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Hercules and the King of Portugal: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón's Spain by Dian Fox (review)
Comparative Drama ( IF 0.1 ) Pub Date : 2022-09-29
Victoria M. Muñoz

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

  • Hercules and the King of Portugal: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón’s Spain by Dian Fox
  • Victoria M. Muñoz (bio)
Dian Fox. Hercules and the King of Portugal: Icons of Masculinity and Nation in Calderón’s Spain. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. Pp. 336 + 5 illus. $55.00 Hardback and ebook.

Hercules and the King of Portugal traces early modern ideations of imperial Iberia and masculinity as represented in contemporary poetry, drama, and royal iconography. Dian Fox studies accounts of the gender performances of the divine hero, Hercules, dubbed “Hercules Hispanicus,” and the lost heir of the Portuguese Aviz dynasty, King Sebastian I (1554–78, ruled 1557–78), who is memorialized as Sebastiãoel encubierto.” The book is split into two parts that examine representations of Hercules and Sebastian, respectively, showing how these figures factored into Spanish and Portuguese national identity. Fox’s study also uncovers the tension between the idealized masculinities of Hercules and Sebastian and their famous violations of appropriate male conduct. In Part I (“Hercules”), Chapter 1, Fox traces the Spanish iconography of Hercules, from whom the Habsburg royals claimed direct, legitimizing descent. The Spanish people accessed the heroic figure through local artefacts and legends, as in “the cult(s) of Melkart/Herakles/Hercules” (36), which located some of the classical hero’s famous labors in Iberia. Meanwhile, contemporary editions and translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules, and Euripides’s Alcestis revived tales of Hercules’s exploits for contemporary audiences, who availed themselves of an “early modern Spanish national project [that] imagined Hercules as founder and native son” (36).

Chapters 3 and 4 treat of two notable emasculating episodes in Hercules' mythology—his donning Medea’s poisoned robe and subsequent death upon a pyre, and his cross-dressed enslavement to Omphale, the Queen of Lydia, which represents a figurative “phallic” death—that are referenced and reflected in four staged comedias by Pedro Calderón de la Barca: Los tres mayores prodigios (The Three Greatest Prodigies) (1636); El pintor de su deshonra (The Painter of His Dishonor) (1650); Las manos blancas no ofenden (White Hands are No Offense) (ca. 1640); and Fieras afemina Amor (Love Feminizes Beasts) (1670 or 1672). For Fox, these works’ effeminate and symbolically castrated male protagonists embody versions of the “hombre esquivo,” here defined as a male who is unattracted to females. Fox casts “immunity to the love of women as a political disorder” (100). She points to the masculine tactic of restoring honor by killing an unfaithful or virtue-blighted wife (and often also her accused lover) as a key form of redress for the culture’s latent anxieties about masculine (im)potency, blood (im)purity, and, ultimately, Habsburg (il)legitimacy. Nevertheless, as Fox also observes of this violent trope that commonly featured on the Spanish national stage, “the process itself of staging countercurrents to hegemonic, reproductive masculinity [End Page 342] exposes its mutability” (112). Calderón’s esquivos emblematize that theatre’s staging scenes of “manliness disturbed shows the vulnerabilities of the sites of power” (112), especially empire.

In the backdrop of Spain’s Inquisitorial tribunals to grant positions of honor to those who could certify pure blood—Calderón also personally had to prove his blood purity before being knighted by King Philip IV(ruled 1621–65)—aberrant behaviors by males who eschewed marriage or otherwise effeminized themselves provoked in early modern audiences a position of sensitivity and defensiveness regarding masculine (im)potency and the potential corruption of bloodlines through either female infidelity or racial/ethnic intermarriage. Fox calls this gendered bloodline obsession “lineage panic,” a racially charged composite of Jeremy Robbins’s “honor panic” and Eve Sedgewick’s “homosexual panic” (10). For instance, one sees an echo of this idea in the contemporary charge that the Moriscos, Christians of Moorish descent, were “bad Christians, and, more to the point, sodomites” (13); such prejudices informed the formal expulsion of the Moriscos from Iberia beginning in 1609.

The combined “honor” and “homosexual” panic undergirding “lineage panic” especially comes to the fore in Part II (“King Sebastian”), beginning with Chapter 5, where Fox examines the correspondence and poetry of...



