La dama del olivar (Spanish Edition)
Guests 1 room , 2 adults , 0 children Guests 1 2. We search up to sites for the lowest prices. An amazing place filled with beauty and peace. All the ones I saw are quiet and beautiful. See all reviews. El Paraje de Sayago Muga de Sayago. Balneario de Ledesma Ledesma. Posada Los Misterios del Alba Zamora. Posada Dona Urraca Fermoselle. La Casa del Regidor Fermoselle. Hotel de Alba Ricobayo. Hotel Puente de Piedra Zamora. Posada De Los Vettones Zamora. Parador de Zamora Zamora.
View more hotels in Zamora. See what travelers are saying:. Reviewed October 31, via mobile. Reviewed October 30, via mobile. Traveled as a couple. Reviewed October 1, La victoria contad, Conde. Pasa, Rey, desta manera: Pierda, que perdida la esperanza, ya no hay remedio que tenga. Bien estamos, a otra puerta.
Salieron luego los celos. Otra vez, vuelve a su tema. He is not fully committed to introspection or interaction. Instead, he resides somewhere betwixt the two, pulled into one by his anguish and back into the other by duty. This conflict and uncertainty would have to inform any performance of his role. In-betweenness is also a common theme in the settings, costume, and performance cues associ- ated with the Duchess.
The first setting linked to her, which appears between verses to , is her Spanish palace. This is a minor setting that only occupies verses, or 3. This space is where she receives and greets the Prince. Once again, this scene does not demand any par- ticular setup. There are no references to desks, ta- bles, windows, etc. Still, dialogue emphasizes that the Duchess's palace is located in the countryside, removed from the urban milieu to which the Prince is accustomed.
Of course, these references establish a contrast between courtly life and that of the coun- tryside. Instead, she has grown, like a plant, from nature. Implicit in descriptions of this space is its transitional nature and the isolation suffered by its primary resident, the Duchess. In either case, if traveling by sea, it would be the middle point of a voyage from Albania to Denmark. Her home is quite literarily betwixt and between the two king- doms mentioned in the play. Additionally, her sepa- rateness becomes apparent visually at the opening of the third act: Beatriz notes this un- usual costume and her irregular behavior: The second setting linked to the Duchess appears twice in the comedia, once between verses and , and again in verses to These occurrences add up to lines, or 7.
This setting is somewhere outside of Rosaura's palace, specifically, outside of a garden with an en- trance that leads to her chapel. This is a nondescript space. Dialogue only reveals that it has a wall. The Prince asks Silvio: Still, there is no need to produce this wall onstage. The main function of this setting is to serve as a transition into and out of the Duchess's oratory. The Prince appears here in the first act right before he sneaks onto her property and in the second act just as he flees.
In other words, this setting high- lights the fleeting and uncertain nature of their rela- tionship. Cordeiro contrasts this visually bare setting with a lavish description of Rosaura's garden. Silvio explains in octavas reales: Cruz-Ortiz 83 En cuadros de pinturas vi centellas de amorosas historias. Instead, the char- acter Silvio seems to be describing settings that are too scenically demanding to be reproduced within the performance space teichoscopia. A la mano derecha hay una puerta, que es oratorio, en fin, de la Duquesa, y a la siniestra mano otra concierta, en perspectiva igual a esta grandeza.
Mira primero que es noble la Duquesa, y esto advierte: The next scene takes place inside the oratory and not around its exterior. Still, this de- scription establishes that the oratory should have a door. Rosaura reinforces this fact by asking Beatriz if she has locked it in verse Cruz-Ortiz 85 The oratory is the final setting associated with Rosaura, and it is the most scenically demand- ing. It appears in the first act, in lines to , and in the third, from verse to These occurrences add up to lines, or Stage notes in the first act introduce this setting: A door with a sign flanks it.
The Prince refers to them when he observes: Shortly afterwards, he reads its message: A second discovery space is used in the same scene: This is the altar upon which the Duchess later falls asleep: Finally, this Christ statue is played by a mo- tionless actor, who in the third act miraculously comes alive to save Rosaura's life. Arellano descri- bes the use of actors hidden in huecos: An astute autor would position the crucifix in the hueco central, converting the stage into a life- sized reproduction of a baroque altarpiece, both in dimensions and in content.
Of course, this discovery space is physically divided from the rest of the stage by curtains, drawn at the appropriate moment for the reveal. Visually, this area is delineated by dark- ness.
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As Varey notes, "It must be remembered that the overhanging balcony and roof over the stage would make the discovery space relatively dark" "The Use of Levels" The resultant visual imagery must have been striking: A woman cries at his feet. Her brother unsheathes his dagger to kill her, and Christ breaks his immobile pose, lowers himself from the altar, transgresses the limits of the dark- ened hueco, and steps out into the light, in between the would-be murderer and his victim.
What is un- clear is whether Victorino entered the hueco to kill his sister, or, conversely, if Christ steps out of it to save her. In any case, the discovery space becomes a limbo, a connection between this world and the next, a place where humans can inter into partial contact with the divine, and through which the di- vine breaks through to intervene on their behalf. For example, in an eleventh-century manuscript, Christ appears painted within a square frame. Some 35 surviving Christ statues built between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries show us how this effect was achieved by sculptors.
