Inês de Castro in Theatre and Film: A Feminist Exhumation of the Dead Queen

Abstract

Since the fourteenth century when Inês de Castro was laid to rest in her magnificent tomb in the Monastery of Alcobaça, artists worldwide have told the tragic story of the Galician noblewoman who was assassinated for political reasons and became Queen of Portugal after death. Inês embodies beauty, love, innocence, and saudade, and, for the Portuguese, she figures prominently in the national cultural imaginary. This inquiry is a comparative, intertextual, and intermedial study of the representation of Inês de Castro across the centuries, as seen through a feminist lens. Thus, it begins with analyses of Garcia de Resende’s 1516 performative poem “Trovas à morte de D. Inês de Castro” (“Ballad to the Death of Dona Inês de Castro”), and two foundational Iberian plays, Castro (1587) by tragedian António Ferreira, and Reinar después de morir (To Reign after Death) (1652) by the popular Luis Vélez de Guevara. These three dramatic texts, built on the Inesian narratives of oral tradition and royal chronicles, establish figurations of Inês that surface in twentieth- and twenty-first-century film, video and performance. The 1945 classic film by José Leitão de Barros, Inês de Castro, with a heroine who is both tragic and romantic, has elements of both Ferreira and Vélez; José Carlos de Oliveira’s 1997 Inês de Portugal plays up Inês’s sexuality and evokes Resende’s courtesan; and YouTube videos by Brazilian and Portuguese students are veritable pastiches of the palimpsest Inês has become. In performance, Whetstone Theatre’s 2001 production of John Clifford’s Inés de Castro revives the tragic heroine originated by Ferreira in a tragedy for our days, while Teatro O Bando’s 2011 Pedro e Inês echoes Vélez’s hunted protagonist and the crowned corpse, and O Projecto’s community theatre play of the same year focuses on Ferreirian saudade. Finally, my 2008 performance of Resende’s ballad, with a feminist direction that foregrounds Inês’s authority, closes this circle of representation and opens up a reading of the Dead Queen. In this inquiry, each case study is interrogated to uncover the masculinist discourse of Inesian texts and give Inês a new and fluid identity in the Luso cultural imaginary and beyond.