Dramas of Distinction: A Study of Plays by Golden-Age Women

Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 1999 by Judith Drinkwater

Dramas of Distinction: A Study of Plays by Golden-Age Women. By TERESA SCOTT SOUFAS. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 1997. 201 pp. $34.95.

The writing of theatrical texts by women writers of the Golden Age is a neglected area, because so few of these texts survive, and because those that do have not received the critical exposure that would allow them to be included in the debates surrounding the dramatic output of the era. Teresa Scott Soufas seeks to redress this imbalance by presenting an extended critical commentary complementing her previously published anthology of works by the dramatists under review: Angela Azevedo, Ana Caro, Leonor de la Cueva, Feliciana Enryquez, and Maria de Zayas, all of whom wrote chiefly in the 1630s and 1640s. She adopts an overtly feminist strategy of subjecting her authors to serious attention in order to demonstrate their contribution to the social construction of gender and to the challenge to established ideologies in seventeenth-century Spain.

The first chapter of the volume provides a useful update on issues of gender and convention in Golden Age drama, and makes tentative suggestions, echoed in later discussions, about the way in which the seventeenth-century focus in drama on issues concerning women and gender anticipates postmodern feminist arguments. The individual texts studied are subsequently discussed in the light of their own merits and for their individual interest, rather than in comparison with male-authored plays of the period. This approach is an appropriate one, since with the exception of Caro, none of the women writers represented here is known to have had her plays performed in public. Instead, these works were produced for private reading, or for private or courtly social functions. They thus reflect in the manner of their consumption the divide between public and private which marks off the literature of women and the lives of women from the mainstream in the Golden Age.

The plays selected for analysis here (Caro, El conde Partinuples and Valor, agravio y mujer; Cueva, La firmeza en la ausencia; Azevedo, Dicha y desdicha del juego, La margarita del Tajo, and El muerto disimulado; Zayas, La traicion en la amistad; Enriquez, Tragicomedia de los jardines y campos sabeos), bear the imprint of the gendered divide. On the one hand they depict motifs and scenarios familiar in many Golden-Age comedias: the relationship between the individual (woman, in this case) and the monarchy or monarch, woman as an object of exchange in the social economy, and the cross-dressing woman (and, more unusually, man). On the other hand, however, Soufas demonstrates convincingly how, at the same time as they address these conventions and even apparently reinscribe their female characters into stereotypes of silence, powerlessness, and submission to the male, the female dramatists challenge the patriarchal dramatic configuration from within and expose the weaknesses of the gendered hierarchy that upholds it. Despite this, in true comedia fashion, the status quo is inevitably restored even in these female-authored texts, in such a way that their chief importance, as Soufas points out, is to underline not some revolutionary content but instead the extent to which women obviously could and did participate in the intellectual and cultural pursuits of their class and time. Equally striking is the substantial bibliography appended to the volume, which reveals the extent to which women critics have come to the fore in comedia studies over the last twenty-five years, and in parallel with their seventeenth-century counterparts created a new tradition in an established field of study.

JUDITH DRINKWATER CAMBRIDGE