Beyond Spain's Borders

Women Players in Early Modern National Theaters

Anne J. Cruz, Maria Cristina Quintero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315438788
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

The prolific theatrical activity that abounded on the stages of early modern Europe demonstrates that drama was a genre that transcended national borders. The transnational character of early modern theater reflects the rich admixture of various dramatic traditions, such as Spain's comedia and Italy's commedia dell'arte, but also the transformations across cultures of Spanish novellas to French plays and English interludes. Of particular import to this study is the role that women and gender played in this cross-pollination of theatrical sources and practices. Contributors to the volume not only investigate the gendered effect of Spanish texts and literary types on English and French drama, they address the actual journeys of Spanish actresses to French theaters and of Italian actresses to the Spanish stage, while several emphasize the movement of royal women to various courts and their impact on theatrical activity in Spain and abroad. In their innovative focus on women's participation and influence, the chapters in this volume illustrate the frequent yet little studied transnational and transcultural points of contact between Spanish theater and the national theaters of England, France, Austria, and Italy.

Part I
From Spain to the Transnational Stage

1 The Domestication of Melibea

Recasting Spanish Characters in Early English Drama

José María Pérez Fernández¹

One of the earliest known references to the presence of Fernando de Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea on an English stage appears in Anthony Munday’s Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580), where he complains about the pernicious effects of playgoing on “the chastitie of vnmarried maides and widowes.” Female audiences, he claimed, were exposed to the “wanton wiues fables” and “pastorical songes of loue” used by playwrights in “their comical discourses,” which turned “al chastity vpside downe” and corrupted “the good disposition & manners of youth.” Munday singled out “the tragical Comedie of Calistus” as a particularly pernicious case “where the bawdresse Scelestina inflamed the maiden Melibeia with her sorceries” (99–101). Concerns about the impact of the stage upon private and public morals naturally intensified in England as its theaters became an ever more prosperous business. So large was the demand for plays that authors and producers had to search far and wide for new plots. In 1599 Edward Topsell ranted against the proliferation on the stage of those “Italian follies, Spanish inuentions, or French-fayned-wanton-volumes” whose characters were “taught to speak English” by many “histrionicall plaiers, whereby,” he concluded, “many good soules are endangered” (63–64). As Munday demonstrates, Melibea and Celestina were among those alien characters who had been taught to speak English on the Elizabethan stage.

La Celestina (as the Tragicomedia eventually came to be known) had become the target of moralists and censors since its first known edition (Burgos, 1499). Its numerous translations and adaptations into other European languages constitute excellent examples of its reception.² This essay will focus on what is arguably the earliest case of its English domestication. The Tudor interlude Calisto and Melebea is exceptional in that it is the first known, and the only actual remaining adaptation of La Celestina to the stage, before the twentieth century—not just in English, but in any other language including Spanish. Although we know that it was published by John Rastell around 1527–1530, we do not know the name of its author. Some scholars suggest the likelihood that Rastell himself translated, adapted, and produced the text.³ He could have done so directly from the original text in Spanish, but he could also have had access to a 1527 French version, or to an early Italian rendering from 1506.⁴ Gustav Ungerer claims that certain textual parallelisms between Calisto and Melebea and other interludes penned by Rastell conclusively prove that it was rendered by him. Others, like Pearl Hogrefe, suggest that the Interlude may have been written by three different hands. Howard Norland proposes that the text resulted from a collaboration between Rastell and Richard Morison.⁵

Far from being a problem, the uncertain authorship facilitates a fruitful focus on Rastell as a cultural agent within a larger group rather than as a single author. The refashioned Melebea of the interlude bears the imprint of the material conditions, the values, and the expectations of the community that produced it. Rastell’s entrepreneurial spirit involved him in the material production of interludes and court spectacles, as well as in the translation, publication, and distribution of a wide variety of texts: literary, legal, and historical.⁶ He is also representative of those cultural agents who set up printing shops all across Europe during the early decades of the new technology. Like many of them, he was an ambitious and reasonably well educated urban artisan situated at the intersection of different social, political, and cultural worlds. Without a formal university education or an aristocratic or wealthy patron, this sort of polyvalent craftsman became, however, a fundamental agent in this period, for through print he usually had the means to produce textual commodities devoted to respond to early market demands and also to fashion public opinion on a wide array of subjects. Although most of them were not exactly independent entrepreneurs with an explicit cultural agenda—many of them actually served the political and cultural interests of others—the majority did enjoy a certain degree of financial clout. Since they also owned the means for the mechanical reproduction of texts and therefore for the distribution of new ideas, they were certainly empowered as agents within the cultural networks to which they belonged. Many of them also came from humble, or middle-class backgrounds. Rastell’s first appointment at court was as supervisor for the unloading of armaments at the Tower, after which he was given a new job building the infrastructure and designing the scripts for civic and courtly pageants (Dillon, “John Rastell’s Stage” 28). He participated, for instance, in the decoration of the settings for the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and he also created some of the civic pageants displayed during Charles V’s visit to London in 1522. These activities required skills, techniques, and materials that overlapped with the industry of dramatic performance. The Tudor interlude therefore developed as a new dramatic genre among other forms of performance that included public displays of political iconography, or more private entertainment in great halls, staged between meals, for courtly and aristocratic audiences—the latter of which involved music and such similar, mostly recreational, contents. From this background, and in the hands of culturally active agents such as John Rastell and his son William, Thomas More, and John Heywood—to name just a few—the interlude gradually became a vehicle for texts with a more explicitly educational or moralizing purpose (Debax 27).

