"¡Ay, Reino Mal Gobernado!": The Monarchy in Mira de Amescua’s <em>Las Desgracias del Rey Don Alfonso, el Casto</em>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until relatively recently, the conventional wisdom regarding the comedia held that the vast and remarkable cultural production of Spain’s Golden Age not only mirrored its political dominance but served as imperial propaganda in the effort to project the Hapsburg monarchy, the Castilian language, the Iberian political and economic systems, and the Roman Catholic religion both at home and abroad. More recent scholarship has found the relationship between imperial cultural production, politics, and society to be much more complicated, porous, and nuanced. Baroque art and literature teem with representations of racial and sexual diversity, class distinctions, and national identities, and the comedia is no different. Catherine Swietlicki has written that “Lope is capable of hearing the full presence of authentic alien voices, of tempering them by the oppositional process, and then writing the voices of the otherness with creative understanding” (219-20), and the same can be said for the genre as a whole. This willingness to explore and, at times, embrace, diversity in both political and cultural matters reveals not just an unwillingness to accept the imperial project in toto but an ongoing effort to criticize its aims and methods and expose the fissures, gaps, and inconsistencies in the monolithic imperial edifice. Even scholars who find it implausible that contemporary playwrights should have created openly subversive works performed in the center of empire still acknowledge that so many plays depict monarchs in a less than flattering light. Arsenio Alfaro, while asserting that the comedia served to instill in its audience “un fuerte sentimiento monárquico” (132), nevertheless concedes that the monarch on occasion falls short: “No todas las veces juega el monarca el papel de administrador recto de justicia o de gobernante concienzudo y responsable o de hombre virtuoso y magnánimo” (136). David Román believes that Philip IV viewed the theater “as a locale where the illusion of power could be constructed and maintained” (76) while simultaneously acknowledging the possibility that Calderón should write a play that is not just “a commentary on the events of the period as well as the King’s manner of style and governance” (78) but one that is, in more general terms, “critical of absolute power” (77).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".