Lope's Leonido: An Existential Hero

Extract

In the past The Outrageous Saint (La fianza satisfecha) was interpreted solely on religious grounds and as such was considered monstrous and shocking. Leonido's sins took him beyond the limits of repentance and salvation. This wayward prototype of Don Juan should in the end have been destroyed, and since he was not, the work was condemned to the oblivion of remaining unpublished after the seventeenth century. Finally, the play was begrudgingly included in the late nineteenth century in Menendez y Pelayo's academy edition of Lope, still safely unavailable to the common reader. It has not been reprinted since.

Some thirty years ago, Valbuena Prat discovered the play. He found it an excellent pre-Freudian case study of incest, sadism, masochism, and other sexual aberrations. The work was at once of contemporary interest. In this postwar period The Outrageous Saint again adapts with ease to the concerns and anxieties of our day.