This Bitch: Self-Fashioning and Social Media in an Adaptation of El perro del hortelano

Abstract

This article examines how self-representational practices in the online sphere have been interpreted in an adaptation of Lope de Vega’s play El perro del hortelano (1618). This Bitch: Esta Sangre Quiero, written by playwright Adrienne Dawes and performed on Zoom as part of the University of Arkansas virtual ArkType Festival in January 2021, reimagines the role of honor and honra in the early modern court as analogous to the clout or status of influencers which dominant social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The delicate balancing act that nobles in comedia must master to navigate between desire and reputation is reflected in Dawes’s adaptation in the juxtaposition of the private selves and the performative selves which influencers display for followers to consume. This article thus explores how this recent adaptation engages with performative identities/identity as performance as a natural through line between the social context of the original play and the self-fashioning practices of today’s rich and (internet) famous. In this version of Lope’s story, the countess Diana becomes a Pilates instructor and pansexual goddess, while the secretary Teodoro is reimagined as her talented, but unknown, social media manager. Although this adaptation was imagined for performance on a traditional theater stage, the social commentary became so much more pointed when examined through the meta-layer of online performance: as we examine the lives of people who mediate their identity via screens using the Zoom screen itself, the audience becomes complicit in the self-fashioning strategies of the characters.