Lope de Vega and the Guilty Mind

Lope de Vega’s Punishment Without Revenge (1631) has long been considered one of the masterpieces of Golden Age Spanish drama, and it is easy to see why. Nearly four hundred years after its composition, four centuries of incredible advances in cognitive psychology and in philosophy of mind, its meditations on the nature of private thoughts and inward depravity remain as compelling as ever.

The central character of the play is Count Federico, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Ferrara. The Duke, a notorious womanizer, has decided to marry Cassandra, Duchess of Mantua, so that he might produce a legitimate heir to the Dukedom and avoid civil unrest. Federico is initially upset that this marriage will mean that he is less likely to inherit, but when he goes to Mantua to fetch Cassandra and saves her from drowning, he suddenly realizes he has a different problem: He is in love with her. Cassandra eventually begins to detect his feelings for her and, driven by her frustration with the Duke’s relapse into debauchery, enters into an illicit relationship with the Count. The two find ample opportunity to indulge their quasi-incestuous passion when the Duke is called away to command the Pope’s army. When the Duke returns, having won much honor for his service, his excitement to see his son and his wife gives way to horror when an anonymous letter informs him of their relationship. Once he has proven to his own satisfaction that what he had read was true, he tricks Federico into running a sword through Cassandra and then has Cassandra’s cousin, the Marquis of Gonzaga, execute Federico for doing so.

The play is deeply interested in the power of wicked thoughts. Federico’s illicit attraction to his stepmother and her infatuation with him essentially put to trial the argument that such thoughts, on their own, can do no harm. As the play shows, this supposition underestimates the power of these thoughts. Not simply because depraved thoughts lead to depraved action, though they eventually do, but because they are never as easy to conceal as one supposes; they always threaten to betray themselves while simultaneously having a corrupting and debilitating effect on the person harboring them.

Federico has his good qualities, and at the outset of the play he may even seem like a more appealing character than his father. The high esteem in which he is held is alluded to on multiple occasions. His eagerness to jump into the river to save the women from drowning in the first act and his desire to accompany his father to go fight in the wars speak to his valor. For that matter it is to his credit that, while he is not permitted to go and join the army his father commands, he is said to have governed well in his father’s absence.

Unfortunately, mental discipline is not one of his virtues. His earliest lines in the play show him to be something of a malcontent, and his conversation with his manservant Batin at the beginning of the first act reveals that knowing his thoughts are selfish and unwise does not make it any easier for him to alter them.

As he enters the stage for the first time, he is already talking about how upset and angry he is because of what his father’s impending marriage means for his own inheritance. Batin reminds him what a good thing the marriage could be for his father. It presents an opportunity for the Duke to do away with his vices: “There’s nothing tames a man like getting married.”¹ Federico wholeheartedly agrees that the marriage could help his father, but he is unable to feel encouraged by this. He asks, “what is it to me if getting married  / Makes my father abandon / His way of life?” Even knowing the salubrious effect getting married and having children can have on a man, Federico cannot help feeling resentment. His disregard for his father’s future happiness and opportunity to reform is made worse by the fact revealed later in the play that the Duke, for all his faults, really does love and care about his son. Not only does Federico have a hard time not feeling this resentment, he also has a hard time not showing it. Batin has to caution him that it is not wise to wear his disappointment on his sleeve in the way that he does.

Federico’s inability to vanquish his vicious thoughts becomes more of a problem when his understandable sadness at the prospect of losing out on the possibility of inheritance is replaced by his far less defensible infatuation with his father’s new wife. Once he meets Cassandra and acknowledges his feelings for her, the play begins to raise questions about the moral status of such impure thoughts and the philosophical problems they present.

The main dilemma is broached at the end of the first act when Federico asks, “Am I to blame? They tell us thought / Is free.” To which Batin responds, “So free, that in its flight / The Immortal soul can see itself / As in a mirror.”

Federico’s argument and Batin’s response present an interesting paradox. Federico suggests that the freedom of our thoughts makes us less than fully culpable for them. And yet, as Batin’s response implies, this same freedom makes them that much truer a reflection of ourselves. The best defense of depraved thoughts is also their indictment. Federico nonetheless decides in the closing lines of the act that he will in fact grant himself license to feel jealous. Ironically, it is Cassandra who later suggests “that jealousy / Is caused by lack of self-respect.” She says this in reference to Federico’s supposed jealousy of her cousin Carlos the Marquis of Gonzaga, who is in love with the Duke’s niece Aurora. She is, however, nearer the truth than she realizes. It may not be easy for Federico to control his jealousy, but the fact that it is so difficult for him to do so is reflective of a deep character flaw that he leaves unexamined by indulging his jealous feelings as freely as he does.

In the second act, Cassandra defends her own guilty thoughts with respect to Federico and her line of reasoning more or less resembles his:

No man’s honour would be perfect
If his thoughts were brought to judgment:
Merely to think is no offence.

. . .

Thoughts are visible to God
But they remain unseen by honour.

The argument here is that honorable people can (and nearly always do) have dishonorable thoughts. Like Federico, she assumes she can erect a firm wall between these thoughts and her conduct and that her thoughts can remain hidden to all but herself and never bring dishonor upon her. But her ensuing actions prove otherwise.