As Freedberg explains, many of these stat- ues were used in liturgical dramas of the Easter pe- riod The animated crucifix topos also appears in a number of paintings. In both cases, Christ, moved by the plight of a suppli- cant, comes alive. These constitute lines, or 9. According to the acotaciones, the scene oc- curs at night: Particularly, this balcony may have railings, since the Count ad- dresses them in the following lament: Victorino should not be able to see her, as the fol- lowing exchange demonstrates: Sombras locas de mi amor, mi propia ofensa os defama. Dile aquesto de mi parte.
La Infanta me manda hablarte. His view of Lenia would be obstructed by his upward vantage-point, the railings, and Elvira, who presumably stands between the two. If in fact this is how this scene was stage, it would be another in- genious use of the architectural structure of the cor- ral, in this case with the intent of highlighting the uncertainty of the young lover. Until now, I have described it as the transitional, the uncertain, and the in- between, but I believe that modern criticism offers a variety of theoretical frameworks from which we can understand these types of phenomenon.
For ex- ample, from the vantage-point of criticism influ- enced by cultural anthropology, we can describe this use of in-betweenness as a manifestation of the liminal. In the first, the ritual subject engages in symbolic behavior that marks his separation from a previous role. Still, modern criticism has expanded upon this vocabulary and applied it to a wide variety of socie- ties and modes of cultural production.
That middle stage, characterized by upheaval and dislocation, provides the dramatic tension that forms the basis of many comedias. In this sense, the comedia is a genre characterized by liminality. In fact, if one were to replace one term for the other, the above definition would often still hold true: Its protagonists often find themselves at a threshold the limen , torn be- tween the demands of opposing forces, and beset by the conflicts and confusion produced by their uncer- tain marital, political, moral, or social status.
In- deed, a list of the most famous comedia characters reads like a register of people stuck in some type of limbo before their state is resolved and they are re- integrated into the social order. These comedias and the liminality of their protago- nists end as the characters complete their transfor- mations and become re-integrated into society, gen- erally through marriage. Still, in defense of its usage here, I would like to make three points: This play employs a variety of techniques to highlight the uncertain states of its protagonists.
It dresses her in mourning and places her far from courtly life in the countryside. Additionally, metaphors link her to na- ture, to plant life, and to the forest. Addition- ally, settings associated with the Duchess are transi- tory and fleeting.
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In particular, Juramento takes ad- vantage of the hueco central, making it a spatial representative of the liminal. It is where prayers are given and answered, and where the Duchess touches the divine. He is, like the Duchess and like Lenia, a person caught in the state of being between states of being. In closing, I hope that this study has shown how a deductive approach to uncovering latent stagings can give us, at the very least, a broad sketch of how a piece may have appeared onstage.
Additionally, this study suggests how El juramento ante Dios, untouched for centuries, might be performed in the future, and what themes should inform these per- formances. Finally, I have also suggested how mod- ern criticism can make sense of those parts of the spectacle that we are able to recover. In other words, in the absence of first-hand accounts of a given performance, modern versions as a point of comparison, and manuscripts that might indicate authorial intent, the contemporary critic, using the text as a point of departure, can nonetheless recon- struct how a play asks to be staged, and catch a glimpse of parts of Golden-Age stagecraft that have been otherwise obscured by time.
This may indicate that the play was written during the Thirty Years' War, in which Christian IV of Denmark joined the alliance against Bohemia in See my dissertation mentioned above. Era hermano de [Jorge de la Mota y Silva]. In- stead, they are relatively consistent. The differences between earlier versions and subsequent ones can generally be attribut- ed to reduction and compression. P U Mirail, Cruz-Ortiz 99 Barbosa Machado, Diogo. Isidoro da Fonse- ca, El juramento ante Dios, y lealtad contra el amor. Comedias Antiguas Sueltas 8. Pe- dro Escuder, n. Los herederos de Pedro Lanaja y La- marca, Los herederos de Pedro Lanaja y Lamarca, Francisco de Leefdael, n.
La viuda de Francisco Leefdael, n. The Power of Images: Studies in the Histo- ry and Theory of Response. U of Chicago P, Colegio Nacional de Sor- do-mudos y de Ciegos, Cruz-Ortiz Larson, Catherine. Hispanic Society of America, ]. The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell U P, The Rites of Passage. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Michael McGaha and Frank P. U of Michigan P, In recent years, it has commandeered the vast Hospital San Juan as its holiday home and, in , two plays were performed there for nine and ten-day residencies the longest for any production in the Festival: The general ethos of exploration and discovery has also benefited the comedia in that Vasco has honored his promise to offer a more eclectic program: With a few notable exceptions, the general emphasis has been on works that have rarely, if ever, been staged in recent years and, in terms of performance style, the prevailing aesthetic has been characterized by an unprecedented sobriety.
I have been unable to uncover any record of this comedia being staged in modern times. Vasco, who adapted and directed this production, attributes this com- plexity to the performance context for which the play was originally written: Lope may have dispensed with the Aristotelian unities but this lengthy play-text, comprised of over 4, verses, is noticeable for not even attempting to emulate the classical precepts.
