Transgresiones ecfrásticas: El texto y la imagen en Los herederos de Segismundo de Schmidhuber de la Mora

The role images play in relation to the verbal medium that produces them constitutes the object of analysis of Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora's Los herederos de Segismundo (1982) as literary text and theatrical performance. The play begins 20 years after the conclusion of Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño and dramatizes 30 years in the lives of Segismundo, his son Américo and their servants. The servants' appropriation of the proscenium, the ekphrastic descriptions of the masterpieces by the royal palace's sculptor and of the scenes inspired by a photograph titled El arado are designed to revise the seventeenth century's socio-economic and theatrical conventions, so that future generations of workers may enjoy the opportunities previously reserved for the nobility.