Comedia Performance

Journal of The Association for Hispanic Classical Theater Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2013 www.comediaperformance.org

Comedia Performance Journal of the Association For Hispanic Classical Theater

Barbara Mujica, Editor Box 571039 Georgetown University Washington, D. C. 20057

Volume 10, Number 1 Spring 2013 ISSN 1553-6505

Comedia Performance

Editorial Board

Barbara Mujica – Editor Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Box 571039 Georgetown University Washington, D. C. 20057-1039 [email protected] [email protected]

Gwyn Campbell – Managing Editor Department of Romance Languages Washington and Lee University Lexington, VA 24450 [email protected]

Sharon Voros – Book Review Editor Department of Modern Languages US Naval Academy Annapolis, MD 21402-5030 [email protected]

Darci Strother – Theater Review Editor Department of World Languages & Hispanic Literatures California State University San Marcos San Marcos, CA 92096-0001 [email protected]

Michael McGrath – Interviews Editor Department of Foreign Languages P.O. Box 8081 Georgia Southern University Statesboro, GA 30460 [email protected]

Editorial Advisory Board

Isaac Benabu Donald Dietz Susan Fischer Donald Larson Dakin Matthews Susan Paun de García Ángel Sánchez Jonathan Thacker Christopher Weimer

Editorial Staff

Patricia Soler – Web Page [email protected]

Katherine Vadella – Editorial Assistant [email protected]

AHCT Officers

Susan Paun de García, President Ángel Sánchez, Vice President Christopher Gascón, Secretary Sharon Voros, Treasurer Presidents Emeriti: Donald Dietz, Barbara Mujica, Robert Johnston

Editorial Policy

Comedia Performance is the journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, an organization devoted to the study of the comedia and other forms of early modern Spanish theater. Comedia Performance publishes articles on diverse aspects of performance of the Span- ish comedia and other theatrical forms. Appro- priate subjects for articles include, but are not limited to, historical or modern staging of the comedia, translating the comedia for the stage, performance theory, textual issues pertaining to performance, historical issues such as audience composition, corral design, costuming, blocking, set design, and spectator response. Comedia Performance does not publish text-based literary studies. Comedia Performance publishes interviews with directors and actors, theater reviews and book reviews in special sections.

Purchase Information

Comedia Performance is distributed without additional charge to members of the AHCT at the annual conference in El Paso, Texas. Individual copies may be purchased for $20. Non-members of AHCT may subscribe for $50 for three issues. Library rates are $30 per issue and $75 for a three-year subscrip- tion. Please contact Gwyn Campbell, Managing Edi- tor, at [email protected], for additional information. Send other queries to Barbara Mujica at mu- [email protected].

Advertising Rates

Comedia Performance accepts advertisements for books, plays, festivals, and other events related to theater. Rates are $100 for a full page and $50 for a half page. Send checks made to AHCT to Sharon Voros and camera-ready text to Barbara Mujica.

Submission Information

All submissions must be original and unpublished. After publication, authors may solicit permission to reproduce their material in books or other journals. Articles may be in either English or Spanish and should be submitted electronically. No paper submissions will be accepted. Articles should use MLA style and not exceed 25 double-spaced, typed pages, including notes and bibliography. Send article submissions to: [email protected] Comedia Performance is a refereed journal. All submissions will be read by a committee of experts. Please submit articles to the appropriate editor. E-mails of editors are listed under Editorial Board. Guidelines for theater reviews:

1. Reviews should be between 3 and five pages long, including pictures. 2. Reviews should not include endnotes and bibliography. 3. Reviews should not include a detailed description of plot. For canonical plays, no plot summary is necessary. For lesser known plays, a two- to three-line synopsis should suffice. 4. Avoid minute descriptions of action, costume, lighting or sets. Avoid constructions such as, “And then Don Lope comes out and says...” Instead, comment on the efficacy of the blocking of particular scenes or the effect caused by costume and decor. Do not describe details of the performance unless you are going to comment on them. 5. Avoid structures such as “This reviewer thinks...” Re- views are by definition subjective. 6. One reviewer may not publish more than two reviews in a single issue.

CONTENTS

Editor’s Note 1

Antonio Regalado García: In Memoriam 4

Performance Studies

Calderon’s La vida es sueño Meets Callaghan’s Fever/Dream: Adaptation and Performance Catherine Larson 19

Water, Wine, and Aloja: Consuming Interests in the Corrales de Comedias 1600-1646 Rachel Ball 59

The Dancing of an Attitude: Inconstancy as Masculine Virtue in Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano Shifra Armon 93

La elusión del vacío en El médico de su honra Gabriel Villarroel 119

Del enredo barroco al minimalismo bizarro: Las bizarrías de Belisa y la renovación escénica de los clásicos Esther Fernández 153

Interview

Tirso’s Damned by Despair at London’s National Theatre: An Interview with Bijan Sheibani Maryrica Ortiz Lottman 195

Theater Reviews 227

Book Reviews 244

EDITOR’S NOTE

This issue marks the tenth anniversary of Comedia Performance, the journal of the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater. Two years of discussion at AHCT board meetings preceded our launch in 2004. No one doubted the value of creating a journal devoted to the performance of classical plays, and no one doubted the ability of scholars to produce first-rate articles on subjects such as period and modern productions of the comedia, translating for the stage, and acting techniques. Still, questions abounded. How would we finance the journal? Would universities subscribe? Would advertisers place ads? Finally, we decided to close our eyes and leap into the water. Ten years later, we are still swimming! In a single decade, Comedia Performance has grown into a sleek, internationally respected, refereed journal with an acceptance rate of about 30 percent. Our advisory board consists of eminent scholars from three continents. We receive

2 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 submissions from Europe, as well as the United States. Numerous universities subscribe, and, although we would like the number of our advertisers to increase, publishers are gradually beginning to place ads on our pages. Most important, we consistently publish well researched, well written articles that are cited routinely by scholars. We are listed in the MLA Bibliographies and are considered an essential resource for both academicians and theater practitioners. And now, Comedia Performance is available not only in print, but also online. Serving as editor of this thriving journal has been a real pleasure. It was something I had longed to do years before the dream of Comedia Performance became a reality, and the experience has been as rewarding as I anticipated. I have been blessed with a hardworking, enthusiastic staff and advisory board, and I am indebted to all of them as well as to the scores of scholars who publish with us. This issue of Comedia Performance is dedicated to the memory of Antonio Regalado (1932-2012), who passed away last June at his home in Estepona, Spain. Regalado was a pivotal figure in the professional lives of several of us in the AHCT, and through his monumental, two- volume study of Calderón, he has influenced countless others. Sharon Voros and I studied with him at Columbia University and have continued to

Mujica 3 derive inspiration from his teaching throughout our careers. And now, it’s time to take a deep breath and keep on swimming!

Barbara Mujica Editor

Antonio Regalado García (1932-2012): In Memorium

ANTONIO REGALADO: IRREVERENT, IRREPRESSIBLE, AND IRREPLACEABLE

BÁRBARA MUJICA Georgetown University

If it weren’t for Antonio Regalado, I wouldn’t be a Calderonista. The summer before I enrolled in his Golden Age Theater course at New York University, I had studied Calderón with another professor—a much older and more distinguished scholar than Regalado was at the time. Alas, the entire summer consisted of counting syllables. The scholar in question was preparing a study of the autos sacramentales, and, I am convinced, he was using free graduate student labor to perform the tedious task of determining the versification of some unpublished plays. Every day after work I would trek up to the Hispanic Society, sit down in the reading room, and count syllables. At the end of the course, the illustrious scholar said, “And now, I hope all of you will continue to study Calderón.” “Fat chance,” I said to myself, vowing

Mujica 5 never ever to read another play by this deadly Spanish playwright. Nevertheless, thanks to the exigencies of scheduling courses while working fulltime, I did wind up taking another course on the detested author. The first semester of Regalado’s seminar on Spanish Golden Age Theater was on Lope and his contemporaries. The second semester was on Calderón. Those two courses changed my life. Regalado was so dynamic, creative, and irreverent that I felt suddenly galvanized. We read everything—Lope, Tirso and Calderón, of course, and the pertinent criticism, but also Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Rilke and Saint Augustine. We read these authors not because Regalado assigned them, but because he had read them. He sparked our intellectual curiosity in a way no professor ever had before. He would plunge into German and French philosophy, and then skip suddenly to patristic thought or the Italian Neo-Platonists. One day he expounded on the Counter Reformation roots of German romanticism and another on the Cartesian revolution and Segismundo. His lectures were unpredictable. They were never on exactly what we had prepared for class. He didn’t give us a syllabus, and he didn’t respect ordinary teaching norms. He appeared at the front of the room five minutes early or twenty minutes late, lit a cigarette, and launched an avalanche of ideas.

6 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 And he was funny. He could say something astonishingly profound and then something completely outrageous. In one class he discussed the sociological basis for the seventeenth-century notion of honor and then an article by a British critic named C. O. Jones (not to be confused with C. A. Jones). “Ah, C. O. Jones,” he mused. “Claro, ¡yo lo llamo COJONES!” He made fun of the other professors in the Spanish Department, pointing out the narrow-mindedness of one or the sanctimoniousness of another, but he was self- deprecating, too. And yet, at the times I felt truly stupid—how could I not feel stupid in the presence of such genius?—he made me believe that I had something to offer. But Regalado could be intimidating. He did not suffer fools easily, and he could cut down an arrogant colleague or graduate student with a devastating quote from Plato. . . or an obscure bit of data on werewolves! He once actually shouted obscenities at a colleague in public! Unfortunately, the occasion was my dissertation defense. At the end of the first semester he decided to give oral exams in addition to term papers. I was so nervous when I went to his office to take the test that I could hardly answer a single question. He asked me, for example, about the versification of Fuenteovejuna—and, God knows, I knew how to count syllables! When I stammered and froze, he picked up my book and saw that I had gone through the entire text line by line and identified every

Mujica 7 single verse form. And then he burst out laughing! I went home forlorn, certain that I had failed the course. Imagine my surprise when my grades came in the mail and I saw that he had given me an A. When I asked him about it the following semester, he told me that it had been clear that I knew the material, but was nervous, and besides, he said, I had written a fine term paper. That incident influenced my entire teaching career, making me a much more patient and compassionate professor than I would have been otherwise. Regalado and his wife, children, and dog Pipa lived in an apartment building near campus, and it soon became a gathering place for graduate students hungry for intellectual exchange. We would meet for formal presentations by noted critics in his living room, or else we would drop by to discuss our term papers with him. Sometimes I would run over to his house during lunch hour and return to my office at a publishing company afterward. Even when I was researching a topic for another course, Regalado made himself available. “Realmente no sé nada acerca de eso,” he would say, and then spend an hour or two throwing out brilliant ideas and endless bibliography to get me thinking about my subject in new ways. I took every course Regalado gave at New York University. At one point he switched to Columbia, and I followed him there. When he came back to NYU, I followed him back. This became something of a problem, because I had requirements

8 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 to meet. At one point I was in a quandary because Regalado was giving a course on The Generation of ‘98, which I didn’t need, and my advisor was telling me to take a course on Vulgar Latin, which I did need. During the MLA, which was held in New York that year, I explained my dilemma to an old friend, Sam Armistead, who had been my professor during my undergraduate years at UCLA. “If you’ve found a mentor you can really learn from, stay with him,” said Armistead. “You can always study Vulgar Latin, but to be able to study with someone who truly inspires you is a gift. Don’t pass up the opportunity.” I followed his advice and have never regretted it. Now I tell my own graduate students, “Study what you love, not just what you think is marketable!” When I decided to write my dissertation on Calderón through the lens of French existentialism, the Spanish Department refused to approve the topic. I had done my B.A. and M.A. in French, with a concentration in contemporary thought, and it seemed like a perfect topic to me. However, the professors did not agree. It’s philosophy, not literature, they said. (Those were the days before Interdisciplinary Studies.) Regalado was on sabbatical in Spain at the time, and his colleagues were quick to suggest alternative topics. When he returned, he simply shoved them aside and took over the project. However, he was not an easy advisor to please. He was demanding, impatient, and blunt. But he made me read incessantly and

Mujica 9 introduced me to new horizons, which greatly enhanced my work. Regalado has continued to influence me throughout my career, both in my research and my teaching style (although I do prepare syllabi and always arrive to class on time). I did not remain in close contact with him after he left New York to direct the NYU program in Spain, although I did speak with him a few times on the phone. However, I would frequently think of him—especially when I read something brilliant or perceived unlikely connections between works of different periods and places. “I should share this with Antonio,” I often said to myself. “I should call him.” But most of the time, I didn’t. And now I can’t.

Requiescat in pace, with plenty of books, wine, and Marlboros.

IN MEMORIAM: REMEMBRANCES FROM A YEAR ABROAD

BRADFORD ELLIS St. Norbert College

I first learned of Professor Antonio Regalado’s passing during the business luncheon of the recent GEMELA conference this past September in Portland, Oregon. While I was shocked and saddened by this news, I also realized the important role Professor Regalado had played in my professional career by igniting my interests in the people, culture, and literature of Spain. Indeed, my presence at the GEMELA conference was, in no small part, due to my experiences with him. During my undergraduate studies as a Spanish major at Bates College, I spent my junior year (1988-1989) studying abroad through New York University’s program in Madrid, then housed entirely at the Instituto Internacional, calle Miguel Ángel. Professor Regalado not only directed the NYU program, but also taught courses on the Spanish comedia and Pedro Calderón de la Barca, in particular. During my spring semester that year,

Ellis 11 I was fortunate to have taken just such a course from him. This was my first course devoted exclusively to the comedia and I remember being extremely impressed, and at times overwhelmed, by Professor Regalado’s knowledge and insight into the plays we read, which included such Calderón classics as El médico de su honra and A secreto agravio, secreta venganza. What struck me the most, however, and what I will never forget, was his intense passion for these works. I can still picture him today in front of our class in his sport coat, comedia in one hand, a piece of chalk in the other, pacing back and forth, explaining lines and passages of critical importance to theme and character development, as if these works lived within him. On more than one occasion, he would follow his explanation of a particular passage with the words, “¿Me explico? Veis que no digo, ‘¿me entendéis?’, sino ‘¿me explico?’ Que hay una diferencia, ¿eh?” Now, sixteen years into my own career as a college professor, I can truly appreciate how he probably felt with such a wealth of knowledge standing before a class of twenty-year-old college undergraduates in their first Golden Age theatre course. To this day, these words still bring a smile to my face. In addition to his knowledge and wit in the classroom, Professor Regalado was gentle, kind, and generous. On more than one occasion he accompanied us to theatrical productions, such as El burlador de Sevilla at the Teatro Clásico, or spent

12 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 time with his students over tapas. I remember a particular evening when he hosted a gathering at his Madrid apartment for a large group of us. Although we were initially nervous, Professor Regalado made us feel very much at home with his usual humor and gentle generosity. It is with great respect for Professor Antonio Regalado that I recognize the profound impact he had on me personally and professionally. I will never forget his wisdom, passion, and generosity during my junior year in Madrid and the Instituto Internacional. My experiences that year and with Professor Regalado awakened me to the mystery and adventure of Spain and its people, culture and literature. My thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends, and colleagues. His presence among us will be greatly missed.

ANTONIO REGALADO (AND NYU) IN SPAIN

LAURA L. VIDLER West Point

My semester-abroad experience with the NYU in Spain program was formative to say the least. The day I arrived, I had to write my host family’s address on a piece of paper for the taxi driver because I was pronouncing 6 c/Cid with no zeta. I ended up leaving my backpack (complete with passport, travelers cheques and brand new Nikon) in that same taxi. And I still remember my culture- shock-induced sickness flowing through Madrid’s cobblestone streets as a rectangular, cinematograph- ic monochrome. Things were better after that, largely thanks to the program’s director, Antonio Rega- lado. He was a visually striking man upon first impression, mostly, it seemed, because he refused to embrace his height and good looks. He kept his hair just a bit too long, his clothes not quite in the right place, and he smelled (like everyone else in Spain at the time) of those distinctive black-tobacco ciga- rettes. Nevertheless, Antonio Regalado understood

14 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 that he was responsible, not simply for delivering NYU’s academic program in Madrid, but for craft- ing his students’ holistic Spanish experience. For that reason, he accompanied classes to tapas in the late afternoons and interacted enthusiastically with groups on various cultural excursions. He also had the courage and vision to hire extraordinary, if non- traditional faculty, including theater director Luis Dorrego who taught the Golden Age Drama course.

When the students in the course produced an afternoon of entremeses, songs and dances, Professor Regalado traveled with us to the corral de comedias in Almagro to cheer us on. Someone using my camera captured our curtain call—a photo which is of interest for many reasons. For starters, of the students on the stage, two of us are now Spanish professors. To my stage right (I’m the one with the long curly hair) is Kathy Everly, now Associate

Vidler 15 Professor at Syracuse University and wife of AHCT Secretary Chris Gascón. In the dapper, double- breasted sport jacket, of course, is Antonio Regala- do, who joined us on stage for our final bows. That this scene ever happened in the first place, at the corral de comedias no less, is a testament to his leadership as well as his scholarly accomplish- ments. The NYU in Spain program is directly responsible for my study of Golden Age performance. As I look back on my memorable experiences there, I remain ever grateful for Professor Regalado’s vision and courage.

IN MEMORIAM: ANTONIO REGALADO AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

SHARON D. VOROS United States Naval Academy

Anyone who ever took a class with Antonio Regalado (Madrid, 1932 - Estepona June 4, 2012) certainly never forgot the experience! Before I even signed up for his class at Columbia University in New York City, a fellow graduate student came up to me one day, just outside the Chock Full of Nuts on Broadway, and said I absolutely had to take his class. "Regalado is a new kind of professor," he told me barely able to catch his breath. "He smokes like a chimney, he makes you think, and he's one of the most charismatic guys I know." Yes, graduate student talk, at a time when professors often lec- tured from yellowed notes written decades earlier. However, Antonio lived up to his reputation as a dynamic, caring, challenging professor of Spanish literature, with never a dull moment, never a tedious lecture, and always the unexpected comment, such as Francisco Delicado's novela dialogada as a kind of exercise in Probablism, a concept "probably"

Voros 17 most of the class had never heard of and certain an author who was largely unknown and not studied. The class, the only one I had the privilege to take with Antonio, dealt with Spanish Prose of the Six- teenth Century. In attendance also were Randolph Pope and Barbara Mujica. We never had a syllabus in those days, just reading lists that we were supposed to begin working on immediately. We never really knew, or at least I didn't as a beginning graduate student, just what was going to be discussed, and Antonio would say, "Now take out the Lazaril- lo," as if this great work was something we carried around with us every day of the week. He constant- ly engaged us, and if you hadn't spoken in class, he would press you until you did. I never got the impression that the class was just about him, despite his high energy and strong personality. Antonio approached the literary text not as a dead artifact, but as a vital part of Spanish culture in its broader sense, including philosophical debate, almost never discussed in literature classes, such as those of the Jesuit Francisco Suárez. A student of his, Vincent Martin, now managing editor of the Bulletin of the Comediantes, brought back a message to me from Antonio, years later, when he heard that I was teaching at the United States Naval Academy, and he wanted to know if I had to wear a uniform. I do not, but this comment made my day! Antonio always had time for his students, and even though I hadn't seen him for over 20 years, he still remem- bered. I am happy to reciprocate. He will not be

18 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 forgotten by those who were fortunate enough to work with him. "Y con el pensamiento discurría / por donde no hallaba / sino memorias llenas de ale- gría" (Égloga I, Garcilaso de la Vega).

Performance Studies

CALDERON’S LA VIDA ES SUEÑO MEETS CALLAGHAN’S FEVER/DREAM: ADAPTA- TION AND PERFORMANCE

CATHERINE LARSON Indiana University

All images courtesy of Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

Approaches to discussing adaptations and translations of early modern Spanish dramas have evolved in recent decades, as we have had increasing opportunities to see comedias performed in a variety of ways—and languages—in all parts of the world.1 As critics, we have tended to move beyond the “comedia-as-museum-piece” approach, which

20 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 was often guided by a preference for representations that audience members saw as authentic or true to the 16th and 17th centuries, even as we took into account our inability to know a great deal about the original theatrical productions or the authorship of texts, multiplicity of versions, etc. This type of reading has gradually been replaced by broader views of what could happen to the classics onstage, as increasing numbers of critics and audiences ex- panded their horizons of expectations by attending a greater number of theatrical productions than in the past; translations brought a new type of viewing public to the theaters; literary theory encouraged multiple readings and misreadings of any text, as well as a serious consideration of intertextuality; and a focus on performance and performance studies led readers and spectators to engage not merely with the text of the written drama but with the drama as embodied in performance onstage.2 It is fair to say that we now are far better equipped to talk in a serious way about the performance of classical theater, in particular, the ways in which contemporary adapters, translators and theater professionals stage plays that form the heart and soul of our discipline. We use—often interchangeably—a variety of terms to describe the drama we read or experience as theatrical spectacle: “version,” “adaptation,” “recontextualization,” “reworking,” literal and metaphoric “translation,” “remake,” “reimagining,” “re-

Larson 21 invention,” “update,” “modernization,” “reconstitu- tion” or, as André Lefevere calls it, “refraction”:

. . . a re-writing of a text in function of different linguistic, cultural, ideological and poetological constraints . . . in order to make [it] acceptable for a new audience. In the process virtually every feature of the original may be changed, or else very little may be changed. Changes will usually fall under three categories: a change of the language in which the original is written, with its concomitant socio-cultural context, a change of the ideology of the original (i.e., its “world view” in the widest, not just the political sense of the word) and a change of the poet- ics of the original (i.e., the presuppositions as to what is, or is not, literature) that can be seen to have guided the author of the original, whether he /she follows them or rebels against them. (“Refraction” 191)

Refraction is ultimately about the re-interpretation and re-writing of a text—and the “rules” governing those actions are fluid, if not erased, as productions of the classics may range from literal translations to bold adaptations that are, in essence, new plays. In a similar vein, John Milton explores the terms “adaptation” and “appropriation” by basing his discussion on Dryden’s distinction between “paraphrase” and

22 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

“imitation,” as well as the work of Julie Sanders in Adaptation and Appropriation:

. . . an “adaptation” will usually contain omissions, rewritings, maybe additions, but will still be recognized as the work of the original author, where the original point of enunciation remains. . . . [In “appropriation”] the original point of enunciation may now have changed, and although certain characteristics of the original may remain, the new text will be more that of the adapter or rewriter. (“Translation Studies” 51)

The subtle differences between and among these terms are further complicated for the theater when translation from one language, ideological base, culture, and epoch to another is involved. Jo Litson addresses the universal issue of keeping classic texts alive, noting that although the classics still have things to say to us, some need massaging, as a well-known adapter, Andrew Upton, underscores:

It’s great to do some plays as written but not all plays remain immediately relevant. First of all translation changes everything and so the fabric of any piece is in question. The production must be able to breathe and so I make whatever changes necessary to let it live.3

Larson 23

A case in point is Sheila Callaghan’s Fe- ver/Dream,4 directed by Howard Shalwitz and performed in its world premiere by the Woolly Mam- moth Theater Company in Washington, DC, in a run from June 1-28, 2009. Callaghan (b. 1973) is identified with the New York experimental theater scene, and her plays have been performed and published both domestically and internationally. She has won several awards for her work and has taught college-level English and playwriting. In 2010, Ma- rie Claire magazine described her as one of “18 successful women who are changing the world.” Callaghan’s reputation as one of the country’s best emerging playwrights was bolstered by the well- received Fever/Dream, described as “A hilarious and highly physical reimagining of the Spanish classic Life is a Dream, now in a contemporary business setting” (“Fever/Dream, a world premiere”). Calling attention to Callaghan’s appropriation of La vida es sueño, a similar assessment—one not often associated with Calderón’s classical drama—appears on the back cover of the script: “This raucous reinvention of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream gleefully skewers corporate Ameri- ca with razor-sharp wit.”5 While clearly illustrating its indebtedness to Calderón’s drama, Fever/Dream is simultaneously everything La vida es sueño is not: it is a two-act comedy written in English and in prose, set in 2008 amid the disastrous economic re-

24 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 alities of that year in the United States, and it might be argued that it deals less with the great Baroque philosophical questions about illusion and reality than with its biting satire of corporate greed in America.6 Despite those differences, Fever Dream is an appropriation—a refraction—that worked well as 21st-century theater, even as it reminded its audiences of one of the great dramas of Spain’s 17th century. In fact, I would suggest that this “uproarious update” (Washington City Paper) not only examines American corporate culture and entitlement but encourages us to see something new in a play that most of us have read or seen performed dozens of times. As might be expected in an update, Fe- ver/Dream contains numerous recognizable allu- sions to Calderón’s drama. Callaghan’s comedy is set in the 77-floor building housing Basil Enterpris- es. In the basement, literally chained to his desk and glued to the phone, is the filthy Segis, whose speech acts reveal his status: “CustomerservicehowmayI- helpyou.” Freight elevator doors open to reveal two women, Rose and Claire, who have accidentally stumbled upon the place where Segis has been en- slaved among ancient dot matrix printers.7 When asked the contents of the package she is delivering to the company’s COO, Aston Martin, Rose replies, “Nothing. My honor. Whatever.” Fred Clotaldo soon arrives to arrest the women but is visibly shak-

Larson 25 en when he recognizes the ornate pen that Rose un- sheathes.

Fred Clotaldo (Michael Willis) and Rose (Kimberly Gilbert)

Aston Martin and Stella Strong, his lover and fellow heir to the corporate throne, enter, fighting via projected text messages over Aston’s refusal to delete a picture of a mysterious woman from his cellphone.8 The two then learn that the company’s president, Bill Basil, influenced by his horoscope, intends to bring his son up from the basement and give Segis the chance to prove himself: “Question: What is the use of building an empire if there is no blood legacy to receive it?”9 In yet another intertextual allusion, Segis is drugged with a poisoned apple and awakens to find himself on the 77th floor, well dressed, in command and warned that “this might all be a dream” (47). Segis is, of course, a disastrous company president, selling all the wrong stocks, in- stalling his manager in a collar and leash and literally trying to bulldoze the competition, and although he and Stella find themselves attracted to one an-

26 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 other, he is returned to his prison in the basement while Bill Basil turns the company over to her and Aston.10 In yet another parallel to Calderón’s original, Clotaldo tells Segis that he must have been dreaming, perhaps as the result of a fever, adding, “The pain you feel in dreams is never lost, even when waking. . . . Neither is the pain you inflict. Remember that” (82). The play draws to a close with an uprising of the company’s employees led by Segis, Bill Basil’s moments of anagnorisis and surrender, the revelation that Rose’s mysterious package is her marriage license to Aston, Stella and Segis’s (re)union in the “merger of the decade,” and Segis Basil’s friendly takeover of his father’s corporation.

SEGIS. I have a fever. Is this my fever dream? STELLA. What do you think? SEGIS. I think. . . I’m going to be a benevo lent millionaire. (119)11

Callagan’s refraction clearly owes a huge debt to Calderón’s classic; as Sarah Ollove notes, the dramatist “capitalizes on the rise and fall structure of Calderón’s play” (6), but Fever/Dream is indebted on even more levels. Spectators who came to the theater knowing the play easily recognized not only the plot and structure, but Callaghan’s playful character names, and despite the years sepa-

Larson 27 rating the original and its avatar, the characteriza- tions reveal consistent parallels. Nonetheless, perhaps due to Callaghan’s decision to transform the philosophical drama into a comic satire, Fe- ver/Dream’s characters ultimately emerge as carica- tures. Most of the time, their over-the-top actions and discourse function effectively in this “new” play, although it might be argued that Stella Strong comes off as an inconsistent combination of shrew and weak-kneed girl with a teenage crush, and Rose’s roommate and traveling companion Claire (played here by a woman) is less a comic graciosa than a whining toady who appears thrilled to organ- ize the company’s filing system. The issue, however, raises important questions regarding audience expectations, as we consider whether our knowledge of the play and its characters enriches or interferes negatively with our esthetic experience. By definition, adaptation foregrounds transformation and difference. We already acknowledge that those who attend a performance with little or no knowledge of the play’s origins will surely experience the spectacle differently, but when we further consider the effect of a modification as complex and multi-layered as this one, we recognize that those audience members who know the source play well will necessarily have an exceedingly different experience. Each of those spectators enters the theater with a history of readings—of the dramatic text and performances of it.

28 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Stella Strong (Kate Eastwood Norris) and Aston Martin (Kenyatta Rogers)

Language plays as important a role for Cal- laghan as it did for Calderón; as Jayne Blanchard, The Washington Times’ reviewer, observed, “The wit of Miss Callaghan’s dialogue is so delightfully on-target and the performances so fearlessly over- the-top that the material seems reinvented.” In addition to the fact that Fever/Dream is in English rather than Spanish, genre also performs a starring role, as the 21st-century version self-consciously plays with the ways in which the dramatic discourse functions in comedy. As is evident in Fe- ver/Dream’s dramatic action and characterization, the employment of names drawn from La vida es sueño illustrates Callaghan’s ludic approach, from her version of Astolfo (the flashy playboy “Aston Martin”) to the strangely ironic pairing incorporated

Larson 29 in the name “Fred Clotaldo” and the alliterative and revealing “Stella Strong.” The acquisition of language—and, meto- nymically, of knowledge—is a central theme of the work. As the play begins, Segis can only express himself via the ironically meaningless words of customer service agents everywhere: “I’llconnectyouwithbillingimmmediately,thankyouf orcalling.” (6).12 When Rose and Claire arrive, he isn’t even sure what is happening: “What is that sound? It’s me. Talking. To someone else. This is what I sound like talking to someone else. I have language again” (9). As in Calderón’s drama, Clotaldo is the character responsible for Segis’s education: “Month after month I come down to this stinkhole with books, magazines, articles. . . I GAVE you that language, mister” (15).13 As we know well from Calderón’s play, however, Segis’s education has been limited to that learned from books. He cannot understand the subtleties of dis- cursive expression, in particular, the difference between literal and metaphoric speech: “Why did [Stella] run from me? I kept my manager on a tight leash, I whipped my employees into shape, I bull- dozed the competition…I’M DOING EVERY- THING RIGHT!” (54).14 Indeed, much like in La vida es sueño, the protagonist has some important lessons to learn—about language and life—before he is ready to assume the role of “ruler” of his father’s company.

30 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Callaghan’s witty dialogue emerges as a significant, self-conscious point of contrast with Calderón’s use of discourse. Ollove asserts, “In place of [Calderón’s] dense wall of [philosophical] reflection, Callaghan substitutes her own hip, contemporary argot, reveling in the peculiar vocabular- ies of business people, accountants, lovers, hipsters, and geeks” (7). The office’s worker bees, who often speak in unison, are described as “Account-ants”; seeking Segis as the leader of their rebellion after he has been returned to the basement, they ask, “Where’s da badass at?” (91), and appear fascinated with their sleeping rebel king: “He so chillaxed. Like freestylin’ in dreamtown” (92).15 Nonetheless, Callaghan’s foregrounding of discourse is also reflected onstage in nonverbal ways. The audience’s introduction to Stella and Aston occurs via cellphone text messages projected for the audience as the two ascend in different elevators:

ASTON. CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT U THE SHEEN OF YOUR HAIR MOCKS THE DAYLIGHT YR GLIMMERING EYES SHAME THE STARS YR BREASTS ARE TWO RIPE ...... FIGS WHICH MORTIFY ALL LESSER TREE FRUIT (19)

Larson 31

In this comic example and in one occurring at the end of the comedy, Callaghan appears to play with the conventions of early modern poetry. In the second example, Rose and Aston, finally reunited and planning their future together, engage in a slow dance, each of them softly alternating a long list of one-word responses to the other; tellingly, the first word is “Sonnet”:

ASTON. Kaleidoscope ROSE. Glitter ASTON. Refrain ROSE. Envelope . . . .

