Queering the Nation:
Performing Gender and
Ethnicity in Jerónimo de Cáncer’s Los Putos
College of Staten Island – CUNY
In recent years there
has been a growing scholarly interest around issues of masculinity in
early-modern
While these lindos, mariones, and sodomites that are objects of these studies are presented as the cause of the nation’s decadence, Jerónimo de Cáncer’s (†1655) Los putos places the cause of this decadence on a different factor, of which the crisis of masculinity would be a byproduct. I will argue that both the choice of characters -all of which have a rich ancestry in the Spanish literature of the period and the period immediately preceding it- and the way the plot develops place the blame on the Spaniards’ ease at cohabitation and dangerous proximity to unorthodox faiths and ethnicities. The toleration of a coexistence with the enemy of the Christian Empire and of everything for which the Empire stands is what causes the feminization and consequent weakness.
Published in the 1668
compilation of popular dramatic interludes La ociosidad
entretenida, and probably written around 1550, Los
putos was one of Cáncer’s twenty six entremeses
(Huerta Calvo 228). Cáncer had been an acclaimed entremesista
and it seems that in many cases his interludes were the reason why the
audiences were drawn to the theater, Los putos being
one of his most popular works(5). These types of
dramatic pieces, the entremeses, were an integral part
of the theater-going experience in baroque
It is precisely in the
context of this kind of laughter producing events when one can take the
temperature to the popular state of mind of a culture. Finding what an
audience is expected to find worth of laughter or of grief, reveals
much about what that culture’s fears and anxieties are. In a society in
constant crisis, like that of
Los putos
plays with the last issue: the source of laughter is the failed attempt
by the main character at satisfying his sexual appetite. His dishonest
dealings to achieve his goal result in him becoming the object of other
male characters’ illicit appetite for sexual intercourse. In this
sense, the study of this entremés can be even more
revelatory of this culture’s particularities since, as Trumbach puts
it: “sexual behavior (perhaps more than religion) is the most highly
symbolic activity of any society. To penetrate the symbolic system
implicit in any society’s sexual behavior is therefore to come closest
to the heart of its uniqueness” (Trumbach 24). This little work in
particular plays with the spectator’s sexual identity anxieties by
means of the dramatization of a “homosexual panic” which, according to
Hutcheson, starts in the Spanish early modern period as a “defensive
reflex [of this society] against the realization of its own queerness”
(Hutcheson “Sodomitic Moor” 101). This queerness, represented overtly
as sexual in the play, is subtly related to ethnicity, so that
“homosexual panic” is also “ethnic panic”. As it will be shown, the
pressures of the fear to be thrown out the gender and ethnic closet
will determine not only the premise of the plot, but also the
complicated chaos which ensues and the precarious return to order as
the piece comes to closure. Thus, Los putos by Jerónimo de Cáncer represents dramatically
the masculine imperial anxiety of the
The basic
plot of this entremés is one that had also appeared,
with variations, in another short dramatic piece of the period:
Quiñones de Benavente’s La hechicera. In both plays
the main character, a young man in love, or rather in heat, obtains a
spell -from a sorcerer in La hechicera, and from a
witch en Los putos (7). This
written spell is meant to make the girl fall in love with the boy as
soon as she reads the note. The problems start for the main character
when the note intended for the girl is read successively by three men
who, now under the spell, pursue him aggressively in order to get the
sexual favors that their bewitched wills crave. What sets Cáncer’s work
apart from Benavente’s is the careful selection of characters in Los putos, whose literary and cultural genealogies allow
the audience to conjure up a series of rich associations in a very
economical way. While Cáncer’s characters are chosen for their
evocative richness, Benavente’s seem randomly selected. Hence,
the trigger of laughter in the La hechicera is just
the action, while in Los putos, laughter is triggered
by both the action and the types of people who are forced by the author
to suffer the plot described above. The social and cultural critique
becomes thus not only more nuanced in Cáncer’s case but also redirected.
The main
action in Benavente’s piece is preceded by a long introduction in which
the undesirable genealogy of the character Badulaque, who will end up
fooled, is suggested. The anti-Semitic
tone which is meant to insult this character starts with him running
away from a fire. Making allusions to the fires of inquisitorial autos de fe, Badulaque tries to escape the flames by
voicing out loud his claim of blood purity:
¡Oh fuego de un judío!
