The Spanish Actress's Art: Improvisation, Transvestism and Disruption inin Tirso’s El vergonzoso en palacio (original) (raw)

In the past two decades, feminist scholarship has demonstrated the magnitude and variety of women's participation as theatrical performers in early modern Europe, particularly in England, France, and Italy. 1 Similarly, scholarship has examined how actresses in Spain interrogated their gendered place in society. Until recently, however, little of this criticism has been available in English, with the notable exception of that of Melveena McKendrick who asserts that 'the wholesale emergence of female actors on the Spanish stage … at the end of the sixteenth century was a remarkable development, the impact of which, it seems to me, has never been adequately registered'. 2 In conversation with this growing body of criticism and to consider further this 'remarkable development', my essay investigates how the introduction of women onto the early modern Spanish stage disrupted patriarchal norms, since actresses often dressed, acted, and spoke as men, engaged in extemporaneous speech, and because female audiences responded loudly and insistently in the theatre. As Sidney Donnell contends, 'Times were changing and very unstable in Spain during the 1500s and 1600s, and transvestite dramas serve to mark the uneven paradigm shifts taking place in the cultural milieu'. 3 Donnell specifically identifies transvestite drama as the marker of cultural instability, but I suggest that the very presence of women on stage and the actresses' particular linguistic skills also indicate subtle power negotiations within the culture. Unlike the majority of women who faced the confinement of private life, actresses had access to a public forum and discourse due to the nature of theatre itself. 4 Actresses led public lives and had public voices, even as they might portray the private lives of women on stage and speak lines written by male playwrights. In a culture that was, as José R. Cartagena Calderón argues, increasingly preoccupied with masculinity, Spanish actresses participated in a masculine discourse through the conventions of cross-dressing and the practice of extemporization, introduced by Italian commedia dell'arte ET15-1.indd 169 ET15-1.indd 169 4/26/12 10:48:32 AM 4/26/12 10:48:32 AM