Paremias in the Plays of Juan Pérez de Montalbán

Abstract

This study seeks to catalogue in alphabetic order the paremias that are included in the dramatic works of the ill-fated Madrid poet and friend and disciple of Lope de Vega, Juan Pérez de Montalbán, as a manifestation of a very popular convention in Spanish Golden Age dramas: the systematic incorporation of proverbs, refrains and other paremias in the dramatic text, generally issuing from the mouth of the gracioso. This corpus is based on a total of 46 dramas, that include 25 plays universally accepted as authentic, 11 plays of probable authorship and 10 plays of dubious attribution. Once the corpus is established, the article proceeds to a brief analysis of the function of paremias en Golden Age comedy in general, and in the dramatic works of Pérez de Montalbán in particular.