¿A mí te atreves? ¿A
don Badulaque,
De linaje sin mácula
ni achaque,
Más rancio que
tocino tras añejo,
Más que vino
hipocrás, cristiano viejo? (258).
[Oh fires of a Jew!
Do you dare come close to me? Don Badulaque,
of lineage without stain nor blame,
more rancid than old bacon,
more
Old-Christian than Hippocras wine is old?]
In terms of
dramatic construction, Los putos avoids Quiñones’ long
preamble which, funny as it might have been for his audience, seems
superfluous since it does not work towards supporting the central
action. Cáncer goes directly to the point and continues with a neatly
developed and cohesive three part structure which contains an
introduction that sets the action in motion; a central complication of
chaotic nature; and a solution at the end which somehow returns the
characters and their community to their initial stable state. This last
play lends itself to a much more organized and dynamic performance in
contrast with the static quality, almost tableau like, of La
hechicera (Quiñones de Benavente 257-269). Cancer’s, also unlike
Quiñones de Benavente’s play, does not attach a subaltern status to the
characters that become the unintended victims of the witch’s spell in
his entremés. Rather, the character who is in control of, and is
responsible for the action is the one who is marked by her belonging to
a part of the population of suspicious cultural origins.
The play
opens with Toribio lamenting his lack of success in conquering the love
of Menga, whom he calls disdainful and cruel. His speech, far from that
of the urban gentry that populates the comedia, is
also a mock attempt at the refined language of the characters of the
Renaissance pastoral poetry. His country folk efforts at emulating the
classically inspired similes of Renaissance love poetry turn the
disdainful Anaxarete of the Ovidian story -the one who was transformed
into stone by Venus for her lack of emotion at the death of her suitor-
into “Anaxarra,” a mountain in the vicinity of
This
degeneration is first hinted at in Toribio’s complete lack of the sense
of honor, a value which was central not only to the conventions that
ruled the plots of the comedia genre, but also to the
patriarchal organization of Renaissance Spain’s respectable society. He
wonders aloud why Menga denies him the love for which he yearns, but
also reveals that the object of his desire liberally offers it to
others: she loves the sexton, the apothecary, the scribe and the
sheriff (lines 6-9). Since a good deal of the concept of honor resides
in the societal perception of the proper sexual conduct of the female
members of a family, in pursuing this woman’s love, Toribio is openly
placing himself outside the paradigm of propriety of this society. His
romantic desire is aimed at a woman who not only rejects him, but one
who also happily offers her affection to anyone who can offer something
in return. This not so veiled allusion to prostitution will become
clearer as the association is made between the girl and the character
that appears next in the play: the witch.
Witchcraft, sorcery, matchmaking, and illicit ethnicities
Even though historically speaking witchcraft and sorcery had been practiced by members of the three cultures of medieval Spain -the Christian, the Jewish, and the Islamic- and the character of Celestina in Rojas’ work is not presented other than Christian (Russell 293), the imaginary of early modern Spain assigned the origin of these practices to the cultural Other within the society. Assigning witchcraft and sorcery to the Conversos (Christians of Jewish descent) may have been the effect of the pervasive presence of widely read treatises on magic by Spanish authors of Jewish culture, such as Clavicula Salomonis, or the thirteenth-century Liber de Raziel by the Saragossan Jew Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia (Rusell 289). Assigning them to the Moriscos (converts of Islamic origin) could be more a product of a social reality. Menéndez y Pelayo (267-68) mentions several Inquisitorial cases against Moriscos in the sixteenth century, such as that of D. Felipe de Aragón in 1563; or the other in 1564 against a Morisco of Orihuela; and finally the case of Román Ramírez from Deza in 1600; cases that appear suspiciously close in time to the periods of great pressure against Morisco culture that gave way to the uprisings between 1568 and 1571, and the mass expulsions between 1609 and 1614.
