The House of Trials, on trial

I admit that when I first started reading Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz’s The House of Trials, I couldn’t help but wonder if the playwright was trying to appeal to a less sophisticated audience of theatre watchers; for reason that the characters would often break the fourth-wall dimension and speak directly to the audience, but unlike Shakespeare’s plays, there was no heightened language. It almost felt like reading a musical where characters sing to reiterate events that have already happened. And while the characters in The House of Trials would often unveil information that was not previously known to the audience, since the language was not heightened like in Shakespeare’s plays, it just read as elementary to me. However, I could see this working incredibly well on stage and playing out to be quite entertaining for audiences, both old and young. This element of a diminishing the 4^th wall and having actors reveal things to the audience seemed to be a quite consistent element of this play and if reading only this in the Spanish Golden Age comedia genre, I would think it was a consistent feature of the genre itself. Another initially apparent element of this play was the use of verse structure from beginning to end, with rhyme occasionally incorporated. Although there is no intentional use of iambic pentameter, there is a vague sense of spoken rhythm that would accompany the text of the play with all of the lines of s stanza being about the same length. This is another element that could read elementary or uninventive in the play, but would play out very musically on stage and would be helpful for audiences, especially with many of them “listening” to plays rather than “watching them.”