Caught in a Mirror of Princes: Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza, from Early Modern Statecraft to Helena Pimenta's Stagecraft

Abstract

In Helena Pimenta's production of Lope de Vega's El castigo sin venganza (1631) with the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC, 2018–19), a massive mirror presided literally in the created palace space on stage, implicating all the characters and even the audience. This mirror was responsive as a dramatic character, as it were, constituting the central axis—a main protagonist—of this mise-en-scène. It functioned technically and iconographically to effect an admonitory representation of the Duke of Ferrara's aberrations that were, ironically, a living portrait of his son's. This path leads naturally into the painterly domain of geometry and perspective, for which Diego de Velázquez's Las Meninas will serve as a point of reference. The notion that the reflective surface was not at the geometric center of the staging but at its pictorial center will be considered vis-à-vis certain technical aspects of the court painter's quintessential work. Given that the mirror provided an illustrative portrait of the Duke's imperfections, we also turn to the genre of advice literature known as specula principum to explore the iconographic meaning of the onstage glass reflector in Pimenta's mise-en-scène.