These
beliefs slipped into literature right around the same dates, in fact,
the story of the last Morisco mentioned above found itself on the stage
in Quien mal anda en mal
acaba (ca. 1616), a play attributed to Juan Ruiz de Alarcón
(1581?-1639). Earlier on, Lope de Rueda (¿1505?-1565), the
alleged founder of Spanish national theater, had introduced a Grenadine
Morisco called Muley Búcar as a sorcerer in his Comedia
Armelina (published in 1567). And in the early seventeenth century,
La pícara Justina (1605) offers us a Morisco model of
Celestina that the main character encounters: “Una morisca
vieja, hechicera, experta, bisabuela de Celestina” [An old Morisca,
expert sorcerer, great grandmother of Celestina.](405). Of this
celestina-like woman, Justina says “Siempre entendí della que era
bruja”[ I always understood that she was a witch.] (407), and tells us
what made her so by describing activities that we also see performed by
the witch in the entremés:
Era pura dama de ahorcados. El día que los había era el día de sus placeres, y, con ser coja, todos aquellos tres días siguientes no cojeaba, antes con gran prisa salía todas aquellas tres noches de casa. Lo cierto era que no iba a rezar por ellos, sino que la primer noche traía los dientes que podía. (407)
[She was a lover of hang-men. The day there
was one, that day she was most pleased. Even though she was normally
lame, she would not limp the next three days. She
would even get out of her house in great hurry each of those three
nights. The truth is that she didn’t go there to pray for them. Rather,
the first night she would bring home as many of their teeth as she
could.]
María de
Zayas also makes the protagonist of her La inocencia
castigada the victim of a Muslim necromancer. But above all, the
great story teller of the period, Miguel de Cervantes, identifies the
sorceress Cenotia in his Persiles as Morisca. Morisca were also the sorceress who drove Tomás
crazy in his Licenciado vidriera, and the famous
Cañizares, who turned the boys into the dogs who converse in his El coloquio de los perros. Within the ideology of the
Counter Reformation, it was easy to place witches and sorceress,
because of their relationship with the Devil, on the side of the
non-Christian element of the society (Díez and Aguirre 48). To this
day, as Julio Caro Baroja pointed out:
Los “moros” sea como gentes inferiores, sea como personajes
antiguos, dados a encantos, u objeto ellos mismos de encantos y más aún
las “moras,” han quedado como entes proverbiales en el folklore de
cantidad de partes de España, incluso en aquellas que experimentaron en
menor grado los efectos de la invasión islámica. (63)
[The male Moors, whether because they are considered inferior, or because they are seen as members of an ancient people given to enchantments—or they themselves being victims of such—even more so than the female Moors, have remained as proverbial beings in the folklore of innumerable regions of Spain, even in those that suffered the Islamic invasion to a lesser degree.]
The
layering of the character of the witch continues to gain in complexity
as the interaction with the main character proceeds in a sequence of
alternating movements with which she and Toribio come close in order to
identify the person they have in front, and then withdraw in terror.
Toribio fears the witch first and screams for her to go away “Apártese
allá/mas, vive Dios, que esta es bruja” [Get off of me!/for
sure this is a witch.] (lines.
30-31). After his initial panic, Toribio seems to recognize the woman
and comes closer: “mas ¿no sois vos la doctora?” [But,
aren’t you the Doctor’s wife?] (lines
32-33). She is thus revealed as the doctor’s wife making the sign of
her dangerous ethnicity to keep growing in strength as another layer is
added.
Even though
the typical character of the doctor in the short plays of the Spanish
Renaissance has much in common with the same type in the Italian commedia dell’arte (Huerta Calvo 31), it had acquired the
stereotypical genealogy of the practitioner of medicine established by
the popular lore. As Maire Bobes reminds us, even when the ascendancy
of the doctor was not ostensibly declared in these dramatic interludes,
the popular belief associated them to a Semitic lineage (1227). The
tradition of medicine in the Islamic and Jewish culture of the Iberian
middle ages was renowned (Glasser 54-55); a tradition that was heavily
persecuted by the Inquisition in the following historical period
(Gutiérrez Nieto 682). This led to the representation of doctors as
ridiculous figures in many instances of Golden Age Spanish literature
(Cull 321) where they were feared and disrespected as incompetent
professionals who were suspicious of provoking disease, rather than
curing it. Following the stereotype, they were accused of doing this as
a means of feeding their greed for financial wealth (Cull 326). García
Ballester, though, explains that since Moriscos were not allowed to
enter the university (Medicine in a Multicultural Society
160), they might not have been referred to as doctors, but almost
all the converso physicians who appeared in the Inquisition’s courts
had undertaken university studies (Medicine in
a Multicultural Society 158). In any
case, García Ballester explains that male Morisco healers enjoyed in
In
the case of the woman in the play, though, the association is negative.
