First published in 1499 in an anonymous edition of sixteen acts under the title Comedia de Calisto y Melibea (The Comedy of Calisto and Melibea), and then in 1502 (1505 at the latest) in a signed and enlarged edition of twenty-one acts, now entitled Tragicomedia, the one and only work of Fernando de Rojas that has come down to us met at once, in the universe of Spanish letters, with outright success.1 For generations, the public was captivated by the ill-fated loves of the noble Calisto and the beautiful Melibea, and — above all — fascinated by the intrigues and machinations of the procuress of those loves, old Celestina, the greedy and crafty bawd who finally gave her name to the work. On the strength of preliminary pieces that present the Tragicomedia as a moral example for the edification of “lovers driven to distraction who, vanquished by their uncontrolled appetite, call their mistresses their God” and declare it “likewise written to warn them against the trickery of bawds and the flatteries of bad servants,”2 La Celestina has long been inscribed within the tradition — already amply nourished in the Middle Ages — of the didactic-moral work.
It is permissible, however, to doubt that the intention of the tragicomedy rests on these moralising pretensions alone. The work in fact marks the irruption of a singular, corrosive voice, so deeply set on the margins of the codes of its time that it would be almost impossible, as Stephen Gilman has stressed, to over-emphasise its lack of conventionality.3 The astonishing polysemy of the work, its heightened sense of parody, and its boundless pessimism very often distance it from any conventional morality and let show through a message that is allusive, to be sure, but precise and shattering — apt to revolutionise the meaning ascribed for centuries to this artistic masterpiece.
This revolution began at the start of the twentieth century, when it was discovered that the author was a descendant of converted Jews, and when scholars set about, on the basis of this biographical datum, to consider the work only by actualising it within its socio-religious context. The Tragicomedia was then analysed as a problem of relations between old Christians and converted Jews (from a “tragedy of love,” La Celestina turned into an “ethnic tragedy”), even if it remained to be determined — which fuelled the criticism throughout the entire twentieth century — which of Calisto or Melibea was the old Christian and which the new.4
Context, here, will not be at issue.5 The present study proposes — in the line of the studies by Georges Martin and Yirmiyahu Yovel6 — to analyse various intra-textual elements which, taken within the semiotic code they establish, seem to us to reflect the sufferings and the tensions of the daily lived experience of the Spanish Marranos of the very end of the fifteenth century.
1. La Celestina: a work of subversion
1.1 Pessimism and immanence
To better understand this message, “allusive but shattering,” of which we spoke in the introduction, let us begin… at the end. Too long disdained by the critics, because perceived as a strange appendix cut off from the rest of the drama, the lamentations of Pleberio, besides constituting one of the rhetorical summits of La Celestina, may well be a fundamental key to the reading of the work. In a phrasing without affectation or irony, of a moving simplicity, Rojas draws the portrait — through the mouth of a father annihilated by the loss of his only daughter — of a cynical and cruel world, without value or foundation. Complaining of Love (the supreme and founding value of Christianity), the sad Pleberio casts a disabused gaze on an existence henceforth empty of meaning: “O world here below! Many have written of you, passed varied judgements upon you. But they spoke only by hearsay. As for me, I shall speak from experience, the sad experience of one who knew not how to sell and buy at the fair of your illusions.”7 Neither the sentiment of honour nor the infamy of suicide (considered a sin in both the Jewish and the Christian religions) animates this discourse. No God comes to console the father of Melibea: Fortune, the World, Love are the only powers evoked, but they could in no way ensure his metaphysical salvation. The whole existence of the grief-stricken father is reduced to the materiality of this lower world. Pleberio evokes honours, riches, possessions (trees and ships): achievements, nothing more. He knows, or learns at this tragic turning point of his existence, that the springs of humanity are reduced to a base materialism.
