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Popular Culture Review
social aspect of honor and the relation between the individual and the king.
Through these and other situations, the long plays present a very rigid code of
honor, which makes very clear what is acceptable and what is not. The world
portrayed by the long plays was strict in its rules.
The idea of honor is still present in the aforementioned three dances; in fact,
all of them are about dishonored women. The dances ridicule the same code of
honor that constituted the ideological base of the long plays. They expose the
irrationality of the code by exaggerating its rules or presenting characters that
totally ignore them. Take as an example the case presented in Dance ofLucretia
and Tarquin: one sees how Lucretia, instead of the prototypical virtuous
noblewoman of the long plays, is a greedy person that considers giving away her
honor for a coin, disregarding her obligations. Immediately after that, she
overreacts and kills herself because someone kisses her hand. Her husband is
also used to make fun of the conventions of the code of honor. According to this
code, when a woman was raped there were only two ways of repairing the
damage: killing her and her lover or marrying them. Obviously, the two things
could not happen at once, but they nevertheless coincide in this dance. The
husband kills the lover and then asks him to marry his wife Lucretia in the
afterlife to repair the family honor.
In the Interlude-like Dance o f King Rodrigo and La Cava the scene of a
woman who reacts to a kiss as if it had been a consummated rape is repeated.
Although here it seems that what really concerns La Cava is not the damage to
her moral character, but the fact that the King did not give her any money in
exchange for her sexual services. H[