If the scared one at the beginning was Toribio, the one who panics now
is the woman as she finds herself recognized by her neighbor. She is
the one who withdraws in fear of being associated with a profession and
ethnicity that can put her in serious danger: “El
sufrimiento me apura./¿La Doctora yo? ¿Qué dices?”[ This suffering is killing
(lines 40-42), she pleas for her honor : “No me
quites el honor,/mi desatención pregona”[ Do not rob me of
my honor! Do not call attention to me!] (lines
43-44) As it was mentioned before, honor rested on the perception of
the rectitude in term of sexual mores of the female members of a
family. However, it also depended on the social perception of the
purity of a family’s lineage. Toribio could compromise the Doctora by
outing her ethnic ancestry, which apart from destroying her honor,
would also bring her all sort of problems not only with the
Inquisition, but also with the state, since the Moriscos had been
ordered to abandon the country earlier in the century (10).
The
publication of her practicing of witchcraft or sorcery would compromise
her honorable standing in society.
As for this
outing having an effect on the woman’s sexual propriety, we have to
have in mind that witchery and sex were deeply related in the
imagination of the early modern period. The belief was that women
became witches, especially in old age, so that her sexual appetites
might still be satisfied by the devil. In
his Tratado de supersticiones y hechicerías
(1529) (Treatise on Superstitions and Sorceries) Fray
Martín de Castañega reproduces
the common thought of his time:
Los unos y los otros que por pacto expreso están al demonio
consagrados, se llama por vocablo familiar brujos. […] De estos
ministros […] más mujeres hay que hombres. Y más son de las mujeres
viejas y pobres que de las mozas y ricas porque, como después de
viejas, los hombres no hacen caso de ellas, tienen recurso al demonio,
que cumple sus apetitos. (cit. by
Lara 523)
[Those who are consecrated to the Devil by
means of a pact are commonly called witches. […] Among these ministers
[…] there are more women than men. And most are old and poor women
rather that young and rich. Since men do
not pay attention to them as they grow old, they turn to the Devil, who
satisfies their appetites.]
Then, in
turn, the witches would market their knowledge to others in order to
provide for their livelihood. Celestina, of whom la Doctora claims to
be an heir, was called a witch and earned her living in the sexual
trade. She worked as a procuress, restored virginities, cured female
maladies, and above all offered her services as a matchmaker. This last
activity was commonly associated both in the social as the literary
tradition to sorcery since it was believed that these matchmakers did
not have qualms in getting the love for her client by means of a love
potion or spell, the philocaptio (Russell 289).
By offering
Toribio what is expected from someone who proclaims herself an heir to
Celestina, her matchmaking services in the form of a love spell in
exchange for his discretion, the Doctora manages to change Toribio’s
attitude from fear and righteousness to a playful interest. He calls
her now “bruja mía,” [My witch] (line
52), promises to conceal all she wants (v 54), and rejoices in the
contemplation of the possibility to make Menga desire him. Together
with her reputation as a witch or sorceress, which was connected to her
Muslim or Jewish origin, this other occupation of Celestina’s, the one
for which her own name has become synonym in the Spanish culture, was
also understood as inherently Semitic in the Spanish tradition.
Matchmaking was used by the Inquisition as proof of judaizing
tendencies (Márquez Villanueva 23). The association of this practice
with the Jewish or Muslim origin of its practitioners was common in the
literature of the Spanish Golden Age and even in earlier examples.
Márquez Villanueva reminds us as well that the matchmaking skills for
which Celestina was sought after were also attributed to the “judeos
casamenteiros” in Gil Vicente’s Farsa de Inez Pereira (1523)
(19-20). The tradition also existed in texts of Islamic Spain, as it
appears in Ibn Hazm’s The dove’s neck-ring (ca. 1023)
(28). The literary ancestor of Celestina, Trotaconventos, in Arcipreste
de Hita’s Libro de buen amor (1343) is
a character of clear Islamic pedigree (88-89). These
medieval types were still alive in the Spanish imagination of the
sixteenth century, as Morisco women were often accused of practicing
this profession (173). As Celestina was a doctor for the love-sick (Márquez
Villanueva 31), la Doctora will initially offer her services to Toribio,
who had opened the play crying: “ ¡Que me muero, señores, que me
muero/de amores…!”[ I die, I die of love, gentlemen!] (lines
1-2). The medicine that Doctora offers Toribio is a written spell
which, according to her, “tiene tan fuerte violencia,/que ha de morirse
por ti/la persona que le lea” [It has such a strong violent
power, that whoever reads it will die for you.] (lines
59-61). But this not only will not solve Toribio’s problem: Toribio’s
dishonest dealings with the Other are going to be the source of disease
for his community.
