Ironic Gender-Role Inversion as Poetic Justice in Marcelo Díaz Callecerrada's Fábula de Endimión

Abstract

It is well known that Spanish Renaissance and Baroque literature in general, and poetry in particular, drew heavily on classical mythology as a source of allusive references for textual enrichment. These borrowings served the Spanish poetic community at court with a function similar to that of the original myths-to explain and reinforce the idea of a common origin and to provide a unifying bond for defining poets and their listener/readers as an exclusive community by requiring of their readers and practitioners familiarity with certain common texts. Within this context, one of the more popular subgenres that arose was the fábula mitológica, an extended, expanded and highly ornate retelling of an episode from classical mythology, most often based on passages from Ovid's Metamorphoses. José María de Cossio's monumental 1952 work, Fábulas mitológicas en España, which remains the authoritative study of the phenomenon, catalogues and describes hundreds of these fables. Comparisons of these retold tales with earlier versions of the events often yield insight into the tastes and ideology ofthe latter period, or at least into those of the reteller. In this essay, I will examine one of these poems, the 3260-line Fábula de Endimión, published in 1627 by Marcelo Díaz Callecerrada. Almost nothing is known about the poet.