Abstract

The playwright used the possibilities that offered the merchant of precious stones and species in order to create pieces of a great value concerning symbolism and stage design. In that way, as he did with other motives, he unified a quotidian reality with a literary and a religious tradition. In the case of the ship, the motive had a biblical precedent and it was related to the literary and religious as well as to the Senecean and Jesuitical tradition. Moreover, it evoked the exaltation of shipping resulting from the battle of Lepanto which, at the same time, had developed different literary, plastic and iconographic ways of representation. In this work a chronological study of the religious texts is carried out in order to show how the playwright creates a dramatic text, intensifying certain effects and establishing progressively complex symmetrical games, oppositions and references.