Rastell has also gone down in history as the publisher of the first secular play in English—Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (1512)—and as the owner of the first public stage. Whereas we have material proof of the former, the evidence for Rastell’s stage in his own house is scant. Janette Dillon suggests that the date for the construction of the stage in Rastell’s household must be about 1524–1531, a period that coincides closely with the publication of Calisto and Melebea (“John Rastell’s Stage” 15). For about two decades the Rastells were also responsible for the publication of a significant amount of interludes, and as such they played an important role in the creation and codification of this particular dramatic and publishing genre during its early stages.⁷ Before Elizabethan drama became a medium of mass entertainment for a socially mixed urban public, these interludes addressed coterie audiences distinct from the aristocratic circles of court entertainment and the popular urban masses in the cases of late medieval drama such as mystery or Passion plays. In this respect, the interlude can be read as the literary-doctrinal expression of a new third space, whose values straddled the relative privacy and domesticity of John Rastell and his associates—the different social worlds that he inhabited between the city and the court, between artisans and aristocrats—and the still diffuse public sphere that was rising from the products issued by early modern printing presses and their readership.

A considerable percentage of Rastell’s output as a cultural agent was related to the homogenization and public distribution of the legal standards that regulated civic and domestic life. This entailed the defense of a fundamental professional within this new third space: the secular expert in civic law. Lawyers, Rastell proclaimed, are of great value because they “increase and multiply the common wealth” (Tabula 3–4). Rastell explicitly aimed at making the common laws available to the common man through their translation and publication in English: doing so would contribute to the foundation of a harmonious civic community. As he himself declared in the preface of his English rendering of the Abbreviation of the Statutes, such law “ought and shulde be wryttyn in such manere and so opynly publisshyd and declaryd that the people myght sone wythout gert dyffyculty have the knowledge of the seyd laws” (The Statutes 1). In this reformist, legal spirit he spoke with the same voice as other influential scholars of the period, like the Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti, or the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives. This common European ethos pervades in important ways the adaptation of La Celestina produced by Rastell and the way in which its young protagonist, Melibea, was domesticated into this new normative discourse.

Short of its total obliteration from the public stage, or from its circulation in print, what Rastell did with La Celestina was as close as he could get to what the moralists of the late sixteenth century were proposing. Although the adaptation acknowledges in part the originality of Rojas’s work—its dramatic and epistemological foundations—by preserving a relevant part of its opening sections and dialogues, its author also engaged in a most vigorous transformation of the original. Consequently, Melibea and Celestina were recast as solid examples—positive and negative, respectively—of civic and moral values. Rojas’s Tragicomedia also underwent a generic metamorphosis that involved its domestication in several different ways. This generic complexity features in the title which Rastell chose for his printed version (“A new comodye in englysh in maner Of an enterlude”), where its tragic component vanishes as the publisher underlines the fact that (a) this is new in English and (b) that it is presented in the manner, i.e. the format, of an interlude. The description that follows emphasizes its educational and moralizing purpose, administered under the species of a rhetorical exchange, as it also foregrounds its recreational nature: “ryght elygant & full of craft of rethoryk / wherein is shewd & dyscrybyd as well the bewte & good propertes of women / as theyr vycys & euyll condicions with a morall conclusion & exhortacyon to vertew.”⁸ Besides expectations arising from the vocabulary of dramatic conventions, the title also evokes another different genre, that of the academic dispute, the dialogical exchange of weighty moral considerations in the form of elegant rhetorical orations. All of it pleasantly gilded as a comedy with a happy ending and wrapped up with a “moral conclusion and exhortation to virtue.” The end result was a polyvalent, transgeneric text, displayed first within the domestic space of aristocratic and bourgeois civic households, and then distributed in print.

Peter Happé has described Tudor interludes as a “peculiarly British genre—a Britishness which [Rastell] locates in the spaces where they were staged” (“Introduction” 9–10). And it was into this peculiarly British format and the households where it was performed that the Castilian Melibea was domesticated. Like the genre of the text itself, the concept of domestication is complex and involves strategies of cultural transla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I From Spain to the Transnational Stage
• PART II Commedia and Court Crosscurrents
• Index