La Tramoyera: A New Role for Women in the Golden Age Comedia de Capa y Espada

This thesis explores female agency in seventeenth-century comedias de capa y espada [cape and sword plays]. I wish to identify and examine women's diverse contributions to a highly popular genre that constituted half of the dramatic production in Spain's Golden Age. Through socio-cultural, historical, and feminist approaches, I analyze the meaning of women's representations in these comedic plays. I intend to show how the emergence of actresses toward the end of the sixteenth-century impacted the development of variant female roles and the evolution of Spanish commercial theater. Skilled female performers brought to life fictional characters that showed relentless determination to shift patriarchal parameters and expand feminine spaces. Prolific writers seized the opportunity to blend illusion and reality, and portray evolving gender paradigms at a time of great urbanization in Madrid. In capa y espada plays, female protagonists skillfully engage in courtship, premarital sex, and marriage negotiations. In fact, real women also had more command of their lives than previously believed. Social, religious, legal, and medical discourses did not have such a strong influence on female identity formation as historians have argued in the past. I draw attention to the privileged position of self-assertive, unmarried female characters in the capa y espada genre. I aim to reinterpret the phenomenon of the comedia de capa y espada as female-centered and reevaluate the role of the single woman as subject in early modern Spain.;An important motivation to write this thesis has been to change the stigma of the comedia de capa y espada as one that is trivial in nature since this faulty perspective fails to recognize the importance of the plays in charting women's social history in early modern Spain. In my introduction, I scrutinize women's active contribution to this compelling historical period in order to enhance my reading of these plays. I write about the need for a new classification of female lead characters. I have chosen to classify the female protagonists of the capa y espada plays as tramoyeras [scheming women], in order to make a new distinction for these intelligent characters of agency.;In the first two chapters, I establish the importance of cross-dressing and masquerade for female characters in their attempts to achieve a sense of freedom, voice, and command in their lives. By making connections between the implications of female cross-dressing in real life and in performance, I arrive at fascinating reflections on the fluidity of gender, the illusion of representation, and the power of deception. By analyzing the portrayal of the cross-dressed woman and the overly-feminized woman I am able to make assertions about women's concerns over their right to speak, to choose a husband, and to protect their dowries.;My examination of the tramoyeras who incessantly scheme challenges conventional notions about female characterization and agency. I show how some characters employ their gendered resources to acquire leverage in attaining their goals. In this part of my thesis, I establish how female characters manipulate and negotiate male attempts to subjugate their bodies and voices. I demonstrate how women in these plays invert the stereotypical weak conditions associated with the female gender into sources of power. I will show how many tramoyeras recognize illness and pregnancy, for example, as a means of empowerment to undermine patriarchal authority. I uncover fascinating reasons why several female lead characters defend their socially unfavorable status as widows or unmarried women in the face of danger. My analysis of these representations of female insubordination displayed in the action and the dramatic discourse, in conjunction with the highly disconcerting marital unions at the end of these plays uncovers valuable proto-feminist assertions about women in early modern Spain previously ignored.