Out of the Wings

El conde Partinuplés (?), Ana Caro

Titles

English title: Count Partinuplés
First publication date: 1653
Keywords: morality > honour, identity > sexuality, family > duty, family > marriage, love > desire
Genre and type: comedy

Pitch

In Ana Caro’s imaginative twist on the Cupid and Psyche myth, the Empress of Constantinople finds a husband through the use of magic, creating an enchanted castle and hosting a supernatural banquet. Her devoted suitor, Count Partinuplés of France, abandons his previous love and defeats her other suitors (all princes) in a tournament, winning her as his wife.

Synopsis

Rosaura, Empress of Constantinople, is forced to choose a husband in order to provide an heir to the empire. Her cousin Aldora, a skilled magician, introduces her to occult ways of choosing a prince, and she chooses the Count Partinuplés of France (although he is already engaged to Lisbella). The Count, while out hunting with Lisbella and the King, is given a portrait of a beautiful lady (Rosaura) by two fishermen who find it in a wrecked ship. A savage woman in animal skins (Rosaura in disguise) goes running by, but in a quick costume change, Rosaura soon appears to the men dressed just as she is in the portrait. Veiled, and without identifying herself, she disappears, and the Count tells his lackey, Gaulín, that he is in love with this mystery woman, and they vow to find her.

In act 2 the Count and his servant wake up in a magical castle and Rosaura has set a beautiful banquet for them, but hidden herself away. The Count hears a repeating refrain, ‘If you seek me, you shall find me’, and he falls in love with the beautiful voice of the unknown singer. Rosaura crosses the room, and stumbles on the Count, who begs to see her face, but she refuses, telling him he must have faith. Instead, Rosaura tells the Count to follow a lamp when it appears, enabling them to have a tryst alone in the dark while Aldora plays word games with Gaulín. Rosaura’s other suitors call, and she deflects the choice to her advisers, buying time. The Count, who has abandoned his old love Lisbella, works out that the savage woman, the lady in the portrait, the singing voice, and the lover he has been meeting in the dark but not seeing, are all one, all his love. Rosaura, veiled, tells the Count that France is under attack and he must go, and lends him horses. He leaves, after he and Rosaura exchange lovers’ promises.

Time elapses between acts 2 and 3 and in the third act, the Count and his servant return to Rosaura’s ‘enchanted’ castle. The Count tells Rosaura of his victory in war, but she falls asleep in the middle of his tale. With a lamp, he looks at her face; she awakens and declares she will kill the Count for his treachery, but Aldora whisks him away to safety. Lisbella arrives to reclaim her man, wearing a hat and wielding a sword. Aldora contrives more magic, appearing disguised in stage machinery designed as a cloud; she tells the Count that he must fight in a tournament to win Rosaura, and he agrees. Aldora takes the Count and Gaulín up in her cloud to the tournament grounds. Rosaura looks on as the tournament is about to begin, but Lisbella arrives dressed for battle, and she threatens the complete destruction of Constantinople if Rosaura does not return the Count to her. Lisbella behaves as a man but her goals are political: she readily admits that her arranged marriage to the Count is one of ‘convenience’ as her father wishes the Count to be his heir to the throne. Rosaura tells Lisbella that she has been misinformed, for today there is to be a tournament which will decide her husband, and the contenders are the princes vying for Rosaura’s hand: Frederick of Poland, Robert of Transylvania and Edward of Scotland. The winner of the tournament is an unidentified knight wearing a helmet which conceals his face; when the princes demand to know who he is, the Count reveals himself as the victor. The Count marries Rosaura, Lisbella is content to marry Robert, and Edward marries Aldora.

Sources

An anonymous French medieval romance novel from 1188, translated into Spanish and published in 1497, Portonopeus de Blois, served as the source for a large number of Spanish adaptations of the Cupid and Psyche story (Delgado 1998: 152). For a comparative study of Caro’s play and the French novel, see Luna 1993: 28-40. The original story, the myth from ‘The Golden Ass’, of Cupid and Psyche, is compared with Caro’s play in Luna 1993: 40-44. In that story, Psyche, a beautiful young girl, was prophesied to marry a monster, and is married to a man whom she never sees (Venus’s son, Cupid) who is very kind to her and waits on her through invisible servants. Yet when her sisters convinced her to sneak in and catch a glimpse of her husband, whom they suppose to be a monster, she was so surprised at the young Cupid’s beauty that she dropped hot wax from her lamp on him, waking him up, and he turned her out as the magic castle she had lived in with him turned to dust. Yet Caro’s play departs from and enlarges upon its source, reversing the male and female roles (not unlike Calderón’s La dama duende and Lope’s La viuda valenciana), as it is the lady, Rosaura, who leads the object of her love, the Count, to a magical castle, and the trials that the goddess Venus put Psyche through in the ancient tale are transposed to the tournament battle that the Count fights to win Rosaura.

Caro, Ana. 1993. El conde Partinuplés, ed. Lola Luna. Kassel, Reichenberger (in Spanish)
Caro, Ana. 1998. Las comedias de Ana Caro, ed. María José Delgado. New York, Peter Lang (in Spanish)

Critical response

The mythological allusions in the play, such as its relationship with the Cupid and Psyche myth, have been popular choices for critics’ responses to the play, but a feminist perspective taken on the self-willed figure of Rosaura is a popular critical perspective. Recently, Maroto Camino discussed the play from a gender ideology perspective, making connections between the Rosaura in this play and the character by the same name in Calderón’s La vida es sueño (2007). Soufas classes the play as a ‘comedia de apariencias’ because of its use of stage machinery, visual tricks and onstage magic (1997: 134).