One thing that becomes apparent not long after Federico defends his wicked thoughts is how debilitating such thoughts can be. While his lust for Cassandra eventually prompts him to have an illicit relationship with her during the Duke’s absence, the harm that it does him is obvious long before this relationship starts. In the second act, all of the other characters notice and comment on his deep melancholy. So evident and so severe is his dejection that the Duke says that had he known that his marriage would cause Federico so much pain he never would have married, believing like the others that it is the thought of losing the inheritance that is making him so depressed. Federico is simply not able to hide the misery that his lust and jealousy are causing him, even if the other characters are not yet able to discern the exact cause of his dejection.

His mental state continues to deteriorate throughout the play. His misery alienates him from himself. He acknowledges as much when he says, “To say that I am who I am / Is a thing that I can’t do.” As he explains to Cassandra, his infatuation also makes him feel alienated from God and essentially suicidal.

The final description of Federico’s mental state and behavior comes from Batin near the end of the third act. Batin asks Aurora if he can accompany her and the Marquis back to Mantua following their marriage. He does not want to remain with Federico. This comes as a surprise to Aurora, but Batin has his reasons:

I don’t know who he is, my master,
I don’t know if I’ll ever know that.
His condition’s also very bad;
I just don’t know what’s wrong with him;
One minute laughing, next minute grim,
One minute sane, next minute mad.

Much of this corroborates what Federico himself has confessed, but it also shows that things have gotten considerably worse. The extreme mood swings and apparent instability are new. One almost has to wonder if the Duke is not justified in feeling that for all he knows Federico might attempt to kill him.

That the thoughts which Federico initially believes he can harbor privately without any real harm lead to such a severe loss of mental stability testifies to the pernicious power of lust. Cassandra accurately describes Federico’s problem, as well as her own, when she says:

Nothing on earth, or in heaven
Causes us more restlessness
More turbulence and sleeplessness
Than our own imagination.

Perhaps part of the reason she can diagnose him so clearly is that she is having a similar struggle of her own as a result of the tumultuous nature of her marriage:

After such pain and so many quarrels
With the Duke, my angry heart
Imagines vengeances and pleasures
That would be madness on my part,
Leading me into deadly error.

But the corrosive effects of such depraved thoughts on our mental state is only part of the problem. As much as we might try to keep them secret, these thoughts often have a way of coming out of hiding. Cassandra explains this to Federico by telling him the story of Antiochus, who loved his stepmother so much that it made him ill. According to this story, when his stepmother entered the room, it became immediately apparent “that she must be the one he loved, / By the quickening of his pulse.” By this point in the play, Cassandra already knows that Federico is attracted to her, because his feelings betrayed him during their earlier conversation. Federico is not a good dissembler. Aurora knows that his claim to be jealous of the Marquis’s attention to her is a pretense even before she learns the real reason he does not accept her marriage proposal. For that matter, Batin detects his master’s infatuation with Cassandra before the first act is even over, though he hardly seems to anticipate that this infatuation will have the devastating impact that it does. Federico, when asked if he is keeping something secret from Batin, responds: “it’s nothing that I’ve done, / And so there’s nothing to conceal. / Imagination has no body.” In this formulation, because his feeling of love is non-physical it is nothing, and by concealing it he is concealing nothing. Yet Batin bluntly tells him exactly what it is that he is concealing: his feelings for Cassandra.

Their lust for one another does them both considerable harm even while it remains unacknowledged and private, but what leads to their disgrace, dishonor and execution is the fact that it does not remain this way. This is partly because their attraction to one another is so strong that both soon feel as though they would rather die than not gratify it. Near the end of the second act, Cassandra suggests that the best thing for them would be to separate from one another in order to avoid temptation, but Federico says he would rather die than do this and she pretty clearly feels the same way. The third act then opens with a discussion between Aurora and the Marquis about Aurora’s discovery that Cassandra and Federico have been intimate with one another, and her testimony leaves no doubt about what a revolting scene it was to witness. Once the Duke returns, Federico’s plan to pretend to be in love with Aurora again in order to deter suspicion is so offensive to Cassandra that she threatens to betray their secret if he tries to do so. Not that Aurora has any intention of being complicit in his attempt to hide his sin.

It is fitting that it is through their reflection in a mirror in Cassandra’s room that Aurora first sees Cassandra and Federico making love and doing “every kind of disgusting thing.” Just as they believed their private thoughts could be indulged without risk of dishonor, these thoughts found ways to betray them. They thought they could make love secretly but were actually visible when they thought they were concealed.

Toward the end of the play, the Duke delivers a few long monologues as he contemplates and then undertakes the execution of Cassandra and then Federico. It is from these monologues that the title of the play is taken. In his talk of “punishment without revenge,” it is clear that the Duke understands the importance of his own state of mind. He speaks with conviction and solemnity. The execution is performed more in sadness than in anger and privately rather than publicly. His sadness is a reminder of how much he loves his son. While the Duke is a very flawed character, whose faults were in some ways similar to Federico’s, there are reasons to believe that his experience in the war may truly have changed him for the better. If the descriptions given by his servants are to be believed, he came back from the war looking like a new man, accepting the honors conferred on him with humility and speaking only of how excited he was to see his wife and son. It is possible to believe, or at least to hope, that the Duke’s most recent moral transformation will be permanent, not because he is not deeply flawed, but because unlike his son he understands that what is in his mind matters.

NOTE:

1. Quotations in this essay are taken from the 2013 Meredith Oakes translation published by Oberon Books.

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