Abstract
"The Physician of His Honour, written by Pedro Calderon de la Barca in Spain around 1630, has always been controversial. In 1881, the great don of nineteenth-century Spanish letters, Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, declared it (and by association its author), 'radically immoral'. There has never been disagreement, though, about the brilliance of the playwright, and different generations have found different ways of explaining the text and imagining its performance." "The drama is set in fourteenth-century Seville. The main characters are a nobleman (Don Gutierre) and his wife (Dona Mencia); his former love interest; a Moorish servant; a branded slave; and a bloodletter. Key players are the historical King Pedro of Castile and his bastard half-brother Prince Enrique. These two eventually fought each other in a civil war whose grim denouement (memorialized by Chaucer in The Monk's Tale) is foreshadowed by events in The Physician of His Honour."--BOOK JACKET.