Subject to female power: the community queered under the spell
Toribio
marches happily to town with the witch’s spell in order to get the girl
of his dreams. His happiness, though, will be short lived. When he runs
into Menga and hands her the note, she claims not being able to read it
and turns it to the man who is next to her, one of her suitors. The
spell then takes effect on this man and two other more who read the
spell. They eagerly pursue a horrified Toribio demanding the
satisfaction of their lust for him. The men that Cáncer chooses to be
under the witch’s spell are not randomly selected. The male characters
who find themselves infatuated by Toribio are stock characters of the
comedic literary tradition of early modern
The first
man to read the note is the town’s sexton, also one of Menga’s suitors.
This character, a secular member of the Church, appears abundantly in
these types of plays. Because of the
pressure from the Inquisition, and also from the state that champions
the ideas of the Counter-Reformation, the sexton takes the place of the
priest or the monk of medieval satires as the embodiment of the vices
of the members of the Church. It shares some of the personality
features of his medieval ancestor, such as his expression in
unsophisticated Latin, the obsession for food, and the romantic pursuit
of local girls. The next men to be affected by the spell had also been
named by Toribio in his introduction as
those who easily got Menga’s attention: the scribe and the sheriff.
Both scribe and sheriff were commonly target of satire as people who
used their state sanctioned power in their own benefit at the expense
of the rest of the members of society (Menchacatorre 70) (11).
The three men that are
affected by the spell are representatives
of the governmental and religious order of imperial
The title
of the play, Los Putos, is clear about the
transformation that operates in the men affected by the spell. These
are not lindos, or effeminate men. These men still
perform their gender as masculine and show some of the traits that are
expected from such performance, including the aggressive chasing of the
object of their desire. However, their sexuality is altered. If in
other plays we see the representation of a masculinity in crisis in the
figure of lindos and mariones, the
figure here is that of the puto, the man who engages
in same sex practices. The Spanish early modern lexicographer Sebastián
de Covarrubias makes the distinction clear in his dictionary. Marión,
or maricón, is “el hombre afeminado que se inclina a
hazer cosas de mugger” (fol. 103r). Puto, on the
other hand is too extreme a concept to find itself defined in print.
Covarrubias defines it in Latin: “notae significationis, et nefandae”
(fol. 152r) [of notorious and abominable meaning]. These characters
have been turned into what they most fear, the ultimate threat to the
social order. In early modern
A performative term, a speech act that invoked an increasingly heightened notion of the abject and simultaneously condemned the referent to a marginal and subservient state of being. In the act of pronouncing the word in reference to another person or class of persons, the speaker performatively positioned that objectified person or class in subaltern status. (Horswell 32 )
The contact
with the female Other, either Jewish or Muslim, in this case has
rendered the Spanish imperial administrator a sodomite, a marginal and
subservient subject. In the words of the code of law of the Catholic
Monarchs put forth in 1497, the act of sodomy is one that “offends God
our Lord and gives a bad name to our land…unspeakable crime…by which
nobility is lost and hearts become cowardly” (qtd. By Horswell 60). The loss of nobility and the becoming cowardly
is a result of the allowance for the loss of control to take place
because of an excessive indulgence of the dominant caste in the pursuit
of their desire. That control has been allowed to fall in the hands of
the enemy. The errors of this society-
this is the ease of cohabitation with the Semitic Other -has placed the
Spanish men under a category of sexuality that evokes chaos and
destruction as MacFarlane explains:
Conceptualized as the embodiment of a disorder at once sexual, cultural, political and religious, the sodomite represented an anarchic force that threatened to undermine the nation and against which the nation might define itself … the formation of the sodomite as a social type was to a considerable degree the product of a displacement of social crisis, anxiety and disruption -a process that figures typically in the construction of the ‘unnatural’ and ‘perverse.’ (MacFarlane 78-79)
The
association of Islam and sodomy was a relatively new phenomenon in the
Sexual
binarisms -perhaps better rendered as sodomy versus purity, that is,
absolute license of the body versus absolute self control- were not
spontaneously conflated with notions of racial/cultural difference…Such
binarisms may work for …a Europe from whom the Saracen, the unknown and
unknowable Other, serves readily as the archetype of perversion, but
they lose their sharp edges in Iberia. (106)
The
imperial triumphs, numerous and spectacular in the first three quarters
of the sixteenth century, came to a halt during the last decades of
Philip II’s rule. The continued bankruptcies and the disaster of the
great Armada to invade England in 1588, the impoverishment of most of
the Spanish society drowned financially by inflation, managed to erode
the Spanish confidence on this virile construction of its self-image.
