Lope Enters with His Entourage: Metatheatricality in Ignacio Amestoy’s Lope y sus Doroteas

Abstract

This article examines how Lope de Vega is brought to center stage as a character in the recent theater production Lope y sus Doroteas o cuando Lope quiere, quiere (2021), written by Ignacio Amestoy and directed by Ainhoa Amestoy. The play explores Lope’s last years, his literary work, his relationship with his youngest and illegitimate daughter, Antonia Clara, and his personal struggles. This analysis delves into some theatrical choices used in this production to craft the narrative and highlight Lope’s own obsessions and self-absolution through his relationship with his younger daughter. More specifically, it explores how metatheatrical devices draw attention to Lope’s past, present, and future as he confronts his own mistakes, love affairs, his daughter’s intimate relationship with a womanizer, and his own impending death.

Keywords:

• Lope de Vega
• metatheatrical devices
• Ignacio Amestoy
• Ainhoa Amestoy
• La Dorotea

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Ignacio Amestoy and Aihnoa Amestoy for sharing their knowledge, providing me with an hour-long interview, and giving me access to their performance via streaming. I am incredibly grateful for their generosity.

Notes

1 Although produced more than two years ago, I would like to call attention to Entre Marta y Lope (2014) by Fundación de Siglo de Oro, directed by Gerardo Malla and written by G. Malla and Santiago Miralles. The play is an intense drama that revolves around el Fénix’s relationship with Marta de Nevares at a time when she was declining mentally and physically prior to her death.

2 Some films and TV series released in the last fifteen years featuring Lope as a main character include: Lope (dir. Andrucha Waddington, 2010); El ministerio del tiempo: Tiempo de gloria, season 1 / episode 2 (2015); Tiempo de hidalgos, season 2 / episode 3 (2017); Tiempo de esplendor, season 3 / episode 5 (2017); Cervantes contra Lope (dir. Manuel Huerga, 2016). For an exhaustive list of biopics, educational programs, drama series, films, and fiction series inspired by or based on Lope’s work and life, see Fernández (30–35). More attention has been given to how Lope’s work has been produced for the screen. In this regard, see Duncan Wheeler’s Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen, and Phillip Allen’s Lope de Vega on Spanish Screens, 1935–2020.

3 I agree with Esther Fernández’s assertion that Lope’s mainstream and televised image should be viewed as a cultural phenomenon and a device to promote interest in his literary and historical prominence: “El reciente éxito del escritor en televisión se debe tener en cuenta no solo a modo de anécdota pasajera sino como un fenómeno cultural único en la historia de TVE. De hecho esta popularidad ofrece la oportunidad de recuperar al Lope televisivo, cuya nueva imagen invita a los telespectadores a acercarse a él desde una visión menos imponente, más humana y sugestivamente contemporánea. A fin de cuentas, quizás la experimentación con los clásicos sea la nueva manera de ‘enseñar deleitando’ en este tiempo” (Fernández 29).

4 Lope finished writing and published La Dorotea toward the end of his life; however, in his youth he had written an earlier version, which he lost. In the prologue to this text, he writes: “Escribí La Dorotea en mis primeros años, y habiendo trocado los estudios por las armas. . . se perdió en mi ausencia, como sucede a muchas; pero restituida o despreciada. . . la corregí de la lozanía, con que se había criado en la tierna mía. . .” (89).

5 From now on I will refer to the character of Lope in Lope y sus Doroteas as “stage Lope,” and to the real Lope de Vega as “historical Lope.”

6 Abel explains the concept of life as “already theatricalized” as follows: “By this I mean that the persons appearing on the stage in these plays are there not simply because they were caught by the playwright in dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, but because they themselves knew they were dramatic before the playwright took note of them. What dramatized them originally? Myth, legend, past literature, themselves. They represent to the playwright the effect of dramatic imagination before he has begun to exercise his own; on the other hand, unlike figures in tragedy, they are aware of their own theatricality. Now, from a certain point of view, only that life which has acknowledged its inherent theatricality can be made interesting on the stage. From the same modern view, events, when interesting, will have the quality of having been thought of, rather than of having simply occurred. But then the playwright has the obligation to acknowledge in the very structure of his play that it was his imagination which controlled the event from beginning to end” (134-35).

7 In the introduction to Lope y sus Doroteas, Ainhoa Amestoy mentions that all the characters in this play are inspired by historical ones, but Lorenza is a character drawn from numerous other characters: “[E]s una suma de varios personajes que fueron o pudieron ser . . .” (I. Amestoy 12). However, the name comes from a former housekeeper who worked for Lope. See Ignacio Amestoy, 115, note 5. It should be noted that Lorenza has a role similar to the one Gerarda has in La Dorotea: they are both alcahuetas and introduce or explain details about other characters in their respective narratives. In the case of Gerarda, for example, she provides the reader with the first details about Dorotea: “. . .ha cinco años que este mozo la tiene perdida, sin alma, sin remedio, y tan pobre (por no darle disgusto, o por miedo que le ha cobrado), que ayer vendió un manteo a una amiga suya, y dice que por devoción y promesa trae un hábito de picote la que solía arrastrar Milanes y Nápoles en pasamanos y telas… (Vega 106).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas

Glenda Y. Nieto-Cuebas is associate professor and the George and Louise Peters Professor of World Languages and Cultures at Ohio Wesleyan University. Her current research focuses on contemporary productions of seventeenth-century texts, with special emphasis on performance and social issues. She is co-editor of the volume Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater (University of Toronto Press, 2021) and currently she is co-authoring a monograph that focuses on how Latinx theater practitioners are adapting and producing seventeenth-century Hispanic texts for modern audiences by highlighting and creating awareness of their own reality, lived experiences, and socio-cultural background as BIPOC artists.