Painful as it is, this dawning of awareness is in no way original or isolated. The old father verbalises, as the curtain falls, what is the common lot of each of the characters of the work, whose existence is confined to the sole quest for pleasure (Calisto thinks only of slaking his sexual desire) and for riches (Celestina and Calisto’s two valets, Sempronio and Pármeno, will die for a gold chain). There is, then, no rupture between this final discourse and the rest of the drama, but rather an organic and structural link, tracing one and the same disabused vision of the world throughout the work. The tragicomedy in fact opens on a prologue evoking war and confrontation8 only to close on Pleberio’s lament. In between, the author has not only made the two principal lovers of the plot perish after uniting them in a frenetic passion (obsessive and erotic), but also Calisto’s two treacherous valets, themselves the murderers of the old procuress who refused to share with them the gain of her services. And if some survive this disaster, it is only the better to reproduce the same story: already young Sosia, another of Calisto’s valets, lets himself be bewitched by the charms of Areúsa,9 the juvenile double of Celestina who takes up the challenge of succeeding the latter. In the moral of the story, then, the characters are “chastised” (“castigados”) but are not for all that duly “warned” (“escarmentados”), and no salvation is reserved for them. Confession, to be sure, is often demanded by individuals at the point of death,10 but God — or rather His son Christ — is resolutely absent from their mental and symbolic representations. The work is centred on an immanent conception of the world; all live hic et nunc, in a secularised society, profoundly indifferent to any religious feeling.11
1.2. The perversion of the noble codes
Nothing resists this vision that negates all transcendence. The social and moral codes in force in fifteenth-century Castile are singularly affected by it. A single value in fact subsists in the work: money, and this value substitutes itself for both love and honour, traditionally associated with the nobility. The codes of courtly love are indeed abolished and give way to a passion-love presented as something purchasable.12 As for honour, it is a concept whose use the nobles — those of the play, but also the Castilian nobility of the end of the fifteenth century13 — would have liked to reserve to themselves (“How dare you speak of honour?” Calisto indignantly exclaims, addressing his valet14), but that the bachelor of Puebla de Montalbán places in the mouths of all the characters until it is emptied of all substance. Celestina’s claims on this point are the occasion for a half-farcical, half-serious critique of the role of honour and nobility in Spanish society.15
In fact, this “nobility” — invoked at every turn in the tragicomedy — is but a shrinking patch. Take the example of Calisto. The young man certainly lives like a young noble, in so far as he engages in activities proper to his “class” (he is a man of independent means, he hunts, travels on horseback, handles weapons, loves gambling, music, and… love). He nonetheless never ceases to display serious chinks in his armour, incapable of conducting himself according to the values that ought to be his: he is duped by his valets, knows not how to avenge his own, sinks into madness, and lives only to slake his sexual pleasure. Calisto’s case, though emblematic, is not isolated. The valets Sempronio and Pármeno assume the role of model valets, of counsellors and bodyguards, but do not hesitate for an instant to betray their master and abandon him to danger. The same imposture is found in Elicia and Areúsa, who for their part resort to the standard discourse of the prudish or forsaken woman, but hasten to deceive their lovers,16 or in Centurio, who offers his avenging arm to Areúsa before slipping away at the first opportunity: “to the devil with these whores stuffed with fine speeches! I must now find a way to wriggle out of what I promised, while making them believe that I am carrying out their order with alacrity, and not that I am being negligent out of fear of danger.”17 There is, to take up and broaden a remark of Marcel Bataillon, “the most significant correspondence” between Calisto’s spinelessness, the betrayal of the servants, the cowardice of Centurio, or the deceitfulness of the prostitutes.18
1.3 The mask of “disquiet”
For in truth, in the Tragicomedia, the capacity to change role and costume at will — for the space of an act, a gesture, a line — applies to all. The ironic contrasts between what a character says and its context, the permanent double meaning of the allusions, and the massive presence of asides shut the protagonists up in double-speak and dissimulation. One could, to be sure, see in this nothing but a simple game of disguise, were it possible to distinguish the feigned attitude from the true one. Now, in La Celestina, no character possesses a single truth, duplicity is an intrinsic part of these beings, and the mask is their double nature. This duality manifests itself not only in the confrontation between two characters or two situations; it often runs through two inner aspects of one and the same personality, always in conflict with itself: the about-face of Melibea (act IV) or that of Pármeno (act VII) bear witness to it.19 These are “divided” beings, torn and fundamentally disquieted (the sentiment of urgency and danger haunts them20), not to say frightened (as are, for instance, Sempronio, Pármeno, Celestina, and Centurio21). All entrench themselves, unfailingly, behind deceptive appearances, and it would be useless to try to reduce to a single layer the thickness of their meanings. The very choice of the dialogic form partakes of this ambivalence, since it allows no “single truth” to crown the whole of the narrative. Menéndez Pelayo saw aright in stressing that the creation of an entirely new form of dialogue in modern letters is one of the singular merits of this sovereign book. The commentaries contradict one another, the opinions clash, the judgements are relativised. Ambiguity reigns supreme.