Caro Mallén de Soto, Ana. 1997. Valor, agravio y mujer. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 163-94. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky (in Spanish)
Maroto Camino, Mercedes. 2007. ‘Negotiating Woman: Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés and Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño’. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 26, 2, 199-216

Further information

Delgado reports that there is no record of contemporary performance; nor does it appear in Shergold and Varey’s catalogues. Luna places a possible date of production at the end of the 1630s or start of the 1640s (Luna 1993: 10).

Neither is the play's date of composition certain. It was possibly written between 1610-1621 (Delgado 1993: 28); Delgado ties events and themes in the play to the political environment of that time (See Delgado 1998: 154, where she claims the pay was written around the early 1620s and finds parallels between Rosaura and King Philip III, and Aldora and the Duke of Lerma). Soufas says it was probably written in the late 1630s or early 1640s, the period of Caro’s greatest writing activity (Soufas 1997: 134).

Caro, Ana. 1993. El conde Partinuplés, ed. Lola Luna. Kassel, Reichenberger (in Spanish)
Caro, Ana. 1998. Las comedias de Ana Caro, ed. María José Delgado. New York, Peter Lang (in Spanish)
Delgado, María José. 1993. Valor, agravio y mujer y El conde Partinuplés: una edición crítica. Doctoral thesis, University of Arizona (in Spanish)
Soufas, Teresa S. 1997. ‘Ana Caro Mallén de Soto’. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 133-6. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky

Editions

Caro, Ana. El conde Partinuplés. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid. Manuscript 16.775.
Date unknown, from the seventeenth century.
Caro Mallén de Soto, Ana. 1997. El conde Partinuplés. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 137-62. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky
Caro, Ana. 1653. El conde Partinuplés. In Laurel de Comedias. Quarta parte de diferentes autores. Madrid, Imprenta Real
This is the first printing (princeps) edition.
Caro, Ana. 1859. El conde Partinuplés. In Dramáticos posteriores a Lope de Vega, vol. 2, ed. Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, pp. 125-138. Madrid, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, M. Rivadeneira
Caro, Ana. 1993. El conde Partinuplés, ed. Lola Luna. Kassel, Reichenberger
Caro, Ana. 1998. El conde Partinuplés. In Las comedias de Ana Caro, ed. María José Delgado. New York, Peter Lang

Useful readings and websites

Armas, Frederick de. 1986. 'Ana Caro Mallén de Soto'. In Women Writers of Spain: An Annotated Bio-Bibliographical Guide, ed. Carolyn L. Galerstein, pp. 66-7. New York, Greenwood
Ordóñez, Elizabeth J. 1985. 'Woman and Her Text in the Works of María de Zayas and Ana Caro', Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 19, 1, 3-15
Anonymous. 1944. El conde Partinuplés [the novel that served as the source of the play], ed. Ignacio B. Anzoátegui. Buenos Aires, Espasa-Calpe Argentina (in Spanish)
Armas, Frederick de. 1976. The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age. Biblioteca Siglo de Oro. Charlottesville, Virginia
Delgado, María José. 1993. Valor, agravio y mujer y El conde Partinuplés: una edición crítica. Doctoral thesis, University of Arizona (in Spanish)
Finn, T. P. 2007. ‘Women’s Kingdom: Female Monarchs by Two Women Dramatists of Seventeenth-Century Spain and France’. Bulletin of the Comediantes, 59, 1, 131-48
Kaminsky, Amy. 1993. ‘Ana Caro Mallén de Soto’. In Spanish Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, eds. Linda Gould Levine, Ellen Engelson Marson and Gloria Feiman Waldman, pp. 86-97. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood
Luna, Lola. 1992. Ana Caro, una escritora profesional del Siglo de Oro: Vida y obra. Doctoral thesis, University of Seville (in Spanish)
Lundelius, Ruth. 1989. ‘Ana Caro: Spanish Poet and Dramatist’. In Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, eds. Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke, pp. 228-50. Athens,Georgia, University of Georgia Press
Maroto Camino, Mercedes. 2007. ‘Negotiating Woman: Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés and Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño’. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 26, 2, 199-216
McKendrick, Melveena. 1983. ‘Women Against Wedlock: The Reluctant Brides of Golden Age Drama’. In Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller, pp. 115-146. Berkeley, University of California Press
Soufas, Teresa S. 1997. ‘Ana Caro Mallén de Soto’. In Women’s Acts: Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age, ed. Teresa Scott Soufas, pp. 133-6. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky
Soufas, Teresa S. 1999. ‘Repetitive Patterns: The Unmarried Woman in Ana Caro’s El conde Partinuplés’. In Engendering the Early Modern Stage: Women Playwrights in the Spanish Empire. New Orleans, University Press of the South, ed. Amy R. Williamsen and Valerie Hegstrom. New Orleans, University Press of the South
Vollendorf, Lisa. 2005. ‘Women Onstage: Angela de Azevedo, María de Zayas, and Ana Caro’. In The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain, pp. 74-89. Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press
Review of this book by Kathleen Costales. 2008. Comedia Performance, 5, 1.
Weimer, Christoper B. 2000. ‘Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés and Calderón's La vida es sueño: Protofeminism and Heuristic Imitation’. Bulletin of the Comediantes, 52, 1, 123-46
Williamsen, Amy R. and Valerie Hegstrom, eds. 1999. Engendering the Early Modern Stage: Women Playwrights in the Spanish Empire. New Orleans, University Press of the South

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Entry written by Kathleen Jeffs. Last updated on 4 October 2010.

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Out of the Wings

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El conde Partinuplés (?), Ana Caro

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