In addition to its comic potential, this conceit is likely to appeal to post-modern sensibilities due to its emphasis on the constructed nature of at least some gender roles. He first encounters a potential mate when he accompanies his mother to visit a friend in Belflor and sees Serafina. She is his social equal and his mother thinks that she would make a good match, but he is intimidated when he hears that she has many suitors for he fears that his masculinity is wanting, and that he will not be able to compete: The challenge the director and his team faced with this production was how to perform a lengthy, unfamiliar and self-conscious play with multiple themes in a manner that could delight and entertain a modern-day audience in a large theatrical space.
Indicative of this aesthetic is the fact that his costume designer of choice is celebrity designer, Lorenzo Caprile. Furthermore, the costumes worked well in conjunction with a series of songs. One possible objection is that the performance did tend to focus in a rather one-dimensional fashion on the comic elements of the play. On stage, the play might not exactly perform the role that its director had claimed for it on the page. It also arguably did not tease out all or even many of the dramatic and sexual possibilities latent in the play-text.
What it did, however, achieve was the dual feat of making an unfamiliar and convoluted plot involving multiple layers of transvestism intelligible. The first cycle has now been completed with the initial intake having performed two Lope plays: As Vasco notes in the program to the latter: Very few changes were made to individual verses, but every attempt was made, presumably in an effort to reduce the running time, to cut lines not essential for narrative comprehensibility.
This resulted in an unfortunate middle ground whereby neither the comedia specialist nor the neophyte was likely to be satisfied. The fact that a woman uttered the final lines was symptomatic of a re-alignment of gender roles that was, nevertheless, hinted at but never developed in a production that had no clear directorial vision. Edits made to Las manos were arguably necessitated by time constraints, but La noche de San Juan is lean enough that it could easily have been performed in its entirety.
The fact that it was cut so heavily was, however, necessitated by the performance style. Although the actors recited their lines with technical skill and the production begun with an ostensibly uplifting festive song, there was little on-stage chemistry. The production was also very unoriginal in terms of stage design. Unfortunately, Vasco has been unable to capitalize on individual triumphs; as a result, the Company has been unable to forge a solid identity or consolidate the performance tradition that it set out to create in One explanation is that its status as an epic poem rather than a dramatic play discourages stage practitioners.
Nevertheless, it is of similar length to a typical comedia whilst Lope concludes the poetic narrative with a description of the kind of wedding scene that was a mainstay of many of his comedies, a parallel bolstered by his claim that: An Alpha cat appeared in the opening scene scaring the rest of the characters; this fear was misplaced as he merely promises to tell them a story that then unfolds on stage. Beyond the anomalous presence of actors dressed as cats, there was little to differentiate the production from performances of more conventional comedias.
It was intelligently staged and choreographed, with the movement of the actors as cats owing as much to the conventions of contemporary dance as to any tradition of comedia performance; this appeared to be vital in engaging the audience. The basic conceit of this feline universe was intrinsically interesting but it was overplayed in parts with a constant recourse to meowing soon becoming irksome. Marramaquiz is courting Zapaquilda but is subsequently rejected in favor of a wealthy indiano, Micifuf, to whom her father wants her to marry.
This ongoing conflict over Zapaquilda led to the outbreak of a civil war that was staged dramatically. An apparent impasse in the battle was subsequently ruptured with a loud bang as a human character shot the feline indiano; hence, within the self-enclosed narrative, a man in ridiculous hunting attire effectively took on the role of a deus ex machina.
This bloody resolution paved the way for reconciliation as Marramaquiz married Zapaquilda. The number of literary references was perhaps understandably cut in the transition from page to stage, but there is nevertheless the question of whether anything of worth remains once this literary game and poetic rivalry is largely neutered? Furthermore, how does the feline presence, central to the mockery on the page, survive on the stage where audiences were confronted not with cats expressing themselves in human form but as actors masquerading as cats? Wheeler The most interesting and ingenious moments tended to be those that consciously or unconsciously played with the conventions of comedia performance.
Hence, for example, the feline identities provided the pretext to dress the actresses in revealing clothes whose erotic potential echoed that of female to male transvestism in the corrales. In general, however, the anthropomorphic narrative was too slight and inconsequential to ever move beyond novelty value.
The passage of time seemingly enabled Lope to view his exile from Madrid, as a result of the libel claim, brought against him by her relatives after she married a richer suitor, with a certain level of detachment. Nevertheless, he evokes a degree of worldly cynicism through the use of poetic expression and literary parody; this facet was never explored on- stage as the play was rendered in a more one- dimensional comic mode. She pitched the production in the Festival program in the following fashion: Dramaturgo, poeta, soldado, amante, sacer- dote, hombre de su tiempo.
Lope abruma y sobre- coge, emociona, entretiene, divierte y espe- luzna. Una vida tan rica y compleja da para mucho escenario. Cartas, poemas, comedias, y sobre todo, amores: In terms of dramatic content, the play follows the narrative trajectory of H. He is presented in an unambiguously positive light. Hence, for example, on the death of a mistress, he immediately invites their illegitimate children to live with him. Later, he is shown to be very supportive to his married lover, Marta, as she begins to lose her sight; their adulterous shenanigans are justified on account of her being forced into an arranged marriage against her will at an early age with a man who routinely beats her.
