Out of the Wings

La dama duende (1629), Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Titles

English title: The Phantom Lady
Date written: 1629
First publication date: 1636
First production date: 1629
Keywords: morality > honour, identity > class/social standing, family > brothers/sisters, love > desire, women
Genre and type: comedy

Pitch

One of Calderón’s most accomplished comedies, the strength of this play is due to the wilful Doña Angela, whose clever manipulations of the men who seek to control her allows her to be as free as her imagination. She exploits a moving panel in the wall of her brothers’ house, creating a passage between her lover’s room and a private, fantastical ‘palace’ (in fact her own quarters) which she uses to convince her lover he has entered another world.

Synopsis

This is a play about the manipulations of a woman who refuses to remain invisible. In her position as a widow whose husband died in debt and disgrace, Angela is not allowed by her brothers to leave the family home. Out in the street, Don Luis pursues a veiled lady, not knowing that the unseen object of his affection is his sister, Angela. She gets away thanks to the intervention of a handsome stranger, Don Manuel, who protects her by fighting Luis. Luis’s brother Juan intervenes and diffuses the situation by revealing that Manuel is to be a guest at their home. The men depart as friends. Back at the house, Angela quickly changes clothes so that her brother will not know she was outside. Wishing to thank her protector, she writes Manuel a letter. Manuel is staying in the room adjacent to Angela’s, and she can gain access to his room through a secret panel, a glass cupboard door which has been placed over an old doorway. She tucks the letter in between his coverlet and pillow, and she and her servant Isabel rifle through his belongings, flinging them around the room. When Manuel comes back, his servant Cosme is sure it was a ghost who has upset the room, but Manuel says he’ll respond to the letters from the mysterious woman until he finds out who she is. He is careful to be discreet in seeking her identity, thinking she must be Luis’s mistress as she has access to the interior rooms of his house.

In Act 2, Manuel departs for a day to El Escorial, but returns when it is dark to retrieve some papers that he has forgotten. In his room, Angela is going through his papers and trying to steal the portrait of another lady, which has inflamed Angela’s jealousy. She lights a candle, enabling Manuel to see her, and he is at that point convinced that she may be a ghost. Angela speaks in the language of courtly romance, acting the part of an otherworldly lady protecting her identity, then disappearing behind the glass cupboard panel that separates her room from his. Manuel is left to muse whether she is a spirit or human, and is unsure.

In Act 3, Angela and her servant Isabel lure Manuel to a graveyard and then trick him into returning to the house by confusing his return path, so that when he comes back to Angela’s rooms he thinks he has arrived at a stranger’s home. Inside, Angela has stage-managed all her ladies, and her friend Beatriz, into faking a fantastic palatial environment with candles, costumes, food and drink. Angela refuses to reveal who she is but Manuel works out she’s a high-ranking noblewoman by her ‘servant’ Beatriz’s ‘slip’ that she is ‘vuestra excelencia’, pretending to have forgotten not to address her as ‘Your Excellence’ in Manuel’s presence. Manuel, led back to his room, thinks he is still in the castle, but encounters Cosme who reveals they are in his own room. Meanwhile Luis is surprised to find Manuel at home alone with his sister, endangering her honour. Angela is trapped and explains the situation to Manuel, who is thus forced into a dilemma: if he lets her go he risks Luis’s anger, but if he rejects Angela, he threatens his own sense of chivalric duty to protect a woman’s honour. Manuel decides to be a gentleman and protect her, asking Luis if he can escort Angela to safety. Luis says no man but her husband can take her from the house, so Manuel makes the honourable choice of asking for her hand. Angela thus achieves social reinstatement and an end to her sentence of invisibility imposed on her by her brothers, and she succeeds in marrying the man she loves.

Sources

Critics differ on establishing a ‘source’ for La dama duende, but do notice its similarity with Lope de Vega’s play La viuda valenciana (ca. 1599), and perhaps also tie it to the second part of El soldado Píndaro (1626) by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses (Calderón de la Barca 1999, xxxvi-ix). Although La dama duende also has interesting plot similarities withTirso de Molina’s play Por el sótano y el torno, written just a few years before Calderón’s play (in 1623 or 1624), Antonucci notes that La dama duende is organised very differently (Calderón de la Barca 1999, xxxviii-ix). See de Armas’s reading of the play as a Cupid-Psyche reversal (1976).

Armas, Frederick de. 1976. The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age. Biblioteca Siglo de Oro. Charlottesville, Virginia
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 1999. La dama duende, ed. Fausta Antonucci, introd. Marc Vitse. Barcelona, Crítica (in Spanish)

Critical response

The Spanish National Classical Theatre production was very well received, and a large selection of the press for CNTC’s 2000 production of this play is collected in Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico 15 (2001): 171-82. Literary critics have seen the play as the enactment of a feminine fantasy, in which the woman controls the action and takes full advantage of the weakness and curiosity of the man (Frederick de Armas 1976). There is an atmosphere of the unreal, of a highly theatrical and stylised work (Varey 1983) but some critics (for example, Thacker 1997 and 2002) argue that this fantastical atmosphere is not sustained throughout the play, as the ‘reality’ of social conventions and expectations that restrict Angela’s movements constantly encroach on her imaginative machinations. Manuel has been seen as a Don Quixote-type figure who sees what he wants to see; whose senses deceive him but whose reason is not entirely sharp either; who allows himself to be controlled; who wants to believe the impossible and is tempted by the fantasy of a secret relationship with an unidentified seductress. Thacker compares this play with La celosa de sí misma, Tirso de Molina’s play in which the gallant falls in love with a veiled lady, intrigued by the mystery, thrilled by the unknown, but blind to the fact that the real woman behind the veil is in fact his betrothed, whom he scorns in favour of his veiled fantasy woman.

