Co-authored by the English dramatists Beaumont and Fletcher, Love’s Pilgrimage (c. 1615–1616) is a stage adaptation of Las dos doncellas (The Novel of the Two Maidens) (1613), an exemplary novel penned by the renowned Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Produced at a time when Anglo-Spanish relations were marked by an ambivalent state of religiopolitical hostility and cultural fascination, the play offers a bitterly farcical representation of the perceived ethos and social norms of the source culture. At the same time, it engages with the target culture’s political and ideological matrix, offering – oblique – commentary on the authors’ own society. This article provides a comparative study of both works, to assess both the playwrights’ representation of Spain and their stance on certain political and ideological contingencies that shaped Jacobean England.
LAS NOVELAS INTERCALADAS DE CERVANTES EN THE COMICAL HISTORY OF DON QUIXOTE
RESUMEN: Inmensamente populares en la Gran Bretaña del siglo XVII, los episodios intercalados de Marcela y Cardenio aparecieron en la representación de la primera adaptación teatral británica de la obra maestra de
Este volumen aporta una valiosa contribución al estudio de la matriz histórica de diversas sociedades desde el frecuentemente ignorado prisma de las pasiones femeninas. Destaca por su alcance amplio y enriquecedor, ya que incluye trabajos interdisciplinares y abarca un ambicioso marco temporal y geográfico: la expresión, representación y encarnación de las emociones femeninas se analiza en una gran variedad de territorios, desde principios del siglo XVII hasta mediados del XX. Los sentimientos, tradicionalmente asociados con la esfera “femenina” de la domesticidad sentimental y dicotómicamente opuestos a la “racional” política, han sido relegados durante tiempo a los márgenes de los estudios históricos do- minantes. Esta obra pone en primer plano las emociones de mujeres de diferentes nacionalidades, clases sociales, edades y entornos, prestando atención a las fuerzas históricamente contingentes que trataron de regular sus comportamientos y a cómo las mujeres, creadas y constreñidas por narrativas normativas, vivieron sus pasiones e hicieron historia.
This paper provides a comparative analysis of “The Curious Impertinent”, an interpolated novel in Don Quixote (1605), and The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, a play attributed to Thomas Middleton premiered in 1611. Cervantes’s story about the stratagem contrived by a jealous husband who persuades his closest friend to test his wife’s fidelity and the pernicious consequences that ensue is rewritten in the subplot of Middleton’s work and adapted to the Jacobean political and ideological context. The play’s main storyline also mirrors the Cervantine-inspired episode: the female protagonist is equally tempted by a tyrant, but, as opposed to the seduced wife, she resists stoically and gives up her life to prevent an otherwise unavoidable rape. Critics of both works are divided as to whether they uphold the dominant construction of women as ‘naturally’ inferior to men, both being permeated by a blatantly misogynistic language that perpetuates the ‘weaker vessels’ ideology. The analysis developed in this paper aims to prove that, even though each text was produced in a different social context –and hence has different political motivations–, both are self-subversive, as they undermine the dominant ideology of femininity and the consequent power hierarchy, in both the private and the public spheres.
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