The exchange morphs as they continue, with Rose tending to refer to parts of Aston’s body or choosing the word “lover,” and Aston simply repeating the word “Rose,” until the “poem” ends with “Rose” / “Yes” (113-16). Clearly, this exchange is not a sonnet, but its allusion to that type of lyric poem encourages the reader/spectator to consider the form and function of love poetry, even as Calla- ghan’s version deconstructs traditional poetic discourse in her parody. Callaghan populates her comedy with old office machines and equipment, which become yet another medium for (mis)communication within the corporate offices and the play. Phones and a fax machine acquire great importance; the fax becomes

32 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Bill Basil’s means of communicating his disap- pointment with his son, who only wants his father’s love and the education he needs to learn how to do better at his new job running the company. Segis begs to learn why he was brought upstairs, asking, “Whose dream is this?”; he then reads the final page from the fax aloud: “The dream is your own. Do with it what you will. End transmission.” The dis- embodied fax machine message serves as an ideal tool for Callaghan’s satiric jab at the lack of communication in strained father/son relationships, as well as an apt metaphor for the dysfunctional corporate world. The dream metaphor is, as we would expect, central to Callaghan’s reworking of Calderón’s drama, and it appears numerous times throughout the play. As in the original, the father makes his son believe that his time as probationary ruler was an illusion; Clotaldo later explains to Segis “I’m afraid you fell asleep at your desk, Mr. Basil. You must have been having a nightmare” (41). The metaphor is extended further:

FRED CLOTALDO. Be careful, young man… this might all be a dream…. SEGIS. But it’s MY dream. And you’re fired from it. GET OUT OF MY FACE! (47)

Larson 33

Segis Basil (Daniel Eichner)

Callaghan continues the dream metaphor with the image of the hallucinations resulting from illness, as Clotaldo asserts: “The fevered mind is a lively ar- chitect. . .” (81) and “The pain you feel in dreams is never lost, even when waking” (82). Moreover, the dramatist unites dreaming with the play-within-a- play motif. With Segis’s time on the 77th floor of Basil Enterprises functioning as an inset play within the larger drama, Callaghan creates several dream- like sequences, the most salient of which is a fanta- sy expressing Segis’s most-desired wish, as he and his father, sitting in leather armchairs and reading The Financial Times, discuss Segis’s multiple successes as company president, and his father tells his son that he is proud of him. Such obvious metathea- ter—and numerous other examples in Shalwitz’s creative staging—provide structural and thematic

34 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 support for Callaghan’s over-the-top comedy and serves to foreground her central message.16 As Oll- ove suggests, “Instead of merely talking about dreaming, her characters enter literal dreamscapes which take on magical significance. When Segis’ unique vision finally succeeds in Fever/Dream, it is a triumph first and foremost of the imagination” (7). In like manner, Sheila Callaghan’s appropriation of La vida es sueño speaks simultaneously to its source and her own imaginative refraction of the original. Fever/Dream not only illuminates concepts such as the palimpsest and intertextuality, but revels in playing with them. From the comedy’s ludic riffs on Calderón’s character names to the parodies of so many of the 17th-century philosophical themes that form the heart of La vida es sueño, Fever/Dream hits the audience over the head with multiple allu- sions to other texts. Callaghan’s Segis is drugged after eating a poisoned apple, à la Snow White; when he is rejected by his beloved, his “STELLA!!” recalls A Streetcar Named Desire (75); and, drugged a second time and thrown back in the basement, he laments, in a Christ-like imitation, “father . . . why have you forsaken me . . .” (79). Cal- laghan’s Fever/Dream challenges its audience to join in the game of identifying its intertextual echoes—both from La vida es sueño and beyond it. The appropriation of La vida es sueño also calls attention to genre. In her 2009 interview with Laurence Boswell on the topic of staging Golden

Larson 35

Age plays for English-speaking audiences, Dawn Smith asks Boswell about the relative ease of adapting comedies (e.g., El perro del hortelano and Don Gil de las calzas verdes) over tragicomedies (such as Fuente Ovejuna), using as examples texts he has translated, adapted or directed. Boswell replies:

Each play has its own challenges. . . . Com- edy is always challenging because it has to be funny. It’s often rooted in the real contemporary world, and this makes demands on the version. Literal translation is often the opposite of funny. (“Staging” 165-66)

The implications for Callaghan are many. Her adaptation/refraction does not even remotely resemble a literal translation. Basing much of her plot, themes and characters on Calderón’s masterpiece (“two- plus hours’ worth of ingenious parallels with Calde- rón’s original,” The Washington Post), she nonetheless makes the decision to modernize the text by transforming it into comedy: “comically irreverent…[Callaghan] is without doubt the purveyor of top-shelf American wit, not just in one-liners but also in concept” (Metro Weekly); “An uproarious update” (Washington City Paper); “I can’t remember the last time a play made me laugh so hard. . . . “Fever/Dream is about as funny as the sharpest Hol- lywood comedy, and far more rewarding” (brightestyoungthings.com); “fiendishly funny”

36 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

(The Washington Times).17 Callaghan’s conscious transformation of the early modern philosophical drama into such a funny play also has implications for us readers/spectators and our own horizons of expectations. Faced with a play whose fundamental core, its genre, is so different from the text that we know well—both as written drama and performed spectacle—we are forced to engage intellectually and esthetically will Callaghan’s decision-making. Her choices may make us uncomfortable, as they push the limits of our own expectations and past experiences with La vida es sueño, or we may revel in the new play, which allows us to re-envision the classical text in ways that challenge us on new levels. Either way, the esthetic distance between us and the text increases: we must engage with the adapter’s decision to create a funny play. In essence, the ability to embrace Fever/Dream as a play that makes us laugh out loud emerges as a defining element of this refracted version of Calderón’s best- known text. Alluding to an essay by Alan C. Dessen, Su- san L. Fischer poses several questions relating to reviews of theatrical performances, specifically, of classical dramas; the first three are particularly useful: “(1) What was done in a given production? (2) What was not done or could have been done (the road not taken)? (3) What should have been done?” (“’Some are Born Great’” 9). Dessen’s questions are fundamental in discussing adaptations that cross

Larson 37 genres—not to mention centuries, languages and cultures—so profoundly. Translation theory can help answer the questions that Dessen has posed. For one thing, it underscores the idea that all performances of translated plays are, by definition, adaptations; as Phyllis Zatlin observes, “To achieve speakable dialogue, theatrical translators can and do adapt” as they help move the play from page to stage (1). In addition, however, it underlines issues related to translation in the kind of appropriation or broad adaptation that Callaghan and Shalwitz have done in their script and production of Fever/Dream. Written in prose, composed in English, utilizing the type of witty, hip language discussed previously, on one level, the play is obviously not a literal translation. Violent hippogryphs are not in the picture, and the beauty of Calderón’s poetic imagery was clearly never intended to be a part of Fever/Dream. The translation, of course, is metaphorical, and although the dramatist draws heavily from Calderón’s drama, it is important, I believe, to allow that perspective to guide our expectations as we consider what Calla- ghan did, did not do or should have done. In that sense, perhaps the seminal—and polemical— question for those of us who attended this performance—or who find ourselves in such a position with another classical play—is the last of the three: what should have been done? When we know the play exceedingly well, we revel in seeing, in com- prehending, the creativity of the new interpreta-

38 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 tion—on both a macro scale and at the level of word choice. The cleverness of a name, the self-conscious parallels between Segismundo’s and Segis’s chains (the latter ludically reinforcing the image of being chained to one’s desk), the way in which the new play treats Basil’s moment of anagnorisis or creates a contemporary version of the clash between the two armies—each time we recognize how the 21st- century appropriation illustrates its debt to the classical text, our experience with the play changes, radically or subtly, because we focused on what simultaneously echoes and differs from what we thought we knew. Our experience as audience members can never replicate that of those who came to the play with little or no knowledge of what Cal- derón did or how Callaghan and Shalwitz changed it. As a result, the question of what should have been done emerges as more than a bit problematic, because with the adaptation/appropriation of a classical text, there are always multiple audiences with distinctly different experiences with the text and the performance of it. These issues have been played out in recent numbers of Comedia Performance, which included performance studies and reviews of several different translations and adaptations of La vida es sueño, thereby offering a useful parallel with Sheila Calla- ghan’s Fever/Dream, but also illustrating the ways in which we early modern specialists deal with modernizations of a revered classical text. Jorge

Larson 39

Abril Sánchez reviewed “an audience oriented modernization” and translation of Calderón’s play, performed in 2007 by The Theater School at DePaul University in Chicago (220).18 Abril Sánchez questions the production on several levels, most notably because Segismundo decides to return to his tower at the end of the play, choosing to bless the marriage of his cousins and remain single; he thereby leaves Rosaura dishonored and unavenged and puts the future of the royal lineage in doubt. This reviewer also calls attention to the costuming of the rebel soldiers as Nazis, the use of “slang, sexual slurs and vulgar gestures to comment on sentimental relationships” and an overall negative characterization of Segismundo (Abril Sánchez noted how the production called to mind images of Han- nibal Lecter) that would then directly impact the adapter’s decision-making with regard to the play’s conclusion. Ultimately, although Abril Sánchez suggests that the “exemplary and entertaining” adaptation introduced new generations to Calderón while “questioning our understanding” of La vida es sueño, he concludes, “Given the many alterations, one is led to believe the purpose of this production could possibly be to (de/re)construct one of the cor- nerstones of our classical Hispanic theater in order to make it relevant to the theatrical community of Chicago” (222). Abril Sánchez’s mixed review of this production thereby calls attention to the issues found at the heart of modern adaptations of the clas-

40 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 sics and emphasizes the special concerns of those of us who know the field and the texts particularly well. Those concerns were even more marked in Bonnie L. Gasior’s review of Life is a Dream, produced by the South Coast Repertory of Costa Mesa, CA, also in 2007.19 Gasior, accompanied by a group of students who had studied the play, found this staging “stylistically disjointed”; she adds that the reviewer from the Los Angeles Times stated that for many audience members, “the most pressing philosophical question raised by Life is a Dream will be whether to return to their seats at intermission” (186-87). Gasior describes an adaptation that reflected Calderón’s basic plot, but which trans- formed the dream element into an esthetic nightmare, with a garish, neon-colored set and costumes meaninglessly illustrating different styles and time periods:

The combination of the odd, erratic onstage movements, bizarre apparel, and hybrid quality of the overall performance (part comedia, part musical) proved awkward, distracting, and incompatible with the play’s intended philosophical underpinnings. (188)

Gasior also found this staging disappointing in its failed symbolism, but she was particularly dis- pleased with what she describes as the asphyxiation

Larson 41 of the theme of free will caused by the “multitude of outlandish visuals and props” and, with one excep- tion, bad acting. Ultimately, she asserts that the in- coherence of the production elements, combined with poor acting overall, left the audience unable to confront the big questions at the heart of Calderón’s drama (189). Gasior concludes her review with a firm response to what she sees as a theatrical failure:

While adaptations can be successful by infusing the past with a dose of modernization, this one stands to show that achieving co- herency is directly proportionate to connecting underlying themes with overlaying issues. (190)20

Like Abril Sánchez, Gasior finds it difficult to reconcile changes in the adaptation that clashed with her professional understanding of the play. It is fair to state that in both stagings of Life is a Dream, the quality of the production elements and acting may well have been problematic; it certainly appears that both adaptations raised serious questions. Most interesting from a critical/theoretical perspective however, are the approaches that the reviewers employ vis-à-vis those questions. Abril Sánchez posits that the nature and number of changes in the DePaul adaptation produce a staging that both deconstructs and reconstructs classical theater to make

42 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 it relevant for 21st-century audiences; in other words, he appears to privilege the adapter’s and director’s attempts to achieve relevance above all other possible choices they might have made.21 Espe- cially significant is that the reviewer appears to be unimpressed with the theatrical spectacle; at the very least, he does not offer any explanations for choices such as replacing sentimental exchanges with vulgarity or creating an ending that stands La vida es sueño on its head. Gasior’s critique of multiple elements of the production she witnessed fo- cuses attention on intentionality: the performance was “incompatible with the play’s intended philosophical underpinnings” (188). Moreover, she suggests that “adaptations can be successful by infusing the past with a dose of modernization” (190); although she does not explicitly delineate the size of the dose, the phrase seems to propose a view of adaptation that privileges the original over its avatar and that emphasizes the importance of the original’s central themes and philosophical foundations. These two views support the idea that the modernization seen in at least some adaptations of La vida es sueño, even if undertaken with the goal of creating relevance for contemporary audiences, can at best be a dicey proposition. The reviews ask us to recon- sider what we look for in performance, what it means to be part of the audience at the staging of a classical drama, and how we react critically and

Larson 43 emotionally to the updating of early modern theater—especially of texts that we know and value. This issue is raised even more explicitly in yet another theater review, Christopher Weimer’s analysis of José Rivera’s adaptation, Sueño, performed in 2006 by the Milwaukee Repertory Thea- ter.22 Weimer’s review goes directly to the heart of the matter:

José Rivera’s Sueño can prove an exasperat- ing experience in the theater for those familiar with its source, La vida es sueño . . . . There are moments in which this English- language adaptation . . . provides audiences with a relatively faithful rendering of Calde- rón’s comedia, but more often it can strike knowledgeable spectators as a distorted fun- house mirror image of the original.23

Weimer summarizes: “Sueño is most definitively not, in other words, our parents’ or our professors’ La vida es sueño; it is a revisioning of Calderón’s comedia which simultaneously pays homage to and challenges its source” (244). Describing Rivera’s modern adaptation as both “problematic” and “effective theater on its own terms” (244), the reviewer reminds us that knowledgeable audience members always bring their own past experiences with them to the theater, while he also implicitly suggests that the horizons of experience and expectations associ-

44 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 ated with those past encounters with the classical canon may allow theater-goers to better appreciate the dialogue between past and present inherent in contemporary performance. The director’s perspective on staging Sueño is the thrust of Barbara Mujica’s interview with Ka- ren Berman, who directed Rivera’s play for a 2009 production at Georgia College and State University. Mujica asserts that Rivera’s adaptation, while main- taining Calderón’s original structure, “obliterates its message, replacing it with an anthem to self- fulfillment” (“Karen Berman” 200). As a result, Mujica begins her interview by asking Berman why she had chosen Rivera’s text instead of a translation that more closely resembled the original. Berman responds that she had fallen in love with Rivera’s prologue, an addition to the play that helped to rein- force the motivation for Basilio’s actions. She then adds an illuminating description of her own motiva- tions for using Rivera’s text:

Rivera’s adaptation wrenches the audience on a rollercoaster ride between horrific violence, romance, and hysterical comedy. Ri- vera’s text is bold and irreverent and captures this generation’s cynicism, especially in Clarín’s language. Rivera’s irreverence gave me license as a director to play concep- tually without having to give excessive def- erence to the great Calderón, whom I had

Larson 45

put on a pedestal. This script freed me to ex- periment. (201-02)

Berman’s comments offer precisely the kind of perspective that can transform the ways in which we view the connections between text and performance. As Frederick A. de Armas proposes in his analysis of three different versions of La vida es sueño, the work of Luciano García Lorenzo and others seeking to establish dialogues between critics and directors can be fundamentally important because of the extent to which critical studies, versions, translations and theatrical productions mutu- ally influence one another (“Hipogrifos violentos” 36). Berman embraced Rivera’s ending of the play, which had Rosaura marry Segismundo, rather than Astolfo; Mujica notes, “I found this alteration perturbing, but Berman found it liberating” (205). Like the Joanne Akalaitis production mentioned above (n. 7), Berman also brought a feminist perspective to the performance, expressing discomfort with the restoration of a woman’s honor only via marriage, especially because in Rivera’s version, the past relationship between Rosaura and Astolfo appeared to look more like rape than consensual sex; she adds, “The original upsets me for other reasons as well. The depiction of a woman chasing after a man who has been unfaithful conveys a lesson I wouldn’t want to teach young women” (206). The

46 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Mujica/Berman interview offers a fascinating look at directorial decision-making, as well as the distinctions between the approaches to classical theater of two seasoned professionals. Directly related to this dialogue are studies such as that of Cory A. Reed, who examines the 2010 world premiere of Lewis Spratlan’s Pulitzer- Prize-winning opera, Life Is a Dream, “a close adaptation” of Calderón’s comedia, performed at the Santa Fe Opera (“Calderonian Engines” 9).24 Reed contends that the hybrid nature of this opera

not only breaks important new ground in opera but also demonstrates the breadth of creative possibilities for the theatrical representation of Calderonian themes in the twenty-first century . . . the operatic medium en- hances our understanding of Calderón, real- izing the performance potential not typically achieved by scaled-down theatrical productions of the comedia. (9)25

Placing emphasis on the advantages inherent in such a large-scale production, Reed underscores the ability of Life Is a Dream to bridge epochs, to create a “timeless setting for the story that feels simultaneously like past, present, and future” (16). In that sense, Reed describes how an adaptation can allow audiences to witness ways in which performance can bring together the thematic threads that connect

Larson 47 texts and refractions of them over time. This view of adaptation offers a useful paradigm for analyzing the impact of a wide variety of 21st-century appropriations of La vida es sueño, with particular attention paid to the critical reactions of specialists in the discipline. These critical studies and reviews of modernized versions of Calderón’s play are particularly significant, given the decisions that Sheila Calla- ghan and Howard Shalwitz made in adapting and staging Fever/Dream. Like the 2007 adaptations described above, modernization—the translation of the original into a context expected to be more relevant to a 21st-century audience—was central to the conceptualization of the play. As with the various versions discussed above, the adapter and director of Fever/Dream took risks with their updated play. Transforming the language of performance, the play’s genre, setting, context, and multiple elements of the plot, Callaghan and Shalwitz made decisions that offer parallels to those other appropriations of La vida es sueño in their attempt to create a theatrical spectacle that would be relevant for modern-day audiences. Even as they fashioned a raucous comedy intended to satirize the American business world, the adapter and director of Fever/Dream echoed the essence of Calderón’s classic with its philosophical ideas played out in interwoven and inter-related du- alities or conflicts (illusion/reality, father/son, past/present, internal/external, basement pris-

48 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 on/penthouse palace, individual/state, fate/free will, failure/success, etc.), themes and characters. The final result was by all accounts a success, timely in its modernization of the classical text. The timeliness of Fever/Dream appeared to surprise even the play’s author and artistic director. Alex Baldinger’s Washington Post article on the play, published as it ended its previews, speaks both to the connections between the centuries and to the notion of esthetic authenticity:

The 17th-century Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca died quite a number of years before such terms as “wage freeze” and “unprofitable asset” entered our daily lexicon; the birth of the corporate takeover was still a few centuries off. But it’s a Cal- derón monarchy-in-transition morality play, “Life Is a Dream,” that serves as the tem- plate for “Fever/Dream” . . . . “I was trying to make a parallel to a man running an empire in today’s world, and the way I was able to find my footing in that was to use the model of a corporate dynasty rather than a monarchy,” Callaghan said. . . . . “It just made perfect sense that the business would also be failing under his leadership. What I didn’t expect was that the entire world would be resonating with this same kind of corporate failure in its own models.” It’s a

Larson 49

fortuitous bit of luck that has Woolly Mam- moth mounting Callaghan’s play at the same time the corporate work is in turmoil. When artistic director Howard Shalwitz chose “Fever/Dream” in January 2008, few could have predicted that conglomerates the world over would now be mired in many of the problems facing the protagonist’s Basil En- terprises. [Shalwitz notes,] “It’s tricky, because you don’t want to do cheesy, ripped- from-the-headlines references. You have to find a way to get them in the play that’s really authentic to the story that’s being told.”

Certainly, by design or as the result of exceptionally good timing, Fever/Dream appeared at an especially propitious moment. Like La vida es sueño, the 21st-century comedy was staged in uncertain times, when a troubled economy and the concomitant political and cultural issues surrounding it created the need for an exploration of such themes as the conflict between the personal and professional. Fever/Dream’s timeliness, esthetic vision, poetic coherence and ideological, socio-cultural and linguistic re-writing of La vida es sueño signal its emergence as a successful example of refraction, a new play separate from but indebted to its source text, which leaves audiences and theater critics sing- ing its praises. In their attempts to simultaneously embrace and challenge Calderón’s drama, the thea-

50 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 ter practitioners responsible for the creation of Fe- ver/Dream encourage both an affective and an intellectual response. Those of us who know and love the original and the times in which it was written and first performed must explicitly confront our horizons of expectations and experience, as well as the essential issues related to audience response; doing so is fundamentally a self-conscious act of engage- ment with the text and its embodiment in performance. This self-reflexive critical act offers an ironic parallel to the source text and its 21st-century incarnation, each of which is self-conscious in its own right. Fever/Dream illuminates current adaptive practice, as well as the “creatively, ideologically, politically and socially charged process of rewriting and reshaping all that is adaptation” (Hand and Krebs, 4). Our reactions to Callaghan’s play, to additional refractions of La vida es sueño and to other examples of early modern theater in performance reflect the ongoing conflict between our professional experiences and our personal and critical responses. Unlike just a few decades ago, we now have multiple opportunities to challenge our views of what works in the theater.

NOTES

1 Matthew D. Stroud describes the explosion of staged productions of Spanish comedias in the last twenty-five years: “Whether the performances take place in Madrid, Almagro,

Larson 51

New York, or El Paso, the experience has changed forever the way those who have attended performances view plays previously known only by reading the text” (“Director’s Cut” 77). 2 See my “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Perfor- mance?: A Metacritical Overview of an Evolving Concept” and Robert Bayliss’s “Ancients, Moderns, and the Authentici- ty Issue in Comedia Performance Scholarship.” 3 Litson was writing about the art of adaptation for the Sydney Theatre Company; Upton had adapted Gorky’s The Philistines for London’s National Theatre, using “a thoroughly modern idiom . . . new speeches and a different ending” (“The Art of Adaptation”). 4 The play was “commissioned by and developed with Occi- dental College in 2007, under the guidance of Jessica Kubr- zansky, Co-Artistic Director, The Theatre @ Boston Court” (Program 5). 5 Reminding the reader that the “production of a new play is a journey of collaboration and constant development,” the following appears inside the front cover: “In an effort to illumi- nate and involve the audience in the play development process, Woolly Mammoth brings you this limited edition of the script. These scripts which go to print during the final week of rehearsal are ‘almost at the finish line’—some of what you see on the printed page may have been rewritten during previews. After you see the work live on stage, comb through the script again and note how the play has evolved in performance. It is our hope that you will enjoy this living document well after the proverbial curtain falls.” 6 Callaghan’s website summarizes her take on her play and its roots: “Say your father was the President of a multinational corporation and you were chained to the customer service desk as soon as you could dial a phone… if someone made you CEO for a day, would you go crazy? And if all around you the inner workings of the company were in turmoil—people in disguise, marriages plotted, overthrows planned—and you

52 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

were told that everything happening to you is only a dream, what would you do? A modern corporate dynasty phantasma- goria freely adapted from Pedro Calderón’s Life Is a Dream.” 7 The closest Callaghan comes to reproducing Rosaura’s fall from her horse is that she arrives on the “Down” elevator, wearing the helmet and shoulder bag of a bike messenger, a decision that appears to challenge the role of the fall as part of the symbolic underpinning of the play. For a parallel to Calla- ghan’s decisions, see also Frederick de Armas’s analysis of Joanne Akalaitis’s 1999 staging of La vida es sueño, which uses John Barton and Adrian Mitchell’s translation/adaptation in addition to her own changes to the text. One might argue that Callaghan is presenting a modernized version of Ro- saura’s fall; Akalaitis, however, firmly changes the play by minimizing the importance of the fall and Rosaura’s role in Segismundo’s conversion and by rejecting any expression of love between Rosaura and Segismundo as antithetical to her views on violence against women (“Hipogrifos violentos” 52- 54). 8 Imitating Calderón, Rose later takes the cellphone and de- letes the “portrait” that Aston has been carrying. 9 Echoing Calderón’s account of the omens and events surrounding Segismundo’s birth, Basil and Clotaldo describe what happened the day Segis was born, October 19th, 1987 (“Black Monday”), when the stock market began to crash at the moment Basil’s wife went into labor. 10 In an allusion to the “hombre/fiera” duality in Segismundo’s characterization, Aston calls Stella’s reaction to the “ANI- MAL” a crush; she replies that she is attracted to the power of his “raw passion” (63). 11 Callaghan’s comic version contains no rebel soldier condemned to the tower; her ending, while illustrating Segis’s conversion on some levels, could be viewed as unsatisfying. This may in part derive from Callaghan’s decision to minimize the attraction between Segis and Rose (the only brief spark

Larson 53

between them produces a sexual harassment charge) in favor of a strong magnetic pull between him and Stella, which then makes Segis’s decision to join forces with Stella at the end of the play less a personal sacrifice for the greater good than the fulfillment of his dreams. 12 Later in the play, when Basil replaces Segis in the basement, he slips into the same linguistic role: “Customerservicehow- mayIhelpyou?” (38). 13 Clotaldo returns to this theme late in the play, when he reminds Bill Basil of his twenty-two years of service: “Black Monday… when you handed that baby boy to me and told me it hurt too much to look at him, and I promised you I’d watch over him, give him language. Did I not?” (89). 14 Ordering Rose to bring Stella to him, Segis describes the object of his affection by focusing attention on her discourse: “I WANT THAT WOMAN! GET ME THAT WOMAN!. . . . THE ONE WITH ALL THE WORDS!” (57). 15 Claire responds, “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Hipster” (91). 16 The impact of this metatheatrical performance becomes particularly evident in the antic staging of other self-conscious scenes. In one key example dramatizing the father’s guilty conscience, photos of Bill Basil accuse the character of mis- treating his son and ruining his own company. 17 See Sheila Callaghan’s website (“Press quotes”) for these and other reviews of the play. 18 Adrian Mitchell and John Barton adapted the play Life’s a Dream, with original music by Mark Elliot. Directed by Barry Brunetti. 19 Calderón’s play was translated and adapted by Nilo Cruz and directed by Kate Whoriskey. 20 See also DeLys Ostlund’s strong reaction to an adaptation of Lope’s La prueba de los ingenios, which illustrates her preference for a more “early modern/textual authenticity” approach. 21 Yet another recent theater review of Life Is a Dream (performed at Rose State College in Midwest City, OK in 2007)

54 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

was authored by A. Robert Lauer, who praised the John Clifford translation as “very appropriate for this student production” (271). Lauer’s discussion of Clifford’s updating of the play’s language calls attention to the issue of relevance that has figured prominently in so many performance reviews: he asserts that the translation “served to humanize the play in order to make it more palatable to a modern audience” (271). Relevance via the use of modernized language is often cited as a key method for engaging contemporary audiences. Stroud discusses the ways in which a director makes cuts to the script in an attempt to accomplish a similar goal. He asks, however, “What ever happened to the notion that art was meant to challenge to expand one’s intellectual horizons? When the comfort of the audience takes precedence over the content of the work, then all we will have is a homogenized, bourgeois medium. Usually we call this network television” (93). 22 Sueño was commissioned and first produced in 1998 by the Hartford Stage Company; Weimer notes that for the most part, the director of the 2006 production, Joseph Hanreddy, used this adapted version, although a revised version had been published in 2003 (247). 23 Weimer describes Rivera’s transformation of the source text: the play begins “with a prologue set on the night of Segismundo’s birth, re-sets the main action in a semi- fictionalized 1635 Spain, incorporates modern slang and pro- fanity, reworks Calderón’s eponymous central metaphor into one of existential skepticism, and perhaps most startling of all, ends the play with Estrella’s betrothal to Astolfo and Ro- saura’s to Segismundo, along with Segismundo’s decree that the tower be razed to the ground rather than have it serve anew as a prison” (243-44). 24 The opera was conducted by Leonard Slatkin and directed by Kevin Newbury. 25 Reed adds that audiences attending the performance of the opera gain something special via the experience, at least in

Larson 55

part because of the size and sumptuousness of operatic staging: “Watching the performance of Spratlan’s opera is akin to seeing Calderón’s play for the first time, with a fresh critical eye, free of the expectations conditioned by decades of literary-critical interpretation and conventional theatrical performance” (11).

Works Cited

Abril Sánchez, Jorge. Life’s a Dream [La vida es sueño]. Merle Reskin Theater, DePaul University. Co- media Performance 5.1 (2008): 217-22. Print. Baldinger, Alex. “Sheila Callaghan’s ‘Fever/Dream’ at Woolly Mammoth.” Washington Post. June 2009. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn /content/article/2009/06/04/AR2009060401791. html. Web. Bayliss, Robert. “Ancients, Moderns, and the Authen- ticity Issue in Comedia Performance Scholar- ship.” Comedia Performance 3.1 (2006): 121- 45. Print. Blanchard, Jayne. “’Fever’ Spreads in the Boardroom.” The Washington Times. 18 June 2009. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/ jun/18/fever-spreads-in-boardroom/print/#ixzz 28icb3RfR. Web. Callaghan, Sheila. Fever/Dream. Washington, DC: Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, 2009. Print. ---. “Fever/Dream.” http://www.sheilacallaghan.com/ pubbed_dream.html. 9 September 2012. Web.

56 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

---. “Press quotes.” Sheila Callaghan. http://www.sheila callaghan.com/press.html. 10 October 2012. Web. De Armas, Frederick A. “Hipogrifos violentos: Adaptaciones y puestas en escena de La vida essueño (Boisrobert, FitzGerald y Akalaitis).” Comedia Performance 4.1 (2007): 35-66. Print. Dessen, Alan C. “Reviewing Shakespeare for the Record.” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1985): 602-08. Print. “Fever/Dream, a World Premiere by Sheila Callaghan at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.” Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. 17 June 2009. http://woollymammoth.net/performances/show_ fever/dream.php. Web. Fischer, Susan L. “’Some Are Born Great’ and “Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them’: Staging Lope’s El perro del hortelano on the Boards of the Bard.” Comedia Performance 2.1 (2005): 9-68. Print. Gasior, Bonnie L. Theater review. Life is a Dream. South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, CA). Comedia Performance 5.1 (2008): 186-90. Print. Hand, Richard, and Katja Krebs. Editorial. Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance 1.1 (2007): 3-4. Print. Larson, Catherine. “What Do We Mean When We Talk About Performance?: A Metacritical Overview of an Evolving Concept.” LATR 45.1 (Fall 2011): 23-44. Print. Lauer, A. Robert. “The Staging of Calderón’s Life Is a Dream at Rose State College (Midwest City,

Larson 57

OK).” Comedia Performance 7.1 (2010): 266- 72). Print. Lefevere, André. “Refraction: Some Observations on the Occasion of Wole Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi.” Page to Stage: Theatre as Translation. Ed. Ortrun Zuber-Skerritt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984. 191-98. Print. Litson, Jo. “The Art of Adaptation: Theatre-makers Keeping Classic Texts Alive in the Twenty-First Century.” Back Stage: Behind the Scenes of Sydney Theatre Company. http://blog.sydney theatre.com.au/the-art-of-adaptation-theatre- makers-keeping. 2011.Web. Milton, John. “Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies.” Translation Research 2. Ed. Anthony Pym and Alexander Perekrestenko. Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group, 2009. 51-58. http://isg.urv.es/publicity/isg/publications/trp_2_ 2009/index.htm. Web. Ollove, Sarah. “Boom to Bust.” Program, Fever/Dream, 6-7. Print. Ostlund, DeLys. “The Transformation of La prueba de los ingenios into The Labyrinth of Desire: Adapting Lope de Vega for a Contemporary American Audience.” Comedia Performance 7.1 (2010): 143-69. Print. Reed, Cory A. “Calderonian Engines of Change: Performance, Design and Hybridity in Lewis Spratlan’s Opera, Life Is a Dream.” Comedia Performance 9.1 (2012): 9-37. Print. Smith, Dawn. “Staging Spanish Golden Age Plays for English-Speaking Audiences: An Interview with

58 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Laurence Boswell.” Comedia Performance 6.1 (2009): 161-80. Print. Stroud, Matthew D. “The Director’s Cut: Baroque Aesthetics and Modern Stagings of the Comedia.” Comedia Performance 1.1 (2004): 77-94. Print. Weimer, Christopher. Theater review. Sueño. Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Comedia Performance 4.1(2007): 243-47. Print. “Women on Top Awards 2010.” Successful Women Profiles – Stories of Successful Women. Marie Claire. 13 September 2010. http://www.marie claire.com/career-money/jobs/articles/women- on-top. Web. Zatlin, Phyllis. Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation: A Practitioner’s View. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Print.

WATER, WINE, AND ALOJA: CONSUMING INTERESTS IN THE CORRALES DE COMEDIAS 1600-1646

RACHEL BALL University of Alaska Anchorage

It has been well established that during the second half of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth century performed drama thrived in Spain and its overseas empire. In the decades following the Council of Trent, pious lay religious brotherhoods, enterprising troupe mangers, and financially savvy city fathers and civic authorities established permanent corrales de comedias as a means of augmenting the charitable work of running the hospitals and orphanages of their cities. Their participation in Tridentine works of devotion and piety that combated disease, vagrancy, and poverty created a space for members of acting troupes, directors, lessee-theater administrators, playwrights and some other enterprising business- men and women to earn a living. Conquerors, colonists, clergymen, and administrators carried the connection between public drama and hospitals

60 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 along with other more tangible items of culture, such as fabric, healing stones, comedias written in Spain, and recipes for aloja, an extremely popular, honey-sweetened beverage similar to mead that was frequently sold to spectators at the playhouses, to Castile’s colonial holdings in the Americas. The corrales de comedias provided urban dwellers in Spanish cities throughout the Atlantic World with regular – if not quite daily – entertainment and some with the possibility of an occupation. One of the potentially lucrative aspects of the theater business was the licensing of vendors to sell food and drink at the playhouse. Taking Madrid as its starting point and using Seville and Puebla de los Angeles in Mexico as points of comparison, this article argues that, as public theater became ingrained in daily life in Spanish cities from 1600 up to the long-term closure of the theaters in March of 1646, the opportunity to sell aloja, wine, fruit, and other comestibles to playgoers became a sought after right, but one that carried with it contractual obligations. A number of the records that stipulated the terms of selling and consuming food and drink in the playhouses of these cities from the first four decades of the seventeenth century are extant and can provide glimpses into theatrical events and business practices in the Spanish Empire during the first half of the seventeenth century, as the financial relationship between theater and charitable institutions of caregiving be-

Ball 61 came entrenched and more fully developed. The granting of licenses and monopolies to sell refreshments, and, at times, the disputes and petitions that contested certain individual’s abilities to meet their contractual obligations, suggest an increase in profit-seeking activities connected to the commercial theater in Golden Age Spain and in the Spanish Americas. This was true even during the 1630s and 1640s decades when antitheatrical sentiment and legislation peaked in the domains of Philip IV.1 Working within a formulaic system of contracts and regulations, men and women exercised their agency and helped to further commodify the comedia – which theater historians might legitimately call the blockbuster of its day. Furthermore, an analysis of the vending of food in the corrales – a subject that has been largely, though not completely, overlooked by theater historians and literary scholars – can add important components to our understanding of the experience of attending a performance at the corrales in the early modern Spanish Atlantic World. Crowds of spectators in the corrales did not just see the performance of a play or actors and ac- tresses on stage; they also saw and heard each other; they ate confections and drank spiced aloja; they smelled the scents of the citrus fruits and confections their fellow spectators devoured and the odors resulting from a crowd of bodies. Some members of these noisy and ostentatious audiences in Spain and Mexico purchased food and drink and consumed

62 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 them. Others may have envied fellow spectators their nougat, lemons, or wine. Occasionally audiences also used the refreshments that they bought from the alojerías or from the vendors that moved through the various sections of the Spanish theaters as projectile weapons. They threw food to express their displeasure with performers and in the brawls and riots that occasionally took place at the corrales. Along with the sights and sounds of the plays and the noisy and ostentatious audiences that came to see them, the odors of bodies and food and the tastes of citrus fruits and spiced aloja were part of the seventeenth-century experience of playgoing. The early modern period was a time of evolving relationships with food as animals and crops crisscrossed the Atlantic on ships of exploration, conquest, and colonization. Humoral under- standings of food and drink continued to hold sway in learned circles and among physicians and surgeons throughout much of the period in the Spanish Empire, complicating the way diet was perceived and creating variations on recipes to cater to the various temperaments of individuals. Table manners and social rituals connected to food were not exactly new, but food writers and chefs increasingly challenged older notions of the ways to prepare, display, and feast upon food. Luxury foods, like the spices that gave added flavor to the aloja, made up a substantial sector of European trade. Banquets for early modern monarchs and nobles consisted of

Ball 63

"elaborate sophisticated presentations offering as many different ingredients as possible, cooked in as many ways as possible” (Albala 126). There were more butchers and pastry cooks, and those who could afford to do so spent their money readily on food and its presentation. As Michel Jeanneret argued in A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, writers of treatises stressed the importance of mealtime conversation and convivial- ity as a means of affecting grace, wit, and elegance. Food and drink were not only essential to life; they also had symbolic functions as well. The recent work of Jodi Campbell has shown that both early modern medical treatises and conduct books con- cluded “different kinds of foods [were] appropriate to different kinds of people and occasions.” She has argued that “conduct books of course [contained] several chapters on food and table manners [and] the constitutions of [confraternities dedicated] up to a third of their chapters on the organization and provision of meals for themselves and for the poor.” Campbell has noted that food was a prop in the performance of royal power, elite culture, and student hierarchies, as well (Campbell 2-4). It is worth noting, that these practices were not solely reserved to the table of nobles and the refectories of colleges. Similarly, at the public playhouses the reception of entertainment and dialogues took place as those who were watching and listening imbibed food and beverage.

