Sor Juana’s Double Crossing to the Boards of the Bard: Los empeños de una casa and Helen Edmundson’s The Heresy of Love

Abstract

For Maureen Mary Murphy (alias Sister Jude Marie)1Jornada I.House of Desires or The Trials of a Noble House: Encloistered Tour de Farce and Interrogation of an Endinghe inspiration for first jornada of this essay comes from Found in Translation diaspora project at London's Globe Theatre in spring of 2012, which mapped journey of Shakespeare in translation, but not without representing things Hispanic in Read Not Dead section. The project kicked off with a reading of Life's a Dream (5 February 2012), and it included a Mexican staging of Henry IV, Part 1 as part of Globe to Globe festival (14 May 2012).Sor Juana's El festejo de los empenos de una casa (1683) was in some sense a prequel to 2012 Globe to Globe festival, for it had been staged- albeit without accompanying loa, letras, sainetes, and sarao that arguably elevate it to level of musical court spectacle (Hernandez Araico 328)-in Catherine Boyle's eminently playable translation (House of Desires or The Trials of a Noble House) under direction of Nancy Meckler (30 June-1 October 2004).2 As part of Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) 2004 Spanish Golden Age Season, this baroque literary figure of Mexico found herself on boards of bard with a play originally penned, not for public stage, but for viceregal court and aristocratic palaces. Even more importantly, perhaps, she found herself in illustrious company of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Cervantes, whose works were part of that season's Spanish repertoire.3As lights went down in Stratford-upon-Avon's Swan Theatre with its meter high thrust stage surrounded on three sides by spectators, public was immediately confronted with a set covered in shimmering polished brass. A wall of brass rising at rear of stage held up a pseudoaltar with glimmering candles and a clutter of iconic and ornamental objects-a sacred space that may have evoked an inner world of memory. As two novices polished brass floor to sound of Church music, a figure in a nun's habit sat at a desk in front of altar, quill in hand, undoubtedly penning play we were about to see: a baroque festival about the trials of being in love (HD 2.5,60), with its intrigue, deceit, mistaken identities, jealousy, dishonor, unrequited desire, loss of mutual love, search for correspondence. Or, perhaps, as production's translator posited-evoking another of meanings of empenos-Sor Juana was moving her characters into place as in her imagination, [...] foregrounding sense of lack of real agency of characters, who are puppets to abstracted codes that will guide them to an inevitable end: reconciliation with codes that dictate their destiny (Boyle, Loss 179). In effect, passing from creative process to stage reality, from convent to palatial home of Don Pedro (William Buckhurst), occurred as two icons were taken from sacred altar space and set center stage, at same time that their comedia alter egos, Dona Ana (Claire Cox) and her maid Celia (Katherine Kelly), were animated by Ben Ormerod's distinctive lighting. The resurrection of Sor Juana (Rebecca Johnson) as a stage presence had been bom of director's decision to use play's myriad references to dramatist as nun-images of convents, sanctuary, and being locked away-in order to create a complicity with a modem audience similar to that which an original audience might have experienced (Daley).The nun stopped writing and, as if hearing voices in her head, listened intently to Dona Ana as she told Celia (who sat polishing a candlestick) of her brother Pedro's plan to abduct his beloved Dona Leonor de Castro (Rebecca Johnson) as she eloped with her lover Don Carlos de Olmedo Qoseph Millson) and to have her cloistered in [the] safe haven of his house in care of his sister (HD 1.1, 23). Sor Juana continued to observe pawns of her imagination as Celia revealed, in an aside, hidden presence of Dona Ana's lover Donjuan (Oscar Pearce). …