Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calderon in "Los empeños de una casa"

Author(s): Carl Good

Source: Latin American Literary Review , Jan. - Jun., 1999, Vol. 27, No. 53 (Jan. - Jun.,
1999), pp. 28-48
Published by: Latin American Literary Review

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/20119798

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 BAROQUE DESIRE: SOR JUANA AND CALDER?N
IN LOS EMPE?OS DE UNA CASA1

CARL GOOD

?yeme con los ojos,

ya que est?n tan distantes los o?dos
?Sor Juana, "Amado due?o m?o"

Given the current emphasis on performance, visuality and historical

representation in drama studies, it is easy to forget that the images, move
ments, and voices of the mise en sc?ne, as well as the possibilities of
historical inquiry into these factors, continue to be filtered through problems
of writing. This is not the case, or at least not in quite the same way, in the
study of performance itself, where things can be said about the "visual text"
which do not necessarily require or demand reference to the written script,
assuming one even exists. But when the focus of study is something other
than a viewable performance of the work, readers must confront the fact that
what they are dealing with is, first and foremost, a written object. Questions
of how a particular play was staged at its time of writing, what historical and
ideological factors accompanied and influenced its production, how visual
effects were manipulated, and so on, become meaningful only through the
written artifact itself, as either the source of information or as the confound
ing singularity upon which all contextual knowledge about the work
ultimately depends.
Such an acknowledgment might seem to reject the vital critical
dimensions that the emphasis on performance, visuality and history has
made possible. But then again, the performance-writing distinction as such
may itself be a false one. In the case of Sor Juana' s Los empe?os de una casa,
for example, a focus on questions of writing need not leave behind the
concerns of visuality and history; in fact, they might reinvigorate those
concerns by telling?or performing?a story that has not been adequately
told: that of Sor Juana's strategies in relation to the conventions of Spanish

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 29

drama. For as it turns out, this story is too dynamic to remain "hidden" in the
script of the play, accessible only to the excavations of close reading. An
examination of Sor Juana' s relation to Calder?n de la Barca and the Spanish
dramatic tradition?the story of that relation within the text of her work?
can result not merely in a predictable "allegory of influence" whose effects
are invisible at the performance level and which ends up ignoring the
theatrical specificity of the work. Rather, it can also bring to light a
performative allegory?a simultaneously written, visual and historical
expression?which Sor Juana actively plays out on the stage. The result is
a particular juncture of writing and performance in which the two interrupt,
enrich and even become each other.
Such a stress on performance and writing, however, need not, in turn,
discard extra-textual matters of historical context in a consideration of Sor
Juana' s work. If anything has been demonstrated by the emphasis on history
and culture of the last two decades of North American critical studies, it is
the tenacious persistence of critical imagination about the biographical
subject of writing and the ongoing (albeit always provisional) narration of
history. Although questions of biography and history, if they are to have
symbolic meaning and effect, must ultimately be drawn from or put into
conversation with the literary work itself, both biography and history
nonetheless persist in the critical imagination independently of whether
such a work of textual filtering is carried out. This persistence?or insis
tence?is not often confronted as a problem in current criticism, where
biographical and historical contextualization are taken for granted as a
necessity without that necessity itself being thought. An enormous critical
gap thus separates the (unjustified) disappearance of the author in structur
alism and that author's (magical) resurgence in cultural studies. It is of
course reductive to characterize the history of recent criticism as a passage
between structuralism and cultural studies; neither movement was, or is,
itself monolithic or completely dominant and the latter does not emerge only
from?and is not always a break with?the former. However, reference to
this transition as a general trend does at least put into relief the dramatic
about-face in critical treatments of the writer that has taken place over the
last several decades.
To caricature: the writer was theorized out of the picture, but after a
short lull in the conversation everyone hastily resumed talking about him or
her as if nothing had ever happened. The issue is related to the problem of
the subject itself; but the resurgence of the subject in contemporary criticism
(particularly in psychoanalysis2) still has not specifically addressed the
concrete problem of whom we speak of when we refer to the writer. In the
strictest terms, that writer remains at least in part an imagined entity, the
ambiguous combination of a textual effect with a historical conjecture;
however tempting it is to brush the problem away, it nonetheless persists.

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30 Latin American Literary Review

The problem, which raises the importance of the writer rather than eliminat
ing it once again, is too large to be adequately treated here, but it bears at least
this brief acknowledgment. To initially grope a way through the problem,
however, the word 'imagination' might be crucial to the question: the turn
toward cultural studies might have a great deal to do with the insistence of
the imaginary itself. What such an insistence demonstrates is that biography
and history maintain a life of their own through the imaginary, even if that
life is a provisional, ever-changing one with constantly shifting content and
whose effects for criticism are always productively under question. Critical
insights do not necessarily grow out of the historicizing imagination, but
they are always accompanied by, and?at least in part?secretly motivated
by, that imagination. This gives a certain odd legitimacy to biographical
contextualization, since that activity has its own unpredictable and produc
tive effects on the imagination even while, strictly speaking, not serving as
the principal source of critical insights in relation to the text.
As critical work on Sor Juana has demonstrated, historical details are
particularly insistent and compelling metonymical factors associated with
this writer and thus bear acknowledgment as productive of an ever-increas
ing amount of critical work. At the same time, the unstable bases of historical
information should be kept in mind: Sor Juana's biographical details
themselves are not grounded in any kind of permanent foundation but
emerge through readings of fluid testimonial accounts and the minimal sign
posts of a few historical documents. In other words, what we know of Sor
Juana is owed to productive fictions, although, paradoxically, the unreliability
only increases the vital insistence of her biography. Furthermore, her life,
like every passionate life, originally asserted itself like a fiction. What is
striking about the history of scholarship on Sor Juana's life is its basis on
very few first- and second-person accounts; that is to say, beyond a few
concrete specifics, the image we have of her life grows mostly out of the
productively unstable truths of testimony. Nearly everything that is known
about Sor Juana comes from three principle sources: her own brief autobio
graphical account in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz', a letter she
wrote to her confessor Antonio N??ez de Miranda3 ; and a short biography
by Jesuit priest Diego Calleja, a contemporary of Sor Juana who never met
her and whose knowledge of her life was based on his own research,
including discussions with her friends, such as the Marqu?s de Mancera.
Other sources of information include a few written testimonies from her
acquaintances and a number of documents such as her will, her baptismal
certificate, several legal contracts and her profession of faith.4
As we will see, several details of Sor Juana's life are particularly
relevant to a discussion of Los empe?os de una casa. The majority of them
are already well known, although they bear repeating. Most important is her
status as a woman who asserted herself brilliantly?first as a courtier, then