Who, then, are these ambivalent, masked beings, so profoundly disquieted? What is it that drives them to mask themselves in this way?
II. An infamous “community”
2.1 Fusion, confusion
If we hold to the principal “roles” assigned to them, we have here a handful of nobles on one side, prostitutes and valets on the other. Two worlds, then, a priori antagonistic. On closer inspection, however, the gap between the two universes is not so great… The author of the tragicomedy, as we saw in evoking the social critique that underpins the whole of the work, “dares to part the curtains of the alcoves of the nobility to look at the hidalgos in their nakedness, caught in human and no longer legendary actions, preserving appearances in public, but behaving like valets in private.”22 This critique of the noble values allows Rojas, at first, to bring closer together — through their behaviours — the noble Calisto and his valets, or the beautiful Melibea and the prostitutes, but the comparison in fact goes much further. The author, so meticulous in the profile of his dialogues, in fact makes the different characters speak one and the same language — regardless of its register. While the valets philosophise even better than their master, Alisa (Melibea’s mother) shares singular features of speech with Celestina, Areúsa, and Elicia.23 Such slips, in language as in behaviour, end by sowing confusion and make possible many a play of mirrors. Sempronio can define himself, on several occasions, as the double of his master (“I had myself become another Calisto”24), or Areúsa can compare herself to Melibea.25 Let us note, finally, that an astonishing “coincidence” willed that Calisto and Pármeno should have been brought into the world by one and the same midwife: Celestina!26
2.2 Prior acquaintance
Troubling details bear witness, moreover, to a prior and, above all, intimate acquaintance among the characters of the drama. For reasons revealed to us little by little, none of them is radically a stranger to the others: Calisto has known Melibea for a long time (which Melibea’s own words at act XX confirm27), Sempronio is the regular lover of Elicia, the ward of the old procuress, who was herself trained by the young woman’s grandmother.28 This same Elicia is a cousin of Areúsa, Pármeno’s lover, and of Lucrecia, Melibea’s servant. It is not, however, this kinship that facilitates Celestina’s entry into the dwelling of Melibea’s parents, but an old bond of neighbourliness between the old procuress and the latter.29 A strange proximity, in truth, of which Pleberio’s family would gladly have done without, but which the bawd does not hesitate to invoke! Another troubling detail: Areúsa, jealous of Melibea’s success with Calisto, denounces the latter’s physical defects, letting it be understood that she has seen her half-naked.30 She thereby suggests a further relation of intimacy which, however, remains unexplained in the text.
“The nameless city is [therefore] small, and its inhabitants have no need to introduce themselves to one another. Even when someone momentarily forgets who the other is […] this confirms the human narrowness.”31 In this human narrowness, Celestina plays a particular role, she whose trade is to bring together beings whom she has been tracking since their birth.32 Yet, more than her office, it is her status as matron, as “aunt,” and, above all, as universal “mother” that governs the deep semiological structures of the work.
