>>Pawns of a House/Los empeños de una casa

ISBN: 1-931010-17-X
264 pp. | paper only | $22.00

Coming in October 2005!

a play by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; bilingual edition
critical edition scholarship and introduction by Susana Hernández Araico; translation by Michael McGaha

In this seventeenth-century cloak-and-sword play, eight characters are enmeshed in a tangled web of mutual obligations. When they find themselves thrown together in the house of Don Pedro de Arellano in Toledo, they struggle to fulfill, or escape, those obligations. The action involves female rivalry, love triangles, kidnapping, and confusion of identities. The hilarity peaks when the rivals, young Don Pedro and Don Carlos, who are moved about the house like pawns on a game board, clash swords in the darkness, only to discover by candlelight that the person they are fighting over is not the beloved Doña Leonor, but the gracioso Castaño dressed in her clothing. In the end, however, the immobilized characters regain the initiative and make way for the comic solution of multiple marriages.

Susana Hernández Araico received her Ph.D. from UCLA. She is a professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, and the author of Ironía y tragedia en Calderón.

Michael McGaha is a professor and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Pomona College. He has published thirteen books and more than forty articles on Spanish Literature in the Golden Age and on the history and literature of the Sephardic Jews.