Friendship in María de Zayas's La traición en la amistad

Abstract

María de Zayas's works have long been the object of study by scholars, but most serious inquiry has been focused on her prose. Not until recently has her production as a dramaturga become a matter of study in its own right. Her only known comedia, La traición en la amistad , has been analyzed from various perspectives, but no critic has defined precisely what is meant by "friendship," an important topic not only in the work, but in sixteenth and seventeenth-century literature in general. In this paper, I argue that Zayas casts aside the anthropocentric model of friendship, a construct based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and limited to two participants, as unsuitable for women. Instead, she proposes a different type of friendship: one among several women, who in spite of the dangers ever-present to nascent feminine friendships in a male-oriented world, overcome the difficulties they face and achieve their goal.