Varey, John E. 1983. ‘La dama duende de Calderón: símbolos y escenografía’. In Actas del. Congreso International sobre Calderón y el Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro, Madrid (in Spanish)
Armas, Frederick de. 1976. The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age. Biblioteca Siglo de Oro. Charlottesville, Virginia
Thacker, Jonathan W. 2002. Role-play and the World as Stage in the comedia. Liverpool, Liverpool University Press
Thacker, Jonathan. 1997. ‘ “… Now You Don’t”: The Manipulation of the Visible in Calderón’s La dama duende’,Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 5, 111-21

Further information

Two film versions have been made of La dama duende.

IMDB link to Film Version

IMDB link to another Film Version

Editions

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 1636. Primera Parte de comedias de Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Madrid, María de Quiñones
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 1954. La dama duende, ed. Angel Valbuena Briones. Madrid, Clásicos Castellanos
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 1999. La dama duende, ed. Fausta Antonucci, introd. Marc Vitse. Barcelona, Crítica
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 2005. La dama duende, ed. Fausta Antonucci. Barcelona, Crítica
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 2006. La dama duende, ed. Fausta Antonucci, Barcelona, Círculo de Lectores, Galaxia Gutenberg
In what will no doubt become the definitive edition of this canonical play, the editor includes, in addition to a very complete contextual introduction, an alternative printing of the third act of the play as an appendix.
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro. 2007. La dama duende. Barcelona, Linkgua

Information about the editions

Critics such as Thacker have argued that we might see Angela’s manipulation of her social status as a social critique. She is a disgraced widow who is supposed to remain invisible to society; she is supposed to be locked up in her brothers’ house, and not emerge. Yet she does again and again, first in the street, then to lead Manuel on a fantastical adventure. Ultimately she is able to bring her play-acting into the real world, and secure a new future for herself; she finds a husband. But does she love him? How will this marriage fare on the stage of the real world?

Useful readings and websites

Varey, John E. 1983. ‘La dama duende de Calderón: símbolos y escenografía’. In Actas del. Congreso International sobre Calderón y el Teatro Español del Siglo de Oro, Madrid (in Spanish)
Antonucci, Fausta. 1998. ‘Nuevos datos para la historia de la transmisión textual de La dama duende: las traducciones italianas del siglo XVII y comienzos del XVIII’. In Actas del IV Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Internacional Siglo de Oro (A.I.S.O.) (Alcalá de Henares, 22-27 July 1996), vol. 1, pp. 173-84. Alcalá, Servicio de Publicaciones (in Spanish)
Antonucci, Fausta. 2000. ‘Contribución al estudio de la historia textual de La dama duende’, Criticón, 78, 109-36 (in Spanish)
Arellano, Ignacio. 2001. ‘La dama duende y sus notables casos’, Cuadernos de Teatro Clásico, 15 ,127-39 (in Spanish)
Armas, Frederick de. 1976. The Invisible Mistress: Aspects of Feminism and Fantasy in the Golden Age. Biblioteca Siglo de Oro. Charlottesville, Virginia
Cascardi, Anthony J. 2005. ‘La dama duende’. In The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón, pp. 24-36. Cambridge, University Press
González, Aurelio. 2006. ‘De la palabra a la escena en tres comedias de Calderón’. In La dramaturgia de Calderón: Técnicas y estructuras (Homenaje a Jesús Sepúlveda), eds. Ignacio Arellano and Enrica Cancelliere, pp. 229-48. Madrid, Iberoamericana (in Spanish)
Greer, Margaret Rich. 1994. ‘The (Self)Representation of Control in La dama duende’. In The Golden Age Comedia: Text, Theory, and Performance, eds. Charles Ganelin and Howard Mancing, pp. 87-106. West Lafayette, Purdue University Press
Heigl, Michaela. 2001. ‘Gender Struggle and Power Relations in La dama duende’. In Spanish Theatre: Studies in Honour of Victor F. Dixon, eds. Kenneth Adams, Ciaran Cosgrove and James Whiston, pp. 57-70. London, Tamesis
Larson, Catherine. 1991. ‘La dama duende and the Shifting Characterization of Calderón's Diabolical Angel’. In The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age, eds. Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith, pp. 33-50. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, Bucknell University Press
Martino Crocetti, María. 1991. ‘La dama duende: Spatial and Hymeneal Dialectics’. In The Perception of Women in Spanish Theater of the Golden Age, eds. Anita K. Stoll and Dawn L. Smith, pp. 51-66. Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press
Mujica, Barbara. 1997. ‘From Comedia to Zarzuela: The Generic Transformation of Calderón’s La dama duende’, Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures, 10-11, 17-35
Nelson, Bradley J. 2002. ‘The Marriage of Art and Honor: Anamorphosis and Control in Calderón's La dama duende’, Bulletin of the Comediantes, 54, 2, 407-41
Ruano de la Haza, J. M. 1987. ‘The Staging of Calderón’s La vida es sueño and La dama duende’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 64,1, 51-63
Thacker, Jonathan. 1997. ‘ “… Now You Don’t”: The Manipulation of the Visible in Calderón’s La dama duende’,Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 5, 111-21
Thacker, Jonathan. 2002. ‘A Strategy for Self-Expression: The Puppet-Mistress’. In Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia, pp. 107-32. Liverpool, University Press

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Entry written by Kathleen Jeffs. Last updated on 4 October 2010.

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Authors, Plays & Translators

Out of the Wings

Out of the Wings

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La dama duende (1629), Pedro Calderón de la Barca

Authors, Plays & Translators