Acceso usuarios
Roy Norton
MANY READERS OF THIS JOURNAL will by now be familiar with the Comedias completas de Calderón series of which this edition of La exaltación de la cruz constitutes volume 27. Fewer will know this particular comedia religiosa, which perhaps stands out for the extension and detail of its didactic treatment of several of the great mysteries of the Christian faith and also for the splendor of several set-piece scenes described in its stage directions. The final scene, for instance, involves the cracking open of a mountain to reveal the city of Jerusalem with, at its center, a shining altar upon which the True Cross is to be deposited. Arellano's edition of La exaltación provides a very clean, readable play text accompanied by the standard scholarly apparatus of bibliography, list of variants, and index of footnotes (the latter, in the main, drawing on the Diccionario de Autoridades, Covarrubias's Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Corpus Diacrónico del Español [CORDE], the Bible, Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, and Arellano's own excellent Repertorio de motivos de los autos sacramentales de Calderón [U de Navarra 2011]). The edition is available electronically to those whose libraries have the relevant subscription. Professor Arellano's work here and more generally as the director of Iberoamericana / Vervuert's Biblioteca Áurea Hispánica, to which the Calderón series belongs, is of very substantial importance for the study of this playwright, bringing as it does reliable and readily accessible versions of many lesser-known plays to a wide audience, a task crucial to the expansion of the Calderonian canon and the continuing refinement of our appreciation of his oeuvre.
Notionally set in the seventh-century Middle East, the principal action of La exaltación de la cruz traces the capture of the True Cross by the pagan horde led by Persian king Cosdroas and its eventual recovery by Emperor Heraclio of Byzantium, who—having learned the pious lessons many of Calderón's kings learn during the course of his plays—triumphantly restores the Cross to its proper place in Jerusalem. At the heart of the comedia, then, we have the clash between paganism and Christianity and, as Arellano observes, this is one of several binaries upon which Calderón constructs his plot and characters. Cosdroas has two sons, upstanding Siroes and his [End Page 175] scheming brother, Menardes. Heraclio's soul is torn between two women, beautiful Eudocia, for whom he pines at the start of the play, and Clodomira, Queen of Gaza, who teaches him to prioritize his duty as a Christian prince over the romantic desires of a private individual. Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, Calderón brings together the two sages whose debates would have offered the Golden Age spectator the intellectual meat of La exaltación: Zacarías, Christian priest of the Jerusalem temple, and pagan sorcerer Anastasio, who, in the manner of Cipriano of Calderón's better-known El mágico prodigioso (1637), is seeking enlightenment, searching for the True God. By way of a series of scholastic-style debates on topics ranging from redemption from original sin to the nature of the hypostatic union, Zacarías convinces his interlocutor of the truth of the Christian religion. This may not be one of Calderón's most stirring, thought-provoking, or entertaining comedias, but it is a decent example of the playwright's religious dramaturgy (note, for instance, his weaving into the dramatic verse scriptural quotation and paraphrase), and it illustrates once again just how perennial many of Calderón's thematic concerns are: kingship, the love-honor dichotomy, and strained relationships between fathers and sons and among brothers are all examined here.
Arellano's fifty-one-page introduction to La exaltación is divided into sections that cover the controversy relating to the play's title, the play's possible sources, its doctrinal content, and some thoughts on staging. There...