64 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Yet, even as elaborate spectacles involving sumptuous consumption emerged, Spanish peasants and urban poor frequently suffered from hunger and malnourishment due to agrarian decline and rapid inflation in Castile and the constant disruption of food growing cycles due to disease and bad weather. In Mexico pressures were placed on the popula- tions of not just the vice-regal capital but also on other cities due to a series of devastating floods around the turn of the century and a catastrophic storm in September of 1629 that, coming after a particularly rainy summer, resulted in waters inun- dating the city. On the one hand, there was tremen- dous largesse and ostentation in the presentation and consumption of food. On the other, there was devastating poverty. The arbitrista Mateo de Lisón y Viedma described the plight of some of the Span- ish monarchy’s impoverished subjects, such as “poor, needy widows” and “honorable women who have nothing more to eat than a crumb of bread earned from the labor of their needles” (113r). Per- haps as much as half of the urban population of cities like Madrid and Seville and Mexico City lived at or below subsistence level and depended largely on bread and cheap meat like mutton for their surviv- al.2 Strikingly, the theaters of early modern Spain and Mexico had been founded, at least in part, to combat famine and poverty among urban dwellers. During the seventeenth century, the reli-

Ball 65 gious brotherhoods of Spanish cities rounded up paupers, the sick, and the disabled, and placed them in hospitals, which tended to both the bodies and souls of the impoverished and the ill. Early modern hospitals in the Catholic lands of the Spanish- speaking world continued to employ priests, as well as university-educated physicians and licensed phlebotomists and apothecaries. As John Henderson has pointed out in The Renaissance Hospital: Heal- ing the Body and Healing the Soul, hospitals aimed to heal both the physical body and the soul. Hospi- tals were institutions that combined the qualities of the clinic, the poorhouse, the nursing home, and, as the work of Michele Clouse has shown, the practical training ground for physicians and surgeons who were in the process of getting a university education. Some of these hospitals, such as Madrid’s General Hospital, which Philip II founded in 1566 by combining three older hospitals, took in hun- dreds of patients with curable diseases in any given year. Home to the curable ill, foundlings, and the so-called deserving poor, these institutions were a physical manifestation of the outward displays of lay piety in counter-reformation Spain and baroque Mexico. The confraternities associated with hospitals and orphanages also donated food, firewood, and money to hire skilled personnel to care for their patients and wards. While excise taxes on confiscat- ed goods, meat, and olive oil helped to fund the care

66 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 provided by these institutions (Huguet-Termes 76), a significant portion of hospital funds came either directly or indirectly from the admission fees of spectators in the corrales de comedias. Spanish historians Carmen Sanz Ayán and Bernardo García García have examined the financial and institutional relationship between Madrid’s corrales de comedias and hospitals during the second half of the sixteenth century in their study, Teatros y comediantes en el Madrid de Felipe II. They have compellingly demonstrated the influence that social welfare in the court and capital had on the production of public theater. This charitable function, which continued under slightly different mechanisms during the seventeenth century, helped to give theater legitimacy and to entrench it into the daily life of Hapsburg Spain and its overseas holdings. In Madrid both of the seventeenth-century permanent playhouses, the Corral del Príncipe and the Corral de la Cruz, not only contributed to pious works and public health, but they were also within the city walls and located in comparatively respectable neighborhoods. This fact helped to integrate theater into the social fabric of Castile’s court and capital. Margaret Greer has compared them to the public theaters of other courtly capitals, such as London or Paris, and argued that this comparison brings into sharp relief the centrality and stability of Madrid’s commercial playhouses. Both theaters were within the limits of Madrid, as determined by

Ball 67

Philip II in the 1560s, and within the commercial and social center of the city that Philip IV ordered enclosed in 1625 (Greer 398-401). The playhouses and much of the theatrical activity that accompanied their presence were located on the Calle del Prínci- pe and the Calle de la Cruz, streets that intersected near the Plaza de Santa Ana, only a short distance east of the Plaza Mayor, which served as the major market of Madrid. At the Plaza Mayor city dwellers and visi- tors to the court could buy vegetables, candied almonds, fruit, and pastries among many other food items (Escobar 1-16), such as the ingredients necessary to concoct potentially refreshing beverages, like the aloja that vendors sold to spectators at the nearby corrales. One recipe for aloja featured in a treatise about its qualities and uses by Francisco de Figueroa, a Jesuit who served the Inquisition as a physician, called for “16 parts water and one part honey” as well as “a moderate quantity of spices, such as pepper, cloves, ginger, and cinnamon” (18v). Other recipes called for baker’s yeast and nutmeg, as well, and some gave specific directions on the exact quantity of spices to be used in the mixture (Deleito y Pinuela 160). As the sixteenth century drew to a close and the seventeenth century began, one aspect of Ma- drid’s expanding theater business was the increase of entrepreneurial activities connected to the commercial theater, as a way for the confraternities and

68 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 the municipal government to make even more money off the playhouses to fund the charitable work of the hospitals.3 Business and financial opportunities included the rental of private boxes to courtiers who wanted to watch plays in comfort and to publicize their social rank through the very privacy of their spectatorship. Significantly these opportunities also included the right to sell food and drink to playgoers of all sorts at the corrales de comedias. As early as 1587 the practice of selling fruit and aloja had become a regular and regulated part of the entertainment experience in the playhouses of the court and capital. In March of that year the deputies of the Hospital of the Passion granted Francisco Briceño, a citizen, of Madrid, the right to sell fruit and beverages in both of the public theaters. In turn, the enterprising citizen paid a fee of five reales for this business opportunity. His opportunity was also an obligation from the viewpoint of city administrators and hospital officials. According to the terms of the contract, if Briceño failed to provide the stipulated food and drink for sale “each day that there was a performance of a play in either of the said two [play]houses” he risked the potential revocation of his license (Varey and Shergold 67). In 1604 the corrales in the court and capital came under the official supervision of the Protector of Madrid’s General Hospital. At the same time other business practices related to the commercial activity of the playhouse, such as box rentals and

Ball 69 the selling of wine, aloja, and various snacks, came under the control of a lessee-manager, who paid to lease and operate the inn-yard theaters of Madrid, but in exchange took half a real for each performance, a cuarto for each bench rental, and the proceeds from the sale of all refreshments. Later contracts for the leasing of the theaters suggest that while the comedia was becoming the blockbuster of the first half of the seventeenth century, the sale of refreshments was becoming an integral and thriving part of the business that enhanced the experience of playgoing in significant ways. In the spring of 1612 Juan de Jarava, in competition with Cristóbal López and Jerónimo de Fuensalido, bid 4,000 reales to be paid in three installments over the course of the year for a license to sell aloja, wine, fruit, and other snacks and for the privilege of renting boxes and selling tickets to the seats in the patios. The contract, which was recorded and notarized by the scribe Juan de Obregon, stipulated that the entrepreneur would be responsible for hiring, supervis- ing, and paying any necessary assistants in these tasks (AHPM Tomo 2448, 421-440). Jarava also assured the hospital administrators that this arrangement would be in their favor, as well as his. The fruit-seller and his wife Lucia Mar- tínez made a similar bid for the years of 1614 and 1615. While scholars of Golden Age theater have noted that it could be difficult for lease-holders to turn a profit (Allen 1-3), the fact that Jarava and

70 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Martínez sought to continue managing this aspect of affairs of the two corrales de comedias indicates that they were either turning a profit or that they hoped to recoup any losses by continuing to operate the alojerias. The agreement that the couple reached with the city and the Protector of the Hospitals guaranteed them the continued monopoly on the sale of refreshment in Madrid’s public theaters for the duration of the contract (AHPM Tomo 2448 440-444). Agreements such as the one negotiated by Jarava exist for much of the seventeenth century, and were bid on by citizens of Madrid on the basis of contracts that typically granted them licenses for a period of two or four years. These contracts are instructive as to how royal officials, municipal authorities, and individual vendors sought to make profits and to aid in the charitable work of giving alms to the hospitals. They also suggest how the comedia was being commodified as a result of both mutual and competing interests between administrators and the individuals involved who must have certainly operated from self-interest as well as a desire to engage in pious activities. During the final years of Philip III’s reign and that of Philip IV, the city fathers of Madrid were required to pay annual subsidies to supplement the income of the city’s hospitals and orphanages. The goal was to make enough profits from the theaters to cover the fixed amount of the subsidy, but in case admission fees were low due to bad weather,

Ball 71 outbreaks of disease, or too many members of the audience managing to enter without paying, the burden was to fall on the lessee-managers of the corrales de comedias, who obtained the rights to operate the public playhouses and their proceeds on the basis of four-year contracts. Their income might be additionally supplemented by the leasing of private boxes with latticed windows to nobles, by charging audience members for the use of the coach depots, and by selling them fruit, aloja, and wine. This was the case of managers like the leaseholder Diego de Santiyuste, who bid for contract in 1635 to operate the playhouses from 1637 to 1641 (Varey and Shergold 100). Documents from 1641 outlining the proce- dures to be followed in the leasing agreement of Madrid’s theaters stipulated that only those expressly allowed by contract “and no other persons [had] the power to give licenses and permission for the selling of fruit, aloja, and water and other things that they sell in the corrales” (Varey and Shergold 118). Similarly, the lawsuit that the tax collector Pedro Trigoso filed in 1644 against the administra- tor of the corrales, Antonio de Soria, listed the terms of the contract, including the exclusive permission of the lease-holder to grant licenses to vendors, once again proclaiming that only those who had the consent of the manager could sell food and beverages (AVM 2-468-13 28v). These stipulations reiterated the spirit and sometimes even the letter of

72 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 the terms of earlier contracts negotiated during Phil- ip IV’s reign, including the leasing agreements from 1621, 1625, and 1637. Considering the continued and largely unsuccessful regulations that attempted to minimize social disorder and maximize profit, such as those that imposed penalties on spectators who entered the playhouse without paying their admission fees, these clauses suggest that the selling and circulation of these goods in the corrales was almost as difficult to control as the behaviors of the spectators and as the making of properly chilled aloja itself. Legislation passed in Madrid in 1639 and announced by the town crier Julian Lopez at the Puerta del Sol and the Puerta de Guadalajara suggests that aloja was such a popular drink that some people had taken to storing the beverage in large earthen jars that they buried beneath the ground or stored in cellars in order to keep the beverage cold rather than using snow or ice to chill it. The members of the Sala de Alcaldes de la Casa y Corte for- bade such activities on pain of public shaming and a fine of up to 20,000 maravedis – an amount that equaled basic entry into the patio of the corrales for over 830 spectators (AHN Libro de Gobierno 1.244 186). Also at stake were the physical properties and perceived benefits of aloja. Other legislation, spear- headed by the efforts of the Galenists, like Matías de Porras, sought to prevent the makers and vendors of aloja from pouring the beverage directly over ice

Ball 73 or mixing snow or ice into the beverage itself (Beltrán Cortés 64-65). Porras claimed in his 1621 treatise entitled Breve advertencias para bever frío con nieve that bad air could corrupt beverages and that pieces of ice and snow were “very bad and evil influences on the health....” so they should not be used in drinks (6). Of course, the problems related to running the theaters, selling food in them, and controlling crowds and unscrupulous vendors were not limited to the court and capital. Seville’s strategic and de- fensible location as an inland port on the Guadal- quivir River and its political and social position within the Spanish Empire made it a key location for Golden Age theater. Although Seville declined in prominence and population during the seventeenth century, it had multiple playhouses and a culture steeped in theatricality. In Seville, as in Ma- drid, popular entertainment and public health were linked through the charitable function of the corrales de comedias, as audience members’ entrance fees went into the city’s coffers. However, Seville’s theaters, including ones operating in the seventeenth-century, in particular the Coliseo, the Doña Elvira, and the Montería, did not have the early direct links provided by the involvement of confraternities between the theaters and the hospitals. Rather ones between the municipality and the commercial playhouses emerged. Here a percentage of admission fees went to the city’s treasury and from there

74 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 helped to sustain the activities of Seville’s many hospitals and charitable institutions, which underwent consolidation efforts in the early modern period as officials tried to make them more efficient. The connection between the theaters and hospitals can be seen in a memorial to Philip IV housed in the Archivo General de Simancas. While this manuscript is undated, it is certainly from the 1640s, possibly during the long-term ban on the theaters from 1646-1651. Noting the deplorable state of the patients of the Royal Hospital of Seville and their “very great necessity and poverty,” Melchor de Al- cazar, the petition’s author, suggested that the performance of comedias be allowed once more in order to alleviate the burden on the city and on individual alms-givers. In careful language, he reminded the royal government that there were, after all, “three places where plays were performed” in the city and claimed that such action taken “in order to succor the poor [would be] without aggravation or harm to the persons [nearby]” (AGS Casas y Sitios Reales 270-2-134). The playhouses had a civic dimension that stabilized early modern Seville even as they were known focal points for disorder in the city. Numer- ous scholars have written about Seville’s place as a crossroads for people, microbes, and goods traveling between Europe and America and about this city as a locus of crime, poverty, disease, and disorder. Condemned criminals carried a cross and sang lita-

Ball 75 nies on their way to the gallows, performing the role of the penitent with the prop that the audience expected them to carry: a crucifix. As Edward Muir has noted, public executions in Seville might include over two hundred participants and appealed to large audiences (118-119). They also involved the performance of elaborate dialogues between condemned criminals and Jesuit priests, who used theater for pedagogical and penitentiary purposes, even as many of them condemned the commercial theater for its promotion of vice. At public executions to punish criminals many of the activities that took place were ones that also occurred at the theaters: men and women observed a spectacle in which they participated by laughing, crying, and screaming in response to the drama that unfolded before them and entrepreneurs sold refreshments, like fruit, water, and aloja to them as they watched and listened. While it may not have been a crime worthy of capital punishment, leases for the Corral de la Montería in Seville during the reign of Philip IV suggest that there may have been extralegal sales of wine and fruit taking place in the city’s theaters, as a contract from March 21, 1629 stipulated that “no one without the express desire of the lease-holder should sell wine, water, aloja nor ice, green or dried fruit or snack of any kind inside the theater.” The contract also stipulated that anyone who was named by the lessee-manager to sell food and drink in the playhouse was under obligation to observe the

76 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 agreements and prices set by the city. This clause indicates that some members of the audience may have been willing to pay above market prices for refreshment or at least that some unprincipled vendors may have been willing to flaunt the price controls set by guilds and municipal authorities (Pineda Novo, 19 and 30). Violating price controls may have occurred in the streets and in the theaters of the Spanish Em- pire, but they were certainly not the only behavior linked to the corrales that troubled city and religious authorities. One scandal described by Daniel Pineda Novo in his study of the Corral de la Mon- tería occurred in May of 1645 and was connected to food that had been, in all likelihood, purchased from the theater’s alojeria. During the performance of a play by the company of Luis López, some women in the Montería’s cazuela began throwing lemon peels at the performers on the stage. Some of their missiles went shy of their mark and hit a man who was sitting in the patio of the theater. The man responded by shouting: “May the devil take you! Watch where you’re throwing!” The man seated next to him responded to this outburst by striking the cursing playgoer, who responded by drawing and discharging his pistol, which not surprisingly further escalated the event (70). Such riotous behavior and brawls and general concerns about depravity, morality, masculinity, and indulgence in vice – including eating, drink-

Ball 77 ing, and indulging the senses in a variety of other ways at the playhouse – fed the vitriol of opponents of the theater in early modern Spain and its colonies. During the first half of the seventeenth century moralists and arbitristas penned numerous tracts railing against the theater and blaming the comedia for corrupt politics and overall decline in Spain.4 Authors such as the famous Jesuit Juan de Mariana criticized the playhouse as a vice-ridden place where people indulged the senses, leading them to be inflamed and to fall into their baser instincts (129-136). In his tract Los bienes de el Honesto Trabajo y Daños de la ociosidad en ocho discursos, Pedro de Guzmán, who was also a Jesuit, listed a number of damages and ills that he believed the public playhouses caused Spanish society. He criticized the selling of food and drink. Guzmán claimed that “among the other injuries, though they be minor” caused by the public theaters was the congregation of large groups of men and women who used the opportunity of gathering in a crowd to not only look at each other and speak to each other in possibly inappropriate ways but also to send each other “spices, banknotes, gifts, sweetmeats, snacks, [and] alojas” (310-311). These authors cited the public theaters as dangerous, not simply because of the supposedly scandalous content of the comedias performed in them, but also because of the com- merce and the consumption of foodstuffs that took place in these public spaces.

78 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Another parallel is worth noting here. While moralists, churchmen, and civil authorities con- cerned both with curing the state – which some of them saw as a diseased and decaying organism – and with curing the many patients and wards of the hospitals and orphanages of the cities of the Spanish Empire debated the corrales’ value, some medical practitioners and Galenists were debating the worth of drinking aloja. Tracts by some learned men questioned its utility in quenching thirst and its efficacy in helping to balance the humors of those suffering from related health concerns like melancholy. Fran- cisco de Figueroa claimed that aloja was “better than wine” and that it could be used to treat a chol- eric temperament or imbalance or “to alleviate sick- nesses coming from heat disorders and dryness” (14 and 31-34). However, Santiago Valverde Turices argued in a tract dedicated to the Count Duke of Olivares and printed in Seville in 1625 that there were many abuses in the preparation and consumption of aloja. He contended that the drink was “very bad” because the spices used in the beverage “consumed the body’s waters and caused more thirst” (B1). Ships and men carried aloja recipes and comedias authored in Spain – along with their at- tendant potential to benefit and to disrupt – with them to the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. Spanish colonists transported the fiscal arrangement between the corrales de comedias and the hospitals

Ball 79 to their new urban environments across the Atlantic. In fact, in some of these new locations these two institutions were even more tightly linked together than they were in Madrid or Seville, as the inn-yard theaters in Mexico City were initially physically connected to the hospitals with the performances taking place in their courtyards and with funds for additions and repairs to the playhouses coming from the treasury of hospitals and charitable institutions, as documents housed in the Archivo General de las Indias and the Archivo General de la Nación suggest. One decree issued in 1642 by the Count of Salvatierra who was then the Viceroy even stipulated that wood leftover from hospital repairs be used to build additions to the theater so that poor relief could be aided (AGN Reales Cedulas Vol. 49 359r).5 The second Audiencia of Mexico founded the city of Puebla de Los Angeles during the middle of the sixteenth century with the hopes of inducing Castilian colonists to settle down and of preventing them from further exploiting the indigenous population of New Spain. Although initially Puebla grew slowly, it became one of the three most populous cities in New Spain by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Many peninsular-born Spaniards and creoles preferred living there rather than Mexico City, for undeniably racist reasons and since Puebla had been set up on the Spanish grid-pattern and on the model of the Spanish town. Also it was a far

80 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 more habitable place in the years immediately following the massive flood that took place in Mexico City in 1629. One of the famous inhabitants of Puebla was the controversial Don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. He had been chaplain to Philip IV’s sister Maria de Austria, before he was nominated in 1639 as Bishop of Puebla. During the 1640s he also served as a visi- tor-general of New Spain and a temporarily ap- pointed viceroy.6 In spite of the charitable work that theater did, Palafox was one of its opponents. Among his many texts on spiritual and political guidance was his 1645 Epistola exortatoria á los curas y beneficiados del Obispado la Puebla de los Angeles. In this work, Palafox called comedias “the plague of the republic” and especially urged clergymen not to attend performances at the corrales. His arguments against the theater were relatively standard ones among antitheatrical writers in seventeenth-century Spain and Mexico: attending performances of comedias “unleashed every kind of sensual appetite” causing men to emulate the feuds, murders, and scandalous behavior that they saw on stage. Palafox claimed that going to the playhouse was a mortal sin. The playhouse was where people enjoyed themselves, but it was “there [that one’s] soul drank [the comedia’s] poison and became inflamed with evil” (421 and 428). Sipping aloja was dangerous indeed.

Ball 81

Although the surviving archival evidence does not prove its existence, some scholars believe that there had been a corral de comedias operating in Puebla de Los Angeles within a decade of the city’s founding in the middle of the sixteenth century (Hardison Londré and Watermeier 53). There certainly was a thriving theatrical scene by the beginning of the reign of Philip IV and the time of Palafox’s arrival in Puebla twenty years later. Juan Gomez Melgarejo, a carpenter and aspiring theater entrepreneur, had rented a house to use as a corral by 1599 and the records of the cabildo of Puebla, which are housed in the Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Puebla, show that he renewed his lease several times and that his widow sought its further exten- sion after his death in 1639. Melgarejo’s theater, as well as a second playhouse built in the city in the 1620s to provide poor relief, provided income and a livelihood for the enterprising men and women who operated them, actors, and for various vendors. Like the theaters in Madrid and Seville, Puebla’s playhouses were located centrally within the city – not far from the main square and the cathedral – and they formed an integral part of the urban landscape and the daily life of Spanish colonists, mestizos, and Indians throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. The corrales de comedias were also venues for the exchange of news and gossip and the broker- ing of deals. However, occasionally, these opportu-

82 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 nities became sites for conflict and contention in Puebla. In 1637 Juan Gómez Melgarejo and Anto- nio de Toledo got into a dispute that lasted for several months over who had the right to sell aloja and other refreshments at the playhouse connected to the Royal Indian Hospital. Toledo claimed that he had the sole right to sell these items there, but Mel- garejo, apparently seeking yet another financial opportunity, had bypassed the city fathers and received a monopoly from the Peruvian-born Viceroy Lope Diez de Aux de Armendáriz, the Marquis of Cadereyta. Antonio de Toledo urged the city fathers of Puebla to refund him for paying for the right to sell aloja con nieve and freeing him from the obligations of his contract since he apparently no longer had exclusive permission to sell the drink and –at least according to Melgarejo’s contract – he could no longer sell food and drink at the playhouses without violating the terms of the monopoly issued from the court. Toledo was probably also taking a substantial financial hit from the competition with Melgarejo (AAP Actas del Cabildo Libro 18 177r, 274v, and 326v). While less is known about the physical space of the playhouses in colonial Puebla than the corrales de comedias in Golden Age Madrid and Seville, it seems reasonable that, as in these other venues, the alojeria was at the rear entry of the theaters, leading into the patio. Theater scholars working on reconstructing the spaces of these early mod-

Ball 83 ern playhouses, like J.M. Ruano de la Haza and John Allen, have shown that the two alojerias that functioned in the Corral del Principe by the early seventeenth century were at the rear of the theater along with the other entrances to the patio. Mem- bers of the audience could purchase food and drink from the stall as they entered the patio of the corral. In the case of the Corral del Principe, they could also potentially watch the performance from inside these compartments since they were both raised on platforms (84-86). Audience members would perhaps have another chance to purchase refreshments as vendors circulated among the crowds with fruit, almonds, and other treats, like nougat, prior to the start of an afternoon’s entertainment (Rennert 278). These fruit-sellers not only added to the noisy and festive atmosphere at the corrales, they may have also contributed to some of the illicit and extralegal activities that took place in them, as has already been mentioned above. A clause in the partial lease of the theaters in Madrid for the year 1612-1613 is also suggestive of this, as it notes that the “lad” who had been hired by Juan de Jarava to sell fruit in the alojerias should receive the equivalent of four mar- avedís “for his work without taking any other item” (Tomo 2448 424v). While it is impossible to say with certainty in this case that the youthful fruit- seller was taking home lemons and almonds, it is quite possible to recognize that it must have been a temptation.

84 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

It is also possible to imagine that many who purchased tickets to see plays put on and bought refreshments to consume while they watched the performance did so to escape the realities of seventeenth century life. Imperial crises, dramatic demo- graphic shifts, and economic decline no doubt made the sights, sounds, and tastes of the playhouse ap- pealing to those who could afford them or those who dared to attempt to enter without paying. While some elements of the older arguments of cultural critics like José Antonio Maraval and José María Díez Borque suggest that the theater provided a means of distraction and escapism, the archival documents do not support their contentions that the comedia was a means of hegemonic social control. Indeed the complaints of opponents of the theater would suggest a complete lack of control over audiences at playhouses as they declined into luxurious lasciviousness. Although the extreme claims of antitheatrical polemicists, such as the aforementioned Pedro de Guzman and Juan de Palafox, must be taken with a grain of salt – or perhaps a draught of aloja – they suggest that the public theaters with all their myriad of associated activities continued to be sites of contestation and occasional disorder and subversion. Contracts and petitions demonstrate that while the theaters and their operation were subject to regulation, that negotiation, angling, and agency were all at play during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Ball 85

Therefore, this analysis of the vending and consumption of food and drink in the corrales de comedias of the Spanish Empire adds significantly to conceptualizing the historical experience of Golden Age theater. Examining the contractual agreements and the petitions contesting certain individual’s abilities to meet the obligations of these contracts makes it possible to trace the increase of entrepreneurial activities connected to the commercial theater as confraternities and municipal authorities in Madrid and Seville tried to put less financial pressure on themselves and more on the middle men who contracted to run the theaters in the seventeenth century. It also provides a means of viewing the spread of some of these practices to Spain’s colonial holdings across the Atlantic to places like Puebla de los Angeles. To some extent it also ena- bles the historian to catch a glimpse of the way individuals involved in the business of commercial theater asserted and came into conflict over their rights. Plays were not only heard and seen; they were experienced through other sensory mechanisms, as well. Aloja, fruit, and other items provided refreshment and every so often all-too handy missiles to early modern playgoers. Consuming food and drink at these entertainments, which had been associated with moral and charitable activities of hospitals, helped to further commodify public theater throughout the Spanish Atlantic World during the first half of the seventeenth century.

86 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

NOTES

1 On the closure of the theaters see N.D. Shergold and John E. Varey, “Datos históricos sobre los primeros teatros de Madrid: prohibiciones de autos y comedias y sus consecuencias (1644- 1651),” Bulletin Hispanique, 62.3 (1960): 286-325. Melveena McKendrick also takes up the moral controversy about the place of the stage in Theatre in Spain, 1490-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 2 On urban poverty and public health in Madrid see the work of Angel Alloza Aparicio, et al. Their study has shown that by the middle of the seventeenth century over sixty percent of Madrid’s bread came from the Pan de Registro. For an excel- lent treatment of some of these problems in Seville see the work of Juan Ignacio Carmona. 3 These opportunities and funds for the hospitals declined during the court’s brief removal to Valladolid in 1601 – a move which playwrights such as Lope de Vega lamented. However, upon the court’s return to Madrid in 1606 theatrical activity increased once again, as did the other commercial activities related to regular performances of comedias. 4 For the best historical treatments of perceptions of decline and crises of masculinity in seventeenth-century Spain see J.H. Elliott, “Self Perception and Decline in Early Seven- teenth-Century Spain,” Past & Present 74 (1977): 41-61 and Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, "Ideal Men: Masculinity and Decline in Seventeenth-Century Spain," Renaissance Quarterly 61.2 (2008): 463-494. 5 See Archivo General de Indias, Sección: Consejo de Indias, Patronato, 182, R. 48, 10 xii 1574 and Archivo General de la Nacíon (Mexico), Sección: Reales Cedulas, Vol. 49, Exp. 449, fol. 359r, 27 xi 1642. For context regarding transatlantic shipments of plays and other printed works and the emerging role of theater in Mexico see Rodolfo Usigli, Mexico in the Theatre (University of Mississippi: Romance Monographs, Inc., 1976); Irving A. Leonard, “A Shipment of Comedias to

Ball 87

the Indies,” Hispanic Review 2.1 (1934): 39-50; and Carlos Alberto Gonzalez Sanchez, Los mundos del libro: medios de difusión de la cultura occidental en las Indias de los siglo XVI y XVII (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1999). 6 For a fuller account of Palafox’s life and reforms see Cay- etana Alvarez de Toledo, Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of Juan de Palafox 1600-1659 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).

Works Cited

Albala, Ken. Food in Early Modern Europe. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003. Allen, John J. The Reconstruction of a Spanish Golden Age Playhouse: El Corral del Príncipe 1583- 1744. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1986. Alloza Aparicio, Angel, José Miguel Lopez Garcia, and José Luis de Pablo Gafas. “Prevention and Re- pression: Food supply and Public Order in Early Modern Madrid.” Revue des etudes de I'École francaise de Rome 112 (2000): 615-644. Alvarez de Toledo, Cayetana. Politics and Reform in Spain and Viceregal Mexico: The Life and Thought of Juan de Palafox 1600-1659. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Archivo del Ayuntamiento de Puebla. Actas del Cabildo. Libro 18. Archivo de la Villa de Madrid. Sección 2. Legajo 468. Number 13. Archivo General de Indias. Sección: Consejo de Indias, Patronato 182. R. 48.

88 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Archivo General de la Nacíon (Mexico). Sección: Reales Cedulas. Vol. 49. Exp. 449. Archivo General de Simancas. Casas y Sitios Reales. Legajos modernos 270-2-134. Archivo Histórico de los Protocolos de Madrid, Tomo 2448. Archivo Histórico Nacional. Sala de Alcaldes de Casa y Corte. Libro de Gobierno 1.224. Beltrán Cortés, Fernando. Apuntes para una historia del frio en España. Madrid: CSIC, 1983. Campbell, Jodi. “Food and the Performance of Social Identity in Early Modern Madrid.” Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. Fort Worth, Texas. 27 October 2011. Conference Presenta- tion. Carmona, Juan Ignacio. Crónica Urbana Del Malvivir (S. XIV-XVII): Insalubridad, desamparo, y ham- bre en Sevilla. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2000. Clouse, Michele. Medicine, Government, and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain: Shared Interests, Competing Authorities. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Cotarelo y Mori, Don Emilio. Bibliografía de las con- troversias sobre la licitud del teatro en España. Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 1904. Díez Borque, José María. Sociedad y teatro en la Espa- ña de Lope de Vega. Barcelona: Casa Editorial, S.A., 1978. Elliott, J.H. “Self Perception and Decline in Early Sev- enteenth-Century Spain.” Past & Present 74 (1977): 41-61.

Ball 89

Escobar, Jesus. The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Deleito y Pinuela, José. Sólo Madrid es Corte. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1968. Figueroa, Francisco de. Dos tratados, uno de las calida- des y effetos de la Aloxa; y otro de una especie de garrotilla ó esquilencia mortal. Print. R8456. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. Gonzalez Sanchez, Carlos Alberto. Los mundos del libro: medios de difusión de la cultura occidental en las Indias de los siglo XVI y XVII. Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 1999. Greer, Margaret. “A Tale of Three Cities: The Place of the Theatre in Early Modern Madrid, Paris and London.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 77 (2000): 391-419. Guzmán, Pedro de. Los bienes del honesto trabajo y da- ños de la ociosidad en ocho discursos. Madrid, 1614. Print. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Ma- drid. Digitized PDF file. Hardison Londré, Felicia and Daniel J. Watermeier. The History of North American Theatre From Pre- Columbian Times to the Present. New York: Continuum, 1998. Henderson, John. The Renaissance Hospital: Healing the Body and Healing the Soul. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Huguet-Termes, Teresa. “Madrid Hospitals and Welfare in the Context of the Hapsburg Empire.” Medi- cal History Supplement 29 (2009): 64-85.

90 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Jeanneret, Michel. A Feast of Words: Banquets and Ta- ble Talk in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth A. "Ideal Men: Masculinity and De- cline in Seventeenth-Century Spain." Renais- sance Quarterly 61.2 (2008): 463-494. Leonard, Irving A. “A Shipment of Comedias to the In- dies.” Hispanic Review 2.1 (1934): 39-50. Lisón y Viedma, Mateo de. Discursos y apuntos sobre el gobierno de la monarquía. 1623. MS 10508. Bi- blioteca Nacional de España, Madrid. Maravall, José Antonio. La cultura del barroco: análisis de una estructura histórica. Barcelona: Ariel, 1980. ---. Teatro y literature en la sociedad barroca. Madrid: Seminarios y Ediciones, 1972. Mariana, Juan de. Ioannis Marianae E Societate Iusu Tractatus VII Nunc primum in lucem editi. Co- loniae Agrippinae,1609. Print. Biblioteca de la Universidad de Granada, Granada. Digitized PDF file. McKendrick, Melveena. Theatre in Spain, 1490-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989. Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe: New Approaches to European History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de. Tomo quinto de las Obras del ilustrissimo y reverendissimo señor Don Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. Madrid, 1665. Print.

Ball 91

Pineda Novo, Daniel. El Teatro de Comedias del Corral de la Montería y del Alcazar de Sevilla. Seville: Guadalquivir Ediciones, 2000. Porras, Matías de. Breve advertencias para bever frío con nieve. Lima, 1621. Print. Biblioteca Nacio- nal de España, Madrid. Digitized PDF file. Rennert, Hugo The Spanish Stage in the Time of Lope de Vega. New York: Dover, 1963. Río Barredo, María José del. Madrid, urbs regia: la capital ceremonial de la Monarquía Católica. Ma- drid: Marcial Pons, 2000. Rocamora, J. Luís. El Teatro en La América Colonial. Buenos Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1947. Ruano de la Haza, J.M. and John Allen. Los Teatros Comerciales del Siglo XVII y la Escenificación de la Comedia. Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1994. Sánchez-Arjona, José. El teatro en Sevilla en los siglos XVI y XVII. Madrid 1887. Reprinted by Centro Andaluz de Teatro: Padilla Libros, Sevilla 1990. Sanz Ayán, Carmen and Bernardo J. García García. Tea- tros y comediantes en el Madrid de Felipe II. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2000. Shergold, N.D. and John E. Varey. “Datos históricos sobre los primeros teatros de Madrid: prohibiciones de autos y comedias y sus consecuencias (1644-1651)” Bulletin Hispanique 62.3 (1960): 286-325. Usigli, Rodolfo. Mexico in the Theatre. University of Mississippi: Romance Monographs, Inc., 1976. Valverde Turices, Santiago. Tratado sobre el uso del aloxa. Seville, 1625. Print. R/26597 Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.

92 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Varey, J.E. and N.D. Shergold, Los Arriendos de Los Corrales de Comedias de Madrid: 1587-1719. London: Tamesis, 1987. Versenyi, Adam. Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics, and Culture from Cortes to the 1980s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

THE DANCING OF AN ATTITUDE: INCONSTANCY AS MASCULINE VIRTUE IN LOPE DE VEGA’S EL PERRO DEL HORTE- LANO

SHIFRA ARMON The University of Florida

The comedia nueva crackled with the hottest controversies of its day. It questioned abuses of imperial and local power, problems of venality and hypocrisy; the place of women in society, etc. As Louise Fothergill-Payne notes, with reference to Lope’s Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo of 1609, “[Lope’s] premise was to write for ‘este tiempo,’ that is to say, ‘this day and age’” (133). Another burning issue of Lope’s day and age was the identity crisis of the Spanish nobility as they adjusted to the centralization of power at court. In 1561, Philip II had proclaimed Madrid the capital of Spain. From that point onward, the burgeoning urban hub became a magnet for all who sought royal favor.1 Alonso Núñez de Castro’s motto, “Sólo Madrid es corte” encapsulated the political ascend- ency that Madrid, and Castile with it, had come to

94 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 enjoy.2 The competitive atmosphere at court required those who aspired to a place on the social pyramid to develop new talents and skills in order to succeed. Although our twenty-first-century labor economy takes for granted the legitimacy of striving to obtain wealth, patronage and sinecures, seventeenth-century seigniorial ideology opposed the notion of social climbing. Rampant careerism at court ran afoul of both precedent and precept, posing ethical challenges that Lope did not hesitate to exploit onstage. The discourse on courtly conduct is usually associated with the didactic genre of Renaissance courtesy manuals, which attempted to enshrine striving for favor as the new normal of courtly culture. Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (made available for Spanish readers in 1534), for example, condoned efforts to please others for the sake of social gain as long as the effort itself remained con- cealed, a tactic Castiglione called sprezzatura. But the genre best suited to “imitating men’s actions,” in Aristotle’s classic formulation, was drama. Lope’s comedia nueva served as a laboratory for remixing rules of courtly conduct and for transfer- ring these new models from page to stage. The play that I have selected to illustrate Lope’s timely en- gagement with the task of refashioning masculine virtue at the Spanish court is El perro del hortelano. Since courtiership itself consisted largely of the performance of verbal and gestural acts aimed at pleasing others at court, it is especially compelling

Armon 95 to approach El perro del hortelano from a performance studies perspective. The phrase, “the dancing of an attitude” in my title points toward the embodied nature of comedia, with a nod to Kenneth Burke’s theory of symbolic action. Just as Lope’s comedias dramatized rather than merely textualized current questions concerning right action, Burke located ethical deliberation within rather than beyond the human body (Puchner 45, 6). As a corrective to the tendency to read Golden Age playtexts in two dimensions alone, I have chosen Pilar Miró’s award-winning film adaptation of El perro del hortelano (1996) to illustrate the embodied “dance of attitudes” toward social striving in Lope’s play. Miró’s film succeeds especially well at pairing the artifice of drama with the constructedness of gender--”masculinidad en obras’—or gender under construction, in Cartagena Calderón’s felicitous phrase. Given the many theoretical distinctions to be made between staging a performance before a live audience, on one hand, and mechanically producing a reel of film that des- tines audience and actors never to meet, on the other, some may find this elision of film and play trou- bling from a methodological perspective. However, it would also be crippling to overlook the common ground that stage and film share. Dramatic performance, whether before a camera or an audience, imitates human interaction “through its embodiment by human beings and . . . presenting this interaction to an audience as though it was happening at that

96 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 very moment before their own eyes” (Esslin 33). As a sister dramatic art form, film can help situate the ethical deliberation of a play within rather than beyond the human body. In accordance with the Arte nuevo’s dictum that honor plots are the most pleasing, El perro del hortelano, clothes the discourse on masculine conduct in the trappings of an honor intrigue.3 That intrigue involves the marriageable Neapolitan Coun- tess Diana, played by Emma Suárez, who must se- lect a husband to ensure the stability of her lands. Much like Homer’s Penelope, Shakespeare’s Portia or Ana Caro’s Rosaura, Countess Diana is belea- guered by three unwanted suitors: Counts Ludovico and Federico, and the Marquis Ricardo. While fret- ting over how to keep them at arm’s length, she dis- covers that her secretary, Teodoro, played by Car- melo Gómez, has been courting her own lady in waiting, Marcela (Ana Duato). This revelation re- leases a volcano of jealousy in Diana, yet she cannot bring herself to admit that Teodoro, a social inferior, has kindled her passion. Countess Diana is the play’s “perro del hortelano que no come ni deja comer.” Her senses of honor and decorum conflict with her attraction for Teodoro. Torn between these incommensurate de- sires, the Countess neither frees Teodoro to pursue Marcela, nor claims him for herself. Meanwhile, Diana’s mixed messages throw Teodoro into the dangerous game of second-guessing her affections.

