SOURCE: “Love, Comedia Style,” in Kentucky Romance Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1, 1982, pp. 47-60.

In the following essay, Wade discusses how priests and other officials of the church wrote erotic Spanish comedies during the Golden Age in spite of the fact that moralists of the time opposed the subject.

The “aesthetics of the folk”¹ have determined not entirely but in large part the nature and content of literature. Thus when the folk affirm that all the world loves a lover, that the course of true love never runs smooth, or that love makes the world go ’round, the aphorisms, like those of similar nature, help to make understandable the inevitable recurrence of the love motif in much of the world's literature. Although this motif may be, and often is, treated seriously—and also tragically—² it is more usually, in what may be termed its surface treatment, given a comic texture...