Lope and his family are, however, shown to be hostage to fate and economic insecurity. He may have multiple affairs on his travels around Spain but the moral implications are downplayed. Nevertheless, an ominous figure appears after his wedding to inform him that he will pay for his sins; his wife then dies in childbirth.
Lope is imbued with a sense of weary melancholy in his dotage, beset by personal misfortunes and the need to work ceaselessly to maintain his household and support his daughters. Hence, for example, in a scene that is likely to sound tragic on the page, an elderly and infirm Lope struggled to settle his bills whilst his exuberant daughters demand a carriage.
The highly appreciative Almagro audience was particularly enthused by a musical routine set in Valencia that presented the locals as simple but happy souls replete with tomato necklaces! The contrasting of seventeenth- and twenty-first century discursive styles was another source of humor. Else- where, Lope was annoyed when Marta spoke well of Cervantes; he claimed that his competitor was unable to write plays and that his verse was not that good.
However, he was left uncharacteristically speechless when she proceeded to compare their prose. Her hair was obviously a wig and she clearly had a drink problem. I personally found this performance rather tiresome and symp- tomatic of a rather facile and one-dimensional com- ic approach. Nevertheless, I do concede that, at least on the night I attended, I was in the minority; the audience was in hysterics throughout and re- warded the actors with a lengthy standing ovation.
One obstacle is, admittedly, the lack of a modern scholarly biography; dialogue between academics and practitioners might, however, have benefited the on-stage action. On stage, the latter was presented as a buffoon easily hoodwinked by the former. In one scene, the aristocrat complained that all the women he courts through letters fall in love with the secretary rather than the master. In real life, there was clearly a more complex social and sexual dynamic at play that was largely left unexplored. This stern image was also counteracted at Almagro in Comedia de capa y espada, comedia de en- redo, de burlas y veras y de veras burladas.
In the late s, he established a collaborative company dedicated exclusively to the staging of Golden Age plays. This co-operative, that predated the CNTC and received no state funding, was unprecedented in terms of continuity.
Through their extended residencies in El Escorial and nation-wide tours, they developed an impressive and eclectic repertoire that included Casa con dos puertas. From a theatrical perspective, the delivery of the verse was grandiose, exacerbated by the use of artificial amplification that was distracting and amateur.
The narrative was played for high farce and there was little sense that the doors function as psychic as well as physical barriers. However, thirty years on, the level of professionalism, and failure to interrogate the play- text in any profound way, is regrettable.
A student production performed at the Chamizal Festival in piqued scholarly interest in a play that had hitherto largely been ignored by critics. Halkhoree as an appendix to his doctoral thesis. Ruano de la Haza subsequently prepared a version of the play that Maya and his long-standing collaborator, Amaya Curieses, adapted for the stage.
Although there is an element of speculation, I would suggest that the production was so accomplished largely as a result of this interdisciplinary collaboration facilitated by the ongoing collaboration between Ruano de la Haza and Maya. La mujer por fuerza begins with a fairly standard comedia scenario that is then developed through a narrative that is relatively straightforward in comparison to the Tirso plays with which it is most readily comparable: Don Gil de las calzas verdes and Marta la piadosa.
Finea cross-dresses so as to pursue the Conde Federico. Festival de Almagro 74 Furthermore, this conception ostensibly matches the theme of the Festival. It is not, however, immediately apparent what is achieved by turning the male character into a hapless victim whilst making the female manipulative and selfish. This consideration was, nevertheless, effectively bypassed by focusing almost exclusively on the comic potential the scenario affords.
Furthermore, humor was not wrought at the expense of intelligence. These were not, however, made indiscriminately. As a result, on-stage exchanges did not feel incomplete and the transition between scenes did not appear incongruous as in many stage versions based on heavily edited texts.
Wheeler The small cast was bolstered by the presence of an on-stage musician, Toni Madigan, who, in addition to playing skilful and enlivening music, became an active participant. His arrival on stage marked the start of the performance, and he punctuated many speeches with musical strums. One comic scene that worked particularly well was when the bemused Conde heard for the umpteenth time of a woman with whom he supposedly had an affair; he asked both the musician and a member of the audience about this ex-lover of whom he knows nothing.
It is, I think, no insult to characterize this production as modest. It was given a much shorter residence at Almagro than Casa, and its success depended in no small measure on the goodwill of the audience. Without this, certain comic scenes, such as when characters interrupted their speeches and held their faces in frozen contorted gestures to express their surprise, would take on the air of an amateur production. There was also a certain lack of originality as some ideas appear to have been appropriated from the CNTC. Where Maya and the actors excelled was in exuding frivolity whilst taking both Tirso and the performance seriously; the play-text may have been simplified but it was never condescending.
This tendency is, I would suggest, symptomatic of both a lack of knowledge and imagination on the part of practitioners and actors who also appear to have a worryingly low expectation of their audience. One, although by no means the only, way of tackling this problem is to encourage communication between academics and practitioners; this was, after all, one of the major reasons for the creation of the Festival in the first place.
