Abstract

Theater is constituted by a double and correlative tension between auditory and visual elements, on one hand, and verbal and factual components, on the other. Due to restrictions in staging or to aesthetic preference, in the Spanish Golden Age Comedia there is an initial preference for auditory constituents over visual elements. However, this partiality does not entail, as could be expected from the double binary, a supremacy of the verbal over the factual, but rather requires an equivalence between both dimensions. Given the original diminished role of visual action, in the Spanish Comedia the word becomes the action; both are one and the same. From this hypothesis, I propose an analytical model wherein the play’s plot appears as set of verbal incidents that could be reduced to four: utterance of a statement, silence, correct and incorrect interpretation of an utterance. To prove or test the validity and the critical fruits of this theorization of the Comedia and the analytical method derived from it, the essay reviews (or better, rehears) a corpus of representative plays: El médico de su honra, El desdén con el desdén, El condenado por desconfiado, and Entre bobos anda el juego.