Ana Caro, Drama Queen, at the University of Chicago by Noémie Ndiaye

A most welcome note from Noémie Ndiaye, Associate Professor of English and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, on her experience teaching DTC’s The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs:

To teach Ana Caro’s play Valor, agravio y mujer in my “Drama Queens” course, I use the translation established by the UCLA Working Group on the Comedia in Translation and Performance (Diversifying the Classics). The critical introduction (20 pages) is just perfect for undergraduate students who are encountering Spanish comedia for the first time and need to learn a little bit of theatre history, cultural history, and literary history before being introduced to this playwright and diving into this wonderful play. The section titled “Why Brussels?”, which grounds Ana Caro’s feminist rewriting of the Don Juan myth in the geopolitical realities of the early modern Spanish empire is particularly enlightening. The translation itself is vibrant and spirited, clearly designed for live readings (of which we have many in my course), and supported by a lean but effective apparatus of footnotes clarifying references to mythology, the Bible, early modern Spanish literature, and historical events or figures. Lineation makes it easy to keep everybody on the same page. I use the hard copy of this edition myself but assign the free PDF version to my students (very useful to do word searches when the time comes for them to write course papers on the play). This edition is a gift to all instructors who wish to teach this gem of a play and diversify their syllabus.