ABSTRACT
Considered by Wilhelm Goethe to be Calderón de la Barca’s greatest work, La hija del aire [The Daughter of the Air] (1653) takes as its source the story of queen Semiramis, whose legendary beauty, ambition, and thirst for power became both an exemplary and a cautionary tale in early modern Europe. The playwright makes use of the strategies of exclusion and revision in order to fashion a political parable related to the state of the contemporary monarchy. As he does in La gran Cenobia, Calderón in La hija turns to an Oriental and classical model to elaborate this particular version or fantasy of female rule, but this time to greater dramatic effect. Gwynne Edwards tells us that the legend of Semiramis 2 was a hybrid containing both religious and historical elements, and that it provided a fluid field of interpretation throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period (xxiii–xxix). The “historical” Semiramis (also known as Sammuramat) governed Assyria from 811 to 808 B.C. in the minority of her son and was, by all accounts, an exceptional woman who led her armies into battle. In myth, she came to be associated with fertility and the changing of seasons, and often appeared as an erotic symbol. Semiramis appeared frequently in Renaissance treatises dealing with female exemplarity. In De Claris mulieribus [In Praise of Famous Women], Boccaccio, for example, describes her as “so spirited that she, though a woman, dared undertake to rule with skill and intelligence” (4). In Spain, the tendency was to attenuate the more scabrous versions of her story (her lasciviousness, the accusation of incest, for example) in treatises written by Juan Rodríguez del Padrón and Martín de Córdoba. An exception was Juan de Espinosa, who saw her decidedly as emblematic of feminine perfidy and dissoluteness. 3 In La hija del aire, Calderón eschews the mythic associations and the sexual transgressions, although he does selectively adapt other negative elements of the story, portraying the queen as a successful but ruthless military leader who abuses her authority, usurps the reign from two legitimate rulers, and precipitates the downfall of her kingdom. 4 Of particular interest in this play is the repeated enactment of gender dissonances, only hinted at in La gran Cenobia, and how these relate to the portrayal of monarchical power.