Armon 97 Unsure of where he stands with her, he must adapt to her changing whims. Pilar Miró fully exploits the visual potential of this palatine drama. To accentuate Diana’s veiled eroticism and power, she drapes Emma Suárez, in sumptuous primary-colored gowns and surrounds her with a fantastic court, gardens and serving staff. Diana’s ubiquitous veils also symbolize the ambig- uous or veiled nature of her true passions. To em- phasize the gulf in social station between Diana and Teodoro, Miró costumes Carmelo Gómez, in sober navy and white, tamping down his strong, hand- some features behind a nondescript moustache and beard. In Miró’s hands, Teodoro recedes from view while Diana fills the screen; Teodoro orbits around the edges of the frame while Diana occupies its center; Teodoro’s pallid moon follows Diana’s brilliant sun. Carmelo Gómez’s lunar portrayal of Teodo- ro calls attention to his character’s struggle to nego- tiate two competing repertoires of masculine conduct: the non-striving repertoire, which demands that Teodoro act at all times with Apollonian constancy, and the striving repertoire, which requires him to adjust his behavior to changing circumstances. Miró’s film translates this dialectic from the poetic word to the visual plane. Lope’s text lends strong support for Carmelo Gómez’s planetary portrayal of Teodoro. In Act One, Teodoro obliquely compares the dangers of aspiring to a mésalliance (with the Countess) to the

98 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 reckless ambitions of Phaeton and Icarus; the one unable to rein in the power of the sun; the other’s waxen wings melted by its heat. But Diana vigor- ously disavows Teodoro’s analogy of herself and the sun, retorting that if the sun were a woman she wouldn’t have punished Phaeton or Icarus for their exalted pretensions:

DIA. No lo hiciera el sol Si, como el sol, mujer fuera (vv. 825, 826, p. 77)

Can a woman refashion herself into a sun? Can a man remake himself into a moon? In the same act, Marcela joins her rival in assigning masculinity, not femininity to the heliosphere. She compares Teodo- ro to the sun god Apollo himself:

MAR. Y cuando vi que en el polo que Apolo más presto dora le despertaba la aurora, dije, ‘Yo veré mi Apolo’ (vv. 897-900, p. 81)

The symbolic drama soon to unfold will decide whether Teodoro comes to satisfy Marcela’s conception of him as a stable, solar signifier, or whether Diana’s volatility will oblige the secretary to abandon a heliocentric model of masculinity and fight flux with flux.4

Armon 99 Lope delivers this mythopoetic struggle as an honor plot in which social constraints inhibit a man and a woman from pursuing one another out- right. In order to court Diana effectively, Teodoro must find a way to discard the inflexible masculine operating mode that he has been assigned and act with greater agility. Judith Butler credits gender with being susceptible to such refashioning because it is

not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow, rather gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. (1990 141, 42)

As El perro del hortelano develops, Teodoro reconstitutes his gender identity again and again until hitting upon inconstancy or adaptability as the strategic performance best suited to pursuing Diana. Viewing El perro del hortelano as a struggle between two competing models of masculine virtue makes greater sense of Miró’s decision to insert a dwarf buffoon (Michael Caballero) into the silent interstices of Lope’s script. Opulently costumed, the tiny page solemnly follows the Countess wherever she goes. When Diana dresses in red, her bufón appears in crimson livery; if she wears purple, so does he. When his mistress paces, the tiny page follows; when she holds court, he seats himself on the steps

100 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 at her feet. Thrice removed from the sexual economy of Belflor (by race, size and rank) Miró’s bufón both mirrors and mocks Teodoro’s effort to recon- figure himself as a lunar, contingent suitor. The source of Teodoro’s assigned gender identity can be found in Renaissance treatises on manly virtue, a genre invigorated by the rediscovery of Greco-Roman ethical philosophy.5 Belgian neostoic philosopher, Justus Lipsius found inspiration in Seneca’s epistle, De constantia, which he adapted for a Christian context. “More clearly perhaps than any classical Stoic,” writes Jeffrey Miles, “Lipsius conveys the need for constancy in a world of continual change where nothing is stable but the rocklike strength of the human mind,” (75).6 Lipsius’s De Constantia of 1584 underwent forty- nine reprintings and was extensively translated, including a slightly expurgated Spanish edition that came out in 1616.7 To live a happy life, the De Constantia advises, one should imitate God by being immovea- ble. The virtuous man must not be swayed by public opinion “or else be in the condition of an unbal- anced ship ‘continually floating on the waves of doubtfulness, without any certain resolution’” (Miles 72).8 Thus, Diego Saavedra would remind young prince Baltasar Carlos in 1640 that good governance depended on keeping the monarchy as steady as a ship anchored at both prow and stern.9 In similar fashion, as early as 1530, Erasmus had instructed young boys to avoid the stigma of ap-

Armon 101 pearing to be as variable as Proteus by keeping their faces impassive:

Indecoroso es, a tal propósito, hacer la cara mudarse en diversas trazas, de modo que ahora se frunza la nariz, ahora se contraiga la frente, ahora se levante el sobrecejo, ya se contorsionen los labios, ya se deje abierta la boca, ya se ponga apiñada: tales muecas ar- guyen de un alma semejante a la de Proteo. (65)

Carmelo Gómez’s Teodoro follows Eras- mus’s advice. He presents a bland and inscrutable face to Diana, reserving expressive brow-furrowing for scenes with Marcela and his serving-man, Tristán (Fernando Conde). His attempts at embody- ing the doctrine of constancy, however, are foiled by the inconstancy of the object of his desire, Di- ana, whose face, in outdoor scenes, Miró bathes in intricate flickers of sunlight and shadow. Teodoro moves through El perro del hortelano questioning his commitment to constancy, and experimenting with alternatives modes of action. 10 Neostoic motifs also find their way into Mi- ró’s film where they uncannily reflect Teodoro’s inner conflict. For instance, the director stages an important dialogue between Teodoro and Diana in a gondola that seems to evoke Saavedra Fajardo’s empresa of the evenly balanced ship of state. Just as Teodoro must navigate the treacherous waters of

102 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 courtship, so too he must steer Diana through the picturesque canals of her estate. During their, time alone in the vessel, it becomes obvious that the Countess is baiting and testing her secretary:

TEO. De Marco Aurelio se cuenta que dio a su mujer, Faustina, para quitarle la pena, sangre de un escrimador; pero estas romanas pruebas son buenos entre gentiles (vv. 1130-1135, p. 88)11

It is significant that Teodoro invokes the image of a fencer to describe the cat-and-mouse game in which Diana has ensnared him. At stake in Diana’s testing game is not merely whether Teodoro succeeds in winning her hand in marriage. The larger issue at play as the two verbally strike, feint, block and parry is whether Teodoro can muster a performance of aristocratic masculinity that functions on the fluid aquascape of Belflor, without capsizing in the attempt. Once restored to shore, Suárez’s Diana immediately baits Teodoro again. Faking a stumble as she leaves the gondola behind, the Countess obliges him to help her to her feet. Gómez’s Teodoro paus- es for several long seconds before coming to her aid. Is he dumbfounded at the Countess’s theatrics or calculating his response to her “throwing herself at his feet”? Miró leaves the viewer no doubt as

Armon 103 Gómez deliberately winds his hand inside his cape before extending it to her to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Yet this parry only serves to agitate the Countess even further. Swept up in the vortex of Diana’s whims, Teodoro asks himself over and over again whether he should continue to uphold neostoic precepts of constancy or try to best Diana by beating her at her own game of mutability. By contrasting stable land with fluid water and walking with stumbling, Miró manages to exteriorize and embody this “dance of attitudes.” Neostoicism taught that there are two kinds of objects of desire demanding two distinct responses. Axía are those things that lie “within our hands” or which can be chosen by reason such as moral intention, manual skills, intellectual development, health, beauty and strength, while ataxía are those objects of desire to be avoided because they lie beyond our control (Krabbenhoft 18, 19). In this regard, Quevedo warns in La cuna y la sepultu- ra,

lo que no está en tu mano y está fuera de tu poder, sólo te toca, si lo previenes, evitar- lo.12

For Teodoro, the choice of whether to touch the Countess or sheath his own hand first lies, literally, in the palm of his hand. By choosing to cover it, he veers away from the cancionero tradition of slavery

104 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 to love, the Petrarchan tradition of suffering for love and the neostoic tradition of avoiding that which appears to lie outside of one’s control. Instead, he reconstitutes masculine identity as a strategic performance that he, rather than circumstance, will direct. In Act One, Teodoro professes loyalty to the ideal of constancy until Diana’s romantic innuendos begin to soften his resolve. As his name, “Teo- D’oro” suggests, the secretary could well be expected to succumb to worshipping Diana’s riches. Diana’s rival, Marcela, exploits this paronomasia in Act Two:

MAR. Yo te conozco, Teodoro; Unos pensamientos de oro Te hicieron enloquecer (vv. 1830-33, p. 119)

Yet, even as Teodoro switches allegiance from Marcela to Diana, he continues to denigrate Diana for her fickleness. He complains to his servant, Tristán that Diana--like the Roman goddess of the same name associated with the phases of the moon--embodies all things shifting and changeable:

TEO. Pues, Tristán, agora vino ese tornasol mudable, esa veleta, ese vidrio, ese río junto al mar, que vuelve atrás, aunque es río;

Armon 105 esa Dïana, esa luna, esa mujer, ese hechizo, ese monstruo de mudanzas, que sólo perderme quiso por afrentar sus vitorias (vv. 1749-1758 p. 116)

By linking womanhood--“esa Diana, esa luna, esa mujer”---with mutability, Teodoro take refuge in an essentialist distinction between the inconstancy of women and the constancy of men. But in the face of Diana’s phase-changes, Teodoro too must alter his course. When Diana announces that she plans to wed the tiresome Marquis Ricardo, Teodoro decides to return to Marcela.13 In order to regain her shaken confidence in him, Teodoro evokes a popular neostoic image, insisting that his devotion to the maid is more steadfast than a rock in the ocean, “No es tan firme / ninguna roca en el mar” (1944, 45).14 Teodoro’s unpredictable changes of heart in- furiate Marcela, but Tristán reassures her that his master is merely undergoing “una mudancita/que a las mujeres imita / Teodoro” (vv. 1489-1491, p. 105). Anachronistically speaking, as Tristán sees it, Teodoro is merely “rebranding” the feminine vice of inconstancy as the masculine virtue of mutability. Teodoro’s sonnet at the close of Act One gives voice to the process by which the secretary makes peace with his inner chameleon.15 After the Coun- tess’s feigned fall, Miró returns Teodoro to the moored gondola to contemplate her provocative

106 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 words and actions: “¿Qué haré?” he asks himself, seated in the gently rocking vessel,

TEO. . . .Seguir mi suerte venturosa; si bien, por ser la empresa tan dudosa, niego al temor lo que al valor concedo. Mas dejar a Marcela es caso injusto; que las mujeres no es razón que esperen de nuestra obligación tanto disgusto. Pero si ellas nos dejan cuando quie- ren por cualquiera interés o nuevo gusto, mueran también como los hombres mueren (vv. 1178-1186 pp. 90-91)

In the last tercet, Teodoro once again overturns Pet- rarchan convention: if men suffer unto death for the love of their ladies, than it is only fair to give women a taste of their own medicine by treating them with equal irresolution. Despite pressure to remain firm and steadfast, Teodoro opts for inconstancy. Miró’s staging of Teodoro’s dubitation in a boat also ties in with the play’s notable Odyssean motif, for Lope invokes Homer’s Greek mariner to dignify Teodoro’s “mudancita.” It was already noted that Diana’s impatient suitors call to mind Penel- ope’s unruly houseguests in the Odyssey. In Act Two, Teodoro makes explicit his identification with Ulysses by comparing his susceptibility to Diana’s charms to Ulysses’s propensity for falling under sorceresses’ spells:

Armon 107

Pero, ¿es mucho que me engañen aquellos ojos a mí si pudieran ser bastantes a hacer engañar a Ulises? (vv. 1701-1704, p. 114)

Later, when Tristán promises to devise a scheme for marrying his master to Diana, Teodoro also compares Tristán’s spirit to that of Ulysses: “Que a ti se te pasa/ a Ulysses el espíritu” (vv. 2543-4, p. 150). The Homeric connection is further reinforced by the parodic miniature Greek romance that Tristán in- vents in order to unite his master with the Countess. Tristán’s scheme takes the form of a hoax cloaked in the generic formula of Greek or Byzan- tine Romance. Twenty years earlier, Count Ludovi- co’s son and only heir, Teodoro, had been kid- napped by Turkish corsairs in Malta. Tristán exploits the coincidence of names and the novelistic circumstances of the boy’s disappearance to play on the Count’s vulnerability. Lubricating his tongue with a few slugs of Greek wine (v. 2432, p. 145), Tristán dons a turban (exuberantly bejeweled and out-sized in Miró’s production). Then the suitably disguised lackey proceeds to enchant his unsuspect- ing listener with a Byzantine tall-tale replete with ridiculous multisyllabic Greek names and topo- nyms—Serpalitonia, Catiborratos, Terimaconio, Constantinopla, Chafalonía, Tepecas. By dint of this theatrical confabulation Tristán manages to con-

108 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 vince Count Ludovico that Teodoro is the Count’s lost son of the same name. This (false) anagnorisis restores to the Count an heir, and automatically ele- vates Teodoro to the level of titled nobility, making him eligible to wed Diana. Why, we might ask, would Lope take pains to link Homer’s vagrant seafarer with Teodoro? In Canto 26 of the Inferno, Dante had placed Ulysses in the eighth ring of Hell in punishment for his du- plicity.16 Overall, Ithaka’s wayward king was re- viled during the Middle Ages for his crafty ways. But, as Silvia Montiglio, has observed, Petrarch in- augurated a rehabilitation of Odysseus which reached its fullest expression in the Renaissance (150-151). Perhaps the most widely cited testimoni- al to Ulysses’ renewed prestige is Luis de Camões’s epic poem of 1572, Os Lusíadas, which credits an enterprising and intrepid Ulysses with founding the city of Lisbon. More modest but equally compelling evidence of Odysseus’s rising prestige comes by way of a Latin copybook published in Valencia the following year. Juan Lorenzo Palmireno’s El estudiante cortesano taught students enterprise in Latin and in life. Palmireno urged children to practice what he called agibilia, or improvisation in their Latin recitations rather than rote memorization. Like Ulysses, they were encouraged to seize the circumstances at hand rather than rely upon fixed for- mulae. “Agibilia,” writes Palmerino,

Armon 109 . . . llama el vulgo la desenvoltura que el hombre tiene en ganar un real, en saberlo conservar y multiplicar, en saberse bien asentar sobre su cuerpo la ropa, tratarse lim- pio, buscar su descanso, ganar las volunta- des y favores, conservar su salud, no dejarse engañar cuando algo compra, y regirse de modo que no puedan decir: “Este hombre sacado del libro, es un grande asno.”17

Teodoro, abetted by Tristán’s Ulysses-like performance of agibilia, breaks free of the prevail- ing neostoic straitjacket of constancy. By deploying a more supple approach to courtship, he and Tristán succeed at achieving their interlinked goals. Tristán helps Teodoro to win Diana’s hand in marriage, so that Count Teodoro might then promote Tristán to the post of “secretario del secretario” (v. 2424, p. 145).18 Even after Teodoro confesses the genealogi- cal jinx that Tristán had perpetrated on Count Lu- dovico, Diana remains content to wed her secretary. The camera zooms in on Diana’s illuminated face, surrounded by amorphous darkness. Like a sun, she now remains steadfastly committed to her soul- mate, reasoning that, “. . . el gusto no está en gran- dezas / sino en ajustarse al alma / aquello que se desea./ Yo me he de casar contigo” (vv. 3309-12, p. 180). However, Diana proves to be less forgiving of Tristán, the only other member of her court who knows their secret. To silence him, she proposes

110 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 that they entomb his body in a well (vv. 3316, 17, p. 181). Diana’s threat to bury Tristán sounds a dis- sonant note in Lope’s otherwise jubilant denouement. Tristán, the serving-man whose agibilia had secured the Countess’s happiness, and under whose tutelage Teodoro had unshackled himself from conventional gender constraints, had become a liability. In addition to knowing the secret of Teodoro’s base lineage, his vestigial body serves as a reminder that someone from the margins, the lower strata of society, had breathed new life into stagnated seigniorial practice. Until Teodoro opposes Diana’s murderous plan, Tristán hovers perilously between the under- world of ne’er-do-well ruffians and the respectable role of secretary to Count Teodoro. In limbo, he becomes Deleuze and Gautarri’s cultural nomad or Stonequist’s marginal man, who “leaves one social group or culture without making a satisfactory ad- justment to another [and] finds himself on the mar- gin of each but a member of neither” (2-3, cited in Trigo 103, 4). Tristán was no Odysseus; his epic was a joke, a heist, a fraud, as symbolized by his extrava- gant costume-changes. Fernando Conde’s Tristán assumes the appearance of a limp rag-doll as his value is negotiated in the final scenes of the play. First Teodoro grabs him by the arm to prevent him from running away from Diana. Then, as Diana re- tracts her threat and professes friendship, Teodoro grips Tristán in a headlock that defines him para-

Armon 111 doxically as both friend and plaything. When the defeated suitors, Federico and Ricardo enter to pay their respects to Diana, they seize Tristán and threaten him once again.19 Yet again, Teodoro physically yanks his servant back to safety, and, just as briskly, marries him off to Dorotea, a lady-in- waiting who just happens to be standing nearby. Lope does not abandon Tristán and the cultural memory that he embodies; he saves and even favors him with the ultimate token of heteronorma- tive social stability: a wife. By these acts, El perro del hortelano dramatizes not only the search for a more effective mode of seigniorial conduct than constancy-- that of adaptability--it also bears witness to this virtue’s decidedly non-aristocratic origins. Miró’s interpretation of Lope’s playtext too celebrates this realignment of gender boundaries. She contrasts Tristán and Teodoro’s successful practice of adaptability with the kind of emascula- tion suffered by Diana’s silent bufón. She also re- wards Teodoro by admitting him into the privileged space of the center of the camera’s eye. When the couple kisses, Miró places Teodoro physically above Diana rather than below her. As Diana’s equal in aristocratic station, Teodoro’s physical re- positioning represents the prerogatives—and dangers--of patriarchal domination, dangers that Lope and his generation would continue to expose on the comedia stage for decades to come.

112 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 NOTES

1 Felipe II had established the capital of Spain in the modest village of Majerit, or Madrid in 1561. Felipe III relocated his court to Valladolid from 1601-1606, after which the royal court returned permanently to Madrid. It remained in Haps- burg hands until 1700. 2 Libro histórico-político: Sólo Madrid es corte y el cortesano en Madrid, 1675. 3 “Los casos de honor son mejores,” Arte nuevo v. 327. El perro del hortelano first appeared in print in the Onzena Parte of Lope’s comedias published in Madrid in 1618, but is thought to have been composed some five years earlier. While little is known of its staging or reception in the seventeenth century, El perro del hortelano ranks third in popularity among Lope’s works with modern audiences. Adrienne Martín reminds us in her 2011 edition of this work that it was staged thirteen times between 1930 and 2006, both in Spain and abroad (26). 4 For Margaret Wilson, “Teodoro is not Icarus but a monkey dressed in borrowed finery. Diana is not the sun, only a silly, selfish dog” (279). She attributes the breakdown of sun-moon imagery to Lope’s satiric treatment of both pretense and pre- tension in the play. In my view, Diana is only solar relative to Teodoro, who, like Icarus, aspires to rise to her height. Other- wise, Diana’s name and inconstant behavior mark her (until the denouement) as Teodoro’s mentor in the art of lunar flux. 5 For example, Todd Reeser demonstrates that Aristotle’s Eth- ics gendered moderation as a male attribute while gendering immoderation in the form of either lack or excess, as feminine (11-48). 6 In Spain, such political philosophers as Baltasar Gracián, Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Álamos de Barriento and Juan de Vera paid homage to Lipsius’s teachings, this despite the fact that he was suspected of writing from an anti-Hapsburg perspective (López 150). An important school of Neostoicism in Seville influenced Philip IV’s favorite, the Conde-Duque de

Armon 113

Olivares to adopt policies of “autoridad, la templanza, la constancia, la disciplina, y una prudencia enraizada en el pragma- tismo” (Oestreich 275). And of course, Calderón’s El príncipe constante of 1629 anatomizes the virtue of Christian or Ne- ostoic constancy. In that play, Prince Fernando elects to die in captivity rather than cede Ceuta to El Rey moro. For his stead- fastness, Fernando is honored as a martyr and a saint. 7 López, 148, 9. Lipsius is considered to be the founder of the Neostoic movement, an attempt to reconcile Senecan Stoicism with Christian ideals of virtue. The De Constantia was translated into every European language. By 1600 it had reached Mexico. Lipsius maintained correspondences with Quevedo and Arias Montano, and dedicated his 1604 Spanish translation of his six-volume Políticas not only to Philip III, but to all those members of the Spanish nobility unable to read Latin (Oestreich 276). 8 Admittedly, Lipsius followed his own advice in the breach, moving from one post to another to escape controversy, and changing sides from Catholicism to Calvinism. Joseph Hall (“the English Seneca” and future bishop of Exeter and Nor- wich) satirized Lipsius for his inconstancy in Heaven on Earth and Characters of Vertue. In his satire Hall imagines that in “Fooliana the Fickle” a coin is circulated bearing the inscrip- tion CONST(antia) LIPS (ii) with a picture of a chameleon engraved on the anverse. Quoted in Joseph Hall, Heaven on Earth and Characters of Vertue, Rudolph Kirk, ed., New Brunswick, 1948, p. 12. Cited in Miles 70. 9 See Saavedra Fajardo’s empresa 63, “Consule Utriuque”, Empresas políticas, 733. 10 Kenneth Krabbenhoft has recently argued that neostoic discourse informs many early modern recreational genres including prose fiction and the comedia: “[E]l acercamiento neos- toico vierte luz sobre la expresión de valores sociales y morales en comedias tan aparentemente disimilares como lo son Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña de Lope de Vega y La verdad sospechosa de Ruiz de Alarcón.” (160).

114 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

11 All verse and page numbers from El perro del hortelano refer to the Armiño Cátedra edition. 12 1341b, qtd in Krabbenhoft 21. 13 Ricardo’s overwrought octavas reales are thought to parody Góngora’s Soledad primera). M. Artigas’s claim that Góngo- ra’s Soledad primera had begun circulating in manuscript form in Madrid between May and June of 1613 allows specu- lation that Lope composed the play not long thereafter (Armi- ño 14). 14 Jeffrey Miles, cited earlier, referred to the “rocklike strength of the human mind” with reference to the neostoic doctrine of constancy. The firm rock that withstands the ocean’s fury was a popular neostoic symbol. In their polyglot emblem book Devises et emblemes, anciennes et modernes , published in Amsterdam in 1691, for example, Danielle de la Feuille and Henry Offenen depicts a gull perched atop a rock at sea while the epigram explains, “I rust on constancie” [I rest on constancy] (p. 35). For a detailed analysis of the play’s land-sea iso- tope, see Marie-Eugènie Kaufmant. Kaufmant too identifies Teodoro with Ulysses. Because Kaufmant associates Marcela with faithful Penelope rather than noting the parallelism that the play establishes between Diana and Penelope she is obliged to view Teodoro’s refusal of Marcela as a defect of the play (155-156). 15 El perro del hortelano offers an excepcionally display of sonnets—nine in all. Two are coded love-letters that broach the taboo subject of a mésalliance between Diana and her secretary. The remaining seven serve the purpose of slowing the break-neck pace of farcical romantic reversals unleashed by the specter of a deviation from the social contract. The sonnets create space for the principals to reflect on events as they unfold. 16 Dante, it should be noted, only knew the Odyssey by here- say. 17 El estudiante cortesano, fol. A vi v. Qtd. in Gallego, 40.

Armon 115

18 Three decades after the publication of El perro del hortelano, Baltasar Gracián would grant agibilia, not constancy, a place of honor among the manly virtues. Returning to maritime metaphors, he advises his discreet man of court to follow the example of the sea-pilot: “Vivir a la ocasión. . . el sabio sabe que el norte de la prudencia consiste en portarse a la oca- sión” (Oráculo manual Aforismo 288, p. 298). And, as if to smash once and for all the gender dichotomy of the constant solar man versus the inconstant lunar woman, in 1691, the polyglot emblem collection Devises et Emblemes, would re- cast the sun, not the moon, as a symbol of changeability in its own right. The emblem portrays a sundial whose shadow is never still, but follows path of the sun across the sky. Its motto reads, “Somos inconstantes” (43, 44). 19 Earlier, Ricardo and Federico had contracted Tristán to as- sassinate Teodoro, whom they perceived to be a rival for Di- ana’s hand. Teodoro resolves this plot-twist by declaring that Tristán should be rewarded for saving his life rather than punished for breaking his word to the suitors (vv 3367-3371, p. 183).

Works Cited

Armiño, Mauro, ed. El perro del hortelano. By Lope de Vega. Madrid: Cátedra, 2003. Cartagena, Calderón J. R. Masculinidades en obras: El drama de la hombría en la España imperial. Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2008. De la Feuille, Daniel and Henry Offelen, Devises et emblemes, anciennes et modernes. Amsterdam, 1691.

116 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Erasmo de Rotterdam. De la urbanidad en las maneras de los niños (De civilitate morum puerilium). Ed. Julia Varela. Trans. Agustín García Calvo. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Ciéncias; Centro de Investigación y Documentación Edu- cativa, 1985. Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen. London and New York: Methuen, 1987. Fothergill-Payne, Louise. “The Search for a Formula: Spanish Theater at the end of the 16th Century.” Comparative Critical Approaches to Renais- sance Comedy. Eds. Donald Beecher and Mas- simo Ciavolella. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1986. 127- 136. Gallego, André. “Santo, latino y ladino, o el modelo de sabio propuesto por Juan Lorenzo Palmireno en las aulas de gramática.” Modelos de vida en la España del Siglo de Oro. Madrid: Iberoamerica- na, 2004. 31-48. Gracián, Baltasar. Obras Completas. Ed. Luis Sánchez Laílla. Madrid: Espasa-Biblioteca de Literatura Universal, 2001. Kaufmant, Marie-Eugènie. “El perro del hortelano et autres traversées dramatiques: l’imaginaire ma- rin dans la comedia nueva à travers la métaphore maritime.” L’Imaginaire des Espace Aquatiques en Espagne et au Portugal. Ed. François Del- pech. Paris: Press Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009. 147-168. Krabbenhoft, Kenneth. Neoestoicismo y género popular. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salaman- ca, 2001.

Armon 117

Martín, Adrienne, ed. El perro del hortelano. By Félix Lope de Vega Carpio. Newark: European Mas- terpieces, 2011. Miles, Geoffrey. Shakespeare and the Constant Romans. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. Montiglio, Silvia. From Villian to Hero: Odysseus in Ancient Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Mi- chigan Press, 2011. Núñez, de C. A. Libro histórico-político: Sólo Madrid es corte y el cortesano en Madrid. Valencia: Libre- ría París-Valencia, 1996. Oestreich, Gerhard. Neostoicism and the Early Modern State. Trans. David McLintock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Puchner, Martin. “Kenneth Burke: Theater, Philosophy, and the Limits of Performance.” Staging Philos- ophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance and Philosophy. Eds. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006. 41-56. Reeser, Todd. Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 2006. Saavedra Fajardo, Diego. Empresas políticas. Ed. Sagra- rio López. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999. Trigo, Abril. “Shifting Paradigms: From Transcultura- tion to Hybridity: A Theoretical Critique.” Un- forseeable Americas: Questioning Cultural Hy- bridity in the Americas. Eds. Rita De Grandis and Zilà Bernd. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Ro- dopi, 2000. 85-111.

118 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Vega, Lope de. El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo. Ed. Juana de José Prada. http://www.comedias.org/misc/artnue.html. Wilson, Margaret. “Lope as Satirist: Two Themes in El perro del hortelano.” Hispanic Review 40.3. (Summer, 1972): 271-282.

LA ELUSIÓN DEL VACÍO EN EL MÉDICO DE SU HONRA

GABRIEL VILLARROEL Georgetown University

1. Introducción

Ulises Moulines observa que algunos crea- dores literarios son a su vez pensadores originales: “El caso más conspicuo lo representa sin duda Cal- derón: se adelantó a Descartes en tematizar la duda sobre la realidad del mundo exterior” (179). En efecto, uno de los problemas del filósofo francés en El discurso del método fue restaurar la materialidad del mundo luego de cuestionarla con la duda metó- dica; su ostensible respuesta fue la existencia de un Dios perfecto garante de nuestras ideas y proveedor de sentido. Se cuestionó también sobre la a veces difícil distinción entre el sueño y la realidad:

Pues ¿de dónde sacamos que los pensamientos que ocurren en los sueños son más falsos que los otros, si a menudo no son menos vi- vos y explícitos? Y que aunque los mejores

119

120 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 espíritus estudien esto todo lo que quieran, no creo que puedan dar ninguna razón que sea suficiente para superar esta duda si no presuponen la existencia de Dios. (164)

En Descartes, es la divinidad la que permite superar esta diferencia y conservar el fundamento de lo real. Antonio Regalado también establece un vínculo es- trecho entre el pensamiento de Calderón y Descar- tes; para el crítico, ambos parten de una posición análoga:

de un sujeto pensante que al pensar conoce, desea, imagina, percibe y siente, es decir, representa, en tanto no sólo se hace presente el objeto sino que se representa a sí mismo representándose en un mundo inseparable de su representar. (82)

Por lo tanto, el sujeto en Calderón y Descartes es creador activo de su entorno. Ya se mencionó que el filósofo francés finalmente busca refugio en Dios para justificar un mundo más estable; el dramaturgo, en cambio, en sus dramas seculares, exhibe este mundo creado por perspectivas sin ningún asidero universal. De forma análoga, otro filósofo cuestionó la materialidad del mundo. George Berkeley dudó de la posibilidad de existencia de objetos por fuera de la percepción humana:

Villarroel 121 Hablar de la existencia absoluta de cosas in- animadas, sin relación al hecho de si las perciben o no, es para mí insensato. Su esse es percipi; no es posible que existan fuera de las mentes que las perciben. (citado por Borges, 759)

Encontró también su solución en Dios: las cosas existen en la mente divina cuando no son percibidas por el hombre. No cabe dudar de la devoción católica de Pedro Calderón de la Barca, que fue educado por jesuitas y se ordenó como sacerdote en 1651; no obstante, también fue un dramaturgo comprometido con su arte y sus comedias no ofrecen salidas uní- vocas ni se refugian sólo en la moral católica para solucionar sus dilemas. Bien dice Edwin Honig sobre Calderón:

To insist that he is a religious dramatist (Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina were also priests but for some reason are not thought of as religious) seals him off from the thriving humanistic involvements he shared with his English and French contemporaries. (4)

Si bien es cierto que los autos sacramentales de Calderón forman una parte importante de su obra, no toda ella tiene ese velo alegórico moralista; al contrario, rezuma dilemas plenamente humanos.

122 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 Por ejemplo, al final de La vida es sueño, Segismundo declama:

¿Qué os admira? ¿Qué os espanta, si fue mi maestro un sueño, y estoy temiendo en mis ansias que he de despertar y hallarme otra vez en mi cerrada prisión? Y cuando no sea, el soñarlo sólo basta... (168)

En este punto de la obra, Segismundo ha ganado la experiencia para actuar con sabiduría, de acuerdo a las expectativas de su padre y de quienes lo rodean. El final es feliz, pero no deja de producir cierta inquietud esa duda existencial de no saber con certeza si sueña o no; incluso considera que cuando duerma se puede fantasear nuevamente en la prisión. El dilema recuerda al breve relato de Chuang Tzu, tan favorecido por Borges e incluido en su Antología de la literatura fantástica: “Chuang Tzu soñó que era una mariposa. Al despertar ignoraba si era Tzu que había soñado que era una mariposa o si era una mariposa y estaba soñando que era Tzu” (78). En La vida es sueño, Segismundo ha ganado un trono, una esposa y el respeto de sus congéneres, pero ha perdido la confianza en la realidad. Su duda no es tan diferente a la esbozada por Descartes o Berkeley; todos cuestionan la solidez del mundo que perciben. Pero mientras los dos filósofos hallan alivio en la divinidad, Segismundo es privado de este asidero

Villarroel 123 (aunque de todas formas actúa guiado por la moralidad). Puede parecer un exabrupto confrontar pensamientos filosóficos con una comedia, pero allí radica la cuestión: mientras Descartes y Berkeley estaban comprometidos con encontrar una verdad que justificara el mundo que habitan, Calderón, como dramaturgo, no tiene esa obligación. Quizá para sí mismo podía reconocer el principio divino como el proveedor de sentido al hombre, pero tal principio no necesariamente aparece en todas sus comedias. Incluso, cabe pensar que la excesiva presencia de esta moral unívoca cristiana habría disminuido la calidad de su arte, porque los mejores dramas pre- sentan un juego de valores incompatibles que deben confrontarse con relativa igualdad; son un diálogo y no un discurso. La larga presentación para este ensayo acerca de El médico de su honra quiere introducir la se- cularidad de este drama de honor de Calderón. En este ámbito carente de reglas universales nace la necesidad humana de hallar un sentido a través de un sistema de valores, lo cual resulta en la posibilidad filosófica del hombre como un ser abandonado en el vacío ante la ausencia divina. Como soporte filosófico del análisis de El médico de su honra se utilizará el nihilismo como es expuesto por Nietzsche. Se aspira señalar el juego de valores en la obra de Calderón y cómo estos apuntan a un vacío fundamental del que Don Gutie- rre quiere escapar. Esta interpretación se confronta-

124 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 rá con la puesta en escena dirigida por Isaac Benabu en 1997 dentro del marco de una filosofía que expone todos los valores y creencias como una crea- ción plenamente humana.

2. La pasión de Mencía y Enrique

El concepto de honor fue sin duda relevante en la España del siglo XVII; para defenderlo las le- yes permitían la muerte de la mujer adúltera y del amante a manos del marido. No obstante, Ana Ar- mendáriz sostiene que, si bien está documentada la existencia de la ley, los casos de uxoricidio eran demasiado notorios para ser moneda común (28). Matthew Stroud concuerda:

As a result, because of the general environment of sexual license and the relatively rare occurrence of wife murder… the audience would have considered the husbands of these plays rare and extreme examples, perhaps somewhat archaic or rustic, but definitely interesting as dramatic protagonists. The truth is dual: the comedias both represent reality and distort it. (15)

Si no hay una relación mimética, la honra es utiliza- da en las comedias como un recurso poético capaz de conmover al espectador; Lope de Vega confirma la efectividad del tema en su “Arte nuevo de hacer

Villarroel 125 comedias”: “Los casos de la honra son mejores / porque mueven con fuerza a toda gente” (565). Por lo tanto, cabe pensar que Calderón utili- zó el tema del uxoricida como un recurso dramáti- co, no como un reforzamiento de la norma moral o un testimonio de su sociedad; estas tragedias le permitían experimentar con pasiones humanas a través de personajes extremos. Bruce Wardropper alega que explicar el código de honor por medio de observaciones sociológicas, como lo intentó Améri- co Castro y García Valdecasas, disminuye la cohe- rencia interna de la comedia: “La obra de arte es autónoma al menos hasta este punto: que contenga su propia exposición razonada” (584). En este sentido, la poesía de Calderón no es registro sino labo- ratorio. En El médico de su honra Calderón presenta una situación extrema donde la aparente estabilidad de un matrimonio es destruida por el infante Don Enrique y su esfuerzo por seducir a Doña Mencía; la casualidad lleva a que lentamente Don Gutierre se convenza de que ha sido deshonrado y decida tomar venganza, acogiéndose a la ley del asesinato de la mujer adúltera; cuando logra su objetivo recibe la aprobación tácita del rey Pedro y es desposado nuevamente. Bien es sabido que el honor es el pilar que sostiene la trama, pero cada personaje tiene una relación variable con él. A continuación se aspira señalar los valores que Calderón pone en juego a lo largo de su obra, respetando su lógica interna.

126 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 Empezaremos con Mencía. Quizá la frase que mejor represente los valores de esta mujer es: “tuve amor y tengo honor” (369). Esta mujer sufre una ruptura contada por ella misma:

Nací en Sevilla, y en ella me vio Enrique, festejó mis desdenes, celebró mi nombre, ¡felice estrella! Fuese, y mi padre atropella la libertad que hubo en mí. La mano a Gutierre di, volvió Enrique, y en rigor, tuve amor, y tengo honor (565-575)

En Sevilla, Mencía gozó del cortejo de Enrique y llegó a amarlo, aún a sabiendas de que su unión ma- trimonial sería imposible por las diferencias sociales. Es importante notar que para Mencía el honor se construye por oposición a la libertad y el amor que conoció en su juventud. El regreso de Enrique despierta de nuevo ese fuego aprisionado en “cárce- les de nieve” y llega a decir “aquí fue amor” (131). Lo que siente latente dentro de sí es su pasión, que no ha sido destruida por el honor; allí radica su pecado: lleva la mácula de su deseo. No obstante Mencía defiende su honra, no la ha internalizado por completo; dice por ejemplo “… lo metales en el fuego / así mi honor en sí mismo / se acrisola cuando llego / a vencerme, pues no fuera / sin experiencias perfeto” (148-152). El honor, para

Villarroel 127 ella, representa la pugna vencerse a sí misma y cree que puede aprenderse y perfeccionarse. Como se mostrará más adelante, para Gutierre el honor es absoluto hasta lo metafísico; no admite los puntos intermedios que requeriría el aprendizaje de Men- cía. Robert M. Johnston destaca estas impruden- cias de Mencía como una forma insubordinación: “Mencía’s gravest fault is not to fully surrender her freedom. For Gutierre and for the men in the corral audience, Mencía is the incarnation of their greatest fear and insecurity: a rebellious woman” (42). Lla- mar rebelde a la actitud de Mencía puede ser exagerado: la mayoría de sus desaciertos son accidentales y la idea de “rebeldía involuntaria” es un oxímo- ron1. Esta ambivalencia la expresa también la actriz que interpreta el papel de Mencía en la puesta en escena de Isaac Benabu; cuando realiza su primer monólogo habla al cuerpo inconsciente de En- rique con inspiración, alargando incluso los brazos hacia él, pero cuando dice “’Aquí fue amor’ Más ¿qué digo?” (131) cambia su actitud y corta la co- municación para mirar en sentido del público sin enfocar nada. Es evidente cómo la actriz reprime la expresión del sentimiento y desarrolla el monólogo como un esfuerzo por convencerse a sí misma de la importancia de la preservación de su honor. Como Johnston dice, en parte, se manifiesta una sosegada insubordinación por parte de esta mujer que no puede evitar añorar esa libertad y amor que conoció

128 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 cuando era cortejada por Enrique. Everett Hesse observa acerca de la obra: “There is a marked tension between love and honor and between prudence and justice that disclose a dichotomy in the value system” (187). Mencía encarna, mejor que ningún otro personaje de la obra, una dicotomía entre amor y honor, aunque ella quisiera inclinarse por la segunda. La pasión latente en Mencía encuentra un espejo magnificado en la del Infante. Sin considerar las consecuencias, Enrique le declara la pervivencia de su amor apenas se despierta de la caída; poste- riormente, frente a Gutierre, actúa con apenas la prudencia necesaria para esconder su rabia por el matrimonio, aún a sabiendas que él mismo no puede desposarla. Nunca es más irracional su pasión que cuando el Rey le reprocha su amor y él replica: “Es cierto, pero / el tiempo todo lo rinde, / el amor todo lo puede” (2225-2228); la sentencia traída de Virgi- lio (“Amor vincit omnia”) demuestra que, por lo menos de palabra, Enrique privilegia la pasión sobre el concepto de honra. La unión entre Mencía y el Infante es imposible por la diferencia de sus posi- ciones sociales, pero los sentimientos de ambos se oponen inútilmente a esta jerarquía. Finalmente, Enrique confirma que su reputación no es fundamental cuando huye temeroso tras haber afrentado a su hermano. Por lo tanto Mencía, como Enrique, conoce las reglas del honor que imposibilitan su unión; no obstante, en grados y momentos diferentes, ella ma-

Villarroel 129 nifiesta su verdadero deseo. Ninguno de los dos se entrega por completo al honor porque es el valor represivo que los mantiene separados contra su voluntad.

