Branding, Bondage, and Lope's Typeface

Abstract:

In plays such as Los melindres de Belisa, Lope de Vega's characters pretend to be enslaved people who have been branded on the face. Their cosmetic brands or fingidos hierros act as signs within a system of figuration I call typeface. In Lope's typeface plays, hierros are removed easily but are undetectable as fake. These simulated brandings do not disfigure the characters pretending to be enslaved; instead, branding makes the character feigning unfreedom appear simultaneously more sexually attractive and racially ambiguous to other characters. Rather than clarifying racial hierarchies, as Miles Grier demonstrates is the case with the phenomenon he calls "inkface," typeface performances of enslavement represent what is for Lope a metaphysical reality: all human beings are enslaved and branded. Typeface goes beyond the appropriation of enslavement and entails a theory of signification in which human identities circulate as fungible signs, conflating the slave trade and literary dissemination, typographical characters and characterization. By elucidating how simulated brandings signify in plays Lope wrote across decades, this article identifies typeface plays as a subset of Lope's oeuvre, suggesting new ways of understanding his attitudes toward race and enslavement.