If the imperial victories of the earlier years allowed for the
application of a feminized image to the Other, the perception of
current inadequacies creates the fear of seeing all those feminine
constructions of the other applied to the Self. The disasters in the
imperial enterprises during the reigns of Phillip II’s successors kept
deepening the sense of loss of prestige, of damaged reputation, of loss
of the honor based on masculine values, all of which became a great
source of anxiety. The production of the text of Los putos
happens in a moment for the Castilian national psyche when the
construction of its own self image as a virile society is being
dismantled, and a fear of becoming the opposite, this is an effeminate
society, exists.
Sidney
Donnell has asked the question in psychoanalytical terms about the
effect on the community of the ruler’s perceived weakness: “What
happens to a nation when a certain lack appears in the formative
function of the very figure who attempts to fill the role of the
father?’ (49) Which he answers with regards to
In the case
of the entremés by Cáncer, the danger posed by the
contact with the ethnic other is also conflated with the fear to a
turning of the tables in which the male supremacy becomes overturned by
a regained female agency represented in the figure of the Semitic
witch, the “madre Celestina.” The witch has the power to undo all the
constructions of masculinity created in the previous century. She can
bring the patriarchal order of the Renaissance empire back to what
Severin has seen in the witch tradition of Celestina: the return to an “alternative
anti-paternalistic society of empowered women and weak men,” (8) a
society created by the witch, which “is at the same time seductive and
destructive” (8). The witch
that Toribio finds becomes a puppet master in this society, and in her
hands, which are the hands of the Other (female and Semitic), we see
placed the symbolic agency. The witch character, as presented in the entremés, conjures up all this fears. The blame of the
crisis of masculinity which is bringing down the
imperial system has found its target in the toleration of the
participation of marginal ethnicities in mainstream society. Quevedo’s
criticisms of the conversos’ ability to climb in ranks that the writer
thought should be only a privilege of the old Christian caste have been
well studied. The virulent attack against the Moriscos by the above
mentioned Aznar Cardona made them responsible for many of the maladies
of a nation that was losing the grip on its destiny. In
the entremés, the position of control that belonged to
the father is appropriated by the mother Celestina. The spell she has
created transforms the images of the nation’s father (god and king) in
openly declared sodomites that pursue Toribio shamelessly and lustfully.
Another woman saves the day
As the
characters affected by the witch’s influence turn their attention from
the potentially productive, and reproductive, pursuit of the female, to
the nonproductive, and thus sinful attempt at the unspeakable act with
Toribio, the displaced Menga takes charge in the protection of order.
Menga will become the only voice that will claim for the restoration of
the order upset by the witch’s actions. Menga, originally a passive
character that receives the attention of the village men, is forced to
action in order to uphold a crumbling patriarchal system. She
represents an acceptable model of femininity, despite the allusions to
her sexual promiscuity. She cannot read, she is uncultivated, what
allows her to remain safe from the evil actions of the witch. She will
not fall under the spell. When all the men are under the power of the
creature of the night, the witch, Menga as Venus, the morning star,
will herald the return of the Sun, and with it the restoration of male
order. It is Menga who twice screams for the help of justice “¿No hay
quien llame a la Justicia?” [Isn’t there anyone who calls
for justice?] (lines 99
and 115)
Like the virile Laurencia of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, she calls for order. She invokes the help of male figures, but these become successively sodomitic. Her screems “Que se enamoran dos hombres!” [Two men are loving each other!] (101) and then “Que tres hombres se requiebran” [Three men are courting each other!] (118) reproduce the action and attitudes that Allatson has seen when Laurecia enters the town council and insults the villagers who haven’t been able to defend her calling them “maricones” (sissies) and “amujerados” (womanly) (1779-1780):
…the conventionalities of phallocentric rhetoric, driven by an overt misogyny and homophobia, are utilized by Laurencia to goad the men into action. Her insults signify not only the extent to which ascribed and expected gender behaviors have been disrupted by the Comendador’s actions, but the limits in anxiety that such actions have elicited. (267)
Like
Laurencia in Fuenteovejuna, she finally summons the
whole village to help end this sodomitic rule, this disordered state:
“Aquí de la vecindad” [Neighbors, help me!] (138). At
this time the witch comes out again and tears the note breaking thus
the enchantment. Interestingly, Menga, who was the object of the
protagonist’s love, is also the source of the first feminization: the
first weakness which lead to requesting the spell from the witch. The
argument is that the witch does not completely create the sodomization
of this town, but rather, she seizes the opportunity of Toribio’s
weakness (his irrational passion for Menga) to fool the village’s men.