3. Subversiones de Coquín y Arias

Don Arias da muestras de estar más ligado a ese voluble sistema del honor que Enrique, pero también reconoce la generosidad y la justicia por fuera de él. Lo demuestra desde el principio, cuando critica al Rey: “¿Quién a un hermano dejara, / tro- pezando de esta suerte / en los brazos de la muerte?” (29-31); tales palabras de crítica nunca cabrían en la boca de Gutierre, por ejemplo. Más adelante ofrece casarse con Leonor para salvar su honra y cuando ella afirma que así sólo se confirmará la afrenta, él dice:

Como yo sé la inocencia de ese pecho en la ocasión, satisfecho siempre de vos estaré. En mi vida he conocido galán necio, escrupuloso, y con extremo celoso, que en llegando a ser marido no le castiguen los cielos (1805-1813)

En la primera parte, Arias desdeña la opinión públi- ca respecto al honor de Leonor y confirma que sólo

130 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 le importa saberla inocente. En la segunda reconoce en Gutierre a un hombre irrazonable y celoso, si bien él mismo sabe que no ha pecado contra la honra, como Leonor le alegará. Por lo tanto, Arias demuestra su capacidad de ver más allá del honor y de la condición de Rey como ser infalible. Hesse observa: “Arias is the only character to admit an error (even though it is only to himself) having been instructed by Leonor in the code of honor” (186). Ca- be observar las palabras de Arias: “Muy grande ha sido mi error, / pues en escuelas de honor / argu- yendo una mujer / me convence.” (1850-1854); cuando afirma esto se emparenta con el concepto de honra de Mencía como un valor susceptible apren- dido, no absoluto. En la representación dirigida por Isaac Be- nabu, Arias efectivamente muestra una relativa fragilidad en la escena a solas con Leonor; le pide de rodillas el matrimonio mientras ella lo desdeña mi- rándolo hacia abajo. La proxémica del acto responde a la lógica general de puesta en escena de la obra, donde los personajes que defienden o hablan desde su honor tienden a permanecer erguidos, mientras que cuando manifiestan emociones más íntimas curvan su cuerpo. El ejemplo de esta última situación es particularmente evidente en Coquín, que anda casi jorobado y da botes por las tablas. Coquín, en su condición de gracioso, es quien toma mayor distancia del sistema de honor porque no está ligado a él por linaje. Este personaje es el encargado de servir como contrapunto a la vi-

Villarroel 131 sión excesivamente rigurosa de la opinión pública; puede decir "¿Y heme de dejar morir por sólo bien parecer?”, como una forma de preferir la supervi- vencia a la honra. La visión de Coquín, como sus chistes, no caben dentro de un drama de honor; así lo recuerda Armendáriz cuando afirma: “Coquín no es gracioso; las circunstancias trágicas acabarán por excluirle, como veremos, lo que refuerza el universo trágico que constituye la obra” (203). Por eso a medida que avanza la acción deja de reír, como la sirvienta Ja- cinta se preocupa por señalar. Ruiz Ramón alega acerca este gracioso:

Además de invalidar el estereotipo del gracioso cobarde, revela el fondo de humanidad grave y noble capaz de responsabilidad y de compromiso con la verdad oculto tras la máscara cómica del bufón (…) asume como excepción el punto de vista distanciado, úni- co dentro del mundo del drama que puede mostrar las contradicciones del sistema en que están estribadas las acciones de los personajes nobles. (citado por Armendáriz, 211)

El papel de Coquín es interesante precisamente porque es ajeno a las reglas del sistema de honor que articulan toda la trama. Mientras que Arias y Enri- que huyen, él se enfrenta a la posibilidad de la muerte, o de perder sus dientes, para contar la ver-

132 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 dad al Rey. Coquín también es el único personaje que cambia a lo largo de la obra: pasa de ser un gracioso vivaz e impertinente a un hombre valeroso que conoce la realidad de la tragedia y trata de salvar a una mujer inocente. La sabiduría que gana se emparenta más con la Segismundo, de La vida es sueño, que con la de ningún otro personaje de su propia obra. Pero con este cambio también le aviene la melancolía, un talante más apropiado para la tragedia. En este sentido, Ann Wiltrout afirma:

Al final de la obra, Coquín, vuelto ya un hombre de veras que apenas ríe, es el que re- suelve la antinomia; ya sabe que ni la risa, que niega la importancia de un aconteci- miento, ni el decoro, que disimula su existencia, le puede consolar en su dolor. (662)

Si al principio Coquín y sus chistes estaban fuera de lugar y, como gracioso, no tenía injerencia real en la acción, hacia el final intenta salvar a la víctima y así integrarse al drama, aún cuando permanezca por fuera del sistema de honor. Sobra decir que no logra su cometido. A lo largo de estos dos apartados se ha rela- cionado a diferentes protagonistas de la obra con diferentes valores señalando las discrepancias. Estas divergencias mismas perfilan el concepto de honor dentro la lógica de El médico de su honra; difícil- mente es una ley unívoca, metafísica, de la que los personajes participan sino que la observan de

Villarroel 133 acuerdo a sus respectivos temperamentos y búsque- das. Bien lo dice Stroud:

We can easily see the multiplicity of ‘true’ presentations in these plays even if the characters can never reach a unified vision. Gutierre’s ‘truth’ is quite different from Mencía’s because he sees the same objects from a different perspective. (140)

En esta pluralidad, bien se puede ver que Calderón propone la honra como una construcción plenamente humana y, como tal, falible y susceptible de cues- tionamientos.

4. El Rey Pedro y la honra

El sistema de la honra como artefacto humano es uno de los corolarios de El médico de su honra. De alguna forma sigue el proceso que Nietzsche llama “desnaturalización de valores” (24), percatarse de que los dictámenes morales po- seen un carácter artificial, impreciso y en constante construcción a través de las acciones. La moralidad no sólo es una imposición que direcciona a la ac- ción sino que es construida por la acción misma. Esta fragilidad se refleja en la dubitativa autoridad del dirigente máximo, el Rey. A primera vista, Pedro parece hacer honor a su epíteto, “el cruel” (aunque también tenía el “el justiciero”) en su decisión de abandonar al Infante

134 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 cuando ha caído del caballo o la amenaza a Coquín de quitarle los dientes; no obstante, también realiza actos de generosidad como darle un diamante a un mendigo o interesarse por ayudar a Leonor a recuperar su honor. Roberta Thiher observa:

He has the appearance of a cruel King, but in reality he seeks justice. Far from presenting him as cruel and aloof, Calderón goes to some trouble to endow Pedro with some human qualities. (239)

Lo cierto es que Pedro no realiza ninguna acción abiertamente cruel y ciertamente busca ser justo, el inconveniente es que la justicia, como el honor, es un valor inestable y Pedro una suerte de aprendiz con aires de severidad. Por ejemplo, cuando el mendigo le pide li- mosna le da un diamante; si bien el gesto denota generosidad, también es exagerado y se trata de una solución superficial. Un rey debe gobernar en miras a todo su pueblo; Pedro no podría darles diamantes a todos los mendigos y, en este sentido, su acto no ofrece una solución a la pobreza, el problema de fondo, sino sólo a lo inmediato. También es de destacar lo cortante de su lenguaje y actitud en estos actos, tanto que uno de los soldados afirma: “Pocas palabras gasta” (583). Ocurre algo similar cuando le pide a Leonor que se esconda ante la llegada de Gu- tierre o, más adelante, a Gutierre mismo; Thiher se- ñala precisamente: “Pedro’s gravest defect is his

Villarroel 135 imprudence, in permiting both Leonor and Gutierre to earsdrop on confidential testimony, but even here his intention is to be just” (239). Es indudable que Pedro busca ser justo al escuchar a las diferentes partes del conflicto en aras a emitir una resolución imparcial, pero procede con cierta torpeza al fomen- tar estas intrigas en vez de proponer un dialogo abierto o buscar otra solución más estratégica. La consecuencia, como se sabe, es que Gutierre, al escuchar a Enrique, se convence de la inexistente in- fidelidad de Mencía. Al final de la obra, Pedro decide no tener en cuenta el uxoricidio. Luego del horror ante la sangrienta escena de Mencía, da la mano de Leonor a Gutierre. No deja de haber frialdad y apresuramien- to en una decisión así, cuando “las cenizas aún se hallan calientes.” El cadáver de Mencía es el testimonio de las intrigas y confusiones que han tenido lugar y Pedro las conoce bien, pero no se preocupa por desenmarañar ese nudo sino que nuevamente soluciona lo inmediato: recuperar el honor de Leo- nor casándola. No tiene sentido declarar a Pedro como un hombre justo o injusto categóricamente; como el honor, la justicia no es un concepto platónico que cobija o no las acciones. Pedro se considera justo y actúa en consecuencia, con esa generosidad dadivo- sa y su apresurada severidad; no tiene sentido com- parar su sentido de justicia con el actual. En la puesta en escena de la obra, Benabu resalta la categoría de este Rey poniéndolo en un pequeño escalón, de

136 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 forma que mira hacia abajo a los demás personajes, pero también se baja y camina; una forma de representar su relativa igualdad, no tanto en sentido de rango pero sí de hombre en incesante constructor de valores. Como se ha señalado, aunque él es la autoridad, sus normas no reinan por completo en los demás personajes, no dominan los deseos de Men- cía y su hermano Enrique, la jocosidad de Coquín o al trashumante de Arias, que se fuga al final. Sí tienen, en cambio, una relación más estrecha con el proceder de Gutierre.

5. Ética católica y el vacío moral

Se ha señalado la divergencia de valores entre los distintos personajes de El médico de su honra; aún cuando graviten alrededor del honor, las emociones o la justicia, cada concepto cobra un nuevo significado de acuerdo a quien lo vive y ninguno domina completamente a los demás. Es notorio que Calderón de la Barca omita la justicia divina en este drama de honor; ninguno de los personajes, incluso cuando actúan con nobleza, parece proceder movido por la ética cristiana. Estos valores se invo- can sólo una vez, en el mensaje que Gutierre le deja a Mencía: “Dos horas tienes de vida; cristiana eres, / salva el alma, que la vida es imposible”; el mensaje invita a la moribunda a expiar las culpas como medio para salvar su alma, pero también indica que este arrepentimiento en nada cambiará su condición, es decir, la llegada de la muerte.

Villarroel 137 Especialmente en el Siglo de Oro, la religión se entiende como un valor absoluto, normas incues- tionables y dogmáticas que preexisten al hombre. Por ejemplo, en la obra de Tirso de Molina El burlador de Sevilla, la religión tiene un papel constante como forma de justicia que inevitablemente castiga- rá las calaveradas de Don Juan; al final de la obra lo alcanza esta forma de moral antes incluso que la humana, que no llega a sancionarlo. La religión le da a esta obra un carácter moralista, porque si el protagonista puede burlar a hombres y mujeres, no puede burlar a la ley divina que prohíbe el asesinato y mucho menos puede burlar a Dios. En cambio, Gutierre puede matar a su esposa con la mayor premeditación y aún así ser premiado al final; esto ocurre porque la ley humana, encarnada en el rey Pedro, es falible y está permeada por factores como la honra o el mismo capricho. Díez Borque señala también esta antinomia:

Se trata de un enfrentamiento entre una ética pagana y una ética cristiana y ambas, por su propensión hacia lo absoluto, degradan los restantes valores, como la propia vida, que pierde importancia ante la perfección del ideal que se opone: vida sobrenatural, honor. Pero un sistema de valores no se puede explicar por el otro, antes bien, constituyen dos éticas en oposición y de aquí que los mora- listas y escritores didácticos condenen el ho- nor, como sistema pagano que suple a la

138 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 moral cristiana, aunque –en el fondo de ambos– haya afinidades. Lo más importante a señalar es que en la comedia triunfa la ética pagana sobre la moral cristiana, al modo del fatum griego, aunque como un poder individual más definido. (104)

Es cierto que en la comedia triunfa la ética secular, pero cabe precisar que la oposición de ésta con la moral cristiana sólo se da en el espectador de la obra; Calderón debía suponer que el auditorio, cató- lico idealmente, contrastaría la vileza puesta en escena con sus propios valores. Regalado indica tam- bién el carácter doble de dramaturgo como pensa- dor; indica que en sus tragedias profanas “está ausente la sotería cristiana y todo primer principio que sustente la bondad del ser, vacío en el que irrumpe desenfrenadamente la ambición demoniaca, la voluntad de voluntad o la voluntad de poder” (80). En El médico de su honra obra no aparece la ética cristiana como oposición a la honra; todos los valores son elaborados performativamente por los mismos personajes. No obstante, el vínculo entre el Calderón secular y el católico debe ser matizado; si es cierto que durante el siglo XVII la Iglesia como institu- ción pretendía tener mantener la autoridad sobre las normas morales y excluir otras interpretaciones, existía corrientes paralelas pertenecientes al mismo catolicismo que relativizaban esta aproximación. Mujica (Skepticism and Mysticism…) señala que

Villarroel 139 teólogos como Juan Maldonado o Erasmo de Rot- terdam se aproximaban al pensamiento escéptico en tanto forma de cuestionar autoridades únicas de interpretación. Esta “escuela” cuestiona la posibilidad de aprehender la verdad debido al carácter im- perfecto de los sentidos, por eso se valora una mayor posibilidad de puntos de vista. Por lo tanto, esta noción venida de cierta rama del catolicismo tam- bién puede vincular incluso al Calderón más secular. Nietzsche es uno de los pensadores que re- conoció la totalidad de los valores, especialmente la religión, como artefactos humanos proveedores de sentido. A estos artificios contrapuso el nihilismo, como el agotamiento de preservar estos valores falsos:

Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the ‘in vain’, insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to re- cover and regain composure -being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long- This meaning could have been: the ‘fulfillment’ of some highest ethical canon in all events, the moral world order… (12)

Por lo tanto, este nihilismo requiere la previa creen- cia en un sistema trascendental que soporta las acciones y el mundo; siguiendo a Nietzsche, Heideg- ger lo define de la siguiente forma: “Nihilism is that

140 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 historical process whereby the dominance of the ‘trascendent’ becomes null and void, so that all being loses it’s worth and meaning” (4). Por lo tan- to, el nihilismo también es una posición angustiante donde el hombre vive en el vacío y entiende que él y el mundo carece de propósito. Cabe recordar que Nietzsche lo entendió como un instante transicional hacia la creación de nuevos valores, y para esto se requería la llegada del superhombre. Ya Bárbara Mujica observa una analogía entre el existencialismo como corriente filosófica que privilegia el libre albedrío del hombre y el teatro de Calderón, donde, ante la incertidumbre del carácter ilusorio de la realidad, los personajes deben tomar decisiones:

Like Sartre’s, Calderón’s characters are, in the face of choice, besieged by doubts. The uncertainty experienced by Sartre’s characters result from their awareness of the lack of finality of human existence and from the absence of moral absolutes. (Calderon’s Characters… 11)

Tanto Nietzsche como la corriente existencialista comparte la idea que la existencia precede a la esencia, es decir, el hombre parte desde un vacío fundamental y desde allí debe construir sus propios valores, aunque en Nietzsche sea guiado por la voluntad de poder y en Sartre por un sentido de responsabilidad.

Villarroel 141 En Los hermanos Karamazov, Dostoevsky pone en boca de uno de sus personajes una sentencia plenamente nihilista: “If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted.” Dios existe para los personajes de El médico de su honra, pero no es una presencia manifiesta que guíe sus acciones; el valor que deben privilegiar es la honra, que es uno mucho más inestable. En el siguiente apartado se estudiará a Gutierre bajo esta luz, como un hombre que debe actuar comprometido con su sistema a partir de un vacío fundamental.

6. El vacío y la fragilidad de Gutierre

Tanto la puesta en escena de Isaac Benabu de El médico de su honra como su artículo “ ‘Who is the protagonist?’: Gutierre on the stand” tratan de focalizar la atención del espectador en Gutierre en tanto personaje trágico. En contraste con otras opi- niones que lo acusan de ser un asesino cegado por su orgullo, Benabu lo destaca como un doliente que padece un intenso proceso emocional que lo impele a asesinar a la mujer que ama. La desgarrada actua- ción de quien interpreta a Gutierre en su puesta en escena, su voz quebrada y ocasional llanto, da buena cuenta del sufrimiento del personaje. La interpre- tación de Benabu tiene la ventaja de ser idónea para llevarla a la escena; como director teatral es necesa- rio que enfatice la tragedia y el conflicto. No obstante, en este ensayo se toma una posición diferente. Para sostener su argumento, Benabu afirma:

142 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

To use Gouhier’s terminology, honor in these plays provides the trascendence which is an esencial component of tragedy. There is plenty of textual evidence to show that like Othello, Gutierre also looks on the killing of Mencía as an act of sacrifice. (18)

Precisamente, Benabu postula la trascendencia del código de honor en la tragedia, de manera que Gu- tierre actúa impulsado por ese motor invisible que lo avasalla; preservar su honra lo obliga a sacrificar a su esposa a esa “fuerza” superior y allí radica el conflicto del personaje. Como se ha mencionado antes, en esta interpretación el honor que caracteriza la obra de Calderón es inmanente, asumido por los personajes mismos de forma casi involuntaria. El ejemplo de Gutierre es particular; como se mostró anteriormente, todos los demás personajes actúan influenciados también por valores diferentes al honor, sea la pasión o la justicia. En este ensayo se quiere mostrar que Gutierre, en cambio, no muestra deseos o pasiones ajenos a los mandato- rios por la honra; por tanto, se aferra a ella en un esfuerzo por no caer en una visión nihilista. En su análisis de “A secreto agravio, secreta venganza,” otro de los dramas de honor de Calde- rón, Mujica observa que Don Lope, el uxoricida de la obra, se siente obligado a limpiar la mancha en su honor, “but not without first condemning the ho- rrors of the honor system” (Calderon’s Charac-

Villarroel 143 ters…, 151). Este cuestionamiento es ajeno a Gutie- rre. En ningún momento toma distancia del sistema de honra sino que, al contrario, está completamente identificado con él. Así, le dice al Rey:

No te espantes que los ojos también se quejan, señor; que dicen que amor y honor pueden, sin que a nadie asombre, permitir que llore un hombre; y yo tengo honor y amor. Honor, que siempre he guardado como noble y bien nacido, y amor que siempre he tenido como esposo enamorado; adquirido y heredado uno y otro en mí se ve… (2063-2074)

Gutierre recuerda que para él honor le es heredado e inherente a su persona (en contraste con Mencía o Arias, que lo ven como una escuela de aprendizaje). El amor, dice, es adquirido. Lo que inquieta es la equiparación entre ambos valores; como hombre de honor, debe no sólo casarse sino mostrarse cortés y cariñoso con su esposa, si bien es cierto que en esta época el amor no era requerido para el matrimonio. Este carácter contrasta con el de Mencía, que dice en cambio “Tuve amor, tengo honor”, es decir, sa- crifica uno para preservar el otro. Pero Gutierre también menciona el amor, ¿cómo se expresa este sentimiento en este caballe-

144 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 ro? Amy Williamsen sugiere que la comunicación entre ambos esposos está fundada sobre conven- cionalismos: “The linguistic features explored so far all suggest that the representation of the relationship between Mencía and Gutierre rests on formulas rather than on true emotions” (31). Para comprobarlo observa que el epíteto más frecuente usado por los cónyugues es “dueño,” un término más ligado a la posesión material que al cariño. Así mismo, cuando Gutierre trata de convencerla que no tiene sentimientos por Leonor le dedica un halagüeño discurso donde la compara con el sol; este tropo es un lugar común del amor cortes, como señala Armendáriz (367), y como tal, tiene un tono convencionalista. Según Williamsen, Mencía entiende el formulismo y responde irónicamente: “¡Qué lisonjero os escu- cho!, / muy metafísico estáis.” (368). Por eso, el cambio de Leonor a Mencía no debió ser significativo en tanto Gutierre no estaba enamorado de ninguna de las dos mujeres, necesitaba una mujer para interpretar el papel de esposo lisonjero requerido por el código de honor. Las acciones de Gutierre, hasta el asesinato de Mencía, no consideran jamás la moral cristiana, el amor o la justicia, sino que desarrollan un afano- so intento por preservar su autoimagen como hombre de honor. De cierta forma, Gutierre utiliza el concepto de honor como un substituto de Dios en tanto sistema ético que guía sus acciones. Cuando siente que su esposa puede cuestionar este valor, el único que posee, toma la resolución de matarla. Su

Villarroel 145 desgracia es que la honra es excesivamente frágil; él mismo lo reconoce: “que al sol una nube negra, / si no le mancha, le turba, / si no le eclipsa, le yela” (1654-1656). En este sentido funciona la metáfora de la luz que, como la honra, siempre es absoluta en tanto que existe o no radicalmente. Gutierre se mueve en la oscuridad, “mata la luz” como considera que su honra ha sido obnubilada. La tragedia de este personaje es que el único valor que posee es demasiado quebradizo y esto lo hace frágil a él; si su honra le fuera arrebatada no sabría cómo actuar porque es el sentido de su mundo. Gutierre tiene un carácter similar al de Iago en la obra de Shake- speare en tanto lo describe Harold Bloom: “Othello was everything to Iago, because war was everything; passed over, Iago is nothing” (435). El crítico le atribuye al villano un pensamiento nihilista de negación total; se define por su odio y una vez pierde al objeto de éste, ya no es nada. Gutierre se define por su honra y sus acciones en la obra tienen como objetivo preservarla porque es su única pose- sión. Gutierre tiene visión trascendente de la honra (a diferencia de la que maneja la totalidad de la obra), es una idea platónica que justifica todas sus acciones; de allí se explica su rimbombante zalame- ría al hablar con Enrique y con Pedro, en tanto ellos son encarnaciones de ese alto sentido del honor. También las exageradas lisonjas a Mencía son producto de esa búsqueda por ajustarse lo más posible al caballero noble y honrado, pero es un simulacro

146 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 que llega hasta la artificialidad; el honor es su escu- do ante el vacío. Su capacidad de simulación queda muy clara en el testimonio que le ofrece al Rey sobre la muerte de Mencía:

Vuelve a esta parte la cara, y verás sangriento el sol, verás la luna eclipsada, deslucidas las estrellas, y las esferas borradas; y verás a la hermosura más triste y más desdichada, que por darme mayor muerte, no me ha dejado sin alma (2860-2870)

Luego de haber matado a Mencía siguiendo un plan detallado, ahora necesita completar su engaño simu- lando dolor ante el Rey. El artificioso parlamento representa el dolor que Gutierre cree que debería sentir un hombre al perder a su esposa. La metáfora respecto a los cuerpos celestes retrata un cielo apa- gado, donde no brilla ni el sol, la luna o las estrellas, pero lo contrario es lo verdadero: la muerte de Mencía es la que le permite mantener encendida la luz de honra, luego de que ella, con su traición (fal- sa, como se sabe) pusiera en riesgo la pureza de su ideal. Es un hombre terriblemente frágil que gravita sobre el vacío y tiene a la honra como único asidero. No obstante, al final, descubierto el cadáver de Mencía, Gutierre tiene un asomo de sentimientos

Villarroel 147 genuinos, cuando gentilmente trata de oponerse a la apresurada decisión del Rey de casarlo con Leonor. Pide tiempo para “llorar su ansias,” que es una forma de declarar que la imagen sangrienta lo afectó. No obstante supera el impacto con relativa presteza para recordar que el “honor con sangre se lava” y confirmarle a Leonor que la sangrará de ser necesa- rio. Finalmente, como bien lo apunta Ruíz Ramón (212), Gutierre ni siquiera llega a la anagnórisis de saber que su esposa había sido inocente; lo importante es que su honra permanece firme y, en este sentido, es un final feliz para él.

7. Conclusiones

Este ensayo empezó hablando sobre la fragilidad de la realidad y cómo la certeza de Dios ofrece un sustento para reforzarla. Se ha querido señalar que Gutierre encuentra ese sustento no en Dios sino en el honor como un valor que le da sentido al mundo; mientras los demás personajes encuentran asidero en otros valores, él interpreta el papel de un caballero honrado hasta las últimas consecuencias. Dentro de El médico de su honra el código de honor no es un valor trascendente, pero sí lo es para Gutierre o Pedro; por eso dice el monarca: “El honor es reservado / lugar, donde el alma asiste; / yo no soy rey de las almas” (2195-2198). El Rey, aún como autoridad máxima, cree estar sujeto tam- bién al código de honor. Pero no ocurre lo mismo con otros personajes: para Mencía o Arias es una

148 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 escuela que se puede contraponer a sus deseos, para Coquín es un código inferior a la preservación de la propia vida. Calderón recrea este valor no como trascendente sino como una serie de normas mudables e imperfectas por ser producto del hombre, que se pueden contraponer a otros impulsos, incluso al más fundamental como es el de la vida. El dramaturgo no impone un Dios a su obra porque si las reglas divinas son consideradas absolutas quedaría arruinado el carácter inestable y humano de la obra. El ejemplo de Gutierre es notorio porque se adhiere sin reservas al código de honor, lo asume como valor totalizante más allá del cual no hay nada. Con el asesinato de Mencía, Gutierre busca evitar su caída en la nada, en el nihilismo. Por eso cree firmemente en la materialidad de ese código, que dentro del contexto general de la obra se entiende como relativo y una mera apariencia. Acerca del pensamiento de Nietzsche, Alexander Nehamas afirma:

Nietzsche does not simply attack the distinction between appearance and reality. He also offers, as we have seen, a psychological account of its origin. He claims that the distinction is simply a projection onto the external world of our belief that the self is a substance, somehow set over and above its thoughts, desire, and actions. (136)

Villarroel 149 La tesis del filósofo alemán es que para todo es apariencia, todo es una creación humana voluble y cambiante de acuerdo a quien la observe. Es la misma naturaleza de los valores; ellos no preexisten al hombre, no son sustancias a las que puede acce- der, sino que surgen de él. Berkeley y Descartes creyeron en un Dios que le daba sentido al mundo sin darse cuenta que ese soporte divino venía de ellos mismos; su epistemología es inevitablemente humana, aunque quiera encontrar un soporte celes- tial. Segismundo, por su parte, actúa con moralidad impelido por un aprendizaje de ensayo y error, pero es dejado con la duda de la realidad de lo que percibe; sabe que los valores son mudables y que lo puede perder todo en un parpadeo. La frase, tan común en el teatro de Calderón y pronunciada por Gutierre, “soy quien soy” apunta hacia la presencia de una sustancia estable dentro del sujeto, quiere reafirmar el soporte en ciertos valores que preexisten a ese sujeto. Esta no es la perspectiva de Calderón, porque sus personajes la pro- nuncian precisamente cuando sienten que el mundo les quiere arrebatar las certezas que sirve como asidero para su identidad. En las circunstancias de Gu- tierre, este temor resulta aún más pavoroso que en los demás personajes de El médico de su honra precisamente porque no dispone de valores distintos que direccionen su vida. La inquietud de perder su honor es terrible en tanto él conoce su fragilidad y no es lo bastante rico para perder nada. Salvar su honor evitará su caída en el vacío. A través de sis-

150 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 temas mucho más complicados, Berkeley y Descar- tes plantearon la figura de Dios como su propia sal- vación de ese vacío de sentido. Esta búsqueda es un dilema plenamente humano y ella pervive en el co- razón de El médico de su honra.

NOTAS

1 Además del texto escrito, Johnston tiene en cuenta las posi- bles reacciones del público; dentro de este marco es más perti- nente su afirmación.

Obras Citadas

Armendáriz Aramendía, Ana. Edición crítica de El mé- dico de su honra. Frankfurt, Madrid: Iberoamer- icana, Vervuert, 2007. Print. Benabu, Isaac. “’Who is the protagonist?’: Gutierre on the Stand”. Indiana Journal of Hispanic Litera- tures. 2.2 (1994): 14-25. Print. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: the Invention of the Hu- man. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. Print. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Nueva refutación del tiempo”. Obras completas 1923-1972. Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1974. Print. Borges, Jorge Luis; Bioy Casares, Adolfo; Ocampo, Sil- vina. Antología de la literatura fantástica. Bar- celona: Editorial Suramericana, Edhasa, 1977. Print. Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. La vida es sueño. Santiago de Chile: Zig-Zag, 1955. Print.

Villarroel 151

---. Edición crítica de El médico de su honra. Frankfurt, Madrid: Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2007. Print. De Vega Carpio, Lope Félix. Rimas humanas y otros versos. Barcelona: Crítica, 1998. Print. Descartes, René. Obras escogidas. Buenos Aires: Edito- rial Charcas, 1980. Print. Díez Borque, José María. Sociología de la comedia es- pañola del siglo XVII. Madrid: Cátedra, 1976. Print. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche Volume IV. San Francis- co: Harper & Row, 1982. Print. Hesse, Everett. Essays on Spanish Letters of the golden Age. Maryland: Studia Humanitatis, 1981. Print. Honig, Edwin. Calderón and the Seizures of Honor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1972. Print. Johnston, Robert M. “The Spectator’s Mirror: Mencía of Calderón’s El médico de su honra.” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures. 2.2 (1994): 39- 48. Print. Moulines, C. Ulises. “El idealismo más consecuente se- gún Borges: la negación del tiempo.” Alfonso Toro y Fernando Toro (eds.) Jorge Luis Borges: Pensamiento y saber en el siglo XX. Madrid, Frankfurt: Iberoamericana, Vervuet, 1999. Print. Mujica, Bárbara. Calderon’s Characters: An Existential Point of View. Barcelona: Puvill, 1980. ---. “Skepticism and Mysticism in Early Modern Spain.” Joan F. Cammarata. Women in the Discourse of Early Modern Spain. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Print.

152 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Nehamas, Alexander. “How One Becomes What One is.” Harold Bloom. Modern Critical Views: Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. New York: Vintage Books, 1968. Print. Regalado, Antonio. Calderón. Los orígenes de la mo- dernidad en la España del Siglo de Oro Vol. I. Barcelona: Destino, 1995. Print. Ruíz Ramón, Francisco. “El miedo en la tragedia de ho- nor calderoniana.” Criticón 23 (1983): 197-213. Print. The Physician of His Honor (recorded play). Dir. Isaac Benabu. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Chamizal: 1997. Video. Thiher, Roberta J. “The Final Ambiguity of ‘El médico de su honra.’” Studies in Philology 67. 2 (1970): 237-244. Print. Wardropper, Bruce W. “Poesía y drama en El médico de su honra de Calderón.” Manuel Durán y Rober- to González Echavarría. Calderón y la crítica: Historia y antología. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1976. Print. Williamsen, Amy R. “Fatal Formulas: Mencía, Men and Verbal Manipulation.” Indiana Journal of His- panic Literatures 2.2 (1994): 28-37. Print. Wiltrout, Ann. “Decoro y risa: dos motivos dramáticos de El médico de su honra de Pedro Calderón de la Barca”. Luciano García (ed.) Calderón, actas del congreso internacional sobre Calderón y el teatro español del Siglo de Oro Tomo 1. Ma- drid: Consejo superior de investigaciones cientí- ficas, 1983. Print.

DEL ENREDO BARROCO AL MINIMA- LISMO BIZARRO: LAS BIZARRÍAS DE BELISA Y LA RENOVACIÓN ESCÉNICA DE LOS CLÁSICOS

ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Cornell University

Vivimos otros tiempos y existen otras necesidades, por lo que consideramos impres- cindible disponer de una cantera de profesiona- les, para que la transmisión no se interrumpa, para que la tradición no vuelva a estar ausente; por eso, la Joven no pretende ser una escuela, sino una compañía de actores jóvenes que se de- dicará más intensamente que otros elencos a la formación, a la investigación y al estudio de nuestro repertorio clásico para su adaptación al espectador del teatro presente. —Eduardo Vasco, “Senado ilustre” 9

La Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC), durante el liderazgo de Eduardo Vasco, inauguró en el 2007 la Joven CNTC con el objetivo de propiciar una continuidad en la renovación, re- presentación y difusión de la dramaturgia clásica

153

154 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 española. Por ende, una de las claves para lograr dicha meta ha consistido en la exhaustiva formación de un elenco de jóvenes actores, todos menores de treinta años. Hasta el 2011 esta compañía novel ha desplegado en escena —con una muy buena acogi- da por parte del público y de la crítica— tres montajes de Lope de Vega y uno de Diego de Figueroa y Córdoba, respectivamente; Las bizarrías de Belisa (Vasco, 2007), La noche de San Juan (Helena Pi- menta, 2009), La moza de cántaro (Vasco, 2010) y Todo es enredos Amor (Álvaro Lavín, 2011). No obstante, cabe subrayar que lo prometedor de este revitalizador proyecto artístico y formativo no se debe exclusivamente a la iniciativa de Vasco.11 Adolfo Marsillach, en su empeño por forjar una tra- dición de la puesta en escena de los clásicos en Es- paña, concibió a finales de los ochenta la creación de una escuela de teatro que, lamentablemente, quedó reducida a un par de cursillos liderados por artistas de renombre (Marsillach 465). 2 El germen de la idea parece haber visto la luz veintiún años más tarde con el estreno, a modo simbólico, de Las bizarrías de Belisa (1634), por ser la última comedia de gran riqueza dramática y vital, escrita por un Lope ya septuagenario. Es su última comedia, fechada en 1634, y publicada por primera vez en La vega del Parnaso en 1937 (Gon- zález 144). Teresa J. Kirschner y Aurelio González apuntan que se representó al menos en cuatro oca-

Fernández 155 siones en 1635 por la compañía de Andrés de la Vega, con María de Córdoba, también conocida como “La gran sultana”, interpretando el papel de Belisa (77; 144). Partiendo de lo expuesto hasta el momento, este artículo evalúa, a través del análisis del montaje de Vasco de Las bizarrías más que de su trama, estructura o avatares simbólicos, de qué manera la Joven, escuela satélite de una compañía del peso y renombre de la CNTC, se acerca a la de- licada y controversial tarea de la renovación de un clásico teatral. En las páginas que siguen problema- tizaré los límites entre la revitalización y la “reescri- tura escénica” de una comedia del Siglo XVII, a partir de un examen de los distintos cambios textuales y estéticos incluidos en la adaptación que afec- tan de manera frontal al texto de Lope. 3

La mise en abîme del Amor

Uno de los compromisos que Vasco ha man- tenido de manera inflexible con su joven compañía, desde su fundación, ha sido el de proteger el concepto de repertorio y, por lo tanto, el de conceder a los catorce actores que forman el elenco un papel, por pequeño que sea, en cada uno de los montajes. Esta idea, que puede resultar tan obvia en teoría, requiere en la práctica una arriesgada manipulación del texto original. En efecto, en la puesta en escena de Las bizarrías el cambio estructural de mayor impacto es la reorganización de los personajes. En la obra de Lope existe un total de once dramatis per-

156 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 sonae entre principales y secundarios: (1) Belisa, dama; (2) Finea, criada de Belisa; (3) Celia, dama; (4) Lucinda, dama; (5) Fabia, criada de Lucinda; (6) don Juan de Cardona; (7) Tello, criado de don Juan; (8) Octavio, galán; (9) Julio, galán; (10) el Conde Enrique; y (11) Fernando, criado del Conde. Ade- más de los mencionados, el autor incluye a otros personajes de trasfondo, más desdibujados y, un número sin especificar de criados y de músicos y dos hombres anónimos. La versión de Vasco, aunque mantiene a la mayoría de estos personajes, incluye tres cambios superficiales que difícilmente deforman la esencia de la trama: (a) Octavio y Julio, galanes en la obra de Lope, pasan a convertirse en soldadotes en la versión de Vasco; (b) Fernando — originalmente criado del Conde— se transforma en “secretario” de éste y; (c) finalmente, los músicos que figuran en el reparto original se substituyen por un único maestro pianista. Aparte de estas tres alteraciones, que no tienen una mayor repercusión, el director incluye a tres personajes —Marcela, Flora y Augusto (cochero)— cuyas intervenciones conllevan un exceso de versos apócrifos que pueden desvirtuar la esencia del texto original. Vasco, sin embargo, parece haber calibrado de antemano este riesgo al fundir con suti- leza a estos entes dentro del guión dramático, gracias a dos mecanismos que “lijan” su artificialidad. La primera estrategia, que denominaré como “reci- claje de la palabra poética,” se basa en la reutiliza- ción de poemas o parlamentos pertenecientes a otras

Fernández 157 obras de Lope para cada una de las intervenciones de Marcela, Flora y Augusto. La segunda táctica es la inclusión contextualizada de cada uno de estos tres personajes, dentro de la interpretación del contexto de la obra, consiguiendo que su presencia es- cénica enfatice los mensajes más sugestivos para el espectador actual. Marcela, caracterizada en el guión dramático como una “dama querellosa contra el amor,” ejerce de maestra de ceremonias a partir de tres sonetos escritos por Lope, calculadamente intercalados en los momentos más cruciales de la trama: al inicio, al cierre del primer acto, y una vez concluida la obra. No obstante, este singular personaje no se mezcla con el resto sino que permanece dramática, física y estéticamente distanciada de los demás, a través de estos solos líricos interpretados desde el proscenio que exhalan un glamour de diva de los años cuarenta. Por ejemplo, nótese que el vestuario que luce Marcela en sus tres intervenciones tiene un corte de sobria elegancia —gabardina de raso, traje de cha- queta, vestido de noche, todos ellos de tonos negros. La contemporaneidad del tema “Doll is Mine” (2004) del grupo de rock alternativo Blonde Red- head que acompaña a cada una de estas espectaculares e histriónicas intervenciones también contribuye a delimitar temporalmente el marco metadramático desde el cual se pone en perspectiva el resto de la comedia. En efecto, su querella en contra del amor, dividida en tres partes, parece funcionar como ad- vertencia para que el espectador observe, a cierta

158 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 distancia, las consecuencias de los peligrosos juegos de Cupido, ejemplificadas a través de los enredos de la trama. En el primer soneto, Marcela recrimina al amor su naturaleza traicionera, responsable de cau- sar estragos en las vidas y corazones ajenos (Zubie- ta, “Estructura” 24):

MAR. Si en un carcaj dorado están metidas, Amor, tu flechas, bien se ve que a tiento, ciego, las sacas, con diverso intento del que después se mira las heridas. Quitas sin vista diferentes vidas; y como las esparces por el viento, y el blanco no se ve del pensamiento, por eso quieres y por eso olvidas. Tirando así, no hay alma que resista las duras puntas de tus flechas fieras, porque el mundo contigo se resista. ¡Oh, si con vista, dulce amor nacieras, y acertaras las almas con la vista! Mas no fueras Amor, si la tuvieras. (1-14)

Vasco recicla estos versos de Lope para adelantar el conflicto de la comedia y sugerir la tensión latente entre el amor y el dolor. Esto se ilustra también al inicio de la trama, al presentar in media res a una Belisa vestida de “luto galán” por haber perdido su libertad tras haberse enamorado de don Juan de Cardona, quien en un principio no parece corres- ponderle.4

Fernández 159 A continuación, el segundo soneto de Mar- cela, al final del primer acto, resalta el poder infalible del Amor (Zubieta, “Estructura” 24):

MAR. Amor, todos se quejan que eres loco; Pues años tienes ya para ser cuerdo. Todos se pierden donde yo me pierdo. si eres tan viejo, ¿Cómo sabes poco? Viéndote niño, a furia me provoco pues, con haberlo oído no me acuerdo cuánto ha que llevas en el hombro izquierdo colgado el arco, cuyas flechas toco. Tras tanta cantidad de desengaños estás como primero, antojadizo, tan niño en el llorar y en los engaños mas eres como el cielo movedizo, que, habiendo dado vuelta seis mil años, está tan mozo como Dios lo hizo. (846-59)

La irracionalidad e inconstancia del Amor denun- ciadas en estos versos resultan claves en el desarrollo del conflicto. Durante el segundo acto, después de que Belisa y don Juan consiguen dar celos a Lu- cinda, ésta se siente repentinamente atraída por el galán, lo que provoca en don Juan un rechazo al verse, inesperadamente, deseado por la que hasta ahora se había mostrado esquiva. Finalmente, en el último soneto, al final del tercer acto, Marcela presenta al dios Amor como vencedor (Zubieta, “Estructura” 25), intervención

160 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 que dialoga con el triunfo de la protagonista y las creencias apasionadas del propio Lope:

MAR. Amor, enfermedad de los sentidos, fundada en tiernos, fáciles antojos, ¡qué presto satisfaces a los ojos! Lo que pudo faltar a los oídos! Algunos pensamientos, atrevidos a darme más victoria que despojos, dieron dulce principio a mis antojos y entraron a robar desconocidos. Vienes y vas, Amor pero no eres poderoso ni igual en tus extremos; porque bien sabes que si matas, mueres. Comienzas bien, pero tu fin tenemos; porque vienes, Amor, cuando tu quieres, y no te puedes ir cuando queremos. (2337-350)

Marcela se convierte, por lo tanto, en una portavoz de los distintos efectos del Amor puestos en perspectiva por la trama de la comedia. Irene Andrés- Suárez, refiriéndose al funcionamiento de la autore- ferencialidad en el teatro del Siglo de Oro, afirma que el marco suele ser más verídico y realista que lo que se representa dentro de él:

Al estructurarse la pieza teatral en varios planos, con distintos grados de realidad sub- jetiva, se crea la ilusión de que lo que se representa en la pieza encuadrante es más real,

Fernández 161 mientras lo que sucede en la/las interior/es correspondería al mundo ficticio, imagina- rio. (13)

Si bien el personaje de Marcela es una invención del director, su presencia escénica se justifica dentro de los parámetros de la revitalización de la comedia al establecer una relación más cercana con el públi- co contemporáneo y, a la vez, recalcar el espíritu de Lope como poeta enamorado: “En efecto, en Las bizarrías de Belisa, el enamorado poeta Lope da rienda suelta no a la evocación abstracta del Amor sino a la representación viva de la acción de amar” (Kirschner, “Los disfraces” 79).

