Spectacular Women: Sites of Gender Strife and Negotiation in Calderon's "No hay burlas con el amor" and on the Early Modern Spanish Stage

Abstract

Calder6n's early comedias de capa y espada privilege and reenforce the social codes of honor and an ideology of male power that ultimately serve the patriarchal interests characteristic of early modern Spain. These cloak and dagger comedies, dismissed by some critics as the mere kitsch of early modern Spanish popular culture, in fact can tell us much about the cultural discourses of gender and power circulating in the period.' While some critics have indeed begun to explore the roots and ramifications of gender strife and its negotiations within the volumes of plays by Spanish Renaissance dramatists, further investigations are necessary in order to arrive at an understanding of the complexity of issues both within the comedias themselves and within the culture that produced them. A more sophisticated analysis of these plays will need to account for the limits of any subversion/containment oppositional polemic, to explore how gender roles are constructed, circulated, and maintained, and furthermore, to investigate the various lacunae within the culture where moments of resistance to these rigid formulations are offered.