Conclusion In terms of comedia performance in modern- day Spain, the Almagro Theater Festival was unprecedented in both intensity and range. There were sales of nearly eighty-thousand theater tickets; this equates to a three percent increase from , and an average occupancy of eighty-five percent EFE. This ought to be cause for celebration but, as we have seen, quantity was not matched by quality. This may attributable in part to the fact that some individual productions did not fulfill their initial promise, but a generally poor level of performance was also the result of wider and deeply entrenched problems.
Foremost amongst these structural difficulties are insufficiently trained practitioners; a reluctance to engage with performances from the past or with academics; and a desire to pander to the lowest common denominator through recourse to sexual content, facile comedy or topical concerns.
Day- trippers may travel by train but the intense heat of La Mancha means that most performances do not begin much before eleven in the evening. Hotels are thereby able to charge premium rates that are often double or triple the standard tariff during the Festival period. These arguments clearly provide a justification for the amount of public money invested in the Festival; the problem, however, is that the comedia is being understood as cultural capital in the commercial rather the artistic sense of the word.
In relation to comedia performance, I believe that this could prove to be advantageous as I hope that it might focus attention on a series of ostensibly more modest productions that nevertheless seek to engage with the Golden Age in a less cosmetic manner than has been the norm. I would also like to thank Victor Dixon, Ma- ryrica Lottman and the anonymous peer-reviews for their very useful comments and criticisms. Then, in , Cayetano Luca de Tena directed a new play with an old title: In the style of a comedia, it depicted a day in the life of a young and hot-blooded Lope.
While the representation of the established order is the house, the locus of the performance is the opening and closing of the doors. Works Cited Alvarado, Esther. Women, Capes, and Marriage. Brown, Jonathan and J. A Palace for a King: Las manos blancas no ofenden. Edition Kurt and Roswitha Reichenberger, Barcelona, de agosto de La noche de San Juan, meta- comedia urbana para palacio.
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Almagro, 11, 12 y 13 de julio de Alexander Samson and Jonathan Thacker. Lope de Vega y el Duque de Sessa. Festival de Almagro, El burlador de Sevilla and Critical Transitions. Robert Lauer and Henry W. Bucknell Universi- ty Press, El burlador de Sevilla: A Study of the Mujer Varonil Cambridge: Cam- bridge UP, Faber and Faber, La noche de San Juan. The Life of Lope de Vega. The Orders of Discourse in El burlador de Sevilla. Sabor de Cortazar, Celina. Celina Sabor de Cortazar. La Gatomaquia and the Burlesque Epic. The Pennsylvanian UP, Stoll and Dawn L. Plot Twists and Critical Turns: Los cigarrales de Toledo.
La prudencia en la mujer, Ed. Wheeler Vega, Lope de. Golden Age Drama in Contemporary Spain: The Comedia on Page, Stage and Screen. U of Wales P, The following errors appeared in the first part of Dr. Wheeler's article, which was published in the Spring issue. We apologize to the author. The following endnote to the title is miss- ing: I would also like to thank Victor Dixon, Maryrica Lottman and the anonym- ous peer-reviews for their very useful comments and criticisms. Several items are missing and some have been incorrectly alphabetized. Por otra parte, en cuanto al teatro del oprimido remitimos a las publicaciones del propio creador del movimiento y analizaremos sus princi- pios a partir de nuestra propia experiencia en el pro- ceso creativo de esta Fuente Ovejuna ambientada en Chihuahua.
En palabras de Boal: En el primer caso se produce una catarsis; en el segundo, una toma de conciencia. Works Cited Boal, Augusto. Using Performance to Make Politics. Jeux pour acteurs et non-acteurs. Almagro, Universidad de Castilla-La Man- cha, Fuente Ovejuna de Lope de Vega. In Honor of Frank P. Robert Lauer y Henry W. Sullivan New York, Peter Lang, Atti del convegno internazionale su Lope de Vega, vol.
Huerta Calvo, Javier dir. Universidad de Salamanca, Javier Huerta Calvo dir. Universidad Complu- tense, Di- rector Gregory Doran has built a version of this character in his production of Cardenio for the Royal Shakespeare Company. A number of recent developments attest to the growing scholarly and popular interest in Cardenio and Double Falsehood. Dorotea is a typical comedia heroine who cross-dresses in order to pursue her seducer and re- claim her honor. Witty, intelligent and independent, she knows how to whittle Fernando down to size: She sniffs distastefully at his cologne during the serenade scene.
When Fernando forces her into a sexual union we are taken aback. Photo by Ellie Kurttz. Oddly, the estrado platform with its carpets and cushions lies empty, while Dorotea is seated elsewhere. Her chair was apparently included in the set so that Fernando could trap her in it, pin- ning her arms to her sides and tipping her back- wards, in a hold that renders her all but helpless. If you view Dorotea as a typi- cal comedia heroine you will expect her to have a father but not a mother.
If you remember her well from Don Quijote, you will recall that she has living parents. But no actors—not even extras—portray her parents and their invisibility makes her more vulnerable and her actions more heroic. These dour images look on disapprovingly and helplessly as Fernando tips their daughter backwards in her chair.
