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Two popular theatrical genres, the thirteenth-century zaju of the Chinese Yuan dynasty and the sixteenth-century comedia nueva of the Spanish "golden age," both followed the formula of poetic justice. The dramas fulfilled the need of the spectators to continue believing that justice was possible even when the judgments of real courts rarely complied or satisfied. The plays generally demonstrate that their villains are concurrently legally culpable and morally wrong; however, a few exceptions show how the playwrights grappled with the conflict between the legal and the moral when the two did not neatly coincide. Such is the case when the protagonists step outside the law to exact revenge after they have been grievously wronged, as in Guan Hanqing's A Butterfly Dream and Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna. The two playwrights come to similar conclusions-the legal must bend to the ethical-even though the Chinese and Spanish cultural contexts vary significantly in their attitudes toward revenge and the avenger.
In Ibsen's The Doll's House, the blackmailing lawyer Krogstad tells the bourgeois housewife Nora Helmer that the law is not concerned with motives. This prompts her to respond that then it must be a very stupid law. But stupid or not, it is the law that she will be judged by if he produces his evidence in court. She says,
I simply don't believe that. Hasn't a daughter the right to protect her dying father from worry and anxiety? Hasn't a wife the right to save her husband's life? I don't know much about the law, but I'm quite certain that it must say somewhere that things like that are allowed. Don't you, a lawyer, know that? You must be a very stupid lawyer, Mr. Krogstad. (Ibsen 175-76)
The conflict between the moral suasions and the legal dictates underlying Nora's question remains one of society's most dramatic dilemmas, one that the theatre has not hesitated to exploit and explore. Because it depicts the emotional life of human beings, the theatre is concerned with motive, and the individual circumstances that either confirm the deeper spirit of the law or challenge the law's limitations. Laws are created to provide general application, not to make exceptions for extenuating circumstances as Nora assumes, and the justice that governs them is a...