2.3 Celestina, universal mother
To the social proximity and the real kinship that exist among the different characters is in fact added a “figurative” kinship (I take up this expression from Georges Martin, who also speaks of “symbolic” kinship) that invades the whole of the tragicomedy. If it is not surprising that the valets, from act VII on, seal their new “brotherhood” (the fruit of their ignominious complicity at their master’s expense) by calling each other “brother,” just as the prostitutes Areúsa and Elicia do by calling each other now “cousin,” now “sister,” more incongruous is Calisto’s participation in this same brotherhood,33 and more singular still, the fact that the valets, the prostitutes, but also Calisto, Alisa, or her daughter Melibea unanimously make Celestina their “aunt” (“tía”), or even their “mother” (“madre”). To be sure, the two appellations are current in the vocabulary of popular sociability. Yet the maternal apostrophe takes on, in the work, a quite particular importance, in that it is, on many occasions, legitimated by the ancient history of the characters. It cannot in fact be considered pure rhetoric in the mouth of Pármeno, who was for a time the adopted son of Celestina,34 nor in that of Elicia, the old woman’s ward. Nor is it innocent, as Georges Martin remarks, that Celestina’s maternal status reverberates ad infinitum throughout the work, from generation to generation, from infamous mother to infamous mother… There is, to be sure, Claudina, Celestina’s double and Pármeno’s mother, but also the old “pastry-woman,” Areúsa’s mother, whose nickname evokes certain dubious practices (was she a poisoner?), or again Elicia’s grandmother, who taught Celestina her trade, and Calisto’s grandmother, who fornicated with an ape.35 So many maternal and marginal figures who, in their degradation, threaten their own progeny.36
III. La Celestina and the Inquisition
3.1 Bourgeois values and social mutation
Celestina — to take only her case — is par excellence an ill-reputed being: she is defined by all as an “old whore” who proudly practises activities infamous by nature (she is a bawd, a sorceress, a repairer and breaker of some 5,000 maidenheads in the city). Doubtless harassed by justice like her counterpart Claudina,37 she carries upon her the mark of her infamy, a scar that runs across her whole face and serves as a defining element of her being. But she is, also, openly and hyperbolically, the representative of a bourgeois universe. She boasts of her workshop of production and rejoices in earning her living thanks to her Machiavellian professionalism.38 “Of the merchant she has the spirit of lucre and the knowledge of others; her skill allows her to serve their interest to her own profit. She lives by satisfying, for a wage — money or payment in kind — the purely earthly desires of others.”39 In this, does she differ so radically from her “sons”? Certainly not.
If Calisto prefers to forget his now distant bourgeois ancestry, he does not manage to free himself from it completely. The anchoring of the noble values of his time is, as we have seen, very thin in this character; the basis of the aristocratic organisation of his life is very tenuous and betrays him on many occasions.40 Worse: doubt hovers at times, at the turn of a reflection, over the nobility of his lineage. His valet’s remark about his grandmother’s relations with an “ape” remains enigmatic but refers, beyond doubt, to some stain — some “impurity” — in his ancestry… The traces of a bourgeois past surface more clearly in the mouth of Pleberio, who bears the very name of the plebs (plebe). Even if declarations in favour of his great nobility stud the work, he cannot mask, in his grief, his past as a rich merchant, thus opening the way to a possible calling into question of Melibea’s noble origin.41
3.2 References to the inquisitorial context
All the characters of La Celestina thus share, willy-nilly, a common origin, infamous and bourgeois, more or less veiled according to the degree of mutation they have attained. This origin is powerfully prejudicial in the inquisitorial society of the end of the fifteenth century, intolerant and unitarist. Satirical toward the clergy (although anticlericalism is not a specificity of La Celestina), Rojas lashes with a quite particular verve at the inquisitorial practices (whose assaults Claudina has undergone), which cannot surprise us when we know that Rojas knew, among those close to him, the attacks of the institution.42 This attitude, however, is not new and could not constitute a definitive proof in the dossier on the converso question in La Celestina (Valdés was railing at the same period against the inquisitorial practices).43 More subtle, but more telling to my mind, are the allusions to the inquisitorial context disseminated by the author throughout his text.
