Staging Madrid

Abstract

This chapter examines the symbiosis between the development of the theater and the consolidation of Madrid as the court and capital of the Spanish monarchy in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. Following an overview of scholarship on the material workings of the public playhouses and the dramatic representation of Madrid in urban comedies, I discuss the geographical, economic, and cultural centrality of the theater in the city’s transformation into villa y corte [town and court] and in the well-being of its rapidly growing populace. I then turn to the main features of the comedia urbana [urban comedy] and the imaginary of and for the city created by Lope de Vega and his followers. Finally, I spotlight one of the genre’s most spirited and deservedly canonical presentations, Tirso de Molina’s Don Gil de las calzas verdes [Don Gil of the Green Breeches] (1615). This lushly theatrical play, I argue, comically hybridizes the pastoral and the urban in ludic homage to Madrid, celebrating the creative possibility generated by the comedia nueva and the city’s capital status, reclaimed less than a decade prior to the work’s composition.