Movilidad y tráfico escénico

Al contrario de Marcela, Flora y Augusto son los otros dos personajes apócrifos del reparto que se erigen como entes mucho más apegados a la realidad económica y social de la España del siglo XVII. En este sentido vale tener en cuenta una ob- servación harto conocida, que Lucien Goldman resume así:

[…] toda gran obra literaria y poética es un producto social y no puede ser comprendida en su unidad sino a partir de la realidad his- tórica, sino que también, e inversamente, el análisis estructural de la vida cultural y en especial de la obra literaria constituye un

162 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 medio de acceso particularmente importante para comprender la estructura de la cons- ciencia y de la práctica de los grupos sociales existentes. (16)

En este sentido Las bizarrías, además de ser una comedia urbana y de enredo, es también un valioso documento sobre la sociedad madrileña cambiante del momento, debido en parte al apabullante creci- miento de la población —de 65.000 habitantes en 1606 a 175.000 en 1636— desde que Madrid se convirtió en la capital permanente (Bass 130). Esta explosión demográfica, según Enrique García San- to-Tomás, problematizó profundamente la relación entre “comportamiento humano y entorno arquitec- tónico” (“Introducción” 21) como ilustra Flora, en- cargada de enfatizar la movilidad entre los distintos espacios en la comedia. Contrariamente a la intensidad emotiva de Marcela, Flora aparece caracterizada por una inocente feminidad que va a la par con la naturaleza ligera de sus intervenciones, limitadas a la enuncia- ción de los distintos lugares en los que se desarrolla la trama: “Sala en casa de Belisa” (I, 35; II, 50), “Soto del manzanares” (II, 56), “Un coche” (III, 73), y recuérdese que las referencias de estas acotaciones indican el número de página de la adaptación textual de Vasco.5 En otras dos ocasiones, estas breves acotaciones implican también una juguetona interacción con el resto de los personajes:

Fernández 163 “Flora va a hablar pero Belisa, Celia y Finea le pisan la frase.”

FLO. ¡Sala en casa de Belisa! “Flora se marcha indignada.” (68)

………………………………………………………

“Se van todos menos el Conde, desconsolado. Flora hace un gesto al resto de la Compañía.

TODOS. Sala en casa de Belisa. (75)

Según declara Isabel Rodes, intérprete del personaje de Flora en el montaje: “Lo maravilloso es hacer grandes los personajes pequeñitos. Flora adquiere importancia dentro de la obra y forma un todo” (Zubieta, “Los personajes” 30). El hecho de que en esta comedia cada protagonista tenga su propio espacio (Sileri 159) justifica el “juego” de “personifi- car” las acotaciones espaciales, a través de este curioso ente de ficción que se infiltra entre las escenas y ensalza la interacción del individuo con su entorno. Si bien Vasco recalca la importancia del espacio a través de las intervenciones de Flora, tam- bién lo “desmaterializa” gracias a la estudiada ma- nipulación de catorce sillas con las que los actores construyen y de-construyen conceptualmente estan- cias y lugares a los que Flora dará un nombre concreto, como acabamos de subrayar.

164 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 Estas sillas, por su parte, están consciente- mente diseñadas para sugerir metafóricamente una compleja topografía madrileña, según explica Caro- lina González, escenógrafa de la puesta en escena:

Quería hacer una silla estilizada, que ya iba a ser un elemento que contuviera los espacios en sí misma. Debía contener la suficiente información para transportar al espectador al sitio concreto y, a la vez necesitaba que fuera esbelta y ligera. (Zubieta, “Entrevista a Carolina González” 52)

Fotógrafo Daniel Alonso. Foto perteneciente al Centro de Do- cumentación Teatral (CDT), Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música (INAEM), Ministerio de Cultura (Gobierno de España).

Los tapizados de los respaldos —todos distintos pero siguiendo un estilo uniforme inspirado en una estética decorativa de Art Nouveau— evocan lugares concisos gracias a una codificación de colores y diseños precisos:

Fernández 165

Hemos asignado, por supuesto, los verdes para el Soto, y luego blancos, oros para la casa de Belisa. El vestuario está también en esa tónica. El negro para la reja de la casa de Lucinda, que es el respaldo de la silla por detrás. Cuando todas las sillas se colocan en línea se pretendía buscar la verticalidad a través de esa combinación de terciopelos y rasos. (Zubieta, “Entrevista a Carolina Gon- zález” 53)

Paralelamente, las sillas funcionan también como un signo de la porosidad de los espacios limítrofes, claves en el funcionamiento del enredo de la comedia. Para García Santo-Tomás, las fachadas de las casas, los jardines, las verjas e incluso los aposentos de las protagonistas están siendo continuamente traspasados por don Juan o el Conde Enrique, sin que ello suscite una crítica de moral (“Introducción” 41). Esta constante redefinición de los espacios pú- blicos y exteriores versus los privados e interiores, y viceversa, encuentra su materialización escénica en la ligereza y movilidad de las catorce sillas. Si bien Flora se convierte en un referente espacial, su personaje también subraya la tempora- lidad de la trama al pronosticar la llegada de la noche y declamar un soneto apócrifo —aunque escrito por Lope— que sigue el estilo recitativo de las intervenciones de Marcela:

166 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 FLO. Noche, fabricadora de embelecos loca, imaginativa, quimerista, que muestras al que en ti tu bien conquista los montes llanos y los mares secos; Habitadora de cerebros huecos, mecánica, filósofa, alquimista, encubridora vil, lince sin vista, espantadiza de tus mismos ecos. La sombra, el miedo, el mal se te atribuya, solícita, poeta, enferma y fría, manos del bravo y pies del fugitivo. Que vele o duerma, media vida es tuya: si velo te lo pago con el día y si duermo no siento lo que vivo. (1660-673)6

Este solo escénico, con el que se abre el tercer acto, encaja perfectamente dentro del simbolismo de la oscuridad como rentable mecanismo dramático en la trama:

Lo nocturno acentúa entonces un sentido de novedad en donde las calles, plazas y fuen- tes se convierten en rentables escenarios dramáticos ya familiares al madrileño del siglo XVII, que vive su ciudad desde un fas- cinante proceso simbiótico. (García Santo- Tomás, “Introducción” 39)

En este sentido, esta premonición de la nocturnidad es clave para el desarrollo del tercer acto, al tener

Fernández 167 lugar en plena noche y propiciar toda una serie de malentendidos que precipitarán el desenlace de la comedia. Si bien Marcela opera desde el marco de la comedia y Flora interviene desde los intersticios de la trama, el tercer personaje apócrifo, Augusto, se adentra en el conflicto dramático mientras ejerce de jocoso comentarista de las nuevas costumbres capitalinas. Su primera intervención, por ejemplo, es una descripción de la actividad social en las riberas del Manzanares durante los días festivos:

AUG/COCH. Pues, ¿no te deleita el ver tantos coches tan bizarros tantos entoldados carros, tanta gallarda mujer, y más locas las riberas del humilde Manzanares, que están los soberbios mares con sus naves y galeras? ¿No ves entre apuestos pinos cubiertos de blancas flores, tanta alfombra de colores vistiendo rudos pollinos, que ayer con las aguaderas traían el agua, y hoy, pasan ninfas de Madrid que abrasan las aguas de sus riberas? ¿Tanta guitarra y pandero, tanto sombrerillo y pluma, tanto amante? (1184-203)

168 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Este parlamento refleja el locus amoenus en el que se convirtieron las orillas de este madrileño río para el solaz de damas y galanes (García Santo-Tomás, “Introducción” 42). Por lo tanto, desde el primer parlamento el director relaciona al cochero con el entramado urbano y social del Madrid del siglo XVII. Aunque su segunda intervención tiene un ma- tiz mucho más filosófico que costumbrista, su tercer parlamento se centra enteramente en otro aspecto espacial y material, crucial en la comedia: el coche.7 En particular, en esta intervención, el propio Augus- to justifica la nobleza y funcionalidad de su oficio —“la cochería”— autorizándola con ilustres ejem- plos de la antigüedad:

AUG/COCH. Hay hombres que en decir dan que los cocheros es gente diabólica e insolente: y en muy necio engaño están. Los griegos y los troyanos los más valientes hacían cocheros, porque tenían riendas y armas en las manos. Héctor y Aquiles tuvieron cocheros de gran valor, a quien Virgilio, señor, y Homero mil honras dieron. En su coche cada día el sol el mundo rodea, y basta que el sol lo sea

Fernández 169 para honrar la cochería. (2118-133)

Estos versos subrayan además la moda del coche dentro de la cultura cosmopolita de la época y vie- nen a justificar los numerosos desplazamientos por Madrid descritos a lo largo de la comedia. Desde una perspectiva socio-histórica, García Santo- Tomás ha insistido en la importancia material y simbólica que va adquiriendo este vehículo en la sociedad:

[…] el coche se convierte en un territorio híbrido, en un lugar intermedio, acaso en un no-paisaje (o paisaje utópico) que elimina las distinciones entre lo público y lo privado, entre lo oculto y lo visible, entre lo estático y lo móvil y, desde estas categorías que par- cialmente engloba, en un motivo estético de extraordinario rendimiento que permite, una vez más, cuestionar la noción de espacio como algo contextual y acabado. (“Eros móvil” 217)

Y desde un punto de vista dramático para este mismo crítico, Las bizarrías expone, dentro del amplio repertorio de Lope, “el tratamiento más complejo del coche con relación a la construcción de las relaciones sociales que se llevan a escena” (“Eros mó- vil” 229). Por su parte el director hace de este “espacio móvil” el centro estético de su puesta en escena, al utilizar simbólicamente un piano de cola

170 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 como coche de caballos, para mimetizar los múlti- ples trayectos de los protagonistas por la urbe ma- drileña. González, efectivamente, se inspiró en el piano/coche para diseñar la estética del resto del decorado:

Partimos de este elemento [el piano] cuando empezamos a jugar con la estética: el suelo tiene que ver con el piano, es como un pro- longación suya, el brillo del suelo, que es como una lámina, el brillo de las paras de las sillas… (Zubieta, “Entrevista a Carolina González” 52)

Tanto las sillas como el piano se erigen en este montaje como signos escénicos de las costumbres sociales del momento, estrechamente entrela- zadas con las relaciones interpersonales que des- pliegan los personajes. Por una parte, Vasco utiliza la constante manipulación de las sillas para sugerir la permeabilidad de los espacios interiores y exteriores. Esto viene a subrayar la ambigüedad de los límites entre lo público y lo privado y alude, a su vez, a una mayor liberalidad en la dinámica de las relaciones amorosas. Por otra parte, las referencias a los constantes desplazamientos y al uso del coche —simbolizados por la presencia del piano como pieza central del decorado—implican no sólo una ciudad en vías de desarrollo sino también, en palabras de García Santo-Tomás, una

Fernández 171 nueva cartografía amorosa en donde los amantes deberán encontrarse superando las previas imposiciones de un tráfico incesante de carruajes, personas y, fundamentalmente, se sentimientos que se cruzan. (“Introduc- ción” 47)8

Cultura material y glamour hollywoodiense

En relación con el trasiego espacial y el cre- ciente tráfico urbano, la comedia exhibe toda una gama de bienes materiales. En ella el consumismo parece haberse convertido en un requisito para la seducción, según le confiesa don Juan a Belisa, respecto a su experiencia de cortejar a Lucinda:

D. JUAN. Gasté, empobrecí; mi padre, enojado, descuidóse de mi socorro, y Lucinda (que éste es de esta dama el nombre), desdeñosa, apuros celos me mata viéndome pobre. (247-52)9

Esta dinámica del intercambio también la ponen en evidencia las dos protagonistas femeninas, las cuales se refieren al amor y a los galanes como bienes de consumo, igual de intercambiables que las prendas de vestir que se prestan entre ellas (2123-128) o que, incluso, se ceden entre ama y criada (1048-56):

BEL. No hacemos nada con eso.

172 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 Vuesa merced se ha engañado: que este galán me le llevo como mi marido, a casa. (928-43, énfasis mío)

……………………………………….……………

LUC. […] yo soy aquella mujer que, engañada de mi sombra, le pedí el galán prestado sobre prendas y lisonjas. (1879-882, énfasis mío)

Tanto la expresión “llevarse” (930) como “pedir prestado” (1881) pertenecen a un discurso consu- mista del que Belisa y Lucinda se apropian para hablar de los hombres. Pero, además de equiparar a los galanes a bienes de consumo, la moda y los accesorios personales pasan a ocupar también un papel crucial en la trama. Este énfasis por lo material del que hace alarde la obra llega a equiparar al amor con un sistema de intercambio económico, lo que se debe en opinión de Kirschner a la falta de una verdadera ocupación de los protagonistas:

Todos ellos, salvo los criados (claro está), viven de la renta que han heredado o de los medios que reciben de padres y tutores. De ahí la importancia de la ostentación que Lo-

Fernández 173 pe retrata con la presencia del vestido y el derroche del dinero, con la alusión a los pa- seos en coche, meriendas, fiestas, regalos de joyas y demás. (“Los disfraces” 64)

En efecto, la comedia exhibe explícita e implícita- mente todo un lujoso escaparate de complementos, de accesorios/objetos para el hogar y sobre todo de moda, requisito fundamental en un ambiente cortesano (García-Santo Tomás, “Tráfico barroco” 45).10 Dentro de los parámetros sociales del momento, Encarnación Juárez-Almendros apunta a propósito de la función de la vestimenta en la literatura de la época que:

[…] las representaciones sartoriales reflejan configuraciones del cuerpo social, pero tam- bién del cuerpo y de la personalidad individual. Los personajes literarios se afirman y se sitúan dentro de las estructuras lingüísti- cas a través de su aspecto. Las apariencias comunican y ocultan. Con ellas se manifiestan deseos conscientes o inconscientes, sen- sualidad, continuidad y resistencia. Estos elementos del sistema sartorial construyen el entramado lingüístico e ideológico de los textos. (350)

Este sería el caso de la protagonista cuando aparece de “luto galán” al comienzo de la comedia: “Entra BELISA con un vestido entero de luto galán, flores

174 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 negras en el cabellos, guantes de seda negra y valona, y FINEA” (81). Más adelante, Belisa explicará a Celia la razón de llevar prendas tan contradicto- rias:

CEL. Ya la novedad recelo. Dijéronme que te habían visto con luto en la calle Mayor, aunque gala y talle la causa contradecían, y hallo que todo es verdad; pero tanta bizarría no es tristeza.

BEL. Celia mía, ¡murió!...

CEL. ¿Quién?

BEL. …mi libertad. (44-52)

Si bien el traje de “luto galán” podría representar cierta pasividad por parte de la protagonista, tam- bién deja entrever el deseo latente de ser vista y de atraer. A este propósito Aurelio González ha notado cómo el color negro, después de esta primera “di- dascalía icónica” relacionada al atuendo de Belisa, se traspasa a Lucinda. Por ejemplo, cuando la protagonista se refiere a su contrincante como “Ninfa del sombrero negro / y los guantes de achiote” (912- 13) (146).11

Fernández 175 En efecto, según avanza la trama y la protagonista se vuelve más activa en sus tretas para ena- morar a don Juan, ésta no duda en lucir todo su guardarropa, según se sugiere en el resto de las acotaciones de la obra que describen el vestuario de Belisa, incluso prendas varoniles cuando se disfraza de hombre en las distintas escenas:

(1)“BELISA entre con la mayor gala de color que pueda, manto y sombrero de plumas, y FINEA de la misma suerte.” (107)

(2) “BELISA, con diferente vestido del que llevó al campo.” (121)

(3) “BELISA y FINEA, con sombreros de plumas y ferreruelos con oro, y dos pistolas.” (157)

(4) “Entren BELISA, muy bizarra, y CELIA.” (181)

De igual manera, existen también acotaciones im- plícitas en los parlamentos de los demás personajes que demuestran el asombro de ver a la protagonista tan bien vestida:

D. JUAN. ¡Qué bizarra!, ¡Qué galarda! ¡Qué talle!, ¡qué lindo aseo! (785-86)

………………………………………………………

176 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

CEL. No te espante que pregunte para qué es tan nueva gala, y vestirse a tales horas. (2647-649)

Según demuestran estos parlamentos, Belisa utiliza paulatinamente el esplendor de sus galas como arma de asombro, de seducción e, incluso, de venganza. En efecto, con la complicidad de don Juan, la protagonista tiende la trampa final a Lucinda, utilizando como cebo uno de sus vestidos:

D. JUAN. Díjome que en un papel que Lucinda le escribió (que por eso me llamó, para darme parte de él), la escribe que hoy se desposa; que a tanta ventura tengo, que yo propio a daros vengo las gracias, lucinda hermosa; y que en razón del vestido, que le honréis tiene a favor sus galas, con el mejor y que nunca le ha servido. (2587-598, énfasis mío)

Ahora bien, para escenificar la riqueza verbal del vestuario, de los accesorios y de los demás bienes materiales, todos ellos intrínsecamente ligados en esta comedia al funcionamiento del Amor, Vasco opta por substituir a nivel visual muchos de estos

Fernández 177 detalles textuales (Zubieta, “Entrevista a Eduardo Vasco” 39). Primeramente, el director juega con el efecto sorpresa de la vistosidad del atuendo de las protagonistas, como se demuestra en las acotaciones del guión de la adaptación:

(1) “Belisa, llamando a Finea, con el vestido cubierto y Celia.” (75)

(2) “Entran Lucinda, con el vestido cubierto, Fabia, el Conde, Don Juan, Tello, y el resto de acompañamiento.” (76)

(3) “Lucinda descubre su vestido. Todos reaccionan admirados.” (76)

(4) “Belisa descubre su vestido y todos vuelven a reaccionar admirados.” (76)

178 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

En segundo lugar, aunque Vasco apuesta por una ambientación atemporal en la que se entremezclan complementos típicos del siglo XVII como capas y espadas,12con un diseño sonoro contemporáneo —la música rock de Blonde Redhead o Études pour piano del compositor Gyorgy Ligeti—, la estética escénica se centra, concretamente, en dos manifes- taciones culturales populares: el musical hollywoodiense de los años treinta y el cine negro de la déca- da de los años cuarenta.13

Fernández 179

Fotógrafo Daniel Alonso. Foto perteneciente al Centro de Documentación Teatral (CDT), Instituto Nacional de las Artes Escénicas y de la Música (INAEM), Ministerio de Cultura (Gobierno de España).

Por un lado, los musicales de los años treinta contenían en su estructura fílmica elementos del medio teatral, tales como la presencia en algunas tomas de espectadores y de números musicales es- cenificados en vivo. También, en estas películas las canciones interpretadas por sus protagonistas se en- trelazan con la trama de la historia, por lo que Vas- co incluye en su montaje parlamentos de la comedia cantados por los propios actores (43; 57; 69), y con estas referencias nuevamente me refiero al número de páginas del guión dramático del montaje. Parale- lamente, el hecho de resaltar la jovialidad y desen- fado de la obra de Lope acerca esta puesta en escena

180 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 a la comedia musical en la cual el humor y la ale- gría desenfrenada marcó los primeros años de la década, justo antes de que los efectos de la Gran Depresión de 1929 empezaran a dejarse notar.14 Fi- nalmente, el director elije, como parte del diseño de sonido, varias canciones de los años treinta— “Pick Yourself Up,” “Dreaming a Dream,” “We’ll Make Hay While the Sun Shines,” “How’s Chances,” “In the Dark”—con el propósito de adentrar todos los sentidos del público en esta anacrónica ambienta- ción. Por otro lado, el cine negro de los años cuarenta es la otra corriente estética e ideológica en la que se inspira el montaje al dialogar con el texto original en cuanto al protagonismo otorgado a la urbe y a sus dos heroínas. En efecto, durante la noche la ciudad —definida por los clubs nocturnos, el latente peligro de sus calles o la alienación producto del capitalismo— es uno de los escenarios preferi- dos del cine negro, como ha apuntado Michael Walker:

[…] in film noir [the city at night], it is, rather bleak and isolating, and the hero tends to take the streets uneasily, aware of himself as an outsider. If the city may be taken as an image of capitalism, the gangster movie dwells on its luxury and spoils in a way which captures something of their allure; but in film noir the focus is on the seedy under- side of the city: the casualties or crooks of

Fernández 181 capitalism. Where the glamour and glitter are shown, there is typically a sense of al- ienation. (30)

El protagonismo de la ciudad nocturna dialoga plenamente con el tercer acto de la comedia, y a su vez responde estética e ideológicamente a la importancia escénica otorgada al poder de la noche a través del personaje de Flora y del suelo negro lacado — extensión estética del piano, como vimos— que in- vade la escena de una brillante oscuridad. A un tal propósito resulta interesante recalcar la compara- ción que hace García Santo-Tomás entre el protagonismo de la capital en esta comedia y la idea de David Harvey de la “arquitectura del espectáculo” (architecture of spectacle), aplicado originalmente al espacio urbano norteamericano y, concretamente, a la recreación de un ambiente escenificado y superficial donde los edificios/espacios se convierten en un signo de comunicación y la ciudad en un discurso que puede llegar a producir un placer efímero y transitorio (“Tráfico barroco” 33). Vasco logra con- ceptualizar en escena esta correlación a través de un montaje selectivamente minimalista. Otro de los factores cruciales que define al cine negro de los años cuarenta es la femme fatale como el motor de la acción (Walker 12). En Las bizarrías, Belisa y Lucinda encajan en la definición de “proto-femmes fatales” por ser las responsables de agilizar la trama a través de la manipulación de

182 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 sus respectivos galanes y subvertir los roles de gé- nero, como la propia Belisa misma reconoce:

BEL. No te parezca desorden que siendo mujer te cuente lo que es bien que otras ignoren; que aunque aguja y almohadilla son nuestras mallas y estoques, mujeres celebra el mundo que han gobernado escuadrones. Semíramis y Cleopatra Poetas e historiadores Celebran, y fue Tomiris famosa por todo el orbe. (126-36)

La protagonista, sin embargo, no sólo se limita a enunciar estas palabras sino que demuestra tales creencias al defender a don Juan —espada en mano y, más adelante, vestida de hombre y con escope- ta— y al desestabilizar la “aceptada binariedad sexual” (Kirschner, “Los disfraces” 72). Lucinda, aunque menos activa que la protagonista ejerce también pleno control sobre don Juan, al principio de la obra. Para González este liderazgo de las protagonistas implica un retrato de la mujer muy actual (143). Visto así, pasado y presente, original y adap- tación, compañía, puesta en escena, actores y espectadores se homologan para mantener la integridad del texto, incluidos los cambios.

Fernández 183

Conclusiones

Cabe concluir que el montaje de Vasco puede considerarse altamente arriesgado debido a un guión dramático que altera el texto original y a una ambientación que se desborda de los parámetros estéticos tradicionales de la comedia. El propio director es consciente de estas libertades al calificar su puesta en escena de “heterodoxa” y de “eclécti- ca,” llegando incluso a comentar en unas declara- ciones que “algunos espectadores que han ido a ver la obra se han llevado una sorpresa” (“La Compa- ñía”).15 Paralelamente, Vasco reiteró, a la hora de describir este espectáculo, su visible manipulación directoral:

La Belisa es lo que se llama un montaje de director. Refleja el momento estético que vivo, cómo estoy absorbiendo las cosas. En el que camino que yo llevo de aprender a di- rigir comedias del Siglo de Oro voy pasando por muchos sitios; ahora probablemente tengo las manos menos atadas que nunca pero el respeto más en guardia que nunca a la vez; el respeto por lo que amo, que es ese tipo de material. La Belisa ha sido un montaje muy ecléctico en ese sentido, porque yo necesitaba traducir el eclecticismo en el que

184 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 vivo. (Zubieta, “Entrevista a Eduardo Vas- co” 40)

Si bien algunas de las decisiones del montaje pueden resultar libérrimas a primera vista, cada uno de los cambios, que podemos tachar de más radicales, responden, como espero haber probado, a una sólida interpretación socio-histórica y cultural de la comedia de Lope. Marcela al dialogar con el Amor establece un marco temático que le recuerda al espectador la fuerza impredecible que rige la trama, ade- más del espíritu de su autor que recapacita sobre las pasiones amorosas. Flora, al vocalizar las acotaciones, guía al espectador por un decorado conceptual y subraya la importancia que adquiere el espacio y el continuo movimiento en la comedia. Paralela- mente, Augusto ilustra una urbe en ebullición donde los coches y el tráfico se convierten en las nuevas realidades capitalinas. Finalmente, la espectacularidad glamorosa y desenfada de musical de los años treinta y de este siglo refuerza la frescura del enredo, mientras que la estética del cine negro apunta a la alienación que conlleva el desarrollo económico y urbano y la incipiente subversión de los roles de género. El director, por lo tanto, si bien renueva es- tética, textual e ideológicamente la comedia original no trata su puesta en escena de manera conceptual, según la significación de Patrice Pavis de este estilo de montaje, ya que Vasco dialoga artística y creati- vamente con aquellas temáticas expuestas por Lope

Fernández 185 que más le pueden interesar al espectador actual.16 Juan Leyva indica que los tres pilares visuales nece- sarios en cualquier puesta en escena de Las biza- rrías son los mismos que Kirschner menciona a propósito de El galán de la Membrilla, comedia también de Lope: “1) el vestido, gesto, movimiento de los actores; 2) los adornos y objetos de utilerías y 3) la utilización de la relación espacial sinecdótica de la pared del fondo del tablado” (Leyva 98; Kirschner, “Estrategias,” 205). Vasco parece tener en cuenta estos tres puntos y, aunque los recrea a su manera, consigue fundirlos con la obra original. En mi opinión, la noción de respeto en rela- ción con la renovación de los clásicos que en su día proclamó Marsillach como misión artística de la CNTC parece haber dejado paso a una mayor libertad interpretativa por parte del director de escena, cuya labor creativa se hace cada vez más patente y visible pero dentro de las pautas regidas por el tex- to, como subrayó Enrique Centeno en su crítica de este montaje: “Importa, sobre todo, que al director se le vea, que se le admire al hacerlo a medias entre el autor y su originalidad” (“Las bizarrías”). Este punto medio mencionado por Centeno, en el que la visión renovadora del director busca un balance ar- tístico y creativo que respeta sin reverenciar y transforma sin desvirtuar la obra original, parece haber sido uno de los objetivos de la Joven CNTC, en la inauguración de su trayectoria escénica con Las bi- zarrías. Si consideramos las aportaciones artísticas de Vasco (Las bizarrías, La moza), Pimenta (La

186 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 noche) y Lavín (Todo es enredos) para esta compa- ñía no resulta arriesgado afirmar que todos los tres directores han experimentado con el concepto de renovación de los clásicos de manera innovadora pero siempre calibrando los límites de hasta donde se puede llevar una puesta en escena de director.

NOTAS

1 Según Vasco, esta joven compañía tardó dos años en formar- se y siguió un intenso proceso de aproximadamente cuatro- cientas audiciones para seleccionar a los catorce actores que compusieron su primer elenco y el reparto de Las bizarrías (Bravo). Ahora que Vasco ha cedido la dirección a Pimenta el futuro del proyecto es incierto, si bien es cierto que la nueva directora ha expresado en numerosas ocasiones de proseguirle. Pimenta ha estado estrechamente involucrada con la Jove CNTC desde el principio al haber participado personalmente en la selección de los elencos de las promociones del 2005 y del 2009 y haber dirigido el montaje de La noche de San Juan en el 2009, como directora invitada. 2 En un artículo publicado en el periódico El día de Toledo, respecto al estreno de la adaptación escénica del poema cer- vantino Viaje del Parnaso, José Luis Massó, ayudante de di- rección de la CNTC, comentaba cómo la “sombra” de Marsi- llach sigue estando muy presente en el espíritu de la Compa- ñía: “No estamos copiando a Adolfo pero sí teniendo la presencia de Adolfo” (Fernández). 3 Hasta la presente fecha, las puestas en escena comerciales representadas en España de Las bizarrías han sido cinco: Feli- pe Lluch (1941); Carlos Vides (1988); John Strasberg y Alicia Sánchez (1993); Antonio Simón Rodríguez (1999) y Eduardo Vasco (2007).

Fernández 187

4 Krischner llama la atención sobre esta acotación y explica sus implicaciones estéticas: “Entre ir de ‘luto’ e ir de ‘luto galán’ hay pues un desplazamiento de significados: la última expresión hace hincapié en la estilización y enriquecimiento del traje corriente de luto, siguiendo las normas dictadas por la última moda y mediante la ostentación de costosos adornos (flores en el pelo, guantes de seda)” (“Los disfraces” 63). 5 Es curioso notar cómo la oposición en la caracterización entre Marcela y Flora es un reflejo del contraste de personalidad entre la Belisa de Las bizarrías y la de Los melindres de Beli- sa—ambas comedias de Lope. Vasco otorga a sus dos personajes apócrifos femeninos los mismos rasgos de carácter que Lope a sus protagonistas tocayas. Esto crea un paralelismo entre Flora-Belisa (Melindres) y Marcela-Belisa (Bizarrías), como demuestra Manuela Sileri en su análisis métrico compa- rativo entre estas dos comedias: “En los dos extremos se si- túan la protagonista femenina de Melindres, caprichosa y pueril, que utiliza el romancillo, mientras que la Belisa de Biza- rrías, personaje más bien varonil, pronuncia un soneto” (160). 6 En esta aparición, Flora, al igual que Marcela en las suyas, aporta una nota de lírica espectacularidad a la puesta en escena si consideramos el llamativo traje de raso negro que luce, adornado de volantes y salpicado de piedras brillantes en la parte superior del corsé. 7 No transcribo aquí la segunda intervención de Augusto (1279-317) ya que temáticamente se sale de la problemática de este artículo al enfocarse en los remedios para dejar de amar. Su parlamento resulta ser un fragmento de la comedia, Los melindres de Belisa que Vasco pone en boca del cochero para justificar las ansias de éste por ganarse la confianza del Conde, demostrándole su conocimiento de lecturas cultistas y filosó- fícas sobre el amor (Zubieta, “Entrevista a Eduardo Vasco” 40). 8 Esta escenografía sinecdótica en lo referente a los distintos lugares también se llevó a cabo en la puesta en escena de Las bizarrías de 1993, para la recién inaugurada compañía Teatro

188 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 del Mundo. Sus directores, John Strasberg y Alicia Sánchez ambientaron la obra como si se tratara de un ensayo previo (Centeno, “Un Lope”) pero no consiguieron recrear con dinamismo el papel otorgado al espacio, tan arraigado a la trama y a sus protagonistas en la obra original: “La escenografía refuerza esos defectos. Pronto carga el tejemaneje de los actores haciendo en los oscuros de tramoyistas para cambiar y cambiar de sitio las empalagosas puertas vacías, cuya misión es definir los diferentes espacios teatrales, sobre todo las casas donde viven las dos hermosas que compiten por los amores de sus galanes: Lucinda y Belisa” (López Sancho). 9 Más adelante en la trama don Juan vuelve a reiterar, esta vez a su criado, la necesidad de tener liquidez económica para ejercer de amante digno en la corte: “¡Majadero!/¿Amores en la corte, sin dinero?/¿Y más ahora, que tan caro es todo?” (372-73). El Conde también parece apoyar esta estrategia de seducción al afirmar con respecto a Lucinda: “Tienes razón: ya no quiero/celos; servirla es mejor,/con amor y más amor,/con dinero y más dinero” 1887-890). 10 Algunos de los complementos personales que se destacan a lo largo de la comedia son: “peto doble de Milán” (154-55), “sombrero [de] pluma blanca y randas negras” (559-60), “sarta de cuentas de vidrio” (583), “verde pollera” (588), “chinelas” (592), “rosetas” (596), “manto sevillano” (615), “hábito de picote” (1053), “gabancillo leonado” (1074), “bigotera” (1077), “montera” (1091), “papahígo” (1093),“valona” (1592), “fénix de diamantes” (1559). Respecto a los accesorios para la casa, la obra menciona, por ejemplo: “retratos” (1098), “de raso de la China un pabellón” (1112-113), “tafetán” (1115), “baúles” (1116), “trastos de casa” (1116-117), “libros” (1118), “guitarra” (1118), “ante” (1118), “casco” (1118), “broquel” (1119). Específicamente, con relación al “peto doble de Mi- lán” véase Marcella Trambaioli. A propósito de los retratos en la literatura dramática de la época y de su importancia entre los círculos elitistas urbanos, véase Bass.

