Acceso usuarios
Charles Oriel
Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El alcalde de Zalamea has typically been viewed as a drama that pivots on the tension between social honor (fama, opinión) and personal honor (patrimonio del alma). This essay argues for the inseparability of these two concepts and, in turn, explores how they relate to morality and justice. The corporate sense of honor—related to a Christian worldview and as elaborated in an early essay by Peter N. Dunn—functions in the drama as an organizing principle made manifest by the opening and closing images of the body. While reassessing honor’s place, I examine the ways in which language within the drama elaborates a dynamic and dialectically conflictive sense of subjectivity typical of the Golden Age literary corpus.