The momentary quiet on stage focuses our attention on the mumble of the moving bobbins and on the demands of the craft. In early modern Eu- rope, sewing, embroidery, and lace making were the quintessential pastimes of the virtuous maiden. Pippa Nixon is deftly manipulating bobbins when Fernan- do intrudes and begins his too-forceful pleas. The seduction scene is framed by the sud- den appearance of villagers carrying carnivalesque puppets and straw dummies peleles. A passage from the book very evidently influ- enced the depiction of village revelry before and after the seduction scene.
Brenan describes the peleles as dummies that had been stuffed with straw and which often had a sexual or bacchic sig- nificance. Phalluses made of sausages would be placed in appropriate positions, female bodies would be bellied out with pumpkins and calabashes and decorated with strings of figs, and jars of wine would be placed be- side them. The peleles have outsized heads, breasts, noses and genitals and are dressed like country bumpkins. Bouncing up and down in a blanket, they illustrate energetic love-making, and since they do not move of their own volition, their erotic activity seems controlled by a force outside them, i.
Two works by Goya have also inspired the staging. The above passage from South from Granada describes the fireworks and flames that accompany the destruc- tion of peleles in Andalusia. While Doran could not show these figures being burned, he implies as much. When the air clears, we see the limp effigies abandoned on the village plaza as if dead 1.
Cardenio has walked onto the stage, but no devil appears in the stage directions for Cardenio 2. The verb to conjure is usually applied to an evil spirit, not to a handsome young friend like Cardenio, whose presence delivers a rueful insight. The seduction scene asks: To what extent is Dorotea a mere puppet-victim manipulated by Fer- nando? To what extent is she not an agent of her own future? She argues that the great difference in their social classes will make for an unhappy match, one that his father the Duke would definitely disapprove.
It is only when Fernando again threatens her with vio- lence that she calls her maid to witness the troth- plight 1. Peter Kirwan, a Shakespeare scholar who has extensively blogged on the subject of Cardenio, accurately notes of the seduction scene, The overall impression was one of consen- sual sex under false pretences, rather than enforced rape. Soon after Cardenio premiered on April 23, to overwhelmingly positive reviews, a contro- versy nonetheless arose in the UK theater communi- ty over two issues: In shame-cultures such as this women, as here, wind up having to woo the men who have raped them.
Coinci- dentally, political events exacerbated the controver- sy, proving once again the spot-on relevance of ear- ly modern drama. Surveying the popular reviews and academic blogs, one is forced to conclude that many critics were not willing to accept the production on its own terms. For this pro- duction, the act is not rape. The fact that this key speech is a sudden burst of prose in a sustained sea of verse may explain away any change of voice. A very similar inci- dent occurred while I was watching a performance of Cardenio.
Soon after Fernando enters the room he near- ly climbs on top of her, but her anger and caustic denunciations force him to free her, and this mo- mentary victory can dupe us into believing that he cannot overpower her will. Humor also plays a part in our own naive seduction. Since we have just seen Dorotea mock him and easily escape his ardor in the satirical serenade scene 1.
Modern audiences may find it distasteful to see a potential rapist treated as a comic figure, guessing that the director wished to make the production more fami- ly-friendly. Commentators who want a modernized, po- litically correct Fernando-Dorotea plot may be simply unwilling to accept the source material in Don Quijote and to acknowledge the legal status of women at the time. Contemporaneous canon law would not have considered what happens to Dorotea a rape since it does not involve abduction. In point of fact, what happens to Luscinda, who is abducted and spirited away in a coffin, comes closer to the contemporaneous definition of rape.
This problematic episode of at- tempted rape is lightly adapted from Double False- hood 4. Her psychology is much en- larged as she moves beyond her own situation and shouts a warning to all women: Like the noble Fernando, he considers himself socially superior to Dorotea and like Fernando he should defend her rather than attack her.
He repre- sents an ersatz father figure to the evidently parent- less Dorotea, and he guards the cooking pot as if he were a source of food and comfort. He lowers his trousers, and as she attempts to flee he clumsily jumps after her with his pants down around his legs, to the irrepressible mirth of the au- dience. Just as he mounts Dorotea and is about to rape her, Pedro interrupts the scene and stops the crime without ever knowing its sexual nature.
While his attitude may encourage some audience members to dismiss the rape attempt as a crime averted, it may encourage others to compensate for his blindness and to recognize the psychological assault experi- enced by any victim of any such a crime. Like the seduction scene, this episode of the Master of the Flock depicts sexual relations in a way that provokes us to enter the action and to ask essential questions about rape and about the conse- quences of depicting it comically.
But Timothy Speyer, the talented actor playing the Master, is perhaps too young to play an ancient Pantalone, and the Master plans his attack with more craft than any ordinary buffoon. Dorotea is making the very best of a very bad situation. A Dorotea with more depth and heft would force us to recognize that she is exercising her free will and good judgment when in the final scene she embraces Fernando as her husband. The stage Dorotea is rescued from the Master of the Flock instead of freeing herself, and there is no lustful servant-companion for her to throw over a convenient cliff.