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 31

as a nun?in the rigid cultural and intellectual milieu of colonial Mexico

City. Her writing, her intellect and her wit were much celebrated by a
succession of viceregal courts and also by readers in the Americas as well
as in Spain: her achievements in prose, poetry and drama (but also theology
and philosophy) would have been notable if produced anywhere in Europe,
but were even more remarkable in the Spanish American colonies. Although
cultural life in the Valley of Mexico rivaled that of many Spanish cities at
the time, it was even more closely governed by autocratic religious and
political institutions which, we could add, held a particularly tight reign over
the expression of women. The circumstances of Sor Juana' s birth have also
been productive for critical imaginations: she was the daughter of an
illegitimate union (her father's identity is uncertain), born in either 1648 or
1651 in the village of San Miguel de Nepantla in the mountains southeast of
Mexico City; her work has thus often been seen as haunted by the absence
of the father and by the subsequent instabilities of her social position.5 Also
noteworthy were Sor Juana' s bold responses to the ecclesiastical authorities
of the time, along with the enigmas surrounding her subsequent renunciation
of the literary-intellectual life in 1693. The circumstances ofthat renuncia
tion are of particular interest here, since they demonstrate the aggressive
relation to paternal (or, rather, fraternal) law that she had staged a decade
earlier, albeit in a very different context, in Los empe?os de una casa. Sor
Juana' s writings went literally beyond the limits of the social and intellectual
world that circumscribed her; in her famous autobiographical defense,
Respuesta a SorFilotea de la Cruz of 1691, for example, she manifests not
merely her much-vaunted stylistic and intellectual brilliance, but also the
tendency of her work to confront symbolic death through its insistence in the
face of conceptual, aesthetic and institutional prohibitions.
One of the many insights of Octavio Paz's literary biography of Sor
Juana, Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz o las trampas de la fe, is his suggestion of
a direct link between her boldness in the face of ecclesiastical authorities and
her subsequent renunciation of her own work in 1693.6 Paz suggests that the
latter was largely a consequence of the nun's loss of her crucial ally, Manuel
Fern?ndez de Santa Cruz, the bishop of Puebla, after her epistolary self
defense proved too excessive for his own expectations and also began to
threaten his political position. The story has been told numerous times, but
several details bear emphasis here. In 1690, Fern?ndez?inspired by what
appears to be his own rivalry with the Jesuit archbishop of Mexico City,
Francisco Aguiar y Seijas7 ?published, under the title, Carta atenag?rica,
Sor Juana' s theological refutation of a sermon by Portuguese Jesuit Antonio
de Viera8, a prominent priest closely associated with Aguiar y Seijas. The
bishop accompanied the letter with his own simultaneously flattering and
admonishing prologue written under the feminine pseudonym, Sor Filotea
de la Cruz. The prologue could have reflected any, or all, of a number of the

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 32 Latin American Literary Review

bishop's purposes, such as to attenuate the riskiness of his own action and
to preempt likely attacks on Sor Juana's daring, but it also probably served
to sharpen the irony of his own aggression against the archbishop as well as
to satisfy his own clerical duty in admonishing Sor Juana for her intellectual
excesses as a woman. None of these gestures of authority covered over Sor
Juana's own rhetorical boldness. Commenting on her letter, Paz character
izes her as "una verdadera pugilista intellectual" (512) all the more effective
because she did not depart from rules of decorum; nonetheless, he refers to
the content of the debate itself as mere "pasi?n ret?rica, enamorada de s?
misma, lejos tambi?n del aut?ntico sentimiento religioso: shadow boxing"
(515).9 We might wonder why such an apparently rhetorically substance
less letter would have provoked such a violent response, since the Carta
atenag?rica incited a storm of polemic both in Mexico and Madrid?
mostly, although not exclusively, against the author. The response might be
that subtle effects of rhetoric are felt more strongly in a highly rigid political
system?or even that the use of rhetorical ironies comprises the only truly
effective political agitation in general; Sor Juana's use of references to her
own sex in the letter leaves no doubt that, in her own way and for her own
time, she was a feminist agitator who could cause a disturbance. When she
herself counter-responded to the bishop's prologue by writing him another
letter four months later, the bishop appears to have abruptly withdrawn his
support. The second letter, probably her most famous work, the spiritedly
satirical, autobiographical and feminist Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la Cruz,
was not published but was likely circulated among members of the Mexican
intellectual elite.
For Sor Juana, the sudden loss of a key political ally, compounded by
a shift of political power from the Viceroy to the Archbishop in the face of
famine and civil unrest in the Valley of Mexico, as well as her own alienation
from key supporters in Spain, seemed to have put great pressure on her to
renounce her "secular" activities. She died two years after doing so, in 1695.
What should be stressed here, however, is perhaps not the psychological
mystery that obscures Sor Juana's renunciation of her work; Paz, for
example, takes perhaps too many liberties in conjecturing the psychological
content of her downfall.10 More crucial is Sor Juana' s own aggressive, albeit
fatal, role in the events leading up to her own demise. Paz himself
effectively counters Italian critic Dario Puccini's portrayal of the nun as a
passive instrument of the bishop of Puebla in the publication of the Carta
atenag?rica:

en este incidente hay un elemento nuevo, desconocido

hasta entonces en la historia de la cultura hisp?nica: la
aparici?n de una conciencia femenina. Este elemento es lo
que le da otra significaci?n al suceso. Repito: Sor Juana no

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 33

fue un instrumento del obispo de Puebla. Fue su aliada

(533).