Not content with accumulating blasphemies, the bachelor of Puebla de Montalbán in fact likes to parody the Bible and to give the Old Testament quotations a double meaning. Thus Pármeno does not hesitate to praise his first step toward vice with a formula generally reserved for the triumph of virtue.44 Celestina, for her part, makes a poignant eulogy of the sinful “perseverance” of her colleague Claudina, an emblem “of courage and greatness of soul, the quality best recognised in the Marrano martyrs of the Inquisition.”45 The author also lets hover, as said above, doubt over the characters’ purity of blood and over the (Christian) orthodoxy of certain of their practices, scattering the potential clues of a latent Judaism.46 He moreover refers without ambiguity to pre-inquisitorial society as to a golden age — “twenty years ago, in the time of my prosperity,”47 — by contrast with a present time, a well of misery and sorrows where the law no longer protects men (“iniquitous is your law, since it is not equal for all”48). In this disquieting landscape, Rojas forces his characters into uprooting (of which Celestina’s removal is but one example) or into disguise, thereby underscoring the tensions that agitate beings who are hybrid, double, subject to the aberrant rule of the “one” against which Celestina revolts: “What do you expect, then, my daughter, from the number one? It has more drawbacks than I have years on my back!”49
3.3 Conclusion on a “Marrano” reading of La Celestina?
Although the converso question is at the heart of this study, I in no way claim to make it the central theme of the Tragicomedia, nor do I seek to reduce to this question alone the various aspects and meanings of the play. La Celestina — and on this point, the criticism is (exceptionally) unanimous — is a complex work that defies any attempt at reduction to the one-dimensional.
Too recently begun, the Marrano reading of La Celestina could not, for the moment, lay claim to a conclusion. Let us note, however, that we are now far from the intuitions, hypotheses, and contradictions that accompanied the beginnings of this reading. The conjoined effort of historians, philologists, and philosophers has made it possible to bring to light a bundle of converging clues that points to the emergence of a strongly coherent semantic-notional system, structured around the notions of falsehood, injustice, and disquiet. It appears, on this account, ever more licit to bring closer the first clues of a converso writing of the Tragicomedia, such as they have been set out in this study, and the context of the founding of the Inquisition in Castile. The bourgeois universe, frightened and sclerotic, depicted by Rojas, the anguished and pessimistic perception of existence that underpins the work, founded on an aesthetic of the double and on a “rhetoric of anguish,”50 were assuredly, in contextual terms, the common lot of the Spanish Marranos at the end of the fifteenth century.
Notes
The success of the work may be measured by the many versions and imitations it inspired. There were, in the sixteenth century, more than thirty editions of La Celestina in the Iberian Peninsula, and several translations in France, Holland, England, and Italy. The work was also translated into Latin and Hebrew (in a now-lost version by the poet Sarfati). On this point, see Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza et autres hérétiques (Spinoza and Other Heretics), Paris: Seuil, 1991 (original English edition, Princeton University Press, 1989), “Marranos masked in a world without transcendence: Fernando de Rojas and La Celestina,” p. 118.↩︎
Preliminary piece, p. 51. Let us note, however, that the letters, prologue, and arguments do not appear in the sixteen-act version.↩︎
Cf. Stephen Gilman, La España de Fernando de Rojas, Madrid: Taurus, 1978 (1st ed. Princeton, 1972).↩︎
