The 'Comedia' and Points of View (PDF)

Chapter Eight The Hermaphrodite Archetype and Role-Playing in the Comedia (p. 125)

Introduction

Greek mythology records the legendary existence of the hermaphrodite, a being partly male and partly female. The word derives from Hermes and Aphrodite, the Greek god and goddess of love, whose sacred union was thought to have produced a two-sexed god.

The idea of such a being originated in the East, where many deities possessed a dual nature. The concept of the hermaphrodite has persisted to our day and designates a condition of various degrees of mixed male and female sexuality. The notion of the hermaphrodite appears in the Comedia, and this chapter will explore how the dramatists of seventeenth- century Spain regarded this phenomenon and the techniques, principally role-playing, they employed in creating hermaphrodite characters.

The plays to be examined are Tirso`s ElAquiles and Don Gil de las colzas verdes, and Calderon`s La vida es sueno, El monstruo de los jardines and La hija del aire, I and II. We will study the protagonists of these plays, first the female and then the male. Before doing so, we will present some background material that is pertinent to the topic.

Backgrounds

The natural sciences designate the hermaphrodite as an organism that possesses or will possess during its lifetime the reproductive structure of both the male and female sex. In biology there is the example of the lowly amoeba, which reproduces by dividing itself. In botany hermaphroditism refers to the condition in which both male and female organs (stamen and pistils) occur in a single flower or, more broadly, where both sexes occur in the same plant.

Medicine and comparative biology differentiate hermaphroditism from gonochorism, the latter is the state of separate male and female sexes. In an evolutionary sense hermaphroditism is the primitive form of sex distribution out of which gonochorism arose by gradual

Dieses eBook können Sie uneingeschränkt auf allen Geräten der tolino Familie lesen. Zum Lesen auf sonstigen eReadern und am PC benötigen Sie eine Adobe ID.