In the Cardenio wil- derness scenes, she is a less decisive character and takes on less of the masculinity that her disguise implies. We sense that Fernando too can find a loving family in her house- hold. In Cardenio, her character is given no such expository speech that puts her in control of the narrative. The absence of any on-stage parent makes Dorotea seem more victimized, and we sense that her only chance at a familial relationship of any sort lies in marrying Fernando.
Doran has pre- pared us to recognize her embrace of a thoroughly Catholic marriage by dramatizing the pervasiveness of Spanish Catholicism in nearly every scene. Moreover, he recognizes that her great innocence initially drew him to her: Fernando sees himself as a victim of love, and the fact that he initially prostrates himself in a soliloquy when no one is there to judge him convinces us that he truly believes in his victimhood.
Intentionally or other- wise, he mocks the Crucifixion by lying face down on the floor, his body taking the form of a fallen cross. Then, in a mockery of Catholic morality and contrition, Fernando proceeds to engage Pedro in the crime of kidnapping Luscinda in a coffin by disguising themselves as hooded penitentes guard- ing a corpse 4. Fernando now refers to Dorotea as an image, suggesting the statue of the Virgin Mary: This script reproduces the text used during the ninth week of an eleven-week rehearsal process Doran, Personal Interview.
Unless otherwise noted, all the performance ele- ments described in this article do not appear in the published text of Cardenio. Prome- theus, , pp. Works Cited Brenan, Gerald. Swan Theatre, Stratford- upon-Avon. June 3 and 6, Carnegie, David and Gary Taylor, Eds. The Quest for Cardenio: Shakespeare, Fletcher, and the Lost Play. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha. The Royal Shakespeare Company, Un- ion Theatre, London.
Cardenio, Swan Thea- tre Stratford, 14 May The Central Problem of La fuerza de la sangre. An Interview with Gregory Doran. El encaje roto y otros cuentos. Modern Language Association of America, Museo Casa Natal de Cervantes: Shakespeare, William, and Lewis Theobald. Double False- hood or The Distressed Lovers.
The Phoenix of Madrid is the Spanish play in the autumn sea- son of three world premieres of European classics new to British audiences. Why did you choose No hay burlas con el amor? I chose this play because it made me laugh, because I love Beatriz, and because it has nine actors!
Speaking as a professional theatre person as op- posed to a learned academic, I find it interesting that the acting companies seemed to get smaller as time went on in the period, they seemed to change from fourteen to nine, probably due as much to the laws in effect at the time as to the laws of economics. Like those later companies I cannot have huge casts The Bath Theatre Royal is not publicly-funded and these later plays are somewhat cheaper to pro- duce in that sense.
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But I was attracted to the play for its sophistication; I could tell that they had been do- ing these plays for 55 years by this time. Why did you decide to title the piece The Phoenix of Madrid? So the decision was really pragmatic in that sense. In the play Beatriz is reborn, and Don Alonso is kind of reborn too, and it also echoes Lope, who was called a Phoenix in his time.
Golden Age writers used titles to create their own myths by celebrating the title. There is Phoenix-like redemption in the play with both Alonso and Beatriz. Laura Rees and Frances McNamee. The text is in your translation, did you work from a literal version or what was your translation process?
When I took over the job I had six months before I started rehearsals, in which time I had to choose the three plays for this season, set up the company, cast it, and design it. Ideally I like to spend a couple of months on a text, and then put it in a drawer, and then spend another couple of months on it. I did what I always do: I get to understand the play first as a piece of drama, I try to find out what is beneath the language, find the living energy, the conflicts, the characters and relationships, and then the words come easier.
My reading of Spanish is getting better from doing those shows in Spain [El perro del hortelano and Fuente Ovejuna in Spanish with Spanish actors] so I feel much more confident now working from the Spanish, but I did have some sup- port from a literal translation. Did you feel you had to cut the play down in your version? Where did you feel you had to make cuts in rehearsal, if any? It just felt that he was alienating us too much.
For all three of the plays in this current season, did you work from the model you used at the RSC where you were looking for translations rather than adaptations? If a play is worth doing, do it! What are your favorite ways the three plays in repertory interact? There are lots of lovely echoes, but part of the way they interact is by their difference. I chose them for their differences more than their similarities, but there are lots of lovely similar- ities such as, for instance, sighing, which is an ob- session in the Marivaux play.
Sighing is an involun- tary sign of human feeling and also a kind of obses- sion in The Phoenix. They all have very good parts for women; there are plenty of talented male actors around but there are even more women of talent. Peter Bramhill and Milo Twomey. In England we revere Shakespeare and the classical tradition, so people go a lot to see Shakespeare and, to be frank, people are used to being slightly bored at classics.
Golden Age plays are different. These plays are based on narrative, like all popular, accessible dramatic entertainment. We can talk about the language as much as we like but the main impact is narrative. The latter play interests me again on the theme of sis- ters; all sibling rivalry stories are fascinating. In both The Phoenix and La dama boba the sisters consist of an outstanding character and one who is just good. Leonor is a good character, but is more conventional, while Beatriz is brilliant, a true origi- nal.
