I love reading Siglo de Oro plays, and I was thrilled to find three Cátedra editions of plays at the foreign bookstore the other day for two bucks apiece. I remember that when I was riding the train a lot, plays were great, because if I had a two hour commute, I could almost read a whole play, usually about an act each way. It´s nice to read something knowing about how long it´s going to take to finish it, and it seems like most plays from the sixteenth and seventeenth century were fairly uniform in length, somewhere around 3,000 lines. I started with El Villano en su Rincón, by Lope de Vega, and will soon read plays by Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca. El Villano en su Rincón is the story of Juan Labrador, a country person of considerable wealth who is content to live his life in his corner of the world without ever setting eyes on the king. The king often hunts nearby, and while Juan Labrador is chilling at home, the king finds the tombstone that Juan has prepared for himself, and reads about this man who is so proud of his happy, secluded country life, and has the audacity to profess that he has no desire to set eyes on the king. The king sets himself to meet Juan, show him the error of his ways, and convince him that life in the court by the side of the king is the best of all possible lives. He accomplishes this, and Juan and his children end up in Paris with the king. The main love story that takes place involves one of the king´s nobles, Otón, and the daughter of Juan, Lisarda. Their love is able to overcome the difference in their social class, and in the end they are set to be married with the king and his sister as witnesses.
I greatly enjoy the language of these old plays. I was reading about Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the baroque style, and realized that much of the complexity of the language was intentional, written as a sort of challenge to the reader to unravel. I have a hard time with poetry by people like Sor Juana and Góngora, that is so complex and full of twists and turns and juxtapositions in sentence structure; but within the narrative storyline of a play, I feel like it all begins to make sense, and I feel a part of the conversations between the characters from way back in the Spanish day. This play was pretty light, and from reading the eighty pages of commentary that preceded it, I knew what el Fénix was trying to do thematically and what was going on in the story from scene to scene. It was a fun read, and I especially liked the conversations between the king and Juan Labrador. I also felt that the praise of the simple, rural life resonated with me. I spent a year and a half living in the Mongolian countryside as a Peace Corps volunteer, and now I live in Chicago. While on the one hand I miss the simplicity and happiness I felt in the rural setting, I also love being surrounded by so much culture and humanity. It´s interesting how Lope´s basic point that life separated from the king cannot be justified because the king is God on earth, and the sun around which the entire nation revolves, can be applied to the 21st century. Can people who cut themselves off from society and seek separation from the culture that rules over us all, as the king did over France in the time of the play, truly be happy? Is ignorance bliss, essentially? Lope says no, that a man ignorant of his king cannot be considered wise and happy. I´d say that culture, as relayed to us by the media and society, is our king, and I´m not sure that a man separated from the world he lives in can be happy either. I´m sure that plenty of people would say that I´m wrong, though, and I´ll come back to this play throughout my life and see what I think as I change. ( )