As they come back from
the influence of the spell and are confronted with the realization of
their acts, they react violently against Toribio. At the linguistic
level they describe his appearance with insulting names “notable
bestia,” “salvaje,” “extraña fiereza.” [Extraordinary beast… savage…
strange fierceness.] (lines145-47). In order to clarify their
allegiances, restore their masculine image, and exorcise their panic,
all three characters affected first will invoke the Christian God then move to beat Toribio to a pulp, which the
town prevents them from doing. They have
called for Divine protection, but it was the pressures of
the institutions that represent this God in Earth which originated the
problem in the first place since La Doctora gave Toribio what he wanted
so her practices would not be reported to the town and the Inquisition.
When the
play comes to an end, the community’s world reverts to its original
state. The witch is not punished, she is rather understood as a member
of the community, she is the doctor’s wife. Menga calls her “amiga,”
which may signal Menga’s belonging to this Celetina-like character’s
circle of procuresses and love dealers. She is just some neighbor who
is allowed to do this entertaining mischief. The consequences of this
permissiveness are made evident in the story, though. This piece
displays the fact that the threat posed by the tolerance of the
marginal element’s agency (or the active presence of the Other) at a
moment in which the decadence of the empire is consciously feared,
exists in this society because it allows it; because this society looks
the other way. The witch character is the richest one in terms of
condensation of meaning as she is the agent of the actions in the play,
and the character who embodies the fear to the female and the fear to
the Other as controller of a society’s destiny.
Notes
(1).
Some recent monographs include the works by Sidney Donnell, and José
Cartagena Calderón. Also, a volume of essays on the topic of
masculinity in early modern
(2).
See the works by Matthew Stroud.
(3).
See Peter E. Thompson, Sherry Velasco and Michael Horswell.
(4).
See Pablo Restrepo-Gautier’s article.
(5).
Cotarelo y Mori mentions not only the popularity of this author, but
also of this particular play, which, according to him, was often staged
and reworked well into the first half of the XVIII century.
(6).
The type of humor that some gracioso
types use in the comedias sometimes resemble that of
the entremeses.
(7). It is not clear that at the popular level there was a difference between witchcraft (brujería) and sorcery (hechicería) in the Spanish seventeenth century. Scholars who have treated the characters of Celestina and Cervantes’ Cañizares have debated if each can be considered one or the other. The distinction is made in early modern manuals, as Maravall (141) explains, which define witchcraft as a demonic cult, while sorcery consists of the manipulation of elements of nature that have an occult power that is unavailable to the uninitiated. The character in Los putos is called a witch (bruja), but her products are spells, or “hechizos.” The other entremés , by Quiñones de Benavente, that shares with Cancer’s many traits of the plot, is titled La hechicera (The Sorceress). Because of all this I conclude that for the purpose of the analysis of Cáncer’s play the distinction is not relevant.
(8).
I use the word Semitic to refer both to
Jewish and Islamic ancestries.
(9).
García Ballester mentions that Philip II hired a
Morisco doctor from
(10). Vicente García explains how Cañizares, the witch in Cervantes’ Dialogue of the Dogs, panics and reacts violently when she is identified as sorcerer because in the popular lore such practices were associated with the Moriscos (“La Cañizares” 2)
(11).
Francisco
de Quevedo in particular attacked often the corruption of the sheriffs
in his satires representing them as the ultimate evil. In one of his
satires, The Bedeviled Sheriff, a demon complains to
be possessed by a sheriff, calling himself a “Besheriffed demon” and
hopes to be exorcised.
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