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Although from quite different methodological and disciplinary perspectives, both Larry W. Riggs and George Mariscal identify a definitive marker of the "early modernity" generally ascribed to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century western Europe: a convergence of and competition between rival discourses (and, implicitly, the ideologies informing such discursive models) with both epistemological and ontological implications. (1) Both Spain and France witnessed the emergence and establishment of public theaters and professional theater industries in the midst of this sea change, and in each country authors of popular comedy drew upon such discursive plurality to entertain their audiences--as well as to comment on or critique the broader society in which dramatist, actor, and audience found themselves. This comparative study posits the importance of the neoclassical precept of decorum in our efforts to trace the ways in which this broader cultural shift translates to early modern theatrical practice. Decorums usefulness as a tool for navigating the complex web of intersecting modes of discourse at the early modern playwright's disposal is proposed by way of case-study, namely through the two versions of the Don Juan myth penned by Tirso de Molina (in El burlador de Sevilla, 1630) and Moliere (in Dora Juan ou le Festin de Pierre, 1665). A focus on the servants attending to the plays' title characters, and on the master-servant relationship formed in each text, illuminates the fundamentally different ways in which the two playwrights negotiate the discursive heterogeneity that decorum was meant to systematically address.
Early modern dramatists' conception of character and their means of linguistically representing it were largely dictated by decorum, in essence a neoaristotelian precept whose call for a "unity of character" or social verisimilitude is both literary and social, insofar as it prescribes a hierarchical social order both for the spectacle onstage and for the audience witnessing it. The master-servant relationships that are discursively represented by Tirso and Moliere constitute divergent "readings" of decorum in terms of the socially and culturally marginal figure of the servant and his ethical position vis-a-vis the noble protagonist. While the socially marginal voice of Tirso's Catalinon continues to be read as a kind of "moral conscience" in the play, (2) I will qualify such a reading in light of the insights gained from a comparison to Moliere's Sganarelle--a role originally performed by the playwright himself. Indeed, we will see that the relationship between the servant's voice and his claims to moral authority is precisely where, in different ways, both Tirso and Moliere situate the comic tension and dramatic irony of their plays.
The moral dimension of the two works--in both cases punctuated by Don Juan's eventual demise in an act of divine justice--has dominated readings of the plays at least since the heyday of the New Criticism, especially in the case of El burlador de Sevilla. Indeed, since the Spanish Romantic playwright Jose Zorilla rewrote the story as an archetypal conflict between good and evil in which Don Juan Tenorio is spared damnation at the last minute, the Don Juan legend has been read in such exemplary terms. Despite the more satirical and comic presentations of the story by Byron, Moliere, and Tirso, the notion of Don Juan as moral exemplum has been retroactively applied to their works. I would argue that this mode of reading tempts the twenty-first-century critic to underestimate the degree to which the codes, conventions, and aesthetic concerns of early modern comedy would serve as a filter through which any ostensibly moralist critique would be represented onstage and interpreted by an early modern audience.
While by no means denying the presence of a moral problem in the Tirso and Moliere plays, this study proposes a more nuanced analysis of their comic treatment that considers more carefully the voices from which such a moralist critique is enunciated. As a pillar of the codes of comedy, decorum bears social and ideological implications that complicate any notion of a socially marginal servant's "moral authority," and this problem is precisely where the two playwrights diverge in their treatments of domestic servants attending to a morally bankrupt antihero. Thus, where Sganarelle's frustrated attempts to sermonize "from below" simultaneously appeal to and impede the audience's identification with his moralist perspective, Catalinon's ethically ambivalent voice engages the audience metatheatrically with a firm grounding in the aesthetic dimensions of comic reception. This difference of characterization, between the frustrated preacher and the buffoonish stage director, indicates alternate comic strategies for framing the representation of moral corruption. Serving Don Juan, and in turn serving the audience witnessing the staging of his exploits, becomes the focal point for understanding how Dora Juan ou le festin de pierre deviates from El burlador de Sevilla in its response to the ideological parameters set by decorum in the early modern theater.
I. Decorum, Language, and Power
A revisiting of the dramatic code of neoaristotelian decorum today enjoys the obvious benefits of the lessons learned in the fields of dramatic criticism and literary and cultural theory over the centuries since the early modern period. While the discursive heterogeneity described above has received ample attention in readings of plays through the lenses of such theoretical frameworks as semiotics, reception theory, the New Historicism, and performance theory, I see merit in revisiting the phenomenon also from within the discourses and theories contemporary to neoclassical playwrights. Both early modern dramatic texts and the theoretical treatises contemporary to them are documents that engage early modern ideologies in ways that poststructuralist theories continue to rediscover and reinvent. Decorum in particular resonates with postmodern perspectives on ideology and power and their impact on the representation of class and gender.
As authors of publicly performed dramatic spectacles, one could say that Tirso and Moliere each served two masters: on the one hand a heterogeneous paying public, and on the other an absolutist state whose institutional concerns included critically monitoring those productions for morally objectionable or ideologically problematic content. Pleasing both audiences--one aesthetically, the other ideologically--was made possible in part through the complex network of linguistic registers dictated by neoaristotelian decorum. By staging a diverse cross-section of the social spectrum while still observing the precept that diction match character, early modern comedy and tragicomedy embraced a polyphony that made multiple interpretations possible, depending upon the ideological positioning, social identity (in terms of both class and gender), and subjective experience of the individual member of the paying public. Interpretation was also subject to extratextual elements of the dramatic spectacle, (3) suggesting that the multiple layers of signifiers at work in a given performance extend beyond the level of verbal (and hence textually representable) discourse.
The domestic servant attending to the (usually male) protagonist is most frequently assigned the traditional role of buffoon or comic fool, the Italian commedia dell' arte arlequin (later recast by Moliere (4)) or Spanish gracioso. His voice emerges from the discursive cacophony described above to negotiate its complexity, coming to the aid of the audience in its construction of meaning. In a period given to metatheatrical gesture, he is the character who most frequently shatters the staged illusion of mimesis by directly addressing the audience, in effect offering an interpretation of the spectacle in which he is participating, and in the process presenting to the audience a "reading" of what is being represented onstage. In her study of Elizabethan drama, Lori Culwell characterizes this presentation as a use of "exegesis rather than strictly practicing mimesis, thus integrating and mirroring the evolution of the self in the Renaissance." (5) The domestic servant had been a longstanding resource for authors of comedy to offer such direct spectacle-witness communication at least as far back as classical Roman comedy, in which the slave assumes center-stage to negotiate the plot schemes upon which his success depends. While this precursor to the early modern servant was at times working for and at times working against his master, he invariably enjoyed a relationship with the audience unlike that of any other character.
The unique nature of this relationship often led earlier generations of scholars to consider the comic buffoon serving the more "serious" male protagonist a privileged voice through which authorial intent could be deciphered. (6) While I would resist such a facile claim to understand authorial intent, such an argument stems from the fact that this comic figure does clearly perform a dramatic function that sets him apart from the rest of the dramatis personae. If his voice is privileged, however, decorum precludes that such privilege be morally or ideologically grounded; it is based instead, I would argue, on the codes and conventions of early modern comedy, on the audience's aesthetic experience of witnessing the comic spectacle. My resistance to equating the servant's voice with that of the dramatist stems from the recognition of two functions of the notion of decorum in the early modern period: one as a literary prescription that diction match character, disseminated through the millennia from Aristotle's Poetics, and the other as a notion of...
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