Dark Prisms by Lima Robert;

Author:Lima, Robert; [Lima, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

VII

Illuminati, Witches, and Apparitions: The Unholy Plays of Domingo Miras

The will to put Apollo to flight has

become more conscious, more lucid daily.

—Domingo Miras, Primer Acto

The world that the contemporary Spanish dramatist Domingo Miras (b. 1934) brings to the stage in many of his plays is more often than not peopled by historic and fictitious beings associated in one way or another with occult practices and beliefs, sometimes in their most extreme manifestations. His inspiration for these plays is generally the culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, the nearly-two-hundred-year period known as the Siglo de Oro, in which the new openness to the classical world inspired some to explore astrology, mythology, and occultism, among other esoteric traditions, at the same time that rational concerns occupied others. In the case of the former, the ways of Dionysus were of greater personal import than those of Apollo.

The pursuit of the esoteric is notable in the dramatic works of that era in that numerous plays delve into occult lore, either seriously or employing it for comic effect.1 Whereas Lope de Vega, Ruiz de Alarcón, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón de la Barca, among many other playwrights, had to work under the watchful eye of Catholicism’s Holy Office of the Inquisition, and within the limitations of the stage of their times, Domingo Miras writes in a society recently freed from such external controls and, empowered by the capabilities of modern staging techniques, suffuses his plays with human characters that appear and disappear magically, that fly or levitate, or that participate in other fantastic or grotesque occurrences, as well as with demons and angels who are the agents of the supernatural happenings on stage. Whereas Golden Age playwrights usually dealt with the occult themes in the context of Christianity in order to enhance the doctrines of the Church vis-à-vis pagan and heretical ideas, Miras uses irony and satire to point to the absurdity of society, be it the monarchy, the nobility, or religious institutions. Aberrations in human conduct on all social levels become the focus of Miras in many plays, and the portrayal of moral corruption shows that he mastered the lessons learned in the grotesques painted or etched by Goya and in those plays of Ramón del Valle-Inclán termed Esperpentos.2 Four of Miras’s major plays demonstrate his continuity both of the Golden Age’s fascination with occult lore and of the later aesthetic of the grotesque as a means of interpreting heterodoxy.

The first case in point is that of Las alumbradas de la Encarnación Benita (1979; The Illuminati of the Benedictine Convent of the Incarnation), whose title speaks directly to the occultist theme of the play.3 Set in Madrid during the seventeenth-century reign of Philip IV (1621-65), the cast of characters includes members of the Church and of the state, with the king himself making an appearance late in the final act. The religious setting and mystique serve as foils to the playwright’s vision of superstition, egoism, and corruption at the very core of the Church—its nuns, priests, cardinals, popes—and of credence in the secular sector, including the high-born.

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