ABSTRACT
The plays considered in the previous chapters, written several decades apart, take their inspiration from classical sources, but Calderón and his contemporaries also used historical events as the basis for their plays. I turn now to Calderón’s La cisma de Inglaterra [The Schism in England] 2 (1627), which had as its immediate source the first volume of Pedro de Rivadeneira’s Historia Eclesiástica del Scisma del Reino de Inglaterra [Ecclesiastical History of the Schism in the English Realm] 3 (1588). The play engages, then, not with a distant, quasi-historical, and quasi-mythical context, but rather—like the chronicle that preceded it—provides the modern reader with a distinctively Spanish perspective on a defining moment of European history, namely the calamitous series of events that led to the definitive break between England and Papal Rome. The dialectic between two genres—drama and “history”—dealing with a specific event that had painful consequences for Habsburg Spain represents a privileged example of the manipulation of historical events to forge convenient ideological narratives. Within these invented narratives, we can identify some of the same collectively accepted conceptions on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and monarchical power that we have seen in the other plays; but here, these tensions are compounded by the issue of religious orthodoxy. In both the chronicle and Calderón’s play, we find a convergence of Renaissance discourses pertaining to women and the role of these discourses in promoting the ideology of monarchy and masculinist supremacy. Rivadeneira’s chronicle and Calderón’s La cisma once more reiterate the deep ambivalence and anxiety felt by seventeenth-century Spaniards toward women and their claim to a political identity. 4
