Speaker: Alani Rosa Hicks-Bartlett, Department of Hispanic Studies, Brown University - Academia.edu, ResearchGate

Abstract: »Although the wife at the unfortunate center of uxoricide tragedies has frequently been discounted as a non-presence in a primarily male drama of power and control, the link between her speech acts and political rhetoric is one of the elements that most clearly reveals the overarching tensions of wife-murder plays, and particularly those by Calderón. Focusing on El médico de su honra, this paper considers how the play’s theatrical, sociopolitical, and sexual anxieties are crystallized in the wife’s linguistic failure—in the moments in which she remains silent or is silenced; in the scenes in which she loses control over written language, or turns to rhetorical devices like prolepsis to announce her own death, all of which are folded into larger political contentions that her silence fuels. The play’s treatment of imagined action—that is, actions that are ideated and ultimately come to fruition, as well as those that are imagined but never realized or hidden—also helpfully evinces the relationality of sexual and political violence in the play, as the slain wife and the play’s political leaders share visions and imagined actions, while also recurring to a nearly identical vocabulary in their attempts to resolve marital and martial/political strife.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Spain / Habsburg Spain | Literature: Spanish literature / Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El médico de su honra | Sex and the law: Sexual assault