The statement could be stronger; Sor Juana was not only the bishop's ally
but, as became clear in her Respuesta, a critic with her own agenda at
loggerheads with his own. As a result, she certainly became a victim of
higher powers. It must be remembered that at a key moment she did not hold
back from asserting a rhetorical subject that would invite wrath from above;
the apparent acquiescence of her "renunciation" stands next to, but does not
subordinate, her temerity in writing the Respuesta a Sor Pilotea.
Although these events took place nearly a decade after the writing and
performance of Los empe?os de una casa, the details of the controversy
retrospectively set the scene for Sor Juana's forays into drama, which at
times show evidence of a similar rhetorical aggressiveness in relation to both
language and the institutions which circumvented her. Although she has
been more often celebrated as a poet?particularly as the author of the
philosophical Primero Sue?o?her dramatic works are remarkable not only
for their artistic merits but also for their evidence of the dramatist's dynamic
participation in the public realm of the Mexican colonial court.
Unlike those of most of her predecessor peninsular playwrights (Lope
de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calder?n, etc.), Sor Juana's plays were all
written for court performances rather than for popular functions. This fact
could put certain restrictions on how they are read, since not only were they
written literally in the face of temporal law, but it would be impossible to
utilize them?as many critics have used other works of Spanish Golden Age
drama?in a search for their birth in, and effect on, the popular imaginary.
Furthermore, their performance context makes these works at least some
what analogous to Sor Juana's religious writings of the Carta atenag?rica
and the Respuesta, since they testify to her involvement in, and potential
effect on, a public sphere nearly as off limits to a woman of her time as the
realm of theology. Two of Sor Juana' s dramatic works are widely acknowl
edged to be her masterpieces, the Eucharistie drama, El Divino Narciso, and
the comedia, Los empe?os de una casa. She also co-wrote (with Juan de
Guevara) a second?although markedly inferior?comedia, Amor es m?s
laberinto, as well as two other autos sacramentales (sacramental dramas) in
addition to Divino Narciso, and several other minor pieces.
Los empe?os de una casa is Sor Juana's most elaborate and fully
realized dramatic work, since she accompanied it with a number of smaller
works as a full-scale fiesta teatral.11 As Paz notes, its first performance
coincided with the arrival of Aguiar y Seijas in Mexico City and Sor Juana
in fact included an acclamation for the new archbishop (who was not in
attendance) in the work's opening loa. This coincidence has little to do with
the content of the play itself, although the same spirit of rhetorical, or

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 34 Latin American Literary Review

dramatic, "pugilism" that would emerge from Sor Juana's public letters six
years later is, as we will see, already very much in evidence here. It is seen
in particular in the relation between two characters, Ana and her brother
Pedro.
Likewise, her aggression's meticulous adherence to protocol is equally
evident in the work. Writing within that dramatic tradition of which
Calder?n was the most immediate representative figure for her, Sor Juana
arranged the theatrical space of Los empe?os de una casa in strict accor
dance with principles of baroque dramatic symmetry. The matrix of the
play's symmetrical principle is an apparent opposition between two groups
of characters: a pair of lovers and a pair of siblings. The lovers, Do?a Leonor
and Don Carlos, have eloped from her father's house only to become trapped
in yet another domestic space, the house of Don Pedro and his sister Do?a
Ana, where they find themselves the unwilling recipients of a coercive
hospitality. Pedro, the original architect of the enredo, is seeking to supplant
his rival, Carlos, in order to marry Leonor. Ana, unknown to her brother, has
taken advantage of his master plot in order to conquer Carlos's affections.
Although the situation ultimately finds a conventional form of dramatic
resolution through which the moral virtues of Leonor and Carlos appear to
triumph over the artful stratagems of Ana and Pedro, that resolution does not
quite do justice to a certain troubling, though subtle, thematic emphasis of
the play, which (not unlike Shakespearean tragedy, for example?an un
likely, yet perhaps apt, counterpoint of comparison) ultimately focuses more
on a kind of failure than a triumph: a breakdown of a principle of action. The
symmetry between the two character pairs (troubled a bit by the antics of
Casta?o the gracioso) is apparent not only in their dramatic opposition,
which is a caricatured binary of bad and good, but also in their paralleled
failures: the thwarted amorous desires of Ana and Pedro are reflected in
Leonor and Carlos's frustrated, and strangely prolonged, efforts to escape.
The two couples face each other, out of each other's reach, within the dark
labyrinth of the Baroque theatrical space.
A number of readers, Paz among them, even when appreciative of the
work's general merits, judge this stiff specular symmetry as a flaw which
paralyzes the work's dramatic action ("vac?a perfecci?n," Paz calls it).
Ultimately, however, the strict opposition between lovers and siblings
produces a kind of vibrant dramatic chimera which transforms the dramatic
plot: that is, a certain kind of imminent "resolution" occurs, but one which
is evoked at a different level, a more visual and allegorical one, than that of
the immediate dramatic outcome of the story line. It is at this level?in which
the function of Casta?o the "transvestite" gracioso will become a crucial
visual mechanism?where Sor Juana asserts the aesthetic and critical force
of the play by depicting herself in an allegorical relation to her dramatic and
literary predecessor, Calder?n, a relation not unlike that exemplified in her

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 35

later antagonism with the ecclesiastical authorities and which shows her
working at the ironic limits of language.
Critics of the play, however, have almost without exception muffled
this level of vibrant symmetry by imposing an Oedipal allegory on the work
through a focus on Leonor and Carlos as dramatic protagonists. The result
forces the play into a framework of conventional dramatic expectations?
that of the conquering hero?in a classical, even romantic, reading almost
completely alien to a baroque esthetic. This reading has taken a number of
forms, but what those forms have in common is a portrayal of Leonor and
Carlos as characters who, faithful to the purity of their desire, resist the
temptations and obstacles raised by Ana and Pedro and whose persistence
finally bears fruit in their symbolic triumph of love and fidelity over deceit
and lust. A brief inventory of these readings shows their similarity in this
sense?although the value of each of these critical readings is not, for that
matter, reducible to its problematic configuration of the dramatic opposi
tions. For Patricia Kenworthy, the virtues of Leonor and Carlos mark a
distance between Sor Juana' s play and the rigidity of the Calderonian honor
code: Sor Juana "weds reason to love as the reciprocal love, respect, and
knowledge of Carlos and Leonor pass the test" (115). Edward H. Friedman
examines the inactivity of Leonor and Carlos as a form of semiotic fidelity:
"Leonor and Carlos maintain their faith in words, in pledges of love_This
faith offers protection against the lies of Do?a Ana and her brother Don
Pedro, who attempt to turn deceptive appearances into truth" (199); thus,
Carlos and Leonor's "semiotic" faithfulness to words separates them from
the "Machiavellian exploits of other characters and turns inactivity into a
virtue" (201).
Paz does not analyze the work in detail, but characterizes it as a
"mundo de sombras y m?scaras" in which "el azar combina las cartas una
y otra vez hasta que triunfa la verdad" (433). In a more recent article, Viviana
D?az Balsera echoes her predecessors in her assumption that the culminating
point of the play is the "punishment" inflicted on Ana and Pedro by Leonor
and Carlos' triumph (the latter pair representing "figuras marginadas" of the
American colony in the face of the "centro del poder/corte madrile?a"
embodied by the former). She concludes: "la perversa estrategia de controlar
y manipular la imagen que asumen los nobles madrile?os para consolidar su
poder de someter al otro a su voluntad (amorosa), queda derrotada por el
matrimonio feliz entre Leonor [y] Carlos" (72). Stephanie Merrim helps to
question these conclusions by reading the two female protagonists in the
play (in an application of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar' s Madwoman
in the Attic) as the split psychical representation of the woman writer: "Ana
and Leonor... are both polarized, into redeemed angel and punished creative
monster, and covertly equated as the two halves of a divided self," thereby
demonstrating "Sor Juana's keen awareness of the conflicts faced by the