中文翻译:

赫拉克勒斯和葡萄牙国王:卡尔德隆西班牙的阳刚之气和民族的象征,戴安福克斯(评论)

代替摘要,这里是内容的简短摘录:

审核人:

  • 赫拉克勒斯和葡萄牙国王:卡尔德隆西班牙的阳刚之气和民族的象征,戴安·福克斯(Dian Fox )
  • 维多利亚 M. 穆尼奥斯 (bio)
迪安福克斯。赫拉克勒斯和葡萄牙国王:卡尔德隆的西班牙阳刚之气和民族的象征。林肯:内布拉斯加大学出版社,2019。Pp。336 + 5 插图。55.00 美元精装本和电子书。

赫拉克勒斯和葡萄牙国王追溯了当代诗歌、戏剧和皇家肖像中所代表的伊比利亚帝国和男性气质的早期现代观念。Dian Fox 研究了被称为“Hercules Hispanicus”的神圣英雄赫拉克勒斯和葡萄牙阿维兹王朝失去的继承人塞巴斯蒂安一世国王(1554-78 年,统治 1557-78 年)的性别表现,他被纪念为塞巴斯蒂安el encubierto。” 这本书分为两部分,分别考察了赫拉克勒斯和塞巴斯蒂安的形象,展示了这些人物如何影响西班牙和葡萄牙的民族认同。福克斯的研究还揭示了赫拉克勒斯和塞巴斯蒂安理想化的男子气概与他们著名的违反适当男性行为之间的紧张关系。在第一部分(“大力神”)第 1 章中,福克斯追溯了西班牙的大力神肖像画,哈布斯堡皇室声称拥有直接的合法血统。西班牙人民通过当地的文物和传说接触到这位英雄人物,如“梅尔卡特/赫拉克勒斯/赫拉克勒斯的邪教”(36),其中定位了一些古典英雄在伊比利亚的著名劳动。与此同时,奥维德的《变形记》、塞内卡的《变形记》的当代版本和翻译Hercules 的疯狂和欧里庇得斯的Alcestis为当代观众重现了 Hercules 的功绩故事,他们利用了“早期现代西班牙国家项目 [that] 将 Hercules 想象为创始人和土生土长的儿子”(36)。

第 3 章和第 4 章讲述了赫拉克勒斯神话中两个值得注意的去势事件——他穿上美狄亚的毒袍,随后死在柴堆上,以及他对莉迪亚女王 Omphale 的变装奴役,这代表了一种象征性的“阴茎”死亡—— Pedro Calderón de la Barca 在四部舞台喜剧中引用和反映了这些内容:Los tres mayores prodigios(三大神童)(1636 年);El pintor de su deshonra(他的耻辱的画家)(1650);Las manos blancas no ofenden(白手无罪)(约 1640 年);和Fieras afemina Amor(爱使野兽女性化)(1670 或 1672 年)。对于福克斯来说,这些作品中柔弱的、象征性阉割的男主角体现了“hombre esquivo,”这里定义为不被女性吸引的男性。福克斯将“对女性爱的豁免权视为一种政治障碍”(100)。她指出了通过杀死不忠或美德受挫的妻子(通常还包括她被指控的情人)来恢复荣誉的男性策略,这是解决文化对男性(无)能力、血液(不)纯洁、以及最终的哈布斯堡(非法)合法性。尽管如此,正如福克斯还观察到这种在西班牙国家舞台上普遍出现的暴力比喻,“与霸权、生殖男性气质相反的过程本身[End Page 342]暴露了它的可变性”(112)。卡尔德隆的esquivos象征着剧院上演的“男子气概被扰乱显示了权力场所的脆弱性”(112),尤其是帝国。

在西班牙宗教法庭授予那些能够证明纯血统的人荣誉职位的背景下——卡尔德隆在被菲利普四世国王(1621-65 年在位)封为爵士之前,还必须亲自证明他的血统——逃避婚姻的男性的异常行为或以其他方式使自己变得女性化,这在早期现代观众中激起了对男性(无能)能力和通过女性不忠或种族/民族通婚可能导致血统腐败的敏感和防御立场。福克斯称这种对性别血统的痴迷是“血统恐慌”,这是杰里米罗宾斯的“荣誉恐慌”和伊芙塞奇威克的“同性恋恐慌”(10)的种族歧视复合体。例如,人们在当代指控中看到了这一观点的呼应,即摩尔人血统的基督徒摩里斯科人是“坏基督徒,而且,更重要的是,鸡奸”(13);这种偏见导致从 1609 年开始正式将摩里斯科人逐出伊比利亚。

引发“血统恐慌”的“荣誉”和“同性恋”恐慌在第二部分(“塞巴斯蒂安国王”)中尤为突出,从第 5 章开始,福克斯研究了...

更新日期:2022-09-29
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