Taking center stage: Early modern women’s tragedies on the contemporary stage

Abstract

From wife murder to cloak-and-dagger plays, female bodies, minds, and financial status are, for the most part, disempowered and abused by male protagonists with societal compliance. Since the 2000s, coinciding with the approval of the Ley Integral contra la Violencia de Género (2004), a wave of stage adaptations emerged in Spain that questioned the marginalization of women characters in the comedia. I claim that this trend in performance has become a sociocultural phenomenon that uses the symbolic capital of the comedia to raise awareness of women’s misrepresentation and gender violence and inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Adaptation
• gender violence
• performance
• Spanish comedia
• women’s rights

Notes

Notes

1 This artistic tendency has prevailed on the Spanish stage since the 1930s, when different political factions began to appropriate the classics as instruments of ideological propaganda. Later, with the arrival of democracy in the 1980s, the creation of the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico [National Company of Classical Theater] institutionalized a new vision of the classics that continues to the present.

2 As Helena Pimenta pointed out with regard to the 2018 adaptation of El burlador de Sevilla [The Trickster of Seville], directed by Josep Maria Mestres, major Spanish plays “require constant revision so that the gaze of our active artists can explore different facets and vertices of a slippery and problematic myth [Don Juan] that bring us face to face with our fears and our passions, as a society and as individuals” (7). All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

3 Although I have not included it as part of this analysis, the recent production of Rosaura (2016), written and directed by Paula Rodríguez and Sandra Arpa, both members of Teatro Inverso, is also a free adaptation of La vida es sueño [Life Is a Dream] (c. 1635) from the perspective of its female protagonist. Through the storytelling technique, Rosaura undertakes a journey in search of Astolfo, which actually leads to her liberation from her past and, ultimately, to finding herself. These apocryphal female leadership interventions have re-emerged on stage in Mestres’s Burlador (2018). In this particular case, the dramaturge, Borja Ortiz de Gondra, enhanced the presence of one of the victims of Don Juan, Doña Ana, relegated to invisibility in the original text. As Ortiz de Gondra explains: “Despite suffering tremendous violence, in Tirso’s original text she never appears, we do not see her, she is merely a voice. It is very hard for me not to give a body, a voice and a presence to this character, and I negotiated with Mestres to make a fairly radical but respectful change according to which she physically appears and speaks in the scene in Act I where the king and her father decide to marry her. And then, when she is waiting for her lover, the Marqués de La Mota, I have her appear again delivering some lines from another of Tirso’s works, Los amantes de Teruel [The Lovers of Teruel], with which she explains her feelings of uncertainty and anxiety while waiting for the man to arrive” (41–42).

4 As extreme as these changes might seem, the three directors coincide in having worked with the most profound respect for the original plays.

5 A similar phenomenon occurs with the representation of “violated bodies” in the works of Shakespeare, which, according to Pascale Aebischer, have become “a barometer on which cultural changes of attitude can be registered as each generation makes them mean differently, using the same textual gaps to articulate ever-changing concerns” (6).

6 Mengo, for his part, destroys the clichés of the village fool—which this character has always embodied—to become the true hero of the story by sacrificing himself for the common good of the town. His ghost will reappear later when the village finds itself in the presence of the Catholic Monarchs. He is the one who denounces the Commander’s crime as a curse from the past. As he reiterates why he sacrificed his own life, Mengo’s ghost is reminiscent of the spectral characters embodying the deber de memoria [duty to remember] that are featured in works on historical memory having to do with the Spanish Civil War.

7 Hernández-Simón was especially careful to stress the different social hierarchies that exist among the villagers of Fuente Ovejuna through their costume designs: “We have created a complete range of costumes, from the King and Queen to the workers, and we want it so that at first glance you can see that Jacinta and Laurencia are not from exactly the same social class, that is, to narrate through their clothes the different classes, the social differences that prevail in Fuente Ovejuna” (Zubieta, “Interview with Javier Hernández-Simón” 60).

8 The centrality assigned to the abduction of Jacinta in this adaptation is unusual. The vast majority of productions of Fuente Ovejuna do not place special emphasis on the dramatization of this event.

9 It is worth mentioning that this change in the outcome of the play is also a tribute to Fernando Urdiales, founder of Teatro Corsario in 1982, whose artistic trademark as a director specializing in Calderón’s oeuvre was altering the endings of his plays to reformulate them more in accordance with the present. This was the case for Amar después de la muerte [Love after Death] (1993), La vida es sueño (1995), and El mayor hechizo, amor [Love the Greatest Enchantment] (2000). For a detailed analysis of these productions and the changes in the endings implemented by Urdiales, I refer the reader to the article by Cienfuegos Antelo.

10 In Peña’s own words: “In the case of this ending, I was advised to go back to the original scene, and I even went so far as to rewrite it. But it didn’t come out well because Calderón did not want to say that Gutierre would repeat his offense by marrying Leonor (who demonstrates that she is not afraid) and has license to kill her if she behaved badly. To kill again without any consequences? And the audience would just have to accept it, happily, as if it were a happy ending to a comedy? I understand that the scene can be defended from a literary point of view, but I don’t see it that way” (Cienfuegos Antelo, “Interview” 139).

11 According to Isabel Rodes, the actress who played Emilia, the evolution of her character in the play was like a journey toward her reaffirmation as a woman: “As you say so well, in this version, Emilia does not die at the end. She is Otelo’s executioner; so the voyage of the character from absolute silence to an outburst of rage in the name of injustice leads me through places where submission, bitterness, envy, and desperation must be lived and shown exactly as they are, without artifice” (Fernández and Vázquez 154).

12 In Lope’s play, Jacinta shows a much more fraternal attitude toward Laurencia’s resolution to organize an army of female soldiers to avenge the actions of the Commander:

LAURENCIA: Jacinta, let the great injury done to you/take the lead; be in charge of a squad of women!

JACINTA: Those done to you aren’t slighter. (113)

13 In this version, Mengo is the only character who seems to be aware of the unjust treatment that Jacinta suffers at the hands of her own community. Indeed, both he and Jacinta function as counterpoints to Laurencia and Frondoso in Hernández-Simón’s adaptation: “Laurencia and Frondoso are the human paradigm because in them we can see the most heroic moments, their true love, but we also see much cowardice, very little empathy for others” (Zubieta, “Interview with Javier Hernández-Simón” 56–57).

14 It is no coincidence that the Catholic Monarchs in this adaptation are characterized as two mannequins or wax-museum figures. Their robotic appearance helps emphasize the disquieting atmosphere pervading the entire production. Their constant presence onstage, even when silently slinking around the stage or motionlessly watching the action from the wings, reduces them to mere puppets of a bloody and inhuman monarchy.