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 36 Latin American Literary Review

creative woman" (106). Rather than finding the creative dramatic potential
in this conflict, however, Merrim's reading of the dramatic plot itself
ultimately shares some key assumptions of the Oedipal reading, since she
too easily equates Ana and Leonor as dual representatives of the autobio
graphical Sor Juana without adequately exploring the intricacies of the plot;
in other words, the autobiographical persona she finds in the work is not
mediated through the writing and action of the work.
As Merrim indirectly demonstrates, however, the real focus of the play
is not so much on the winners as on the losers. Or perhaps it would be better
to say that the very opposition between the two character pairs is more of a
mirage than anything else. Rather than terms of a true dramatic opposition,
Leonor and Carlos are more like the idealized mirror images of Ana and
Pedro. Specters in a mirror have a certain function of alterity, but they make
poor dramatic protagonists, particularly when they are not made to go
beyond the narcissistic, idealized images that Leonor and Carlos so clearly
are set up to be. Such an opposition can only result in endless inversions
between self and image, a dreary repetition of the same within a hermetic
specular space?inversions which, in the play, begin to be manifest in the
contradictory dramatic nature of the characters. Given the perpetual passiv
ity of Carlos and Leonor, their final triumph is not explained in terms of a
force of will; Ana and Pedro, for their part, demonstrate a spirit of persis
tence and ingenuity which is dangerously attractive for the audience; and the
tone of the final resolution?very much in the style of Calder?n?seems
inadequate to resolve the confusing visual and structural game of the
preceding action.
For both reader and public, it is difficult to agree with Don Rodrigo at
the end: "Como se case Leonor/ y quede mi honor sin riesgo, / lo dem?s
importa nada" (III, 1249). It is precisely "lo dem?s" which leads us to
reexamine the work. Such a reexamination shows that Sor Juana follows the
model of the Calderonian Baroque by rejecting the notion of Oedipal
triumph of desire in favor of the visual figure of a temporal and visual
unfolding which resists dramatic solution in the traditional sense. This
figure might be similar to what Roberto Gonz?lez Echevarr?a, in a reading
of Calder?n's La vida es sue?o, characterizes as the "baroque monster": a
figure reflecting "the dynamic of change itself, the transformations which it
occasions, and not the ideal representation of a result which would reduce
reality to simple and complete forms" (95).
The play, in fact, sets up its symmetrical oppositions only as a
conventional point of departure out of which a critical and artistic vitality
begins to unfold, and where Sor Juana leaves her signature. The sartorial
metaphor of "unfolding" is fitting here because it is precisely clothing
which marks the locus of that artistic and critical despliegue, in the
monstrous figure of a baroque cross-dresser. At a key moment in the work,

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 37

the gracioso Casta?o (Carlos's servant) dresses up as a woman, thereby

inadvertently interrupting the symmetry and enabling the hostages to
escape. Through Casta?o's actions, we begin to see that the passive
symmetry between the two couples does not comprise an end in itself, but
points toward something very different from mere specular paralysis.
Casta?o's dynamic position in the work could be said to emblematize what
Jos? Lezama Lima refers to in La expresi?n americana, as the "fuego
originario" and the "puro comenzar" of the baroque: the transgression of a
symmetry that is taken to a liminal point of tension, although without
apparent symbolic rupture at a thematic level. In other words, Casta?o's
transvestite desempe?o is the visual introduction of an allegorical drama
which Sor Juana sets up in the midst of the play's otherwise seemingly
"lame" dramatic sequence. Casta?o' s operation brings to the surface a latent
tension in the work which the struggle between the two couples tends to
obscure: by taking the focus off of their farcical dramatic opposition, he
reorients the dramatic attention to the latent rivalry between Ana and
Pedro?sister and brother?where Sor Juana stages, with a flourish, a
certain representation of her relation with Calder?n and the comedia?her
own relation to the law; her activity as that law. As we will see, the dramatist
not only imitates her master in this representation, but also reinscribes in the
text of her work?as its own critical performance?the implicitly transgres
s?e role of the woman in Calder?n's own comedies. Again, however, it
must be stressed that this allegorical dimension of the work is not the
invisible drama of a hidden allusion, but a fully visual performance on stage;
emblematized by Casta?o's lavishly comical cross-dressing sequence, it
could, in fact, be considered the most visual aspect of the entire play. Thus,
rather than situating Sor Juana at the latter end of a fading peninsular baroque
aesthetic and characterizing her drama as a flawed, though interesting, echo
of Calder?n, we should instead look at the vibrant symmetries of her work
as an expression of artistic and critical force in relation to the dramatic and
social conventions of the time.
In his criticism of Los empe?os de una casa, Paz comments that it
suffers from a certain aesthetic feebleness: Sor Juana is trapped ("encerrada")
in the parallelism of the baroque "y ser?a in?til buscar en sus obras la m?s
leve transgresi?n a la est?tica del decoro" (433). Although Paz is correct
with respect to the formal aesthetic of these comedies, an important element
of transgression haunts Los empe?os de una casa, as emblematized particu
larly in the figure of the gracioso. Paz alludes to the special function of
Casta?o when he refers to him as "el ?nico personaje con cierta
individualidad,.. .quien habla como los mexicanos y que as? introduce una
nota localista en [el lugar abstracto de] la acci?n" (436). However, even if
this "localist note" is an important attribute of Casta?o?all artistic trans
gression, in fact, can be described as a certain irruption of the specificity of

