The Duchess of Malfi and El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi revisited: some differences in literary convention and cultural horizon

Abstract

From the large bulk of national English and Spanish drama, those plays which happen to coincide in dealing with the same subject offer themselves as a privileged domain where a fruitful contrastive analysis can be carried out with a view to eliciting the divergent conventions and ideological values which rule in different and even opposing ways the production of literary works in seventeenth century England and Spain. To analyse and contrast some of those elements in The Duchess of Malfi and El mayordomo de la duquesa de Amalfi and put them in relation with their social, ideological and canonical context is the aim of this paper as a way of showing not only the literary practice in different societies, but how the notion of value in its Bakhtinian sense must be taken into account when assaying the appreciation of literary works stemming from divergent backgrounds.