Hagiografía y militancia católica en "San Carlos", nueva comedia atribuida a Andrés de Claramonte

Resumo

This paper is meant to be a first approach to the play San Carlos o Las dos columnas de Carlos, a hagiographic drama from the second decade of the Seventeenth Century that has not received attention from critics until now, mainly because the name of the playwright who wrote it was unknown. However, the recent attribution of this play to Andrés de Claramonte, an interesting playwright from the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, invites us to recuperate it and locate it in its specific authorial and literary context. Firstly, I place the play in the tradition of the biographies of Saint Charles Borromeo that appeared in Europe between the end of the Sixteenth Century and the first decades of the Seventeenth Century, paying special attention to the situation in Spain. Secondly, I study this play from the perspective of the dramatic genre it belongs to –the baroque hagiographical drama–, analyzing characteristics such as the construction of the action or the typology of the main characters, and establishing points of contact with the dramaturgy of Andrés de Claramonte. Finally, I also study the propagandistic component present in this play, in which the criticism of Protestantism is interwoven with the exaltation of the militant politics of the Spanish empire.