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38 Latin American Literary Review

something "local" into a general schema?the importance of the gracioso

goes beyond his function of geographical-cultural deictic. His transvestit
ism in the third section of the work interrupts sexual, textual and dramatic
continuities. His function is key to the "triumph" of Carlos and Leonor, but
also has the contradictory effect of implicating the "heroes" in the negative
strategies of the "villains," by demonstrating that the apparent moral
superiority of Carlos and Leonor is based, absolutely and contradictorily, on
the same "enga?o" by Pedro and Ana. This identification between the two
groups confuses the positive and negative moral strategies that they initially
seem to claim.
As Friedman observes, the valorization of inactivity in Carlos and
Leonor is a dangerous strategy for a staging of the work (201). However, it
is precisely the tenuousness of the strategy which obliges us to reconsider
the dramatic function of these two characters. Carlos and Leonor remain
trapped in the interior of Ana and Pedro's house not only by external forces
beyond their control, but also by the sterility of their own internal conflicts
and qualities: they have virtually no dramatic dynamism and rely on
everyone else to keep things moving. As idealized visions of Pedro and
Ana's desire, the besieged lovers are incapable of responding to that desire,
even if they wanted to do so; thus, their enclosure in the house figures their
imprisonment as characters on a mirror surface which reflects back at Ana
and Pedro only the very inaccessibility of their objects of desire. Leonor's
entrapment in this sense can be further seen in her fundamental lack of
psychological depth as a character. Margo Glantz aptly associates her with
the myth of the tragedy of Narcissus in Spanish Renaissance literature: "el
encendido amor por el reflejo inalcanzable de uno mismo, cuya ?nica
soluci?n es la muerte, en la tragedia, o el juego absoluto del azar, las
apariencias o las correspondencias en la comedia" (477).
However, Leonor's isolation does not so easily resolve itself in the
conventions of the comedia: her "narcissism" resists such a solution. At the
beginning of her testimonial monologue upon entering the house, her
solipsism is inadvertently foregrounded by Ana's assurance that "El silencio
te responda" (254). The following monologue identifies Leonor as a
beautiful and desired intellectual, in a self-portrait whose details clearly
identify her with the image of the dramatist herself?an identification which
has been noted by a number of critics (since Jos? Juan Arrom' s study in the
late sixties) and probably has something to do with the tendency to elevate
Leonor's dramatic status in the work over Ana's. Leonor's characteristic
conflict is a tension between the truth and the word which cheapens the truth:
the translation of the word of interior truth (a theme common in Sor Juana' s
work, appearing, among other places, in the Respuesta a Sor Filotea de la
Cruz). Referring to her own discretion, Leonor explains her dilemma: "en
un mismo caso / me desmiento si lo afirmo, / y lo ignoras si lo callo" (291

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 39

298). Her discourse is marked continually by internal "contraries" which

threaten to repress her verbal projection and which constantly impede
decisive action.
Carlos, for his part, reflects another version of the same paralysis.
Despite, or due to, his perfection so praised by Leonor, her gallant lover is
too closely identified with her, as reflected in his lack of decisive will. His
own words characterize him as the true "double" of Leonor:

Son tantas las confusiones

en que mi pecho batalla,
que en su varia confusi?n
el discurso se embaraza,
y por discurrirlo todo
acierto a discurrir nada. (I, 907-12).

Within the dramatic space, Carlos's very admirable qualities?his fidelity

and high sense of honor?duplicate Leonor's passivity and prevent his exit
from the dilemma. Hostage to his own honorable principles, he never
manages to make decisions. He is immobilized by his own sense of honor
toward his supposed protectoress Ana, and that fidelity prevents him from
carrying out his impulse to escape with Leonor:

la vida a Ana arriesgo,

y habi?ndome amparado
es infamia; mas ?qu? puedo
hacer yo en aqueste caso? (II 726-730).

Carlos remains entrapped in the house also due to Leonor's continued

presence there, but his attitude is a passive fidelity: "?adonde tengo de ir... ?
Y as? es mejor esperar de todo resoluci?n,..." (II, 143-146). His only
decisive action in the entire play, in fact, is the act of writing: the composi
tion of a letter which he seeks to send to Don Rodrigo but which will never
arrive at its destination. He does not dare to deliver it himself, but hands the
responsibility over to Casta?o. Casta?o inadvertently transforms into vis
ible dramatic action the relative impotence of the written communication. In
order to pass unperceived on the streets, having been observed during the
lovers' elopement by Leonor's cousin Diego, he puts on the women's
apparel entrusted to his care by Leonor, thereby converting himself into her
visual double. Raquel Chang-Rodriguez describes him as having been
converted into the "fake Leonor": in her/him "we find the reflection of the
real Leonor, although seen in the baroque mirror of deformity; his is a
caricaturesque image, an inversion of the real" (415).
Casta?o's change of clothing is accompanied by an abundance of

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40 Latin American Literary Review

mythical allusions to deceit, from the Trojan war (the sequestration of Helen
by Paris and her later "rescue" by means of the famous horse) and, a bit later,
the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau. The verbal and textual references here
put Casta?o in an identificatory ambivalence between the Trojan horse and
Helen herself. Casta?o first refers to his (ab)use by Carlos as that of a
mistreated horse (III, 251). Then, a bit later, he takes out some jewels and
identifies Leonor (and himself) with Helen:

.. .ya he tapado el enredo:

Leonor me dio unas polleras
y unas joyas que trajese,
cuando quiso ser Elena
de este Paris boquirrubio (III, 307-311).