Fernández 189

11 Kirschner interpreta el contraste entre el blanco y el negro de la vestimenta de ambas protagonistas, como un símbolo cromático de su rivalidad (“Los disfraces” 66). Vasco traduce en escena este antagonismo plástico al contrastar los tonos dorados que caracterizan el vestuario de Belisa con los platea- dos que marcan el de Lucinda a lo largo de la representación. 12 Otros elementos atemporales del vestuario son por ejemplo el toque militar de la vestimenta de los criados masculinos o el erotismo juguetón de los trajes de las doncellas, inspirados en las novelas rosas de los años veinte (Zubieta,“Entrevista a Lorenzo Caprile” 49). 13 Ya en 1989, Carlos Vides dirigió Las bizarrías para la com- pañía Zascandil Teatro con una escenografía plagada de referencias al musical y al cine negro (Cortes). 14 El optimismo con el que Vasco envuelve su obra contrasta con la última puesta en escena de Las bizarrías dirigida por Antonio Simón Rodríguez en 1999. En este montaje, también inspirado en las películas hollywoodienses de los cuarenta (Fondevila) dominó un tono mucho más profundo y oscuro que dejaba entrever el cinismo de sus personajes (Ley). 15 Tanto el público como la crítica periodística nacional — según la prensa local de las distintas autonomías por las cuales la Joven CNTC hizo su gira de Las bizarrías— aplaudieron la adaptación del director y caracterizaron sus decisiones escéni- cas de acertadas e ingeniosas, en particular con respecto a su ambientación anacrónica. Quizás la peor crítica recibida fuera la de Miguel Verdú, en la Guía del Ocio, en la que comparó el trabajo directoral de Vasco con la puesta en escena de Cymbe- line, dirigida por Declan Donnellan, concluyendo que, aun teniendo puntos valiosos en común con la adaptación shakes- peareana del director británico, “el montaje de Vasco carecía de la textura poética del de Donnellan” (56). 16 Pavis contrapone el concepto de “conceptual mise en scene” al de “visible metatext or ultraviolet rays” y define el primero de la siguiente manera: “On the other hand, sometimes mise- en-scene is stressed and legible to such extent that it become a

190 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 critical commentary that in itself constitutes another separate work: the mise-en-scene is then ‘conceptual,’ in the sense of a ‘conceptual art.’ It takes itself to be such intelligence that ultimately it forgets it is mise-en-scene of, so as to be simply mise-en scene, reflection in its pure state: no longer material for reflection, simply reflection as its only material” (310-11).

Obras citadas

Andres-Suárez, Irene. “La autorreferencialidad en el teatro español del Siglo de Oro.” Teatro dentro del teatro: Cervantes, Lope, Tirso y Calderón. Ed. Irene Andres-Suárez, José Manuel López de Abiada y Pedro Ramírez Molas. Madrid: Ver- bum, 2007. 11-29. Impreso. Bass, Laura R. The Drama of the Portrait. Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain. Universi- ty Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Impreso. Bravo, Julio. “Las bizarrías de Belisa, un texto de Lope de Vega con el que se estrena esta compañía. La hora joven.” ABC. 7 de diciembre del 2007: 34- 35. Impreso. Centeno, Enrique. Rev. of Las bizarrías de Belisa de Lope de Vega. Teatro Crítica. Web. 12 de Julio del 2009. ---. “Un Lope simple.” Diario 16. 8 de octubre de 1993, Crítica teatro: sin paginación. Impreso. Cortes, Alfonso. “Las bizarrías de Belisa. Un Lope con tul y tacón de aguja.” Extremadura. 30 de octubre de 1988, Cultura: sin paginación. Impreso.

Fernández 191

Fernández, [C.?] “La Compañía Nacional rinde tributo a Miguel de Cervantes.” El día de Toledo. 5 de octubre del 2005:12. Impreso. Fondevila, Santiago. “Una comedia carnal de Lope de Vega llega al Tívoli dirigida por Antonio Si- món.” La Vanguadia. 23 de junio de 1999, Es- pectáculos: 57. Impreso. García Santo-Tomás, Enrique. “Eros móvil: encuentros clandestinos en los carruajes lopescos.” Amor y erotismo en el teatro de Lope de Vega. Actas de las XXV Jornadas de teatro clásico. Eds. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez, Elena E. Marcelloy y Ra- fael González Cañal. Almagro: Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, 2003. 213-34. Impreso. ---. “Tráfico barroco: urbanidad y urbanismo en Las bi- zarrías de Belisa de Lope de Vega.” Bulletin of the Comediantes 52.1 (2000): 31-53. Impreso. ---. “Introducción.” Las bizarrías de Belisa. Madrid: Cá- tedra, 2004. 11-77. Impreso. Goldmann, Lucien. El teatro de Jean Genet. Trad. Gui- llermo Sucre. Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1968. Impreso. González, Aurelio. “Las bizarrías de Belisa: texto dra- mático y texto spectacular.” El escritor y la escena II. Ed. Ysla Campbell. Ciudad Juárez: Uni- versidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1994: 143-53. Impreso. Júarez-Almendros, Encarnación. “El consumo textil y la producción de ideologías textuales: aportaciones teóricas al estudio de las letras áureas.” Materia Crítica. Formas de ocio y de consumo en la cultura áurea. Ed. Enrique Gracía Santo-Tomás.

192 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2009. 253-68. Impreso. Kirschner, Teresa. “Estrategias dramáticas en el teatro de Lope de Vega: la expresión visual en El galán de la Membrilla.” Studia aurea. Actas del III Congreso de la Asociación Internacional del Si- glo de Oro. Eds. Ignacio Arellano, Marías del Carmen Pinillos, Frédéric Serralta y Marc Vitse. Pamplona: Universidad de Toulouse Le Mirail: 1996. 205-13. Impreso. ---. “Los disfraces de Belisa: incursión en Las bizarrías de Belisa, de Lope de Vega.” La década de Oro de la comedia española 1630-1640. Actas de las XIX Jornadas de teatro clásico. Eds. Felipe B. Pedraza Jiménez y Rafael González Cañal. Al- magro: Universidad de Castilla la Mancha, 1997. 61-83. Impreso. “La Compañía de Teatro Clásico apuesta por el musical para su nuevo Lope de Vega.” Levante. El mer- cantil valenciano. 16 de noviembre del 2007, Cultura: 71. Impreso. Ley, Pablo. “Las bizarrías de Belisa. Un Lope insufi- ciente.” El País. 13 de julio de 1999, Teatro: sin paginación. Impreso. Leyva, Juan. “Métrica y teatralidad en Lope de Vega: Las bizarrías de Belisa.” Texto, espacio y movimiento en el teatro del Siglo de Oro. Ed. Aurelio González. México: El Colegio de México, 2000. 91-112. Impreso. Lope de Vega. Las bizarrías de Belisa. Ed. Enrique Gar- cía Santo-Tomás. Madrid: Cátedra, 2004. Im- preso.

Fernández 193

---. Las bizarrías de Belisa. Dir. Eduardo Vasco. Perf. Eva Rufo, Silvia Nieva, David Boceta and Javier Lara. La Joven Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. Teatro Pavón, Madrid. 13 de diciembre 2007. Representación. López Sancho, Lorenzo. “Una ‘Belisa’ de festival, en el Albéniz.” ABC. 4 de octubre de 1993, Crítica de teatro: sin paginación. Impreso. Marsillach, Adolfo. Tan lejos, tan cerca. Mi vida. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1998. Impreso. Pavis, Patrice. Analyzing Performance, Theater, Dance and Film. Trad. David Williams. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003. Impre- so. Sileri, Manuela. “Belisa entre melindres y bizarrías: có- mo cambia la organización dramática de la comedia urbana.” Métrica y estructura dramática en el teatro de Lope de Vega. Ed. Fausta Anto- nucci. Kassel: Reichenberger, 2007. 133-62. Im- preso. Trambaioli, Marcella. “La cultura material de las ciuda- des italianas en el teatro aursecular: telas, cortes, armas, oro de Milán...” Matería Crítica. Formas de ocio y de consumo en la cutura áurea. Ed. Enrique Gracía Santo-Tomás. Madrid: Iberoa- mericana/Vervuert, 2009. 355-81. Impreso. Vasco, Eduardo. (Adapt.) Las bizarrías de Belisa. Textos de teatro clásico 18. Madrid: Compañía Nacio- nal de Teatro Clásico, 2007: 35-77. Impreso. ---. “Senado ilustre, el poeta, / que ya las musas dejaba.” Las bizarrías de Belisa. Textos de teatro clásico 18. Madrid: Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clá- sico, 2007: 7-10. Impreso.

194 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Verdú, Miguel. “Las Bizarrías de Belisa.” Guía del Ocio. 28 de diciembre del 2007, Teatro: 56. Im- preso. Walker, Michael. “Film Noir. Introduction.” The Book of Film Noir. Ed. Ian Cameron. New York: Con- tinuum, 1993. Impreso Zubieta, Mar. “Entrevista a Carolina González, escenó- grafa en Las bizarrías de Belisa, de Lope de Ve- ga.” Las Bizarrías de Belisa. Cuadernos peda- gógicos 26. Madrid: Compañía Nacional de Tea- tro Clásico, 2007: 52-3. Impreso. ---. “Entrevista a Eduardo Vasco, director en Las biza- rrías de Belisa, de Lope de Vega.” Las Bizarrías de Belisa. Cuadernos pedagógicos 26. Madrid: Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, 2007: 38- 41. Impreso. ---. “Entrevista a Lorenzo Caprile, figurinista en Las bi- zarrías de Belisa, de Lope de Vega.” Las Biza- rrías de Belisa. Cuadernos pedagógicos 26. Madrid: Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, 2007: 48-50. Impreso. ---. “Estructura de la acción: el tiempo y el espacio.” Las Bizarrías de Belisa. Cuadernos pedagógicos 26. Madrid: Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico, 2007: 23-5. Impreso. ---. “Los personajes.” Las Bizarrías de Belisa. Cuader- nos pedagógicos 26. Madrid: Compañía Nacio- nal de Teatro Clásico, 2007: 26-34. Impreso.

Interview

TIRSO’S DAMNED BY DESPAIR AT LONDON’S NATIONAL THEATRE: AN INTERVIEW WITH BIJAN SHEIBANI

MARYRICA ORTIZ LOTTMAN University of North Carolina Charlotte

12 October 2012

Tirso de Molina’s theological masterpiece El condenado por desconfiado (Damned by Despair) was recently transposed to the London stage by Bijan Sheibani, Associate Director of the Royal National Theatre. Damned by Despair graced the National’s huge Olivier Theatre, which can seat an audience of 1150. As part of the National’s Travelex series, this production offered nearly half of its seats for only £12 each, attracting an unusually wide audience to this comedia. One of its two stars, Bertie Carvel, also headlines Matilde, the Musical, a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company that moves to Broadway in spring 2013. Tirso’s theological masterpiece dramatizes the moral decay and eventual damnation of the hermit Paulo, even as the murderer Enrico learns to

195

196 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 embrace human love, divine mercy and ultimate salvation. Playwright Frank McGuinness’s verse adaptation, written expressly for the National, divides Tirso’s play into two acts.1 Even during the production’s week-long theatrical previews, director Bijan Sheibani continued to make radical changes, and he eventually subtracted 35 minutes from the running time, chiefly by condensing the early comic scenes set in Naples.

MOL: This is an ambitious production and an ambitious play with huge themes. Could you talk about choosing this work?

BS: Sir Nicolas Hytner, Director of the National Theatre, asked me to read it. Frank McGuinness wrote this version in 2009 and I got passed it just last year. It’s the first play that I’ve done pre-Ibsen. So it was a big leap for me to go into that century and into that world. I had just done The House of Bernarda Alba at the Almeida Theare at the beginning of 2012, so there was a Spanish link. I loved that play, and I just trusted that at some point I would make a connection with this one. I eventually did. To be completely honest, I feel the piece that’s on now is unfinished. I can imagine myself revisiting it in 20 or 30 years, or doing another play from that period. For Damned by Despair, the first question I came to was, “How is a modern, largely secular audience going to connect with a largely theological

Ortiz Lottman 197 play?” The answer didn’t really come to me until mid-rehearsals, if I’m completely honest. I started to realize that this play was really about a fear of being cast out. And that could be cast out of heaven, or cast out of a relationship, or cast out of a monastery. At the time that Molina was writing it, around 1625, someone in the Hapsburg court was on him and he was under investigation.2 So it wouldn’t surprise me if his own personal fear of being cast out of his monastery and not being able to be a playwright anymore was also one of the fuels for the story. The emotional scale of the play really started to get to me through rehearsals and it wasn’t something that came off the page for me.

MOL: Did you choose the Olivier Theatre specifically because of its size and because it has that five-story, hugely versatile drum revolve for special effects?

BS: Nick chose the venue for it. They like to put a range of play in there, not just modern ones, for the £12 Travelex season.

MOL: The Olivier is modeled on the ancient Greek amphitheater at Epidaurus, and very appropriately, Damned by Despair is about heaven and hell and the sky and these colossal landscapes.

BS: The play has epic proportions to it. And yes, you can really feel the heavens in that theatre. It’s

198 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 got challenges, though, that space. Seeing an actor’s eyes isn’t really an easy thing to do in that space. So moving a play from the rehearsal room into the Olivier is a big leap in a way it might not be if you are just moving it into the Cottesloe, the smallest stage here at the National.

MOL: Do you have to change the blocking when you move the play?

BS: You do. You try to imagine the expansive seating. You know the stage itself is so big that all you’ve really got room for in the rehearsal room is the stage area. (Moves his chair back against the wall.) In the rehearsal room I sit up against a wall, like this, on what is basically Row A. When you get into the Olivier, there is suddenly this huge space that also needs to be filled. It can be very difficult to predict how something is going to suit one space. For example, you take some furniture that suits a particular room, then you move it into another room and it doesn’t always look right. (Moves his chair again.) In the theatre what you’ve got to do–in a short period of time–is to adjust the set and build it for the new dimensions and the new architecture. Also with this particular play, there were a lot of elements that weren’t in the rehearsal room, like the video projections or the Mountain.

MOL: By “the Mountain” you mean the large central trapdoor with the jagged lid that is propped

Ortiz Lottman 199 up to form the silhouette of a mountain. The opening of the trapdoor faces the audience, and the opposite side of the lid contains a ladder. When an actor stands at the top of the ladder he or she seems to be standing on a mountain peak.

BS: Right.

MOL: And up in the sky you had those three big arches that to me suggested the frames of church windows.

BS: Giles Cadle, the set designer, was really interested in religious triptychs. In the sky he created our huge Triptych that’s meant to be a fallen one.

MOL: Oh, I see! Right. One arched “window” of the Triptych leans down towards the stage floor, and you can see the sky through the three empty windows in the Triptych. Below them stand very jagged, distant mountains ending in a darker, more distant summit. And below those mountains, flat- topped boulders lead almost like natural steps upward. At any point did you think about creating those boulders and distant mountains in 3 dimensions?

BS: The two-dimensionality of the mountains and boulders is seen in those early religious paintings.

200 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 They are quite cartoon-like—not like Disney cartoons but like a flattened graphic.

MOL: At least during the early preview performances, another major part of the scenery was a wheeled flat that showed a generalized city-scape of early modern Naples. It contained several doors, and could be turned around or spun or opened up, and various facades could be unfolded from it. Did you have that flat in the rehearsals? Do you call it a flat?

BS: Yeah, it’s a flat, a truck. We had a version of it, a mock-up. The “Mini-triptych” we were calling it, because it would open up and shut. The setting is meant to look like a painting has fallen out of the Triptych.

MOL: Oh, wow! I get it. That whole set was richly suggestive. The space under the lifted lid of the Mountain suggested the cave of the hermit Paulo (Sebastian Armesto), especially since when we first see Paulo he is standing on the Mountain just above that dark opening. There is also a little cave at the front of the stage, under the lid of the small trapdoor where Paulo’s servant Pedrisco (Rory Keenan) enters.

BS: He enters, toting his bale of hay.

Ortiz Lottman 201 MOL: And he makes us laugh. –Could you talk about representing hell and spiritual spaces for a modern audience? For example, at the end of the play Paulo describes his own descent into hell, and there you used the Olivier’s famous drum revolve to give us this huge special effect of a life-size blackened man, writhing in a pit where real flames are shooting fifteen feet into the air. I was in Row J and immediately felt the heat! That trick must have been a very expensive one to do. Yet, you took it right out and did something else.

BS: That’s the difference between imagining an effect, putting it into the model box, visualizing it in rehearsals, and then actually putting it into the theater and doing it. It had to be Paulo who delivered that last speech because we’d been following Paulo’s whole story, as played by Sebastian Armesto. Paulo was a burning man in flames, and Sebastian’s voice was supposed to be coming from the man. Live. Sebastian was off stage live speaking through a mike. But it was so obviously a robot, and it was so obviously not the actor, I just felt embarrassed about it as an effect. It didn’t really deliver what was being said. And then we thought, “What is hell in this production?” I thought back to where the Devil had come out of that door in the Mini-triptych. So it made sense to me that she’d just open that door again and Paulo would be in there in hell, where she had started.

202 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 MOL: Beyond the doorway of hell there was an intense white light. Usually we associate bright light with heaven, but that light was so stark and so unreal–not even suggesting flames–that we knew it was a hellish one. Kudos to your lighting designer, Jon Clark.

BS: Also, I quite like how Paulo has become this black silhouette against the light, because his soul was black and that’s all that’s left of him–a shadow.

MOL: You were making lots of changes during the process of adapting this play. I noticed big changes between the first preview performance and the second. And then, right before press night, there were more major adjustments. Could you talk about that whole process?

BS: When I first got into rehearsals, we were looking at the play through the lens of the seventeenth century. I thought we were doing, like, sword fights. People in the rehearsal room kept talking about references to modern films, making connections between Enrico’s violence, modern-day Naples, the Mafia and gang culture. We were all excited about the idea of updating it. In about Week Three of rehearsals, we thought, “Can we do this? Is it too late to modernize it?” So we decided to take the entrance of Enrico as the moment when we’d go into the modern world. That’s what you saw in the first couple of previews, his walking in and

Ortiz Lottman 203 smashing up the seventeenth-century world. But after watching it a couple of times with an audience in, I thought, “We’re not fully committing to modernizing this play by having the seventeenth- century stuff in it.”

MOL: The production opened in what seemed an early modern world, where Paulo the hermit and his sidekick Pedrisco live in caves. Then the scene changed to the terrace of a pizzeria in Naples, where Celia and Lidora were wearing early modern gowns, and Lisandro and Octavio were in historical dress, too, one of them carrying a sword. We don’t notice the revealing splits in the women’s skirts till a motor scooter rolls in and Celia climbs aboard the rider’s lap, crossing her legs.

BS: Those two scenes with Celia, Lidora, Lisandro and Octavio precede Enrico’s entrance, and they seemed from a different production. They didn’t set up the rest of the play or introduce Enrico in quite the way we wanted. So we decided that the opening scenes in the mountains, where Paulo, Pedrisco and the Devil all dress in monkish robes, are timeless, really, because monks’ clothes haven’t much changed. And then, as soon as we get to Naples, we’re in the modern world. That time shift is a simpler idea. There were gains to be made from having Enrico enter in modern dress. People weren’t expecting that, when he walked in and there was a clash between periods, which I found

204 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 interesting, but I wasn’t convinced, ultimately, that it served much of the story telling. So we tried to push more of the twenty-first century update through the previews and rewrote the scenes where the two women are flirting with Lisandro and Octavio. That was quite a lot of work to rehearse all that. We made some trims, effectively. The main challenge was getting all of the very technical things achieved within the tech period—three days. In the opening previews, there were long scene changes and the rhythm of the story was getting in the way of the characters’ energy. By the end of the preview week, after a lot of tweaking and reworking scene changes, we got something with a nice flow to it.

MOL: In the final version you quickly make your points about Enrico and his environment. Tirso uses comic scenes to tell us about Enrico’s Neapolitan gal and nefarious gang, but you trimmed that down to just one instance. Enrico is torturing Octavio, who’s facing us on a chair in the middle of the stage. Enrico and his sidekick Galván mockingly sing that catchy rock song “Stuck in the Middle with You” as if they didn’t want to be there torturing him.3 Enrico stands behind the chair and slits Octavio’s throat, and almost immediately Celia kisses him passionately. That fierce juxtaposition of violence and sexuality certainly conveys the core of their relationship.

Ortiz Lottman 205 BS: They are made for each other.

MOL: Come to think of it, Celia’s black dress echoes the all-black costumes of Amanda Lawrence, who plays the Devil. I noticed you inserted the Devil into your pizzeria scenes, though she’s not in McGuinness’s version or Tirso’s. Your Devil is hanging out on the pizzeria’s terrace, warming up a chair against the wall—a silent, menacing, ever watchful presence. She also helps move the furniture off stage, as if controlling the action along with the other characters. And your Devil wears rather fabulous costumes–tall high- heeled boots and sunglasses so big they might as well be a mask. The furry-feathery sleeves of her black jacket reminded me of Lucifer’s less than angelic wings. I read that with this production of Damned by Despair, the German fashion house Hugo Boss began its collaboration with the National Theatre’s costume designers.

BS: For the Devil, we were interested in lots of different types of black textures, and we liked the idea that in modern Naples she would be a fashionista.

206 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Photo by Brinkhoff/Moegenburg. The Devil (Amanda Lawrence) trying to convince Enrico (Bertie Carvel) to leave his prison cell and thus lose salvation

MOL: Especially in Act 1, the Devil seems an ambisexual being with a scary, pallid face and a ragged haircut, but her voice is unmistakably female. She addresses Paulo in a coal black version of a monk’s hooded habit. Then in the dark, she takes it off and wraps it around herself so that in effect she is wearing a strapless gown. When she addresses Paulo again, she is standing on the Mountain, both of her hands are open, the fingers spread wide, one hand pressing the cloth to her breast, the other hand pressed near her genitals. That Devil is very Tirsian, simultaneously comic and threatening.

BS: I liked those moments as well, where you laugh at the horror. That’s where people can connect to Tirso today because that artistic taste hasn’t really gone away, has it?

Ortiz Lottman 207 MOL: It definitely hasn’t. How did you come up with your conception of the Devil? She’s the one character with whom both Paulo and Enrico have soul-searching conversations. I noticed that you didn’t feminize the pronouns, etc., in Frank McGuinness’s script.

BS: Frank has written the character as very charming and friendly, as someone able to chat with us and be a deceiver. Something about the Devil needs to be multi-layered. Amanda Lawrence has that clown-like ability to play herself and yet play another character, so you’re connecting with her and the character at the same time. If I could play any part–and if I could act–I would play that part because the Devil’s coming on stage and going on in a meta-play is an amazing trick on Paulo. She turns into an angel and just gives him full bells and whistles, acting the angel that he would like to see.

MOL: In each of the three windows of the Triptych in the sky, we see a beautiful blonde angel.

BS: Three images of Amanda Lawrence. Those projections are bright blue now. In the first couple of previews, we made all that quite yellow and quite hellish, and then we thought, “No, the devil would give Paulo something less eerie.” Any play that has a devil coming in is usually good. It’s very clever writing and very exciting. We dressed her as a monk because she’s the opposite of a monk in a

208 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 way. Lucifer started off in heaven and had a fall, and that’s where Paulo is heading. It made sense to us that the Devil was once this holy person.

MOL: And in Act 2, when Paulo’s again in the wilderness, he ignorantly imitates the Devil’s own disguise. Paulo is wearing his monk’s habit when Enrico is his prisoner. Paulo is trying to force him to accept God before he dies, but underneath Paulo is still dressed as a bandit.

BS: One of the messages of the play is “Don’t judge.” The failing of Paulo is that he sees Enrico and thinks, “He’s obviously going to hell, therefore I am.” But Paulo shouldn’t be judging who’s going to heaven and hell. That’s not his decision. Tirso is really saying, “Beware of judging people and have compassion and understanding.”

MOL: Landscape is really important in this play and in this production. Paulo’s opening speech is all about the beauty of nature and eternal springtime and that sort of thing. I thought that his relationship to sensuality was perhaps directed at natural beauty or something similar. It’s interesting that when you showed us beauty in this production it was always projected in the Triptych’s windows—the starry night, Amanda Lawrence as an angel, that sort of thing. It seems you made a decision that you weren’t going to give us flowers, the loveliness of

Ortiz Lottman 209 nature, even though that’s in the poetry. In your staging, aesthetic beauty is only in the sky.

Photo by Brinkhoff/Moegenburg. Front: Paulo (Sebastian Armesto) and Pedrisco (Roray Keenan) with members of the company

BS: Yeah, I suppose so. We were going to try projecting other things, like water and landscapes, in those Triptych windows, but now they provide a view of the sky and the heavens all the time. I decided to be quite pure about it. I figured that the poetry itself would paint those pictures for us, of flowers and fields. In that opening speech, Paulo seems to be appreciating nature, but I actually think all he’s really doing is trying to show God how hard he’s working.

MOL: Oh, wow. That’s interesting.

BS: He is saying, in effect, “Do you see how much I love Your work? Do you see how hard I’m working for You?” He seems connected in a particular way to his landscape. Because that landscape shifts, doesn’t it? As he walks back to the

210 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 Mountain a little later, disturbed by his terrible dream, he’s not talking about the beauty of the flowers then. He doesn’t even notice them (Act 1, sc. 3, pp.6-7). I think those landscapes are quite specific to the state of mind that the character is in at the time. In that opening, all he’s thinking about is, “How can I get my ticket into heaven. I’ve been here for ten years. I’m doing everything I possibly can for You! (Mugging.) Yeah? —You see? —You see what I’m doing?”

MOL: (Laughs.)

BS: With more time, I could have sharpened that, made it a bit clearer that Paulo was only trying to get his ticket into heaven.

MOL: The Devil says of him, “He wants to hear from the boss in person” (Act 1, sc. 4, p.8).

BS: The problem is that Paulo can’t control what comes into his mind while dreaming. In the daytime he can focus on the beauty of nature and tell God, “Can you see how much I’m focusing on the beauty of nature?” But he wakes up from his dream and it shakes him up massively, because it’s a vision of going to hell, and he can’t bear the possibility that might be in the cards. And he can’t bear not knowing. I feel sorry for him. I understand that feeling.

Ortiz Lottman 211 MOL: That’s a complicated way of looking at Paulo. You don’t take that opening speech at face value but see it as metatheatrical, as a total performance he’s directing at God.

BS: Why does he have to keep talking? Two pages, that speech. Most people would say, “Thank you, Lord, for your goodness” and then go back into a cave, or just stand there and stare at it. I’m thinking, “Why is he still talking? What is he trying to do?” In my life, I feel like I have to keep talking when I feel I haven’t communicated something fully yet, when I haven’t finished.” So I thought, “What hasn’t he communicated fully? What hasn’t he finished? He’s talking to God, in most of that speech, so what is he trying to communicate? He’s trying to communicate how appreciative he is, how much he loves what God made. And why is he doing that? To get God to get him into heaven.”

MOL: The play’s references to trees really interest me. I want to ask about your decision to eliminate that large, very elaborately constructed dead tree that occupies center stage in the opening scenes of Act 2. For me, it evoked particular trees in Christian iconography. I’m talking about the same scene in which the bandit Paulo is wearing his I’m-still-a- hermit costume and he’s trying to force Enrico to confess his sins and head off to heaven before he changes his mind. Paulo is about to order his bandits to execute Enrico and Galván by firing

212 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 squad. In the early preview performances, those two captives were tied to that big dead, limbless tree. It was just a tall trunk, really. The bark at the top has been hacked or worn away, showing the wood’s gray flesh. A few short scraggly limbs stuck out at the top, as if this dead tree were trying to renew itself. I noticed that, though it’s not specifically described, a tree is included in that scene by both Tirso and Frank McGuinness. The limbless tree on your stage was rooted in the pit formed by the Mountain, and it seemed to grow from a pedestal of flat stones like the Cross on Golgotha. Painted on a distant mountain, we see a small green tree. I initially read the contrast between those two trees– one dead and one thriving–as the Two Trees of Christian iconography. The Tree of Life in Eden is replaced by the dead wood of the Cross, which revives at Christ’s Resurrection.

BS: We cut the tree because I wanted more flexibility in the scenes and because of the tree’s position we had to stage everything at the front of the stage. That tree wasn’t referred to for five scenes. It was on stage for four scenes, then only used in the fifth. So I just thought, “All the actors are having to work around this thing.” And the Mountain had to be there because the tree was anchored under the trapdoor, and yet no one was really referring to the Mountain, they were referring to the hills. I was trying to pare it back to the pure story and those objects weren’t really necessary.

Ortiz Lottman 213 Pedrisco says, “Tie them up,” and the bandits tie Enrico and Galván to that tree. I thought we could do that by just tying them together. I know we don’t get the Saint Sabastian image of someone about to be shot with arrows, but I thought I’d rather be freer with the way in which we could stage it. In Act 2, I was generally thinking of the landscape as being one of death now. In the first scene of Act 1, where you see Paulo, he’s just talking about the beauty of living things, isn’t he? And then, after the interval, when he goes back to the mountains, it’s like a wilderness. It’s dead and dry. You know, we couldn’t have done that golf thing, for example, with the Mountain and tree up.

MOL: I loved the golf thing! Act 2 opens up under a dark mountain sky, but Paulo is so much enjoying the perks of leading his bandits that he’s playing golf high in the mountains! You invented a hilarious scene, and you brought in comic props for that: an oversized lantern, Paulo’s lawn chair, more chairs, and the golf bag carried by his caddy Pedrisco. Paulo strikes the golf ball off the tee in the prisoner’s mouth and then shoots the man. Another neo-Tirsian scene that was marvelously comic, menacing and violent!

BS: In the first two previews, those opening scenes of Act 2 were set in quite bright daylight. We changed that. Setting them at nighttime brought the forest alive a bit more, giving us the darker state of

214 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 mind that Paulo was now in. And getting rid of the Mountain also allowed us to bring the Shepherd boy in through the auditorium. In the first preview you only saw his little head just poking over the Mountain and that didn’t really work. When we put him in the auditorium, his song became purer and the auditorium then became a sort of afterlife.

MOL: I was sitting in the front of the house, and his soprano voice coming in from behind me somewhere really did seem otherworldly, angelic.

BS: Good.

MOL: In representing the natural world, you also took physical water out of the production. You removed the whole Act 1 episode of Enrico’s drowning a man in the real water under the small trapdoor at the front of the stage. And again when Enrico and Galván were standing on top of the Triptych–at the top of that huge Olivier stage–and they are about to jump into the Bay of Naples to escape the authorities, there was real water falling down the cliff below them.

BS: Umm. When you said there was real water, do you mean in the video?

MOL: Oh, was that video? I was convinced it was real water!

Ortiz Lottman 215 BS: I don’t know if we made the right decision of getting rid of the water in the end, but we had to get rid of it because if you turn the video on it lights the whole stage. And when Enrico and Galván were at the edge of that cliff, the play of their shadows on the back wall of the stage was really good, and we couldn’t have seen them if the video had been on. What I really wanted was for the both men to be up on top of the Triptych and jump, but we couldn’t get them there in time. Which is why, in the first preview there was all that business with the Mini- triptych spinning and the police chasing them around and around. To be completely honest, there we were basically just trying to fill time while Enrico got up to the fly floor in order to jump, but then we sort of abandoned that idea. It was not going to work.

MOL: In the second preview performance, you did even a third version of their jump, a version in which Enrico stands alone at the top of the Mountain.

BS: That’s right. And Galván is up at the top of the Triptych. We did that.

MOL: And Enrico on top the Mountain falls backwards, and Galván at the very top of the Triptych is about to fall forward when suddenly the lights go out and the interval begins. End of Act 1. I thought that was also really effective.

216 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

BS: I liked that as well. But people were saying, “It’s a bit weird they are not next to each other when Galván is saying he’s with Enrico all the time.” We had to make big changes when we decided to have Enrico commit a massacre at the end of Act 1. Galván needed to be there at the massacre, so he couldn’t get up to the fly floor to jump. We had to sacrifice that effect, but as a story it made much more sense that Enrico kind of goes crazy after not being able to kill the old man who reminds him of his father. Enrico’s massive act of violence comes out of a sort of horror. The death of the Governor of Naples used to be the end of Act 1, but that event didn’t feel like it had the scale that we needed. During Act 1, Enrico is becoming more and more violent. Things are falling apart. There’s a storm come brewing. So he needs to do something huge in the battle, which is what the death of the Governor is supposed to be. But I couldn’t really get that moment to have the impact it needed because, first of all, no one knew who the Governor was. In our culture, a political assassination would be a massive deal, but that play didn’t seem that interested in the people who actually ran the country. It was more interested in ordinary people, or in people who are wrestling with the things going on inside themselves rather than with matters of the state. If Enrico is doing more and more violent things at the end of the act, we thought, we should have him killing loads and

Ortiz Lottman 217 loads and loads of people, like the episode in Norway in 2011, or the school massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, or like Columbine. That’s why Enrico does that bloodbath at the end of Act 1, where he shoots all those people. On press night we managed to get all the bullet sounds really coordinated with what he was doing.

MOL: Yes, that sound engineering was abundantly realistic.

BS: Good.

MOL: What do you think makes Enrico tick?

BS: I think that it’s the love coming from Enrico’s visit to his father’s home that makes him break, ultimately, that makes a crack in him. Then he goes into a self-hating state, which, I think, is what he suffers from, a deep self-loathing. His only way of expressing himself is through violence. It’s sort of the opposite of a creative act. Enrico’s trying to get people to see how awful, how horrible he feels. But he never feels like he’s communicating it fully enough. He can’t stop. It’s only in his prison cell, when his dad declares his love for him, and Enrico hears that and declares his own love for his father, that Enrico feels he himself can be stopped. He’s looking to be stopped and contained.

218 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 MOL: So what motivates him is that he doesn’t feel himself worthy of his father’s love? Or is it that his father has not really given him that love to that point?

BS: Well, that’s really interesting. I’d love there to be a couple more scenes perhaps, where you do get that psychological explanation of why does he feels he’s not loveable, or why does he end up in this relationship with Celia, who is not a particularly great person either. She watches the violence and, as you pointed out earlier, she gets off on it. Enrico’s drawn to someone who keeps him violent. One explanation could be Enrico’s afraid of being vulnerable, a fear that Paulo suffers from as well. They are both connected in that respect. Neither of them wants to turn to God and say, “I don’t know what you are going to say about this, but I want to ask Your forgiveness.” They don’t know if they are going to get that love. Paulo is trying to do everything he possibly can to control his own fate, and ultimately you can’t. It’s like sending a woman tons and tons of flowers and knocking on her front door and ultimately expecting her to fall in love with you, but she might not, no matter how hard you work. You can’t demand that complete acceptance, but initially Paulo thinks that you can. He thinks you just have to do all the right things and you’ll get into heaven. The thought of going to hell is horrific to him. I also find it

Ortiz Lottman 219 personally quite horrific as well. I don’t believe in hell.

MOL: I don’t either.

BS: (Laughs.) But if you’re in a system that does have hell, then how horrendous to live your life not knowing if, once you die, you’re going to be in a state of eternal torment. I completely sympathize with Paulo, and Tirso does as well. To do what you’re expected to do–live a good life–but still not know what your fate will be is almost unbearable as an idea.

MOL: Paulo is willing to believe that God isn’t just, because a just God would not say, “Whatever happens to him is going to happen to you.”

BS: Here’s one of the things that surprised me about Christianity. Giles Fraser, an ex-canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, came in and told us that Christianity is not about what’s fair, that it’s about love, about compassion, about forgiveness.

MOL: About divine love and human love.

BS: Yes. Even taking heaven and hell out of the equation and thinking of our work on stage, where we really don’t hold such religious beliefs, the idea of love, of being able to hand yourself over to someone else and have a proper relationship with

220 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 that person. Well, some people find it difficult and some people don’t. I think that’s also what the play is about—real love, the challenges of love, the difficulties of being loved. Those things aren’t that easy.

MOL: Did you have ideas about Paulo’s sexuality or lack thereof? In the opening scene of Act 2, you added an incident in which Paulo, fully clothed, straddles a female prisoner, and he slices her cheek then orders her executed.

