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Cross-Dressing, Theater, and “In-Betweens” in Early SHE AS HE: CROSS-DRESSING, THEATER, AND “IN-BETWEENS” IN EARLY MODERN SPAIN By Rosie Seagraves Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILSOSOPHY in Spanish August, 2013 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Edward H. Friedman Professor Andrés Zamora Professor Benigno Trigo Professor Earl E. Fitz Copyright © 2013 by Rosie Seagraves All Rights Reserved To my parents. iii iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work would not have been possible without the financial support of Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities Joe and Mary Harper Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year. I am also grateful for the financial support provided by the College of Arts & Sciences Summer Research Award, the Vanderbilt Dissertation Enhancement Grant, and the NeMLA Summer Fellowship. These grants allowed me to conduct archival research at the Centro de Documentación Teatral and the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid, Spain during the summer of 2012 in preparation for this project. The support from my committee has been fundamental to my completion of the dissertation. In addition to their continued support, I am grateful specifically for Dr. Benigno Trigo’s thoughtful feedback during an early conversation about the direction of the project as well as Dr. Andrés Zamora’s addition of the “bearded lady” portrait tradition to the conversation. Professor Earl Fitz’s insights about self-reference also helped me to refine my focus early on. I simply cannot thank my advisor, Dr. Edward Friedman, enough. For the rest of my career, “What would Friedman do?” will be my guide. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the immense support of my parents throughout my graduate school education. Their constant love, support, and heroic willingness to answer every panic-stricken phone call have made all the difference. Throughout my time at Vanderbilt I have been lucky enough to build friendships that v both inspired and sustained me as I worked toward this goal. To Laura Cade Brown, Carol Jiarou Duh, Megan Jeanette Myers, and Ben “Joey” Galina: my deep thanks. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page DEDICATION................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................... iv Chapter 1. SHE AS HE: AN INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................1 2. STAGING THE SPECTATOR IN THE HERMAPHRODITIC AND CROSS- DRESSED CULTURE OF EARLY MODERN SPAIN...................................................55 3. PLAY, TRANSVESTISM, AND THE COMEDIA ....................................................135 4. PLAYWRIGHTS OF MAYHEM................................................................................206 CONCLUSION................................................................................................................273 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................284 vii CHAPTER 1 She as He: An Introduction In 1615, Tirso de Molina’s Doña Juana stepped onto the stage and pretended to be a man with green breeches named Don Gil, wooing women and angering men in a character so convincing that by the play’s end, there would be three more characters pretending to be Don Gil. Nine years later, Catalina de Erauso, a Basque novitiate who had spent most of her adulthood as a man fighting on behalf of the Spanish empire in Chile, returned to Spain a celebrity and prepared to make her way to Rome to seek permission from the Pope to continue living as a man (permission that she obtained). Roughly ten years after that, Pedro Calderón de la Barca published La vida es sueño, opening the play with protagonist Rosaura cursing a horse and wielding a sword in pursuit of her lost honor, all the while dressed as a man. Female cross-dressing was an extremely popular phenomenon of the Golden Age comedia, appearing in every major playwright’s repertoire. Lope de Vega, the undisputed “father” of the art form, includes the device in over 100 of his plays, as recorded by Carmen Bravo-Villasante. The tone of the female cross-dresser can be playful (as in the case of Doña Juana/Don Gil) or quite serious, as with Rosaura. Ana Caro’s Leonor (of Valor, agravio y mujer) defines the act in terms of life and death. Regardless of the character’s seriousness, as Lope mentions in his foundational treatise El arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, the female cross-dresser was an audience favorite, though the convention was technically banned at several points throughout the early modern 1 theater’s history due to complaints by moralists. As the story of Catalina de Erauso demonstrates, cross-dressing also occupied a marginal space in seventeenth-century Spanish reality. This dissertation argues that Spanish theater’s treatment of the female cross- dresser in the seventeenth century offers a paradigm for understanding the creative self- consciousness that made both early modern society theatrical and early modern art unique. While Diego Velazquez’s Las meninas and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote serve as the prominent examples of seventeenth-century Spanish artistic self-reference in the areas of painting and narrative, respectively, I propose the female cross-dresser as symptomatic of a specifically theatrical self-consciousness that captivated public attention within and outside the theater. The mass public’s equal fascination with the discursive representation of “real” cross-dressers and the theatrical creation of cross- dressing characters on stage reveal an overall concern with the limits of representation, as the presence of cross-dressing pushed boundaries of language and the self to unintelligibility. Through transvestism, early modern society asked, dramatically, about its own theatrical nature through a fascination with role-play and disrupted binaries (primarily that of male/female). This game of equivocation is visual and linguistic, its own theater, and a ruse that defines early modern dramatics from within the bounds of the comedia and beyond. This type of self-reference serves as one example in a growing body of self-aware artistic expression during the period, rooted in a newfound sense of self-consciousness that emerged during the Renaissance. The interest in cross-dressing’s power of distortion connects with a general artistic desire to innovate form and find ways to surpass that 2 which came before. Each artist of the seventeenth-century seems determined to break free in some regard from the tradition that he or she inherits, opting instead to forge new styles and art forms in the areas of painting, narrative, poetry, and theater. A new version of time characterized by violent ruptures among periods, initiated the century prior, engenders a renewed consciousness on the part of the artist as related to his own temporal positioning, as well as the making and receiving of his art. As this awareness gives way to innovation, these elements (creator, creation, and reception) become part of the often- competitive revolution, making their way into the painter’s frame, the author’s page, and onto the dramatist’s stage. Seventeenth-century Spanish artists, faced with the pressure to surpass the tradition they inherit, strive in each genre to engender a new art form, be it a more realist version of narrative, an Italianate poetic form, or a non-classical dramatic structure. The expansion of the female cross-dresser’s manipulative capabilities and dramatic powers during the seventeenth century harnesses a type of creative genius from the stage that responds to anxieties surrounding the newfound early modern consciousness of social status and the artist’s specific temporal position in the context of innovation, genre formation, and artistic precedent. Dramatists created a character that became something more than a character and, in her metatheatrical performance, more than a figurative director. An authorial, creative power was fashioned that could not be surpassed, fully replicated, or even comprehended during the course of the play. The physical and temporal space of the play opens a window for the temporary “besting” of any limitations placed upon the early modern subject. By examining how the commercial theater incorporated female transvestism into its productions, we may see the way in which early 3 modern Spanish dramatics attempted not only to surpass its predecessors, but also to go beyond the categorical limits, whether social, stylistic, or chronological, that conditioned its presence and prominence. Various Hispanists interested in the phenomenon of the female cross-dressed heroines of the comedia have noted the tie between the figure’s gender-bending antics and the broader Baroque aesthetic in formation at the time. The search for extremes, as well as the celebration of paradoxical realities and the “monstrous,” all characteristic of seventeenth-century artistic expression, coalesce in the figure of the woman dressed as man. As Henry Sullivan points out, this character further offers an avenue for testing the limits of unity via representation, or rather, “Los individuos buscaban principios de unidad donde pudiesen, creando en el arte aquel extraño sentido de la belleza que rompe los límites del control que ahora denominamos el barroco” (“Tirso” 817). By changing
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