The sabotaged oracle: ideology and guided behaviors in the Spanish Golden Age comedia

Abstract

This article proposes an analysis of the Siglo de Oro theatrical genre in one of its rhetorical mechanisms with greater performative capacity: the oracular dramatic function from which a higher voice –be it an oracle, a dream, an inner voice or any other transitory possession– is simultaneously heard by the receiver-character and by the receiver-public. The playwright thus hierarchizes the heterogeneity of discourses present in the microcosm of the play and, offering an epistemological syllogism, encourages the first to act directly and the second metonymically. Criticism understood as sabotage offers critical tools that allow to unmask the ins and outs of these oracular resources that impose a world model on the recipients of the greatest mass show of early modernity.