Abstract
Excerpt: In an age when printed publications required royal licenses in Spain, and theatrical works from 1615 onward likewise required licenses for performance, authors could not openly criticise the crown without risking suppression of their texts or more severe sanctions. Even texts that obtained such licenses were still subject to expurgation or outright prohibition by ecclesiastical and civil authorities. As scholars have shown, however, these conditions did not impose an obsequious silence on dissentient voices (Sullivan 1990, 143; Kahn 2008, 39-40).“Explicit criticism of the monarch, even had it been possible […], was unnecessary,” Melveena McKendrick observes (2000, 36). Instead, writers employed techniques of distancing and indirection, ambiguity and abstraction to overcome the constraints of censorship. Publishing circumstances that might well be perceived as repressive ultimately served to promote a refined subtlety and ingenuity of expression in subversive discourse. The Golden-Age comedia has been the object of most scholarly attention in this regard. The present study shows how similar techniques of oblique representation and abstraction in poetry of the period could enhance a critique of power. I take as my example Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet posthumously titled “Desengaño de la exterior apariencia con el examen interior y verdadero.” This sonnet, by keeping its critique of particular Habsburg authority below the surface, constitutes an imaginative instruction and artful exercise in how to regard shows of power more generally. The poem is also subtly specular, inviting readers to consider-