As he begins to dress, Casta?o speaks of Helen's incomparable beauty and

repeatedly cites the number one thousand, Homer's epic metonymy for the
lovely Greek hostage capable of launching "a thousand ships". He associ
ates himself with this metonymy: ".. .aprisionar / me conviene la melena, /
porque quitar? mil vidas / si le doy tantica suelta" (319); a bit later, "me han
de salir mil colores..." (347); and, still later, when Carlos threatens his rival
Pedro with the phrase, "?os dar? mil muertes!" Casta?o responds, "Miren
aqu? si soy bello / pues por m? quieren matarse" (1195-7). However, he also
describes dressing up like Leonor/Helen as a matter of ballistic aggression:
"Ya estoy armado" (387). Once dressed, Casta?o associates himself not
only with the beauty of Helen but also with the sheath of the sword and the
shell of the Trojan horse. In short, by contrast to his master's passivity, the
transvestite Casta?o literally incarnates the aggression which Carlos lacks.
The only exit from the dramatic dilemma is action, specifically an act
of deceit?if we consider any form of transgressive action to be a form of
temporal deceit?which Carlos and Leonor are incapable of effecting. By
dressing up like a woman and taking on the false appearance of Leonor,
Casta?o puts into effect the dramatic sequence which gives solution to the
sequestration and produces the favorable denouement for Carlos and Leonor.
The (hollow) weapon immediately runs into the enemy, Pedro. Mistaking
the gracioso for Leonor, Pedro asks for his lady's hand and Casta?o offers
it with a glove, thereby alluding to the deceit of Jacob when the latter covered
his arm with deer skin in order to illicitly receive the blessing and inheritance
of his father: "(Aparte:/ Lleg? el caso de Jacob)/?Catadla aqu? toda entera"
(565). "?Con guante me lo dais?" Pedro asks him. Suddenly, from offstage,
Juan's exclamation interrupts the two, as if orally underlining Casta?o's
deceit: "?Muere a mis manos, traidor!" (575). Juan enters, fighting with
Carlos. The scene of baroque chaos which follows, at the beginning of which
Casta?o blows out the candle and leaves the stage in darkness, is the

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 41

immediate dramatic result of the gracioso''s transvestite enga?o, which

produces, finally, Leonor's "liberation." In the midst of the confusion,
Carlos finally takes the real Leonor out of the house, but ironically, far from
this being a heroic act, he does so because he mistakes her for Ana, and
instead of liberating her he inadvertently hands her over to her father, who
is coming to the house in order to bargain with Pedro, whom he thinks was
the one who ran off with Leonor. Casta?o remains entrapped within, his
presence thereby restraining Pedro from pursuing the escapees, the latter
believing that his "Leonor" (Casta?o) is still inside the house. Leonor's exit
directs the dramatic sequence toward the ending.
Within the work as a whole, the most important effect of Casta?o's
transvestitism is the identificatory confusion it produces between the two
couples. Casta?o not only "interweaves" (literally and inextricably) the
motives of Leonor and Carlos with the stratagems of their rivals, but also
puts into relief (by means of the Trojan allusions) the original circumstances
of Leonor' s flight from the house of her father: that original "sequestration"
had the same "illicit," or symbolically transgressive, character as the later
sequestration effected by Pedro. In his first reference to Leonor as "Helena,"
then?that she "quiso ser Elena / de este Paris boquirrubio (III, 307-311)?
Casta?o explicitly associated Carlos, and not Pedro, with Paris the trans
gressive kidnapper. Thus, the supposedly irrefutable identity of Carlos as
the "legitimate" Meneleus now falls into doubt: who committed the original
sequestration, or sin? The apparently clear moral opposition between the
two groups of characters becomes merely a specular reflection: as equally
transgressive before the law, Leonor and Carlos have been merely the
reflection of Ana and Pedro, but also vice versa. The specular confrontation
remains without solution. The presence on the stage of Casta?o the transves
tite is a persisting visual figure of transgression and hence of the inversion
of the character symmetries. Casta?o interrupts not only the dramatic
triumph of Carlos and Leonor, but also the possibility of Pedro and Ana to
satisfy their desire.
Given the impossibility of resolving the reflexive scenario, then, the
terms of the dramatic opposition shift to the relation between brother and
sister, Ana and Pedro, as the idealized images of Leonor and Carlos fade
away as though darkness had been cast on the mirror to which they owed
their tenuous life. The sibling association stages the position of Sor Juana in
relation to her literary predecessor Calder?n. We remember that the "script"
of the dramatic situation had been the plan of sequestration originally
"written" by Pedro, which Ana later appropriated by subverting it for her
own amorous plot to win Carlos. Together with the coincidence of the
names, the domestic intrigue establishes a direct parallel with Sor Juana's
relation to Calder?n. Los empe?os de una casa has been compared with a
number of Calder?n's comedies (among them, Casa con dos puertas, La

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 42 Latin American Literary Review

dama duende and Los empe?os de un acaso). In all these comedies the
relation between sister and brother is a common theme, as it is in the work
of Calder?n as a whole, where a brother-sister rivalry often functions as a
limit metaphor of difference. The Calderonian baroque often takes what
tragedy proper would have set up as a relation to authority, or the father, and
casts it in sibling terms. Robert ter Horst, who has studied this sibling
dynamic in Calder?n, observes that the brother-sister relation is the most
complex instance of the "basic relation" of this theater. The filial association
is a relation between beings "separated but at the same time intimately
linked" and expresses what Calder?n considered "the fundamental dualism
of individual personality" (28). As critics have often noted, in Calder?n's
comedies centered on this brother-sister relation, it is nearly always the
woman who puts into motion the dramatic action upon interrupting the
forces of a social repression imposed on her symbolically through her
brother. In Los empe?os de una casa, Sor Juana mimics the same Calderonian
theme at a dramatic level, but also inverts it at the level of her own critical
action as dramatist. This simultaneous imitation and inversion can be put
into relief through a comparison of Sor Juana's work with Casa con dos
puertas, whose thematic relation with her work is one of the most direct. A
similar comparison could be made with La dama duende, as Stephanie
Merrim has done, paralleling Ana's transgressions with those of Angela,
who "takes on the persona of the 'phantom lady', manipulates the idiosyn
cratic spaces of the house to her advantage and directs a play within a play"
in order to disorder her brother's attempts to hide her from his house guest,
Manuel (105).
Likewise, in Casa con dos puertas, F?lix has appropriated the chamber
of his sister Marcela, enclosing her in a back room in order to hide her from
his friend Lisardo, who is visiting him. But already in the first scene, Marcela
unveils herself in the face of the insistence of Lisardo, who subsequently
characterizes this action of Marcela's as "traici?n":

Usar dessa alevos?a

para turbar mi ossad?a,
ha sido traici?n; pues ?ya
vi?ndoos c?mo os dexar?,
quien sin veros os segu?a? (126-30).

