The purpose of this chapter is to examine the interplay of classical–mythological with biblical and other Christian–religious allusions in El celoso extremeño, the seventh of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares. The ‘two serpents’ of the title refers to what it is hoped to show is the paradigmatic way in which the male protagonists, Felipo de Carrizales and Loaysa, are portrayed as serpents or monsters from the perspectives, respectively, of classical myth and biblical narrative. After a brief contextualizing introduction, the allusions of both kinds will be listed and examined. The essay will then proceed to explore key aspects of their interaction, paying special attention to the way in which they serve to articulate and develop the important ‘father–son’ figure, which is (often almost invisibly) woven into the fabric of the novela. Finally, in the light of this discussion, some general conclusions will be drawn about their status and function within the text.

It may be useful to begin by recalling that these allusions form just two strands (albeit the most significant ones) in what Kenneth Brown has termed ‘el maremágnum de hilos falsos que entrelazan la narración’ (p. 68). One of the principal ‘hilos falsos’ is, of course, the novela’s use of the traditional comic motif of the old man artfully cuckolded by his much younger wife. Another is the string of (often conflicting) stereotypes associated with Carrizales: he is by turns one of the ‘desesperados de España’ (II, p. 99); a wealthy indiano, ‘tocado del natural deseo que todos tienen de volver a su patria’ (II, pp. 100–1; emphasis added); the very embodiment of the Miser (‘Contemplaba Carrizales en sus barras […]’ [II, p. 101]); and the righteously angry ‘dishonoured husband’ of so much seventeenth-century Spanish literature (II, p. 130). Indeed, these ‘hilos falsos’ form part of a broader, more abstract pattern of binary oppositional play that is present at every level of the story: the notion of ‘extremes’ is implicit in its title; it moulds the material of farce into something approaching tragedy; Carrizales moves from wealth to destitution and back to wealth, from prodigality to miserliness, from vengefulness to forgiveness, and, geographically, in a circle around Europe and then from Seville to Peru and back again.