is known for poetic reworkings of history and legend. The two Cid plays dramatize -actualize -the ballads and develop patterns of unity distinct from Lope de Vega's model. The first part of Las mocedades del Cid records a trial by fire: Rodrigo Diaz must simultaneously prove himself worthy of Jimena and of the fame that precedes his actions on stage. When he accomplishes this, by way of the play's episodic structure, his reward is matrimony: a dramatic, historical, and theological icon. The closed system of the theatrical piece opens the historical backdrop, which may in turn become the stuff of drama. Part I contains a foreshadowing of the assassination of King Sancho. The focal point of the second part of Mocedades is the oath in Santa Gadea, marking the convergence of betrayal and allegiance, civil wars and holy wars, fact and fiction. If the ballads are fragmented epics, the play may represent the quest for a new order, possibly for a dramatic analogue of epic pIenitude. The ritualistic ending here is a pledge of loyalty between a new king and his vassal, along with a marriage vow, undocumented by history, between King Alfonso and Zaida, a Moslem converted to Christianity. Two media -one poetic, the other historical -combine to form a third, a dialectical drama that re-creates history and literature.'
Las mocedades de1 Cid may be Castro's signature plays, but his other works show a similar spirit of experimentation, due in part to the diverse influences on dramatic writing in Valencia during the last years of the sixteenth century, including a group of Spanish tragedians and an exiled Lope de Vega.2 Castro's attempts at tragedy are products of his time and products of his own conception, or appropriation, of the dramatic art. Dido y Eneas closely follows the Aeneid, as do Cinquecento tragedies by Giraldi Cinthio and Dolce, while Cristobal de Virues's Elisa Dido is based on Justin's Historiae Phillipicae.3 Castro eliminates the five-act structure, the chorus, and lengthy soliloquies -but not the long expository speeches, dreams, omens, and voices from the dead -of earlier versions, and he works primarily with octosyllabic verse forms. He finds unity in the parallel struggle between loyalty and love that faces both Dido and Eneas. Suffering and vacillation notwithstanding, Dido's choice of love and Eneas's of loyalty may be more a function of literary determinism than an anachronistic recourse to fate; this is destiny at the service of the intertext, not a re-creation of the classical worldview. Ultimately, Eneas proves more adept at heeding -reading -signs and prophecies than Dido, to break a carefully controlled, yet ironic, balance.
La tragedia por 10s celos, based on Spanish history, also deals with the question of love versus responsibility. The fifteenth-century Aragonese king Alfonso V must leave his lover Margarita de Hijar, who has borne Neophilologus 72 (1988) 213214215216217