Jacinto Cordeiro's El juramento ante Dios y lealtad contra el amor: A Critical Edition

Abstract

Portuguese playwrights who wrote comedias during and after the Dual Monarchy (1580-1640), a period in which the Portuguese and Spanish thrones were united under Habsburg rule, continue to be a largely unexplored group. In a first step toward their recovery and study, this dissertation highlights the contributions of Jacinto Cordeiro, one of Lisbon's most successful seventeenth-century dramatists. In many respects, Cordeiro exemplifies the dominant currents of Lusitanian theater before the restoration of the Portuguese monarchy. This dissertation describes the sparse critical attention that Cordeiro has received, his life, literary career, and historical context. Most importantly, it provides a modern and critical edition of Cordeiro's most celebrated play, El juramento ante Dios y lealtad contra el amor (1630), based on a collation of the 21 extant witnesses that comprise the Juramento textual tradition. This includes an in-depth account of the transmission of the play with a stemma that documents the genealogical relationships between extant versions. It also provides an analysis of the staging of the play based on stage directions and performance cues written into the dialogue. This is complemented by a study of the comedia's versification. In summary, this dissertation argues that the mastery of seventeenth-century theatrical conventions displayed in El juramento ante Dios explains why this play was Cordeiro's most enduring work and why Portuguese comedia authors in general should be revisited by contemporary critics.