Three Major Plays Read Online Free PDF Page B

In a way, the tragedy which occurs is
as much his as Alonso's.
    The other characters have fairly standard roles, but the play as a whole points to the fact that, as in Fuente Ovejuna, Lope was fully capable of putting on stage characters who are not
only lively and credible but who also, in many cases, have
considerable depth.
    Punishment Without Revenge
    Punishment Without Revenge, as the autograph manuscript proves, was
written in 1631 and is therefore one of Lope de Vega's late and truly
mature plays. First published in Barcelona in 1634 in the form of a suelta (a single play), it appeared in 1635, the year of his death, in
Volume 21 of his works. In a prologue to the 1634 edition Lope states
that the play received only one performance. He does not specify the
date nor give the reason for its withdrawal, but it is generally
agreed that it was probably staged in the middle of May 1632, by the
company of Manuel Vallejo, the latter also playing the part of the
Duke. As for its withdrawal, several reasons have been suggested, in
particular the possibility that in 1632 the subject matter proved
offensive to a Spanish audience. It was an age, after all, in which
standards of propriety were -- at least officially -- very vigorously
enforced, and in which decorum on the stage was strictly observed. A
play in which a newly married woman has a sexual relationship with her
stepson must clearly have been somewhat sensational, though against
this it has to be noted that in May 1632 a licence for the first
performance had been granted by the censor Pedro Vargas de Machuca.
Another possible reason for the play's suppression is that its subject
matter was regarded as reflecting, albeit implicitly, on the actions
of royal personages. In this respect the King himself, Philip IV, was
not unlike Lope de Vega's Duke in seeking the company of women of
ill-repute. Furthermore, the relationship in the play between Casandra,
the Duke's wife, and his son Federico was not unlike that between
Prince Carlos, son of Philip II, and Isabel, who became Philip's wife
and Carlos's step-
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mother. Even though these events -- the subject of Schiller's play,
Don Carlos and Verdi's opera of the same name -- belonged to the past,
they were still sufficiently recent to have been a cause of possible
embarrassment to the royal family. In this context it should also be
borne in mind that, even if the action of the play is located in
Italy, the actors would have worn contemporary Spanish costumes, which
would have given the subject a decidedly Spanish flavour and
resonance. 20
    The plot of Punishment Without Revenge derives, directly or indirectly, from a novella by the Italian writer Matteo Bandello ( 14851561) entitled How
Niccolò III, Marquis of Este, having found his son in an adulterous
liaison with his stepmother, had them both beheaded on the same day in
Ferrara . A French version of Bandello's story had appeared in 1567 in Histoires tragiques by Bouistau and Belleforest, which in 1603 was published in a Spanish translation: Historias trágicas exemplares de Pedro Bouistan y Francisco de Belleforest, a book which Lope may well have read. 21 There may, of course, have been additional literary sources, and it
is equally possible that Lope may have seen a dramatic performance of
the story by one of the Italian theatre companies which during his
lifetime often performed in Madrid.
    Whatever Lope's source, he clearly followed the broad outline of the
story but also introduced important changes. Apart from giving the
characters names which are essentially Spanish -- Bandello's Ugo
became Federico, his stepmother Casandra (she is simply the Marchioness
in the original story) -- and elevating the Marquis to the status of
Duke of Ferrara, Lope's innovations were intended to create more
dramatic and theatrical situations. In Bandello, for example, Ugo and
the Marchioness know each other before she resolves to seduce