Acceso usuarios
William Childers
Lope de Vega's religious theater (autos sacramentales and comedias de santos) worked in parallel fashion to the comedia nueva to promote ecclesiastical and monarchical absolutism. The ideological effectiveness of the religious plays was grounded in their ability to create the sensation of divine presence for the audience, especially in the use of apparitions. Cervantes systematically rejects this religious theater. On the one hand, in "El retablo de las maravillas" he ridicules the audience of the auto sacramental for accepting the presence of Biblical figures on stage, displaying an empty frame where the final apotheosis would usually appear. In El rufián dichoso, he goes further, deconstructing the conventional comedia de santos by staging sainthood as a series of performances whose traces are only subsequently drawn together to create an artificial image of holiness. In reconstructing Cervantes's sustained critique of Lope's religious theater, this paper also examines the confrontation between the two writers concerning the role of both the sacramental and hagiographic genres in the construction of an emergent national identity.
