6 - The rhetorical shift from comedy to tragedy: ironic foreshadowing and premonitions of death

Summary

According to a commonplace of Celestina criticism, the characters all have premonitions of their impending deaths and of the disasters which occur at the end of the work. The technique of foreshadowing in the Comedia can be divided into three categories: (a) general theories of death, (b) premonitions of their own deaths and predictions of the deaths of others, and finally (c) imprecations containing prophecies of death and ironies unknown to the speaker.

Erna Ruth Berndt, in her book Amor, muerte y fortuna en ‘La Celestina’, considered Celestina to be the mouthpiece of a generalized philosophy of death, citing in particular her famous exclamation against death: ‘¡Oh muerte, muerte! A cuántos privas de agradable compañía … Por uno que comes con tiempo, cortas mil en agraz’ (III, 81). [O death, death, how many dost thou deprive of their sweet and pleasing society! … For one that thou eatest being ripe, thou croppest a thousand that are green.] Celestina points out the unexpected nature of death with the aphorism: ‘Ninguno es tan viejo, que no pueda vivir un año, ni tan mozo, que hoy no pudiese morir’ (IV, 92). [There is no man so old but he may live one year more, nor no man so young but he may die today.] Elicia also contemplates death philosophically and uses the well-known topic of death the leveller as the justification for her Epicurean philosophy:

También se muere el que mucho allega como el que pobremente vive, y el doctor como el pastor, y el papa como el sacristán … No habemos de vivir para siempre. […]