15th-Century Spanish Theater: La Celestina
Theater in the Fifteenth Century: La Celestina
Introduction
Fifteenth-century theater inherited the vitality of popular medieval theater and its religious legacy. However, authors began experimenting with secular subjects, poetic language, and a wider variety of characters. Two distinct currents emerged:
Religious Drama
This genre continued to explore the life of Jesus. The leading figure was Gómez Manrique, author of Representaciones / On the Birth of the Lord.
Secular Theater
This genre included elements of previous farcical theater, alongside romantic and pastoral themes. The two most significant authors were Lucas Fernández and Juan del Encina. Encina is considered the “patriarch of Castilian theater” because he was the first to write plays with some consistency.
The characters in Encina’s plays used colloquial language. The Sayagués, an artificially created character based on the Leonese dialect, used Castilian archaisms and Lusisms. The most representative character in his works is the shepherd, mainly characterized by his love for singing and dancing, his infatuation, and his evasion of responsibilities.
Authorship and Editions of La Celestina
The first known edition of La Celestina was published in Burgos in 1499. The preserved copy lacks the first folio, which should have included the title of the work, its argument, and the name of the author. In this version, the work consisted of sixteen acts, which were later expanded to reach the final text.
In 1500, new editions were published in Toledo and Salamanca, titled Calisto and Melibea’s Comedy. The 1501 edition included a prologue and two poems that provided new information about the work:
- A prologue in the form of a letter, entitled “The author to his friend,” where the author explains that he found some papers in Salamanca that discussed the evils of love. He was so moved that he decided to continue the work. In this version, there are two authors: the anonymous author of the first act and Fernando de Rojas, who wrote the rest.
- An acrostic poem, where the first letters of each line spell out a name or phrase, revealing the name of the author. The acrostic poem reveals the following sentence: “The bachelor Fernando de Rojas finished the Comedy of Melibea, and it was Calisto and was born in La Puebla de Montalbán.”
- A poem by Alonso de Proaza, the editor of the text, explains the existence of acrostic poems with the name of the author of the work.
Genre Issues
La Celestina presents a very peculiar medieval Castilian production. It is a work dominated by dialogue and action, with characters situated in a specific time and space. Its dialogue format suggests theater, but its extended argument, the inclusion of monologues, and the constant changes of scene point to prose.
The explanation is that La Celestina belongs to the genre called humanistic comedy, a piece composed to be read rather than performed. This type of work dealt with aspects of seduction and passion, imitating the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence, where, as in La Celestina, there was a development of the action, contemporary settings, characters from different social strata, cultured and vulgar language, colloquialisms, and proverbs. It was a genre widely cultivated in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The influence of Petrarch as a humanist and scholar is remarkable in the work of Fernando de Rojas.
Theater in the Fifteenth Century: La Celestina
Argument
La Celestina recounts the love affair between Calisto and Melibea. Calisto falls for Melibea after a chance encounter, but she rejects him. Sempronio, Calisto’s servant, advises him to seek help from Celestina, a go-between who, through her skills, will succeed in changing Melibea’s mind and making her fall in love with him.
In gratitude, Calisto gives Celestina a gold chain. She dies at the hands of Calisto’s servants, who don’t want to share the reward with her. The servants are captured and executed.
Calisto, visiting his beloved at night, falls from a ladder and dies. Melibea, devastated by Calisto’s tragic end, confesses what happened to her father, Pleberio, and jumps from a tower. The play ends with the old man Pleberio lamenting the death of his daughter.
Structure
Formally, the work consists of twenty-one acts. Regarding its internal structure or plot development, we can distinguish:
- Act I: The introduction of the action.
- Acts II-XII: Development of the conflict between characters.
- Acts XIII-XX: Development of the passionate love between Calisto and Melibea.
- Act XXI: Pleberio’s lament.
Style
The most striking features of La Celestina’s style are:
The Richness of Language and the Alternation Between Cultured and Popular Language:
- Dialogues of Calisto and Melibea: They use a courtly style and worship nature. Latinisms, parallelisms, antitheses, courtly images, mythological allusions, quotations, and philosophical reflections abound, as well as the use of maxims and sentences.
- Dialogues of Celestina, servants, and apprentices: They are characterized by the vernacular: sayings, broken phrases, and exclamations abound.
Their language is based on rhetorical devices and the vivacity of popular speech. The varieties of discourse that appear in the text are:
- Dialogues: They reveal the character of each character and allow the plot to advance, establishing the cause-effect relationships that organize it. One significant aspect is simultaneity: the same situation is seen by different characters in adjacent scenes.
- Monologues: They reveal the fears and doubts in the minds of the characters, while also uncovering their thoughts.
- Asides: The author uses them as a way of indirectly addressing the reader or the audience and provoking comic situations.