Cf. Américo Castro, España en su Historia, cristianos, moros y judíos, Barcelona: Crítica, 1948, and La realidad histórica de España, Mexico: Porrúa, 1954; Manuel Serrano y Sanz, “Notas biográficas de Fernando de Rojas, autor de La Celestina,” Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1920, VI, pp. 247 and 251. See also the theses of Jesús Rodrigo Puértolas, “El linaje de Calisto,” Hispanófila, XII, 33, 1958, pp. 1–6, making Calisto a new Christian, and those of Fernando Garrido Pallardó, Los problemas de Calisto y Melibea y el conflicto de su autor, Figueras: Canigó, 1957, holding that Melibea is a conversa (this opinion is shared by Alberto M. Forcadas, “Mira a Bernardo y el judaísmo en La Celestina,” Boletín de Filología Española, 46–49, 1973, pp. 27–49). The whole of these interpretations was made on the basis of more or less esoteric arguments (the construction of anagrams or coded messages) that sometimes transformed La Celestina into a properly cabalistic text. Cf. Henk de Vries, “La Celestina, sátira encubierta: el acróstico es una cifra,” Boletín de la Real Academia Española, LIV, 1974, pp. 123–152.↩︎
I refer on this point to the works of Joseph Pérez, Historia de una tragedia. La expulsión de los judíos de España, Barcelona: Crítica, 2001, and of Henri Méchoulan, Les juifs du silence au siècle d’Or espagnol (The Jews of Silence in the Spanish Golden Age), Paris: Albin Michel, 2003.↩︎
Georges Martin, “‘Púsete con señor que no le merescías descalçar’. Celestina y la Inquisición,” in: La Celestina. Comedia o tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Georges Martin, ed.), Paris: Ellipses, 2008, pp. 31–60; Y. Yovel, Spinoza…, pp. 117–169, and The Other Within. The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton: Princeton University Press, February 2009 (in press).↩︎
XXI, p. 343.↩︎
The first lines of the prologue are as follows: “All things created in this world were created in the manner of a combat or a battle, says the great sage that was Heraclitus” (Prologue, p. 45).↩︎
XVII, pp. 307–311.↩︎
XII, p. 267; XVIII, p. 316; and XIX, pp. 328 and 329.↩︎
On the absence of religious feeling in the tragicomedy, see Robert Ricard, “La Celestina vista otra vez,” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 198, 1966, pp. 20–35.↩︎
III, p. 112 (Celestina to Sempronio): “Melibea is beautiful; Calisto, mad and generous. He will not balk at the expense, nor I at the pains. Let him loosen the strings of his purse and, one way or another, the affair will be done!”↩︎
On this point, see S. Gilman, La España de Fernando de Rojas, p. 129: “In their determination to preserve medieval values in a world in full historical mutation, [a mass of old Christians] grew every day more frustrated, more impassioned, bitter, and obsessed with honour.”↩︎
II, p. 103.↩︎
See Y. Yovel, Spinoza…, p. 149.↩︎
I, pp. 71–73, or XVIII, p. 313.↩︎
XVIII, p. 318.↩︎
Marcel Bataillon, however, drew the parallel only between the cowardly valets and the craven Centurio. Cf. Marcel Bataillon, La Célestine selon Fernando de Rojas, Paris: Didier, 1961, p. 140.↩︎
See, respectively, act IV and act VII.↩︎
The allusions on this subject are numerous. See in particular IX, p. 216: “Nothing remains in its state, it is a law of Fortune; change is the rule” and, concerning the sense of danger, III, p. 114 (Sempronio to Celestina): “Do not take offence at my disquiet; it is in man’s nature to fear for his desires […]. And besides, I fear the chastisement” (my emphasis).↩︎
See, respectively, III, pp. 114–115; XII, p. 255; IV, pp. 118–119; XVIII, p. 319.↩︎
Fernando de Rojas (translated by A. Schulman), La Célestine. Preface by Carlos Fuentes, pp. 29–30.↩︎
As proof, this vulgar “mala landre te mate,” variously translated by A. Schulman: act I, p. 88 (“you deserve to go and burn in hell”); IV, p. 122 (“you make me die of laughter”); or VII, p. 185 (“No, no [I am dying of shame]”).↩︎
IX, p. 211.↩︎
IX, p. 210.↩︎
III, p. 110, and IV, p. 138.↩︎