Marcela' s unveiling is not a mere submission to the demands of Lisardo, but

an act of subversion?treason?toward her brother F?lix. Again, her re
moval of her veil is what begins to write the text and put into motion the
dramatic action. The gesture is repeated in the third act: at the moment of
greatest tension between F?lix and Laura (a dispute without solution),
Marcela interrupts the symmetry of the debate by leaving her hidden space

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 43

where she has been confined by her brother and?face covered but body
revealed?passing, ghostlike, near her brother and Laura. The structural
symmetry of the work which Marcela thus sets off-balance has been
established at multiple dimensions of the text: space (the continual move
ments back and forth between Laura's and F?lix' s houses, in which the two
spaces are literally identical as they share the same scenic space of the stage);
royal authority figures (the parallel descriptive scenes of the king and queen
in the country); allegory (the art-nature dialectic in F?lix' s description of his
first vision of Laura in the gardens of Arajuez), and dialogue (the repetition
of parallel dialogue patterns between Laura and F?lix). By throwing these
multiple symmetries into imbalance, Marcela demonstrates what ter Horst
calls the "sovereignty" of the woman in the Calderonian comedy, which
rises from her double function of "vehicle of imminence, 'quietud'" and
"woman of turbulence," 'the storm'". She combines the "contemplative and
the vita activa in the same character" ; "arbiter of good and evil," she also has
the "power to guide circumstance" (38). But despite her disruptive function,
Marcela at the end is reabsorbed by the formal closure of the text of the
comedia. Thus, ultimately, the textual and artistic symmetries of the work
do not acknowledge the visual principle of rupture that they rely on. Ter
Horst comments:

One of the most daring and original gestures of Calder?n is

that of confusing, combining and inverting traditional
sexual roles. However, the logic of an art which would
throw down the barriers between the masculine and the
feminine is directed inexorably to a world in which the true
difference between the two [poles] cannot be defended,... a
world in which Calder?n no longer has clear forms and
patterns to confuse. Consequently, this world remains like
a vision, and not a space in which the artist would dare
function" (43).

I suggest that Sor Juana, in contrast, does function as an artist in this space
of sexual confusion. The most visible difference between the two plays is the
function of Casta?o. In both works, the sister effects a transgression which
is key to the dramatic unfolding (although in Los empe?os de una casa both
brother and sister are equally transgressive in this sense), but in Sor Juana' s
play, Casta?o serves as a persisting visual reminder of a transgressive
principle which is eventually "forgotten" in Calder?n's work. Calder?n
represses Marcela's principle of interference at the play's end, with a clear
reversion of things to where they were, but Casta?o remains on the stage, still
outrageously dressed up as a woman, and even has the last word. Sor Juana
thus effects a performative act in her work. Casta?o's persistence on the

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44 Latin American Literary Review

stage highlights Ana's final appropriation of the script from her brother. In
the last scene, brother as well as sister are obliged to dissimulate their
disappointment in the face of the impossibility of achieving their illusions.
However, at an inter-textual level, the scene also effects a type of (self-)
mockery in Sor Juana's symbolic triumph in the face of her literary
predecessor. Disappointed in the search for her unachievable illusion, Ana/
Juana at least is left with "something"?Juan. But more important, she is left
with her own text. With this "something," she portrays herself in a position
of relative triumph in the face of the sad position of her rival, Pedro/Calder?n
de la Barca. "Primero soy yo, Pedro," she tells him. But this is not the
Oedipal triumph of a subject who has overcome obstacles and achieved her
desire at the end. Ana's triumph takes place only at that allegorical relation
to language; she does not "possess" what she has appropriated, but, rather,
announces her possession by it, a possession which announces a subjectivity
altogether anterior to the economy of desire and appropriation. She, like
Pedro, is on the losing side of the action, but in that losing she wrests the
compensations of loss from her brother and sees her name inscribed in the
pantheon of language. Inversion in Sor Juana' s play is not a triumph, but the
figuration of the dynamic of change itself in the sexual and textual duality.
With her signature, Sor Juana reminds us that the relation of difference does
not only produce the tragedy of the inevitable silence of negativity in the
face of social prohibitions, but rather the constant unfolding?the visible
figure?of transformation.

EMORY UNIVERSITY

NOTES

ll would like to express special gratitude to Susana Hern?ndez-Araico for her

warm encouragement and scholarly assistance during the early stages of develop
ment of this paper.
2One touchstone reference in this regard is the 1994 publication of a
collection of critical essays treating the subject from psychoanalytic perspectives,
edited by Joan Copjec: Supposing the Subject (London: Verso, 1994). It should be
mentioned, of course, that even during the heyday of structuralism many writers
never abandoned the problem of the subject as such. Derrida's essay, "The Ends of
Man" (in Margins of Philosophy, tr. by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1982) provides an important context in its criticism of certain post-war trends
which sought to imagine the disappearance of the subject as the "end" of the (already
imaginary) category "man." Derrida was not alone in his defense, however; many
of his better-known contemporaries?Lacan, Deleuze, de Man (particularly in his
later work), Levinas, and even Foucault?never truly abandoned the problem of the

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Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 45

