SOURCE: Foreman, A. J. “The Structure and Content of Santillana's Comedieta de Ponça.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 51 (1974): 109-24.

In the following essay, Foreman analyzes the structure and historical content of the Comedieta de Ponça and compares it to Santillana's earlier works.

The Comedieta de Ponça is the most ambitious of the Marqués de Santillana's narrative dezires in its length, its use of latinate syntax and diction, and its national, as well as personal, preoccupations.¹ It is probably also the last one that he wrote for twenty years.² It is more than just a culmination, however, for it embodies new principles of organization, verging on the classical and modern ideal of structural unity;³ it represents also a studied attempt by its author to put into practice his beliefs about the rôle of poetry as a source of political wisdom for princes.

The earlier dezires...