Resumen de Imperial Geographies: Poetics of the Atlantic in Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s El semejante a sí mismo

Carl Austin Wise

• Mexican playwright Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s early modern urban comedy El semejante a sí mismo interrupts the cloak-and-dagger plot and its Seville centered-geography three times to narrate in vivid detail feats of glory on New World waterways by the Viceroy of New Spain, the Marquis of Salinas, and the Indies fleet admiral, Lope Diez Aux y Armendariz. By adorning the three monologues with epic-like registers about the deeds of New World heroes, Alarcón’s play establishes a geography of translatio imperii in which the Spanish audience is forced to look away from Seville and gaze westward at examples of imperial glory. The imperial geography comes to an abrupt end, however, when Leonardo delivers a final monologue recounting a maritime disaster on the Atlantic and what begin as a triumphant voyage to the New World devolves into the aimless language of a shipwrecked mariner lost at sea.