Shakespeare and the Spanish Comedia by Mujica Bárbara;Mujica B;

Author:Mujica, Bárbara;Mujica, B;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Since Vélez has eliminated the mother’s influence, blame must fall on Giraldo for raising not merely a thief but also a homicidal monster: “GILA. Que esto merece quien pasa / por las libertades todas / de los hijos. Si tú usaras / rigor conmigo al principio, / de mi inclinación gallarda / yo no llegara a este estremo. / Escarmienten en tus canas, / y en mí los que tienen hijos” (SV, 2351–3258) [GILA: This is what one deserves who allows total liberty to his children. If you had restrained me more at the beginning of my masculine inclination, I would not have reached this extreme].[24] In addition, tearing off her father’s ear with her teeth reduces Gila to the level of an animal, unable to use her hands or the hand-held weapons that distinguish human beings from other creatures.

Vélez’s theatrical adaptation of the ballad of the serrana de la Vera exploits the possibilities of feminine transgression in a specifically baroque exaltation and apotheosis of the hyperbolic and the unique, that which inspires “admiratio” [amazement]. This aspect of the baroque is evident in another play based not on folklore or legends but on the documented gender transgression of the “Monja alférez” [Lieutenant Nun] Catalina de Erauso (1592–1650), whose adventures, published in 1625, were not yet known during the period of greatest popularity of cross-dressing women on stage. Stephanie Merrim cites a key passage that presents the first-person account of Erauso’s deeds to the king as a “singular and prodigious tale,” praiseworthy in itself. “Things prodigious, striking, and bizarre,” including the extreme cases of saints and sinners, as well as the spectacles and ceremonies of the court, “held a special fascination for the Hispanic Baroque worlds.”[25]

Narrated in the first person, the account tells how this daughter of a noble Basque family escaped a convent at the age of fifteen, fashioned male clothing from her female attire, crossed the Atlantic, and fought in the conquest of Chile for several years without being discovered, until she confessed to a cleric that she was a woman. Although civil and canon law prohibited cross-dressing, she was celebrated as a heroic warrior upon her return to Spain and she received a dispensation from the pope that allowed her to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The acclaim she received, rather than her cross-dressing itself, was unique in its time. Erauso’s narrative provides a fascinating example of a “real-life” instance of social acceptance of a woman dressing and behaving as a man, in contrast to the fate of the legendary serrana de la Vera who simply assumed the masculine prerogative of violence. More than one hundred cases of women who dressed as men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have been studied by Dutch scholars Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol. They discovered that “passing oneself off as a man was a real and viable option for women who had fallen into bad times,” particularly in northwestern Europe,[26] and they observe that some women testified that they were inspired by popular ballads.

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