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 Comedy  Frederick Luciani I n 1683 the comedia Los empeños de una casa (TheTrials ofa Noble House) by the Mexican poet and playwright Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651?–1695) was first performed in an aristocratic home in Mexico City in honor of a newly installed archbishop . In a sainete performed between acts II and III, two actors comment on the larger play of which they are a part. This Luigi Pirandello–like interlude offers Sor Juana the opportunity to poke fun at herself—the two characters find the play too long and amateurishly written—and to comment incidentally on the prestige and preponderance of comedias authored by playwrights of the Spanish peninsula: Muñiz To be honest, would it not have been better, my friend, if they wanted to fête His Excellency, to choose, without any fuss, a play by Calderón, Moreto, or Rojas, since, in just hearing those names, no one would dare to whistle it down? Arias But don’t you see that they are putting this one on because it is new? Muñiz Hardly proof of its quality! . . . The plays that come across the sea from Spain are always better, and lighter, never heavy; since things that are passed through water are more easily digested.1 Both this meta-­ theatrical interlude and the larger comedia by Sor Juana have the air of an inside joke shared with the members of the creole and peninsular elite in attendance , among them the viceroy of New Spain and his wife (the nun’s patrons). Sor Juana’s self-­ directed barbs were not to be taken seriously; she aspired to compete with the theatrical greats of Spain’s Golden Age. While following late seventeenth-­century Spanish conventions of the comedia deenredo amoroso (playofamorous intrigue), Sor Juana embroidered the genre with some American, feminist, and even personal flourishes, writing herself into the comedia as the character Leonor, in equal parts beautiful and brilliant . Even in the title of the play, Sor Juana signaled her adherence to—and variations on—conventions of peninsular theater: the title Los empeños de una casa echoes, with a twist, Calderón de la Barca’s Los empeños de un acaso. Sor Juana’s case is emblematic of larger trends in the baroque theater of Spain’s New World colonies. Theatrical genres, themes, and production in the colonies to a great extent paralleled the arc of peninsular theater, from Lope de Vega’s formulations of the “new comedy” at the beginning of the seventeenth century to the high-­ baroque comedia of the school of Calderón in the century’s closing decades. Yet fundamental differences of various kinds— historical, linguistic, cultural, racial, demographic, material , and even personal—meant that the Baroque manifested itself in the theater of the Spanish colonies in a way that was sui generis. The ostensible resemblance of New World comedias to those of Spain reflected the constant traffic of plays, playwrights, and audiences across the Atlantic during the seventeenth century. Plays from Spain, which arrived in the colonies in the form of partes (collections of a dozen plays) or sueltas (individual plays in pamphlet form), were a form of light reading. The newly appointed viceroys and their retainers in Mexico City and Lima served as elite patrons and audiences, au courant with artistic trends in Spain. The transoceanic migration of playwrights worked in both directions. Perhaps the most important American playwright of the pre-­ Lope era was Fernán González de Eslava (1534–1601), whose Coloquios espirituales y sacramentales (1610) reflect modes of religious theater of the playwright’s native Spain while exhibiting linguistic characteristics of his adopted Mexico. One of the most prominent Golden Age playwrights, Tirso de Molina, spent several years in the “Indies”; American characters and themes remained present in his work, most notably in the “Pizarro Trilogy.”2 Another prominent playwright, Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, was a native of New Spain who moved to Madrid and made his theatrical mark there. His limited theatrical production— 81 Comedy (Spanish America) some twenty carefully worked plays compared to Lope’s more than 1,500—along with certain differences of tone and emphasis in his work set Ruiz de Alarcón apart from peninsular-­ born playwrights of his generation and reveal (to some) a distinguishable mexicanidad. Given this transoceanic movement of plays, playwrights, and audiences, as well as the numerous works in prose (letters, histories, chronicles, etc.) and epic poetry regarding the...

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