BS: Paulo tries to cut himself off from anything physical and earthly. In the opening scene of the play, he is on top of the Mountain looking up at the heavens and talking about non-physical things, and Pedrisco comes in talking about how hungry he is. Pedrisco is very much on the ground, talking about his body, about eating, about going to a brothel when he gets to Naples. Then as soon as they get to Naples, Pedrisco reminds Paulo of the “the big blonde” prostitute (“–The one who looked like a guardsman–”), the one whom Paulo used to fancy. Remember that scene? Paulo freaks out, screaming, “Vile, vile body” (Act 2, sc. 11, p.28).

MOL: Yes. And Paulo throws himself on the ground and insists that Pedrisco beat him and stamp on him. Which Pedrisco is quite happy to do! Pedrisco hits him with his pack and with his fists

Ortiz Lottman 221 while straddling his back. Possibly, in a different kind of production, you could portray them as a frustrated gay relationship, especially because Paulo tells him, “Harder, brother – harder” (Act 2, sc. 11, p.29).

BS: You could. I’m sure it’s in there in our production. Pedrisco is a guy who has been totally dedicated to Paulo for ten years, but Paulo barely talks to him, barely asks him anything. Tirso’s story relies on Pedrisco’s being there for him. There’s something really, really lovely about that friendship, in that Paulo can completely depend on Pedrisco. But I’ve got questions about what Pedrisco gets out of it. My view of Paulo is that he’s so consumed with his own destiny that he barely looks at Pedrisco.

MOL: The play obviously contains a strong motif of brotherhood and an even stronger one of fatherhood. Did you at any point consider visually representing God the Father?

BS: Yeah, we did actually. Anareto, Enrico’s father, is kind of like God. In his first scene, at home, the father basically says, “I love you very, very much and you make me feel better. I feel happy when I see you.” In his second scene, he visits Enrico in prison and basically tells him, “You’re not my son since you’ve chosen to turn your back on me. Turn back towards me and I’ll

222 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 love you again.” They have a kind of God-man relationship. And we did think visually we were going to put Anareto’s face in the sky, in the clouds, but we couldn’t really find the right moment to do it. And we ran out of time.

MOL: Call me naive, but once again I am amazed at the amount of technical requirements to consider when you’re putting together such a major production. When you open one door, you close another kind of arrangement.

BS: You do. Exactly. You make decisions where you might lose something but gain something else.

MOL: Speaking of opening and closing doors, I really liked the moment when the Devil is closing the doors on the Mini-triptych, and she opens another door and Paulo and Pedrisco go through it. Then she slams it on them! She’s literally opening and closing doors for them, guiding them. That little arrangement was a recent addition, wasn’t it? In McGuinness’s script of that scene, the Devil doesn’t appear till after Paulo exits.

BS: Yes, we fine-tuned all that. We made quite specific moments where she opened the doors. Pedricso asks Paulo, “How will we manage with no money?” Paulo replies, “The devil himself will provide.” The Devil opens the door and Paulo says,

Ortiz Lottman 223 “And I’ll grab it” (Act 1, sc. 13, p. 40). She’s helping them be practical or whatever.

MOL: Right. I also thought that the scene of Enrico’s hanging was much more effective in your final version. But even in the first preview, it was so realistic that I thought, “You’re going to need another star actor tomorrow night!” That hanging scene doesn’t exist in Tirso’s original, though later we briefly see angels lifting Enrico’s soul to heaven. In the early previews Enrico was hanged from a gallows set in front of the Mini-triptych, and as his body was convulsing, he was kicking and banging really loud against that flat.

BS: Yes, originally we brought that Mini-triptych down and were spinning it because we had to cover the time it took for Bertie to get the harness on. He had to go back stage, take his clothes off, put the harness on, put his clothes back on. It was taking two and a half minutes. There is nothing in the script in between the moment when he exits and when he goes through the execution. I thought, “Why are we doing this? It doesn’t mean anything.” In retrospect, I could probably make it easier for myself by planning those things way in advance of rehearsals and talking to the set designer about how are we going to get from his exit to the harness scene.

224 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 MOL: In your final version of Enrico’s execution, the Mini-triptych has vanished. The actors are arranged in a semi-circle around Enrico like the eternal souls of the people he has massacred. They dissolve away. Bertie Carvel’s feet are hanging only two or three feet off the ground in empty space on a nearly empty stage. Once he’s entirely still and we’re convinced of his death, his arms begin to move in calm, embracing gestures, reassuring us that his soul lives—and that your star isn’t dead! It was beautiful the way he slowly lifts his hands as if about to give a blessing, like a new saint, or like a priest or Christ. He’s carried up on the same rope that hanged him. When he rises into heaven it seems more miraculous, more spiritual because the stage is entirely empty except for his ascent.

BS: Oh, good. I was pleased. Again, it was taking away things we didn’t absolutely need in order to get the essence of it in the final version.

MOL: You said you could see yourself revisiting this play years from now. Would your approach be different?

BS: I think I understand the play a lot better than I did when we were first designing it, when we were first casting it. The process you go through with any play is an unknown journey. You never know when things are going to click into place. But if I were going to do it again, I might think really carefully

Ortiz Lottman 225 about where I’d locate it. If I were going to do it in a modern setting, I’d ask, “Where in the world is that mix of Catholicism and violence?” And maybe I’d think specifically about somewhere like São Paulo or South America, or southern Italy. And I’d really locate it and do a proper modern staging, of a priest or something in a church at the top of the play. Maybe change Tirso’s locations, or get a writer to really update it and commit to that fully, rather than kind of, what is at the moment, a little bit of a mixture of several ideas.

MOL: It’s always a huge treat to see a Spanish comedia given a professional production. Thanks so much for this one! And many thanks, as well, for explaining the process of putting theology on the modern stage.

BS: My pleasure.

NOTES

1 Molina, Tirso de and Frank McGuinness. Damned by Despair: A Version by Frank McGuinness from a Literal Translation by Simon Bredon. London: Faber and Faber, 2012. All citations to the National Theatre production are taken from this edition. 2 Damned by Despair is believed to have been written around 1625, the same year in which Tirso was denounced by the Council of Castile’s Committee for Reform. See María Delgado, “Spain’s Golden Age comedia, Tirso de Molina and

226 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 Damned by Despair.” Damned by Despair by Tirso de Molina in a New Version by Frank McGuinness. Theater Program. London: Royal National Theatre Enterprises Ltd., 2012. N. d. N. p.). 3 “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel. Perf. and comp. Gerry Rafferty and Joe Egan. 1972. Original Recording Remastered, 2004. CD.

Theater Reviews

LO FINGIDO VERDADERO DE LOPE DE VEGA. DIR. CLAUDIO HOCHMAN. LA MÁ- QUINA REAL, TEATRO ROJAS, TOLEDO. 17 DE NOVIEMBRE DEL 2011 (EN GIRA DU- RANTE 2012).

ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Cornell University

La compañía conquense, La máquina real, ha emprendido desde el 2007 uno de los proyectos de teatro clásico más ricos e innovadores desarro- llados en los últimos años en España. Partiendo del objetivo artístico e intelectual de “la recuperación de las artes escénicas del Siglo de Oro español,” Jesús Caballero, director de la empresa, junto con su equipo técnico y artístico, ha conseguido devolver a la escena y a la vida uno de los fenómenos teatrales más populares de la España barroca, la llamada ‘máquina real.’ John E. Varey, en su Historia de los títeres en España (desde sus orígenes hasta mediados del siglo XVIII), ha dejado constancia de este tipo de espectáculos basados en la actuación de compañías de actores que representaban comedias enteras—

227

228 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 sobre todo de santos—con marionetas en los corrales, especialmente durante la Cuaresma. Para ello se construía un retablo de madera en el escenario a es- cala de los títeres que dejaba el suficiente espacio para que los actores se movieran para manipular los muñecos.

Escena de Lo fingido verdadero de Lope de Vega. Foto corte- sía de La máquina real. Fotógrafo Luís Caballero.

El primer proyecto que emprendió esta compañía fue la puesta en escena de la obra maestra de Mira de Amescua, El esclavo del demonio, siguiendo una reconstrucción fiel de estas peculiares funciones (véase la reseña de Elizabeth M. Petersen en Come- dia Performance 8.1). Ahora bien, mientras que El esclavo recreaba de manera purista las representaciones de comedias con títeres, Claudio Hochman opta por una propuesta con una mayor licencia his- tórica para Lo fingido verdadero, siempre dentro del marco espectacular y espacial de la máquina real. En efecto, para esta obra, el director desnuda la estructura de la máquina de los telones de fondo para

Fernández 229 exhibirla al público tal cual, como un armazón de vigas, pisos y rampas de madera. De esta manera, el espectador puede ver directamente cómo funciona la manipulación de los títeres y el paulatino desarrollo de una interesante dinámica entre muñecos y actores.

Escena de Lo fingido verdadero de Lope de Vega. Foto corte- sía de La máquina real. Fotógrafo Luís Caballero.

Lo fingido es una aparatosa comedia inspi- rada en la vida de San Ginés, un mimo profesional que representó ante el emperador Diocleciano el bautismo cristiano, y fue juzgado y decapitado por blasfemia. Lope complica una enrevesada trama histórico-religiosa al sumar una trama secundaria metadramática que juega con las fronteras entre la realidad y la ficción. Cinco actores se hacen en escena con diecinueve personajes mientras ejercen de titiriteros simultáneamente. El espectáculo no necesita de ningún otro decorado aparte de la estructura de la máquina, cuya parquedad comparte escenario con el dinamismo de estos cinco intérpretes y la

230 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 magia de unos títeres—de entre unos 65 a 80 cm de altura—artesanalmente tallados en madera y estu- cados.

Escena de Lo fingido verdadero de Lope de Vega. Foto corte- sía de La máquina real. Fotógrafo Luís Caballero.

Para el público que pudo ver la propuesta de Ángel Ojea del Esclavo para esta misma compañía, Lo fingido resulta una irresistible ventana al funcionamiento interno de lo que en la obra de Amescua presenciábamos solamente de bastidores afuera. No obstante, para aquellos que aún no están familiari- zados con el trabajo de La máquina real, esta obra abre las puertas a un nuevo mundo por descubrir dentro de la cultura espectacular barroca. Si bien los más puristas pueden tener ciertas reservas con respecto a la adaptación textual, no podemos olvidar que estamos ante un teatro de títeres, un género con distintos valores que el teatro con actores y en el cual la oralidad lidera a la palabra escrita. En definitiva, el trabajo que ha venido haciendo La máquina real en los últimos años es

Fernández 231 digno de admiración, de profundo respeto y de ma- yores oportunidades de difusión tanto a nivel nacional como internacional. Gracias a producciones como Lo fingido, esta compañía no sólo ha logrado recuperar una parte clave del patrimonio del fenó- meno teatral, desatendido por parte de los profesio- nales de la escena y los estudiosos del teatro, sino que ha conseguido acercar este arte a un público actual que, además de divertirse, puede experimentar esta joya de museo, la máquina real, en pleno funcionamiento en el siglo XXI.

LA DAMA BOBA DE LOPE DE VEGA. DIR. ESTHER PÉREZ ARRIBAS. PIE IZQUIERDO, CASAS DEL TRATADO, TORDESILLAS. 17 DE NOVIEMBRE DEL 2012.

ESTHER FERNÁNDEZ Cornell University

Si bien estamos acostumbrados a ver en la cartelera de espectáculos infantiles muchas de las obras de Shakespeare para niños, resulta mucho más raro encontrarse con comedias del Siglo de Oro es- pañol, dirigidas a los espectadores más jóvenes. No obstante, la compañía Pie Izquierdo ha sido pionera desde el 2008 en la puesta en escena de versiones infantiles de los clásicos españoles en verso. En efecto, el éxito de su propuesta de La dama boba demuestra que se puede ‘dulcificar’ una comedia barroca sin que por ello se pierda la totalidad de su esencia dramática. Cabe, entonces, preguntarse cuá- les son las pautas dramáticas que Esther Pérez Arri- bas, directora artística del montaje, ha seguido para lograr la re-creación de esta obra clásica dentro de los parámetros de la literatura infantil.

232

Fernández 233 En primer lugar, la elección de un texto como La dama boba facilita la labor de ‘infantiliza- ción’ escénica ya que cuenta con dos características claves de la literatura infantil que posibilitan este tipo de adaptación de manera natural. En primer lugar y, en relación con la estructura de la obra, la trama se desarrolla en torno al carácter opuesto de las dos hermanas protagonistas y a la transforma- ción radical de Finea para concluir con un apoteósi- co final feliz de cuatro bodas simultáneas. En segundo lugar, a propósito de la protagonista, Lope la retrata como un ser aniñado y pueril, con el cual los niños pueden sentirse fácilmente identificados. Pé- rez Arribas parte, por lo tanto, de estos dos rasgos presentes en el texto original para ahondar en el in- fantilismo de su puesta en escena a través de cuatro vetas específicas: la adaptación textual, la caracteri- zación de los personajes, el decorado y la inclusión de otras formas espectaculares infantiles, tales como la danza, el canto, los títeres o el teatro de sombras. Por una parte, el guión dramático convierte esta obra en un cuento tradicional infantil para la escena, al concentrarse, primeramente, en la temáti- ca más optimista de la obra—el nacimiento del primer amor y de sus efectos transformadores—y al evitar desarrollar todo sentimiento utilitario y egoís- ta por parte de los protagonistas. En segundo lugar, esta versión se reviste de un tono didáctico gracias al personaje de Rufino—profesor de lectura en la comedia lopesca—convertido en este montaje en

234 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 maestro de ceremonias y tutor de todos los personajes-niños de la obra e, inclusive, del público.

Escena de La dama boba de Lope de Vega. Foto cortesía de Pie izquierdo. Fotógrafa, Marta Vidanes.

Rufino, en efecto, abre la comedia con una lección, expresamente dirigida a los espectadores, en la que nos introduce al teatro del Siglo de Oro y resume la trama de la obra. Si bien su caracteriza- ción física roza con la del payaso, al salir con una varilla y moverse alrededor de un púlpito, su llama- tiva estética cómica deja paso a una cándida autoridad magistral. Pero además de la caracterización de Rufino como clown, el resto de los personajes, con excepción de Octavio, aparecen igualmente infanti- lizados físicamente gracias a un exagerado maqui- llaje y un colorido vestuario que, según la directora, evoca una estética de cuento con reminiscencias al siglo XVII. Aparte de esta vistosa caracterización física de los protagonistas, sus rasgos morales tam- bién se suavizan considerablemente al alejarse de

Fernández 235 las actitudes calculadoras en la obra original. Inclu- so, Octavio, personaje que linda más con el perfil de un antagonista, resulta demasiado cómico e inofen- sivo para considerarle como una amenaza.

Escena de La dama boba de Lope de Vega. Foto cortesía de Pie izquierdo. Fotógrafa, Marta Vidanes.

Además del guión dramático y de la caracte- rización de los personajes, la sencillez del decorado contribuye, igualmente, a impregnar esta versión de candidez. En el texto original, la mayor parte de la obra se desarrolla en el interior de la casa de Octa- vio, lo que viene a realzar la opresión patriarcal a la que se ven sujetas ambas protagonistas. Sin embargo, en el montaje de Pérez Arribas, la totalidad del decorado se reduce a la colorida fachada de una casa, lo que permite que los personajes se muevan con plena libertad de puertas a fuera, en un escenario abierto, y disipar el sentimiento de sujeción social insinuado por el confinamiento de los protagonistas al espacio interior en la obra original.

236 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013

Escena de La dama boba de Lope de Vega. Foto cortesía de Pie izquierdo. Fotógrafa, Marta Vidanes.

Finalmente, en este esfuerzo de mitigar las facetas más densas del texto de Lope, Pérez Arribas recurre a toda una gama de formas espectaculares infantiles como la danza, el canto, los títeres de mano o el teatro de sombras. Estas modalidades dramáticas imbricadas en la puesta en escena tienen como propósito subrayar a través de lenguajes escé- nicos alternativos los momentos más simbólicos de la trama. Un ejemplo significativo es el parto de la gata, la romana, un episodio de cierta dificultad para un público infantil pero que representado a base de títeres y de sombras, en el tejado de la casa, se convierte en una sugestiva escena metateatral de irresistible interés para los más jóvenes. En definitiva, la propuesta de La dama boba de la compañía Pie Izquierdo logra transmitir con éxito gran parte de la esencia de la obra original. Es cierto que se puede argumentar que la representa-

Fernández 237 ción pierde algunas de las problemáticas más graves de la trama pero el montaje gana a nivel artístico y creativo al explorar una amplia variedad de fórmu- las dramáticas que logran destacar aquellas escenas que mejor conectan con el espectador infantil.

EL DESDÉN CON EL DESDÉN. BY AUGUSTÍN MORETO. DIRECTED BY HUGO MEDRANO. THE TIVOLI THEATER, WASH- INGTON D.C. SEPTEMBER 13-OCTOBER 7, 2012.

KRISTIN CONNOR University of Virginia

While not a comedy in the sense of the word that we understand it today, the genre of the comedia is still meant to be entertaining and may contain much humor; an aspect of the play that can be overlooked or underappreciated during a private reading of a comedia. However, the performance of More- to’s El desdén con el desdén by Teatro Hispano GALA brings this element of the play to the foreground with electrifying results. Their masterful production also visually signals the issues of sex and sexuality that otherwise remain only implied in the text. The end result is a strikingly modern- feeling play that still respects the original text. Humor is an extremely important part of this production and begins from the first scene and cre- scendos to the last. In the first scene, the audience

238

Connor 239 first meets the servant of Carlos; the servant’s name is Polilla, who represents the gracioso, and his comedic performance can easily steal the show and threaten to overshadow the likewise comedic performances of Carlos and the protagonist Diana. Polilla’s humor is based on an approach not entirely dissimilar to The Three Stooges. His performance is body-based. His highly emotive facial expressions that change smoothly and effortlessly first draw the eye to Polilla, as well as his large, often exaggerated gestures, constant movement about the stage and his total body performance that makes it seem even his toes are in on the show. He is also fond of mimick- ing other characters, particularly the female ones and even Diana herself; he curls in on himself and pushes his shoulders forward in a feminine gesture of modesty, brings his hands close to his face as if pretending to be a mouse and speaks in an equally squeaky-mousy voice that is not meant to imitate Diana, but to reveal her ridiculousness. Polilla also engages in self-mockery and abuse, hitting himself in the face and on the head in comedic stooge-like moments. He also has moments of self- congratulation in which he struts about the stage. In another example of body humor, he disguises himself in order to win the trust of Diana and while his costume on top of costume, at first glance, seems to confer on him an air of respectability, it ends up being a mockery of the supposed intellectual superior- ity of the educated classes. His glasses and the fact that he carries about either a book or a writing

240 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 plume over-exaggerate the point and his fumbling with his wig draws attention to the meta-theatrical aspect of his disguise. In all of these attempts at humor, he is rewarded by laughter from the audience. Just as funny are the performances by Carlos and Diana, though their humor is based less on bod- ily humor and more on wit and verbal play. Howev- er, Diana, in particular, is skilled at expressing her sarcasm and disdain with her sardonic facial expressions and disparaging tone of voice. Her wit is often expressed through sarcasm and the audience rejoic- es in this mujer esquiva. Carlos, too, is capable of comedy. He feigns disinterest in order to win the heart of Diana, but his macho façade is sometimes transparent to comedic ends. The juxtaposition of his cool, suave demeanor when dealing with Diana compared to his babbling, love stricken demeanor when alone with Polilla is highly entertaining. He goes weak at the knees and looks to his servant for guidance, advice, both emotional, and quite literally, physical support. Another element this production brings visually to the stage is sex. The play takes place during Carnival, which is traditionally associated with bending the rules of propriety and, one could go so far as to say, lust. In the opening scene, we are reminded on the site of Carlos’ body that conquering Diana is about love, but also sex. During his mono- logue in which he describes his passion for Diana and her continual refusal of suitors, he, by the by,

Connor 241 begins to undress down to his underwear. This onstage striptease would be enough to suggest sex, but he then continues to undress and enters the bathtub on stage in the nude while Polilla holds up his cape to partially shield his master from the immodest gaze of the audience. Upon exiting the bathtub, he remains a while covered only by a towel before getting dressed again. This on stage dressing and un- dressing reminds the audience that despite the courtly flattery, sex is never out of mind. Both Carlos and Polilla use body language and gestures to express sexuality. Polilla, when describing the conquest of love, wiggles his hips and uses pelvic gestures to make it known this conquest will end in the bed. Carlos also uses a similar tactic, when describing his “ansia de verla,” referring to Diana, he gestures to his pelvic area underlining the idea of “anxiety,” which becomes a euphemism for his sexual desire. In yet another moment, the two men are face to face, so close their noses touch and Polilla says “¿Quieres besarme, señor?; a fleeting moment of homosexual referencing and desire in the play. These are all examples of not only how sex and sexuality are made visible, but also made humorous through the actor’s performances. In an equally amusing scene in the second act, Diana and three of her friends sing in their un- dergarments in Diana’s private garden, hoping to attract the attention of Carlos. Their exaggerated facial expressions, gestures and statuesque poses make the audience laugh and their clothing makes

242 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 the actors on stage pine for the women, eliciting more laugher from the audience. While these un- dergarments are not particularly revealing or shock- ing for a modern audience, it is still understood that this is a moment of sexual desire. The maid, Laura, highlights the point by pulling down one of her sleeves to reveal her shoulder and upper arm, the loose drape of the fabric hinting at the fact that it might just slip a bit further and reveal her breast. Indeed, clothing becomes the women’s most provocative ally, especially for Diana. We first meet Diana in Act I dressed in black, with an extremely high neckline and absolutely no skin showing-not even her shoes can be seen as she walks. Her costume seeks to desexualize Diana while we see her reading and writing in her study and also to convey to the audience the impossibility of her chilly exterior ever being penetrated by love’s arrow. Yet, after the scene-change, Diana re-emerges on stage in a white and purple iridescent gown, the neckline square and low, and her necklace pointing down toward her breasts that, if the neckline were just a few millimeters lower, would begin to show her bosom. Diana becomes sexualized, though not ob- jectified. She maintains her character of mujer esquiva and perhaps even mujer varonil until the very last scenes. In her last costume change, Diana changes into a pink gown that shows a little more skin than the white gown, the neckline perhaps a bit wider, her arms showing through the transparent sleeves, and for the first time her shoes (and her an-

Connor 243 kles!) can be seen as she walks. Her pink gown is meant to connect her to Carlos who, in a previous scene, chose the color pink as the color of love. The pink gown symbolizes that she has fallen in love with Carlos, though she herself does not become conscious of it until almost the very last scene. And for a modern audience, of course, pink has become associated with Valentine’s Day and reminds us of love as well. This play could have been approached from another direction, highlighting the more serious aspects of the text, portraying the conquest of Diana in a negative light, or even making Polilla more of a fool than a comedic relief. However, the approach taken that puts sex, sexuality and humor front and center makes the viewing more light-hearted and allows the audience to leave fully satisfied with the ending. The result is an immensely entertaining and delightful production that bridges the past with the present. It is a production that grants access to another time through the lenses of the twenty-first century while allowing the modern audience to revel in stories from early modern Spain with the same enthusiasm as they may view more modern ones.

Book Reviews

Lee, Christina, ed. Los mártires de Japón. Félix Lope de Vega. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2006. Print. 156 pp. $44.95

ANTHONY J. GRUBBS Michigan State University

After presenting a paper on Los mártires de Japón at the 2003 AHCT conference in El Paso, Texas, Christina Lee was encouraged to complete a scholarly edition of Lope de Vega's comedia. She finished the work in 2006 and it was a first. Before Lee’s edition, the play was available in manuscript form in Spain’s National Library and as an unedited transcription completed in the 1890s by Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (available on the Biblioteca Vir- tual Miguel de Cervantes website); since 2006, a children's version of the play has been released on iBooks. Since critics had devoted more attention to the Spanish American colonies, Lee's exhaustive work was timely because of its focus on far eastern Asian culture in the comedia. Lee’s critical edition of Los mártires de Japón is well researched, thoroughly annotated, and overall very good. Her introduction is equally useful

244

Grubbs 245 to those less familiar with the comedia or Japanese history as well as for specialists. It begins with a history of Spain's diplomatic contact with Japan during early modern times. She then turns to the successes and failures of the Catholic missions to Japan, starting with the Jesuits and followed by the mendicant orders. Just as in Europe, the same fric- tion between the different religious brotherhoods existed in the Far East and Lee suggests that this tension is reproduced in the play. She states that it is not the presence of the Jesuits in the play that points to the conflict but rather their complete absence. Next, she briefly compares the attempts at secular colonization and religious conversion both in Asia and in the Americas. Lee’s description of the political and religious landscapes of Japan at the time demonstrates how the clash between indigenous and Christian belief systems eventually resulted in the prohibition of outside religions on the island. Her synopsis of the play follows and it is useful. Then, the critic offers good insight about the representation of the Japanese characters in the play. She notes that the Asian characters act and behave similar to their Spanish counterparts. There are differences, however, that Lope manifests through costuming and religion. Lee also remarks that the Japa- nese are grouped by Lope as indios and share characteristics with the Amerindian characters of his other plays. Next, she discusses why Los mártires de Japón is considered a hagiographical play. De- tails about the history of the manuscript and the cri-

246 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 teria she followed for this first critical edition are the topic of the next section. The introduction closes with a chronology of historical events contemporary to the action of the play and the time it was written, which is informative albeit out of place. It would be better located with historical section at the beginning. The text of the play is the result of Lee’s own transcription of the extant manuscript. She compares her version with Menéndez Pelayo’s, noting differences of interpretations as well as parts that her predecessor omitted. In the original, there are parts crossed out, but she includes the whole text, a good editorial decision. The play is well annotated, and the extensive footnotes offer additional historical and cultural information as well as direct the reader through confusing parts of the play. Lee proposes several modifications or additions to the text, some more appropriate than others. The modernization of the spelling is generally acceptable. Lee also makes some valid suggestions of inserting words to the text to maintain the versification and clarify meaning. Some of the suggested changes, however, are more controversial. Her proposal that some of the lines assigned to certain characters should actually be spoken by others present in the scene are suspect at times. While some of these modifications seem obvious and most likely correct, there are other examples where such a change is not clear. In these cases, a note explaining her rationale would

Grubbs 247 have been appropriate. Also problematic is her re- structuring of hyperbatons and insertion of completely different words for what is suggested in the original transcription. These modifications have a negative effect on the text because they alter—that is, eliminate—the rhyme scheme, meaning is affect- ed in spots, too. While these missteps are not fre- quent, they are present. Some typos and the unnec- essary numbering of each verse—instead of incre- ments of five, for example—can be distracting but do not take away from the merit of Lee's work. Fi- nally, the extensive bibliography would have bene- fited from a greater representation of more recent scholarship, though it does offer a good point of de- parture for research in its highlighting of seminal studies on the topic. Christina Lee’s edition of Lope de Vega’s Los mártires de Japón is commendable. She demonstrates a profound understanding of the time and the culture and combines this with a complete transcription of the original play text, making this is a valuable addition to the collection of Lope's corpus of comedias.

Lope de Vega. Antonio Roca. Ed. Donald McGrady. Hispanic Monographs. Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 2009. Print. 238 pp. $ 24.95.

RUTH SÁNCHEZ IMIZCOZ The University of The South

Antonio Roca es una comedia que ha sido atribuida a Lope de Vega a través de los siglos y el profesor McGrady, en su introducción, habla de la problemática que esta atribución crea, y de la posible datación de la obra, para encajarla dentro de una época y corpus. Para ello usa entre otras técnicas de la ortología, para intentar autenticar la autoría de la obra, cosa que no se consigue, porque según él mismo dice: “está visto que [el] texto es el resultado de treintena de años de revisiones por numerosos directores teatrales que querían incluir trozos suyos en una obra con bandoleros (10-11).” Así pues, en algún momento es posible que un manuscrito original pudiera haber pertenecido al Fénix, pero los años y los autores de compañías la han cambiado. McGrady compara su edición a la de Victor Dixon de 1971, indicando sus desacuerdos, ya que ambos usan como base el manuscrito de Melbury House

248

Imizcoz 249 (Dorset, Inglaterra). Este manuscrito según indica McGrady está en bastante mal estado y tiene un tex- to muy deteriorado, pero con todo lo considera de alguna forma descendiente del original de Lope de Vega. Se sabe que fue representada porque aparecen los nombres de los actores de la compañía de Anto- nio Prado en 1632-1633, en el documento de Mel- bury House, también aparece el nombre de Juan Francisco Ruiz. Sin embargo, McGrady no propor- ciona la lista de actores en su edición (8). Esta edición en particular de Antonio Roca va dirigida a todos los públicos, por lo tanto, para los que trabajamos el Siglo de Oro, hay un exceso de notas explicativas. La edición de la comedia em- pieza, como ya es típico de todas las ediciones, con el esquema métrico, y el de McGrady difiere, como él mismo indica, del esquema que hizo Dixon en su edición de la misma obra. La obra consta de tres actos con unos tres mil ocho versos en total, y va seguida un segundo final de la comedia, que en con- tenido no difiere en gran manera del anterior, aunque sí en el formato. La escena final es distinta, porque en lugar de ver lo que pasa, se narra. Siguen las notas al texto, las cuales están divididas en No- tas y Notas suplementarias. En las Notas encontra- mos las explicaciones típicas de palabras menos co- nocidas, cambios de ortografía, significado de palabras, origen de personajes y mitos, etc. Estas notas son muy útiles en el caso de usarse esta obra en una clase de undergraduates. Las Notas suplementarias son una combinación de gramática avanzada, uso

250 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 del léxico en otros manuscritos, e información his- tórica. Por su naturaleza, estas notas son más agra- decidas a nivel graduado y de investigador. Después de las notas viene el Aparato crítico en el que indica los cambios ortográficos que ha hecho, aunque ya en la introducción indica que va a ser muy conser- vador al respecto. Siguen cinco Apéndices: El primero es un resumen de Antonio Roca según el manuscrito de Melbury House. McGrady da una sínte- sis breve y un Resumen detallado por actos. El segundo Apéndice tiene el mismo formato que el primero y es el resumen de un manuscrito de la Biblio- teca Nacional reproducido por Cotarelo y Mori. Si- guiendo el mismo formato, el tercer Apéndice es un resumen del argumento de La serrana de la Vera Parte VII, 1617; BAE, 223. El cuarto es el resumen de Las dos bandoleras, Doce comedias, II, Barcelo- na, 1630, BAE, 211, seguido por un examen de la autenticidad de Las dos bandoleras. Los resúmenes de La serrana de la Vera y Las dos bandoleras complementan la sección en la introducción en la que McGrady habla sobre la presencia de los bandoleros en las comedias de Lope y la posible influen- cia que estas dos obras hayan podido tener en la producción de Antonio Roca. A los apéndices sigue la Bibliografía, que es bastante extensa, y a ésta un Índice de Notas. El índice presenta de forma alfabé- tica las palabras definidas en las Notas, con su defi- nición y/o uso, y el verso en el que aparecen. La comedia en sí es bastante extraña y bastante alejada del formato general que esperamos de

Imizcoz 251 las comedias áureas, de hecho el mismo McGrady indica que “la caracterización en este drama es es- quemática y tan negativa que la representación (o lectura) no es nada agradable” (15). El protagonista, Antonio Roca, pasa de ser un seminarista relati- vamente santo a ser un bandolero de la peor calaña, y sin atisbo de conciencia. Su madre, Julia, es tam- bién un personaje que llama la atención ya que es “a través de ella”, “a causa de ella” y “por ella” que Antonio se convierte en bandolero, a parte de que las madres son personajes poco comunes en el corpus de Lope. El principio de la obra nos recuerda el principio de La Celestina: El barón Alberino ve un día a Julia, se enamora de ella y quiere poseerla. El rechazo categórico de Julia (como el de Melibea) hace que Alberino se queje de la mala suerte de su amor, y lo hace en el mismo tono en el que Calisto se queja de su amor por Melibea. En lugar de la Ce- lestina, el barón recibe la ayuda de un criado y de una amiga de Julia, los cuales van a arreglar otro encuentro, para que el barón siga con su intento de seducción. Hasta aquí es todo típico enredo de comedia. El barón se vuelve a ver rechazado por Ju- lia, y decide matar a su esposo, cosa que hace, a traición y por la espalda. Hay que añadir que lo hace en el escenario y delante del público. Julia quiere venganza, la justicia no se la da y le ordena a su hijo que mate al barón. Antonio al principio se resiste, cosa lógica ya que lo que quiere es ser ordenado cura para dar misa, pero su madre lo llama cobarde y dice que ella misma se tomará la

252 Comedia Performance Vol. 10, No. 1, 2013 venganza por su mano. A causa de esta acción de Julia, Antonio cambia de actitud, va a buscar al ba- rón y lo mata a bocajarro seguido de Mendoza, criado de Alberino, y del Alcaide que aparece en ese momento. Así termina el primer acto, y a partir de este momento la personalidad de Antonio cambia y se convierte en un asesino frío y cruel sin asomo de conciencia, y que parece contagiar a los que es- tán a su lado de esa falta de sentimientos cristianos. La verdad es que ninguno de los personajes de esta comedia se gana la simpatía del lector, ni siquiera el gracioso, que más que gracia lo que da es pena. Al final de la obra Antonio es detenido y va a ser ejecutado, le pide a su madre que suba al cadalso y de un bocado le arranca la oreja en venganza por ha- berle convertido en bandolero. No pide perdón por sus actos y así termina la obra. Es una comedia curiosa de leer, no es agradable, y hasta cierto punto deja al lector con la pre- gunta ¿para qué se escribió esta obra? Porque no hay moral al final de la historia, pero tampoco hay una alabanza del bandolero, al malo (Antonio Roca) lo cogen y lo castigan, pero él no se arrepiente de lo que ha hecho, como sucedería en una comedia de santos, y muere ejecutado.

Cardiff, UK: University of Wales Press, 2012. Hardback $150. Paperback $35.

Serious scholarship serving academia since 1975.

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA, ® INC. 4501 Forbes Blvd., Suite 200Lanham, Maryland 20706 1-800-462-6420 · www.univpress.com

BASTILLE WITNESS The Prison Autobiography of Madame Guyon (1648-1717)

Introduction and Notes by Nancy Carol James

Translation and Notes by Sharon D. Voros

This translation of Madame Guyon’s prison autobiography provides a compelling account of her eight years of incarceration from 1695 to 1703.

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF AMERICA: An Imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 978-0-7618-5772-3 $50.00 Cloth eBook Available

A fundamental book for:

- Early Modern Spanish Stud- ies. - Theater. - Women’s Studies.

‘Aquel Breve Sueño.’ Dreams on the Early Modern Spanish Stage is a collection of ten essays by distinguished scholars from Spain, France, and the United States. Originally an idea by Ricardo Sáez of the Université de Rennes, France, this volume includes a variety of approaches on the significance of dreams as dramatic discourse. In Part I, “Oneiric Dis- course on the Early Modern Spanish VOROS (Sharon), SAEZ (Ricardo), Stage,” contributors are Belén Ati- (Eds.), enza, Ezra Engling, Ellen Frye, Rogelio Miñana, Charo Moreno, and Sharon Voros. Topics included are Aquel Breve Sueño: Dreams on the the prophetic dream in Lope de Vega Early Modern Spanish Stage. and Guillén de Castro, dreams as motif and dramatic device in Pedro ISBN: 1-889431-51-6. Calderón de la Barca, the metatheatrical function of dream sequences, the dream as dramatic character Order: www.unprsouth.com in Calderón’s auto, Sueños hay que verdad son, and the performance Tel.: 504-866-2791 dream in Leonor de la Cueva y Sil- va’s La firmeza en la ausencia. Fax: 504-866-2750 “Aquel breve sueño” is a line from Garcilaso’s second Elegy.

50% discount for students and senior Contributing to Part II, dedicated citizens (over 65). exclusively to Calderón’s La vida es sueño, are Nelson López, Chris- tian Andrès, Ricardo Sáez, and Christine Aguilar-Adan. Topics include staging and directing La vida es sueño, a comparative study on Pierre Boasituau’s Theatrum Mundi and Calderón’s La vida es sueño and El gran teatro del mundo, poetic structure and style in the redon- dillas of La vida es sueño, and La vida es sueño and the political institution of the prince.

Overlook Press 2013 Now available for preorder at www.amazon.com

Yale University Press 2013 Now available for preorder at www.amazon.com

Upcoming Performances

Wednesday, March 6: Shake & Falstaff (Puebla): El caballero de Olmedo (Lope de Vega)

Thursday, March 7: Cambalache Teatro (Murcia): La vengadora de las mujeres (Lope de Vega)

Friday, March 8: Nao d'amores (Segovia): El misterio del Cristo de los Gascones (Anon.)

Saturday, March 9: Morfeo Teatro (Burgos): El coloquio de los perros (Miguel de Cervantes)

Sunday, March 10: matinee. Morfeo Teatro (Burgos): De burladores y burlados. Entremeses variados (Lope de Rueda, Quiñones de Benavente, Bernardo Quirós)