Art, Agency, and Authority in Calder?ns Darlo todo y no dar nada

This article explores Calder?nʹs play about the legend of Alexander the Great, his mistress Campaspe, and the great painter of antiquity, Apelles. It reads the play as an ironic critique of certain signifying practices of the phallocratic culture of the seventeenth-century Spanish corte and, in particular, the kind of aestheticizing discourse which tends to reduce the historical subject to myth or mute materiality. The device of the stage portrait is read as symbolizing such discursive constructions, while otherness is encoded both in the heroine, Campaspe, a gender-transgressing outsider unfamiliar with the conventions of the male cultural economy of the corte, and in the figure of the Cynic philosopher Diogenes.