XX, p. 337 (Melibea to her father, about Calisto): “You knew him well. You also knew his parents and his noble lineage.”↩︎
VII, p. 189.↩︎
In particular IV, p. 126.↩︎
IX, p. 208.↩︎
S. Gilman, La España de Fernando de Rojas, p. 44.↩︎
III, p. 110 (Celestina to Sempronio): “From birth, I have the girls entered in my register, to keep count of those who escape me.”↩︎
When he calls his valets “my brothers” (“hermanos”), as at act II, p. 98 (which A. Schulman translates as “my friends”).↩︎
VII, p. 174.↩︎
I, p. 64 (Sempronio to Calisto): “And your grandmother with the ape, is that an invention too? Witness: your grandfather’s knife.” The remark has caused much ink to flow. See, among others, Otis Green, “Lo de tu abuela con el ximio,” Hispanic Review, XXIV, 1956, pp. 1–12; James Burke, “Calisto’s imagination and his grandmother’s ape,” Celestinesca, V, 1977, p. 86.↩︎
On the sufferings inflicted by the “mother” on her children, see the remarks formulated by G. Martin, “‘Púsete con señor…’,” p. 47, on Areúsa’s “womb” pain (“que me muero de la madre” in Spanish, act VII, p. 180) and on the murderous viper of the prologue.↩︎
VII, p. 176.↩︎
For example XII, p. 265.↩︎
Cf. Jacqueline Ferreras-Savoye, La Célestine ou la crise de l’autorité patriarcale (La Celestina, or the Crisis of Patriarchal Authority), Paris: Ediciones Hispano-americanas, 1977, pp. 113–114.↩︎
VIII, pp. 200–201. He sends, to give but one example, his valets to provision themselves at the market in the public square, a law of consumption contrary to the practice of self-subsistence proper to the nobility.↩︎
See part 1.1 of this study, in particular the quotation in note 8, in which it appears clearly that Pleberio conceives of life in terms of buying and selling.↩︎
According to S. Gilman, La España de Fernando de Rojas, pp. 23–120.↩︎
In fact, “the Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea circulated in Castile without being touched by official censorship for one hundred and forty-one years, appearing for the first time in the index of Sotomayor (1640),” stresses Otis Green, “The Celestina and the Inquisition,” Hispanic Review, 15/1, January 1947, pp. 211–216 [here, p. 211]. For the case of Valdés, see Amador de los Ríos, Historia crítica de la literatura española, VII, Madrid: Rodríguez, p. 224.↩︎
I, p. 96: “If error is human, obstinacy is the mark of the beast.”↩︎
Y. Yovel, Spinoza…, p. 144.↩︎
These clues are at once enigmatic and strongly polemical, so they must be handled with the most extreme prudence. Take, for example, this strange remark concerning Celestina’s husband (of whom we otherwise know nothing). He appears as an “eater of hard-boiled eggs” (I, p. 76), an expression that A. Schulman interprets as a mark of cuckoldry (“If you had seen the horns her husband wore,” she translates), but which may also be, in Peter Goldman’s view, a mark of mourning in traditional Jewish culture. Cf. Peter B. Goldman, “A new interpretation of ‘Comedor de huevos assados’,” Romanische Forschungen, LXXVII, 1965, pp. 363–367. Did Celestina’s husband, wounded by his wife’s notorious infidelity, consume hard-boiled eggs as a sign of mourning? It is then revealed to us, and this is a second example, that one of Claudina’s misdeeds was to have used “candles” during her nocturnal excursions in the cemeteries, which earned her condemnation as a sorceress (VII, p. 176). Now, it is known that the Inquisition arrested many judaizers precisely by spotting the candles lit for the Sabbath… Might Rojas have wished to sow a few parodic elements signalling the Judaism of deceased characters in La Celestina?↩︎
IX, p. 215. I take the liberty of referring on this point to Sophie Hirel-Wouts, “La Célestine à la recherche du temps perdu…” (La Celestina in search of lost time…), in: Georges Martin (ed.), La Celestina, Paris: Ellipses, 2008, pp. 61–80 [in particular pp. 75–76].↩︎
XXI, p. 346.↩︎
VII, p. 185.↩︎
The expression is S. Gilman’s.↩︎