Finea is not stupid. She finds it difficult to cope with her father and her sister. We will look forward to the upcoming Golden Age Season in Bath. How is the comedia suited to the Ustinov? Are there plans for a tour? The Ustinov Studio is the perfect place to do Golden Age plays. And wherever I am, there will be Golden Age productions. I would love to tour them to the festivals in Spain, and all over the world. When did I first hear about Cardenio?
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust gave me a photocopy of their edition. Actually, we filmed that song in the Swan Theatre with the music of Robert Johnson, a Shake- speare contemporary. You could hear, every now and again, a quantum leap in the quality of the verse. But the real problem was that Double Falsehood had at least three missing scenes. Theobald talks about adapting it for the sen- sibilities of his age, the eighteenth century, and he was probably cutting some juicy bits. The plotting is so coagulated!
As I began to plot what was missing and what you would have to sup- ply, I thought the result would be inauthentic. I did get a bit obsessional! All of them took the story and did exactly what they wanted with it, in sometimes radical ways. The plot co- agulates! So all these writers had also sup- plied missing scenes. It would have been rather limp. Fortunately, the RSC happened to have several moments of coming into contact with our Spanish colleagues.
I told him that Shakespeare may have written a play based on Cervantes. Then weirdly enough, I got a phone call from Gary Taylor, an American profes- sor who had done his own reconstruction of Cardenio4 and he wanted me to direct it. I was quite a long way down my own road by this point. Maybe I should just read it. They deserve their own play.
La Dama del Olivar (Spanish, Electronic book text)
Your Cardenio already has four complicated young lovers, plus those three elderly fathers who are developed in their own right. You find out about the dead mule, the saddlebag— MOL: Shakespeare and Fletcher would not have used that flashback narrative structure. It would have been alien to them.
That still needs fortifying. I wonder if you did that deliberately. We started the project trying to work out whether this was a lost Shakespeare play. And then because there were so many other scenes we were writing in, and bits and pieces we were adding to make the play work, our effort be- came what it must have been for Shakespeare and Fletcher when they coauthored Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen. That is, we tried to cover up the cracks.
I wanted people to be- come engaged with the story. I wanted to see what it might have been that Shakespeare and Fletcher saw in the Cardenio story that satisfied them, that made them think it was a play that would sit in the canon of their work. Shakespeare and Fletcher titled their play Cardenio, but much of the time Fernando was grab- bing my attention more. He seems more dynamic. How did you work with his ability to overshadow Cardenio? But Drury Lane was run at that time by a triumvirate of actor-managers.
But he called it Double False- hood, which takes the eponymous role out of it. Certainly in Double Falsehood, Cardenio is not a sap. Fernando was beautifully handled. Did your experience of directing The Joker of Se- ville back in inform your understanding of Fernando or lead you to see him as a Don Juan fig- ure? At the end of Cardenio we have to feel for Fernando, that he is going through a process of growing up. All the lovers were very young. That was one thing I wanted to make absolutely sure of. Especially Cardenio, who is memorably played by Oliver Rix in his first professional role.
I noticed that Cervantes describes Cardenio as having a beard in the wilderness, but you decided other- wise.
La Dama del Olivar (English, Spanish, Hardcover)
Fake beards can be terrible! I never thought of that. Your production seems to incorporate some of them. There were conven- tions in Double Falsehood that I felt Shakespeare and Fletcher had already changed by putting in the fathers, which I think is the real Fletcherian influ- ence. Those three fathers are a comedia conven- tion that was very creatively handled on stage. They interact with each other, each is dynamic and each has a distinct relationship with his son or daughter.
And they represent a very specific stratifica- tion in certain terms of society. Could you talk about how you built them up as characters? We hardly touched them, in fact. They are re- ally much as they appear in Double Falsehood. They seemed to me to have a kind of depth, espe- cially regarding their children. The Don Camillo character is very funny but is also quite moving in his inability to talk to Cardenio, his own son. Whereas we had to fortify Don Bernardo in the last scene because he was so upset by what he had done to his daughter Luscinda that he seemed unable to speak.
He has come to some understanding of his relationship with not only his daughter, but with his dead wife, whom he believes did not love him. In Cervantes he has a wife albeit very sketchi- ly written and she is present at the wedding, which seemed odd to me. Another comedia convention I find fascinating is the use of the reja, which you used so extraordinarily. Actually he gave me a book by an English- man!
The grille seemed to us to be crucial—a physical demonstra- tion of the way in which Luscinda, as a young woman, is confined. I discovered that in , when Double Falsehood was revived at Cov- ent Garden, they did a play called The Padlock as a comic afterpiece. But the short story is more detailed and strange and certainly better in giving a sense of how male-female relationships were con- ducted in that society, and that was very, very help- ful indeed. And it sort of led to the grille.
When the set designer Niki Turner and I did a research trip to Spain, grilles were on all sorts of windows all over. Your set incorporated that type of window and made it physically part of the reja, a huge iron grille that resembled the same structure in a Spanish church. Yes, our grille was based on the one in the To- ledo cathedral! I really admire everything you did with it on stage, how you made the shadows of the bars form a jail just before the intermission.