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visiting courtier's attempted seduction of
his wife. García has been led to believe that
the would-be seducer is the king, traveling
incognito, and he must therefore contain
his indignation out of deference to the
monarch. When García learns the truth, he
confronts and slays the courtier, on the
ground that no one below the rank of the
king himself may ignore the family honor
of another. In this classic exposition of the
fundamental principles of Spanish society
the author expounds one of the basic
themes of S IGLO DE O RO drama.
scenes. They were characterized by stock
characters, familiar situations from every-
day life, broad humor and slang expres-
sions, and a kind of homely wit/wisdom.
Rueda's pasos were performed before audi-
ences of every rank, from the monarch
down to the proletarian, and represented
a kind of national frame of reference for
entertainment that lacked the universality
and lofty philosophizing of more high-
flown drama. Rueda was the creator of a
popular theater and the audience for such
presentations that made it possible for his
more ambitious successors to fulfill their
much larger aspirations as playwrights.
There is an ample record of situations,
comic figures, and theatrical devices created
by Rueda and a plentiful roster of the names
and plots of his pasos. Many of his basic
ideas were borrowed from earlier writers or
well-worn comic anecdotes. Exact texts for
his compositions, original or otherwise,
have not always been preserved. It can be
said with some certainty that Rueda's most
famous paso is Las aceitunas (The olives,
1548) in which the arguments between a
husband and wife over their prospective
earnings from an olive grove whose first
trees he has just planted prefigures genera-
tions of satire about the folly of fantasizing
about wealth that you have yet to acquire.
Rueda, Lope de (1510-1565)
Spanish playwright
Born in A NDALUSIA , where he seems to
have been apprentice in the goldsmith's
trade, Rueda was evidently entranced by
visiting Italian companies and embarked
upon a life in the theater. Over many
decades he traveled across Spain as actor-
manager and author. Although he wrote a
number of full-length plays based upon
the Italian commedia, these were only
ephemeral in their impact. His chief con-
tribution to Spanish literature was the
paso, a short play designed to fill the inter-
val between the acts of longer productions
or sometimes to be grouped as a series of
 
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