The dark side of the empire: theatrical representations of Hispanic melancholy in the seventeenth century

Abstract

This paper is part of the research project on melancholy and madness in the theater of the Spanish Golden Age, now in its final stage. Although several scholars have noted the distinctive mark of these diseases in seventeenth-century cultural texts, they have not considered them together -with some exceptions- nor have they focused their attention on baroque theatrical productions, in which they figure largely. When investigating their relationship with the main dramatic conflicts of the Comedia Nueva, we observed that these systematically present representations co-occurred with different variables: love and desire, ambition for power and violence, honor (and the lack of it), expressed through devices of intense theatricality that ambiguously gave rise to distancing and identification in the audience. Thus, the dramatic texts selected show a correlation with a melancholy social imaginary shaped, to a large extent, by the failure of the imperial enterprise and the disenchantment of the world, which found a perfect resonating chamber in theatrical discourse.