
illegitimate Federico as his heir. Entrapment in a marriage he does not
want intensifies his resolve to return to his old ways and, in turn,
creates a set of circumstances whose repercussions cannot be avoided.
Again, on a social level the Duke cannot escape the demands of the
honour code once his honour has been offended. As for Federico, he is
from the outset unable to escape the consequences of his illegitimate
status, for he is rejected by the Duke's subjects as heir to his
possessions, and feels intensely the bitterness attendant on his
possible disinheritance. Later he seems powerless to escape Casandra's
hold upon him, and when their affair becomes known to the Duke, he is
trapped by the implacable demands of honour and vengeance. Casandra is
the pawn both of her father and her husband, pressurized by the
former into a marriage she does not want and, as a wife, cast aside by a
man who prefers women of the streets. In the affair with Federico she
then becomes the prisoner of her own powerful emotions, and finally,
like Federico, the victim of honour's tyranny. By the end of the play
the three principal characters are manipulated by forces and pressures
stronger than themselves.

Circumstance is another important shaping factor in their lives. When
Casandra and Federico first meet -- when her carriage becomes stuck in
the ford -- they do so in total ignorance of each other's identity,
which means that their attraction to each other is spontaneous and
uninhibited by those constraints which a knowledge of their true
relationship would impose upon them. First impressions are indeed
powerful. Again, the Duke's unexpected departure from home comes at
the crucial moment when Casandra, though offended by the Duke's
neglect of her, has so far succeeded in containing her feelings for her
stepson. The Duke's sudden absence literally throws the young couple
into each other's arms and pushes them further along the path which
leads to their tragic destiny.

In
short, the argument which suggests that the outcome of Lope's tragedy
is determined by the moral defects and wrongdoing of the principal
characters is a very narrow one, and can be countered, or at least
modified, by an approach to the play which emphasizes

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other factors outside the control of those characters. They may
indeed have to make moral choices, but to make the right choice in the
circumstances in which they find themselves would be a course of
action better suited to saints than ordinary human beings. It is the
interplay of individual motives and external events which therefore
makes Punishment Without Revenge the great and complex play that it
is, for the tragic pattern which it reveals is in many ways that of
Greek and Shakespearean tragedy.
²⁹

It is clear from what has been said already that in this play Lope
created his most rounded and fascinating characters. The Duke,
Casandra, and Federico develop and change in the light of the
circumstances in which they find themselves. Their complexity is
selfevident, and it is no accident that there should be so many
soliloquies, for at such moments characters reveal their most private
thoughts. By the time Lope wrote this play -- he was 69 -- his
experience of life and of love was considerable, and it shows.

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All three plays presented in this volume were written for and performed in the public theatres or
corrales
which developed in Spain, particularly in Madrid, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century.
¹
These were, as the word suggests, large rectangular courtyards in
which the stage, with its projecting apron, was placed at one end. For
economic reasons the staging of plays was relatively simple, and such
great emphasis was placed on quick-moving action that complex
scene-changes would have been impossible. Much was left, therefore, to
the imagination of the audience.

These factors result, in
Fuente Ovejuna,
for example, in a seamless, almost cinematic flow of action, a new
scene beginning where the previous one ends without any interruption;
the fact that the location has moved from, say, the village to the
house of Fernán Gómez, or to the Court of the Catholic Kings, is
indicated only by the appearance on stage of the relevant characters.
Sometimes the location of a scene is pinpointed as well in the
dialogue, as in Act One of The Knight from Olmedo when Rodrigo and
Fernando keep watch on Inés's house: 'Why come here merely to see the
house?' (1.514). Again, the fact that in Act Three Alonso travels to
Olmedo not long before dawn is suggested by the text: 'How dark it is!
So full | Of fearful shadows till the dawn | Begins to place its
golden feet | On bright and flowered carpets' (3.461-4). In this
context it is, of course, important to remember that, in the absence
of stagelighting, the performances of plays in the
corrales
took
place during daytime. Audiences were therefore required to imagine
that the stage-action in a particular scene was set at night, and were
clearly attuned to doing so.

Although use could be made of the balconies and windows of the buildings immediately behind the stage of the
corrales,
the three

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