All That Glitters is not Gold: Layered Performances and Metatheatrical Devices in Luis de Eguílaz's El caballero del milagro
- All That Glitters is not Gold:Layered Performances and Metatheatrical Devices in Luis de Eguílaz's El caballero del milagro
As a key figure of the alta comedia in mid-nineteenth century theatre, Luis de Eguílaz published and produced several plays that reflected the bourgeois lifestyle of modern Spanish audiences. Eguílaz is most well-known for his skewering of middle-class immorality and the didactic tone of his comedias de costumbres burguesas.1 What is sometimes overlooked, however, are Eguílaz's dramas in which he depicts a particular period in Spanish history. This essay addresses one of Eguílaz's most intricate period dramas set in Golden Age Spain: El caballero del milagro (1854). Along with providing an unflinching look at human frailty during the Baroque period, Eguílaz pulls back the curtain on the theatrical process itself, the result being that the nineteenth-century Spanish audience witnesses, and in fact, participates in, a complex tapestry of metatheatre.
The Alta Comedia: A Brief Definition
The alta comedia in Spain can best be described as a living-room drama in which the bourgeois characters face the social and economic challenges of city life. [End Page 113] According to Cantero García, the alta comedia epitomized a nineteenth-century "theater-society" binary in which dramatists held up a mirror to modern society (68, 77). The style of the typical alta comedia lies somewhere between the Romantic tropes of the early nineteenth century and the often unsuccessful attempts at Realist theatre at the end of the century, or as Francisco Ruiz Ramón asserts, "somewhere between pseudo-Romantic and pseudo-Realist" (342). The early comediantes within this genre include Rodríguez Rubí, Ventura de la Vega, Narciso Serra, and of course, Luis de Eguílaz. In many respects, Eguílaz developed the didactic style that best characterizes the alta comedia: a living room drama, set in modern Spain, in which the characters must confront their immorality. Eguílaz's most famous alta comedia, La cruz del matrimonio (1861), presents a somewhat melodramatic portrait of two wives: María, virtuous and subservient, and Enriqueta, the "public" wife who shirks her domestic responsibilities. This model for displaying good and bad bourgeois behavior became the hallmark of not only Eguílaz's work, but also the alta comediantes and Realist dramatists in the second half of the century.
By the 1860s, the alta comedia had become the most popular theatrical genre on the Spanish stage, as evidenced by its most canonical dramatist, Manuel Tamayo y Baus. This quintessential alta comediante produced several hits in the 1850s and 60s, including Bola de nieve (1856) and Un drama nuevo (1867). The latter drama is arguably the more canonical alta comedia, as Tamayo y Baus stages a play within a play, and specifically, sets the action of the interior play in the Baroque theater world. However, the majority of Tamayo y Baus's plays continued the tradition of showing the Spanish bourgeoisie their trials and follies within the context of modern Spain. In this sense, Eguílaz may have influenced his fellow comediantes, and in particular, Tamayo y Baus, with his creative use of Golden Age metatheatre.
Definitions and Categories of Metatheatre
In its most basic definition, metatheatre is a play within a play, a technique that became a hallmark of seventeenth-century dramas.2 In particular, Baroque dramatists employed this metatheatrical frame to reiterate the idea that "all the world's a stage" (Witt 10, 14). At times, this trope served to blur the line between fiction and reality, hence the plethora of Baroque plays in which a dream becomes reality. In the case of Caballero, the drama depicts a famous Baroque acting troupe that rehearses and performs for a Golden Age audience (and by extension, a bourgeois modern audience in Madrid). The characters in Caballero spend much of their time becoming their characters for the Baroque representations, or at least preparing themselves for performance in general. Richard Hornby qualifies this particular type of [End Page 114] metadrama as "role playing within a role," in which the characters knowingly act as another person...