subject, but merely sought to rethink it. (The case of Foucault is particularly
complex, but even when this writer seems to speak of the historical provisionalness
of "man," for example, the deliberate ironies of his own performance, at least,
continue to insist on the subject.) None of these writers, however, have explicitly
approached the problem identified above: that of precisely whom we speak of when
we refer to, and are obliged to refer to, "the writer" of a work.
3This letter was discovered in 1981 in the Seminario Arquidiocesano of
Monterrey by Father Aureliano Tapia M?ndez, who published it as a booklet (Carta
de Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz a su Confesor: Autodefensa espiritual, Monterrey:
Universidad de Nuevo Le?n, 1981).
4Contemporary historical scholarship on Sor Juana rests in large part on the
initial interpretation and organization of these documents (excluding the letter to
Nunez de Miranda, which was discovered only in 1981) in the work of two scholars,
Enrique A. Cervantes (El testamento de Sor Juana In?s de la Cruz y otros
documentos, Mexico City, 1949) and Guillermo Ram?rez Espa?a (Lafamilia de Sor
Juana, Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1947).
5In relation to the father question, critics have been fond of quoting the
following quatrains of Sor Juana, a poem which speaks of the father as a fluid
possibility, a choice, rather than simply a lost origin: "El no ser de padre honrado /
fuera defecto a mi ver, / si como recib? el ser, / de ?l, se lo hubiera yo dado. / M?s
piadosa fue tu madre, / que hizo que a muchos sucedas: / para que, entre tantos,
puedas / tomar el que m?s te cuadre."
As a number of Sor Juana scholars have indicated, however, out of wedlock
births were quite common in colonial Mexico, even among members of the upper
class (Viceroy Fray Payo Enr?quez de Rivera, one of Sor Juana's protectors, was
also illegitimate); Sor Juana's casting fatherhood as a choice thus could be seen as
something less than the expression of an existential dilemma. Virtually nothing is
known about her father and Sor Juana herself is almost completely silent on the
question.
6Paz's extensive psychological, historical and literary study (translated to
English as Sor Juana, or the Traps of Faith) is still the best source of biographical
information on Sor Juana, as well as an important evaluation of her written work.
Numerous readers have acknowledged the importance of Paz's study, its role in
casting new scholarly as well as popular light on Sor Juana, and its particular effort
to consider Sor Juana' s position and treatment as a woman in colonial Mexico. For
an introductory critique of Paz's work, see the first of Stephanie Merrim's two
chapters on Sor Juana in her edited collection, "Feminist Perspectives on Sor Juana
In?s de la Cruz"; her treatment of Paz acknowledges the latter's accomplishment,
although it refrains from taking a clear critical stance; while she critiques the
limitations of Paz's biographical framework in the assessment of Sor Juana, she
recognizes, without challenging, his highly problematic effort to psychoanalyze an
absent historical figure. Merrim's article also provides a good introductory over
view of other critical-biographical treatments of Sor Juana. For a more in-depth
assessment of Paz's biography, see Juan Bruce-Novoa's article, "El hilo de
Ariadne: Sor Juana y Octavio Paz." Bruce-Novoa examines the work within the

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 46 Latin American Literary Review

larger context of Paz's own ambitious critical treatment of Mexican history as

inaugurated in the 1950's with his influential Laberinto de la Soledad.
7The rivalry stems from Santa Cruz's own aspirations to the archbishopric;
although Santa Cruz was elected archbishop in 1680, higher authorities from
Madrid intervened in the decision, installing Aguiar y Seijas in his place.
8The sermon in question had been delivered 40 years earlier, but was later
issued in a collection of other sermons by Vieira, about a decade before Sor Juana
wrote her argument.
9We might comment that, from a perspective which sees "empty rhetoric" as
the grounds of historical struggle, such a shadow boxing is more significant than Paz
allows; this is not the place to examine the rhetorical complexities of Sor Juana's
letters, but what will interest us the most in Los empe?os de una casa is precisely
the same kind of shadow boxing, although it takes place not with a priest but with
another dramatist.
10Paz's description is typical of his excessive psychologizing throughout the
biography; his conclusions are of course reasonable conjectures, but ultimately
based on his own absolutely imaginary reconstruction of the nun's temperament.
His apparently self-deceived fictionalizing can be seen in his own version of her
renunciation of poetry : "?Qu? hab?a sido para ella la poes?a? Fantasma que aliment?
sin saciar sus sue?os sensuales y sus desvarios intelectuales, quimera labrada por su
vanidad y su lujuria, su amor al mundo y a s? misma. Perdidos en una cavilaci?n sin
fin y en el inacabable examen de culpas imaginarias, temperamentos como el suyo
teminan por condensarse a s? mismos. Incapaces de redimirse por s? solos, buscan
afuera lo que no encuentran en ellos: un apoyo, un sost?n... . Por esto no es extra?o
que en sus tribulaciones haya reaparecido la figura de [su antiguo confesor N??ez
de Miranda, "verdadero padre,.. .imagen de la autoridad,.. .la llave de la seguridad
que ambicionaba"].... En su decisi?n.. .hab?a, todo junto, c?lculo, ansia de romper
su soledad y arrepentimiento de faltas magnificadas por la aprensi?n. Hab?a sobre
todo miedo. Este sentimiento no la abandon? en sus ?ltimos a?os. Por todo esto
N??ez de Miranda era el compendio de todo lo que ansiaba y tem?a" (576).
1 !The edition of Los empe?os de una casa published by the Fondo de Cultura
Econ?mica (the one I cite in this article) follows the first two publications of the
work (Sevilla, 1692 and Barcelona, 1693) by including the entire cycle of these
smaller theatrical pieces?which may or may not have accompanied the work's first
public performance in Mexico City sometime between 1683 and 1684. A number
of uncertainties surround the play's opening performance date and location,
including doubts as to whether all of the smaller pieces of Sor Juana' s festejo were
even performed; for a detailed discussion of these problems, see Hern?ndez
Araico' s article, "Problemas de fecha y montaje de Los empe?os de una casa." The
short pieces include a loa (prologue), several canciones (songs), sa?netes (one-act
comedies) and afin de fiesta (afterpiece). In another study ("La innovadora fiesta
barroca de Sor Juana")?the most comprehensive discussion available of the total
montage of these works?Hern?ndez-Araico cites Diez Borque in ascertaining that
Los empe?os de una casa is one of only six such examples of comprehensive Golden
Age fiesta teatral texts in existence. Few critics have sought to read Sor Juana's

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 Baroque Desire: Sor Juana and Calder?n in Los empe?os de una casa 47

festejo in its entirety, one exception being Eugenia Revueltas' essay, "Los empe?os
de una casa: el laberinto de los signos," which suffers from a somewhat truncated
scope.

WORKS CITED

Arrom, Jos? Juan. Historia del teatro hispanoamericano: ?poca colonial. 2d ed.
Mexico: de Andrea, 1967.
Bruce-Novoa, Juan. "El hilo de Ariadne: Sor Juana y Octavio Paz." Tinta 1 (1987),
15-22.
Calder?n de la Barca, Pedro. Casa con dos puertas. In Primera parte de las
comedias de don Pedro Calder?n de la Barca. Vol. 2. Ed. A. Valbuena
Briones. Cl?sicos Hisp?nicos. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Cient?ficas, 1981.
Campbell, Ysla, ed. El escritor y la escena IL Actas del II Congreso de la Asociaci?n
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