Social Values Articulated in the Song of Roland, Celestina & Voltaire

Also working against the horizon of actual staging of the melt down is the fact that the premarital familiar affair of Calisto and Milbea is played out more than or less(prenominal) on stage. Celestina, who with Calisto's servants functions as a go-between for the lovers, is particularly frank, in keeping with her character as bawd: "[B]y communicating myself to many, I should, as it were, deflower my embassage, whose maidenhead I mean to give on your master" (Rojas 37-8).

In dramatic terms, the romance of Melibea and Calisto is raise only for the fact of its fifteenth-century "onstage" presentation. The character of the witch-procuress Celestina is far more compelling (Wardropper 795). Celestina is murdered well before the end of the play, only when she is a prime mover of action. It is inconceivable that a low-born psyche would be given scope in Roland, but in Celestina, Calisto lacks the boldness to pursue his seduction of Melibea without making use of servants and a go-between, who have fairly busy lives independent of their masters. When he hears of Celestina's death, Calisto is get to pay attention to it and accurately anticipates "more ill so-and-so" it, although he adds that "the old woman was wicked and false" (Rojas 80).

The tender position of Celestina is quite low and undoubtedly in disrepute, although because of the work she provides she a

Nay, she had access with more mysterious virgins and would deal with these at the time of early mass or the stations of the cross. . . . She would . . . never miss mass nor vespers, nor neglect the monasteries: they were the markets where she hand her bargains (Rojas 14).

This description does not exactly lampoon the Church, but it does make instrumental use of religion for comic effect in a way that cannot have pleased devout churchmen. That may owe something to the fact that Rojas was a converso, i.e., an apostate Jew who either converted or pretended to convert to Christianity as a scheme of survival in period of the Inquisition (Baer 273 et passim). On the otherwise hand, the pattern of events in Celestina is consistent with Varey's (159) noting that Rojas's overarching intention in the play was a moral one.

Wardropper (795) says that the work was written "as a moral warning to those lovers who deify their ladies and ignore the treachery and voracity of the servants in whom they confide." Indeed, the servants in Celestina are far more quick-witted and capable of manipulating the situation than their noble mistresses and masters. On the other hand, the " informative purpose" of the play is mediated by the sympathetic characterisation of the lovers, who pay for their illicit romance with their lives--Calisto accidentally and Milbea intentionally.

Zadig's attempt to effect his dream of being happy by functioning as a reasoning human being is continually thwarted, sometimes by the jealousy on the part of such characters as the "noble" Orcan or The Envious minister and sometimes by the willingness of people to discard their own reason and descend into irrationality, as in the case of the king who becomes a tyrant and tries to gobble up his favorite (Zadig). For his part, Zadig worries that his wife Azore thinks "that the best-built young men had necessarily the well-nigh virtue and wit" (332).

The Song of Roland. Trans. Frederick Bliss Luquiens. New York: Macmillan, 1952.

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