Transgresiones ecfrásticas: El texto y la imagen en Los herederos de Segismundo de Schmidhuber de la Mora

Abstract

The nature of images in Guillermo Schmidhuber de la Mora’s award winning play Los herederos de Segismundo (1982), and the role images play in relation to the verbal medium that produces them, constitutes the object of analysis of the play as literary text and theatrical performance. The action begins 20 years after the conclusion of Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño and dramatizes 30 years in the lives of Segismundo, his son Américo and their servants. The three generations of monarchs – Basilio, Segismundo and Américo – justify their stranglehold on others through capricious interpretation of visual signs – stars, icons, and sculptures. The visual forms created by the royal palace’s sculptor and the servants’ appropriation of the proscenium to address the public and comment on actions in the palace scenes are designed to alter the subordinate status of the poor, and to revise the seventeenth- century’s socio-economic and theatrical conventions, so that future generations of workers may enjoy the same opportunities previously reserved for the nobility. (GJW)