Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain by Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, Ana Caro Mallén, and Sor Marcela de San Félix (review)

Outside of Spanish literature departments—even in theater programs, people have difficulty naming more than two Spanish classical dramas, usually Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream and Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna. Good English translations of the hundreds of other great early modern Spanish comedias are few and far between. Within the field of early modern Spanish theater, we have begun to recover and seriously study the works of women writers only since the 1990s. Until now, English readers could access published translations of a few plays by the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, María de Zayas’s Friendship Betrayed, and excerpts from several convent plays in the landmark volume Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (1989). In Women Playwrights of Early Modern Spain, Harley Erdman’s thoughtful, readable, and witty translations bring the full text of four interludes by Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, a three-act comedia by Ana Caro, and four loas and a spiritual coloquio by Sor Marcela de San Félix to an English-reading audience for the first time.

This valuable book begins with an introduction by the editors, Nieves Romero-Díaz and Lisa Vollendorf. While Golden Age theater specialists might quibble with some details, the editors provide significant background about the political, social, and religious context of early modern Spain. The introduction also includes sections on the history of Spanish theater, Lope de Vega and public playhouses, Calderón de la Barca and palace theater, as well as city streets and convents as sites of performance. The most compelling information provided in the opening material comes in the segment titled “Women and Theater.” Here Romero-Díaz and Vollendorf offer details about specific women (Isabel de Borbón, María Calderón, Francisca Baltasara, and María Córdoba, for example) who worked as theater patrons, actors, and producer/directors. The section on “Women Playwrights” presents a five-page table of “Known Women Playwrights in Iberia and Ibero-America (1500–1750)” and their works. This chart, along with the extensive bibliographical footnotes supplied by the editors, points readers to significant sources beyond the scope of the current volume. Romero-Díaz and Vollendorf conclude their opening remarks with brief comments about the three women playwrights and the works included in the book. Additionally, the editors preface each author’s translated works with a short biographical note, a helpful bibliography of editions and studies, and a concise plot summary and analysis, which calls readers’ attention to gender issues raised by each text.

Erdman’s translator’s note makes explicit his approach to the meter and rhyme in his source texts. He has chosen to represent the Spanish eight-syllable lines by including four stressed syllables in each English line, and although he does not try to match the Spanish rhyme scheme, he has made the effort to use consonant rhyme in passages that call attention to their poetic nature—the songs, poems, toasts, and rhyming couplets within the plays. Additionally, in his footnotes, Erdman marks shifts in verse form in the source texts and explains his translation choices. These strategies will provide the reader with a feel for the formal, poetic language of the source texts that would be lacking in a prose translation. Erdman has attempted to avoid domesticating these texts by representing their linguistic and thematic strangeness in his translations. He chose the three playwrights because of the theatrical possibilities suggested by the comic, playful tone of their works, and his note and translations also recognize, describe, and represent the differences in their styles and literary personalities.

Feliciana Enr...