She as He: Cross-Dressing, Theater, and "In-Betweens" in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Female cross-dressing was an extremely popular phenomenon of the Golden Age comedia, appearing in every major playwright’s repertoire. This dissertation argues that Spanish theater’s treatment of the female cross-dresser in the seventeenth century offers a paradigm for understanding the creative self-consciousness that made both early modern society theatrical and early modern art unique. I combine analysis of purely fictional cross-dressing protagonists with an examination of the theatrical discourse surrounding real-life gender-benders such as Eleno/a de Céspdes, Catalina de Erauso, Francisca Baltasara, and Queen Christina of Sweden. While Diego Velazquez’s Las meninas and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote serve as the prominent examples of seventeenth-century Spanish artistic self-reference in the areas of painting and narrative, respectively, I propose the female cross-dresser as symptomatic of a specifically theatrical self-consciousness that captivated public attention within and outside the theater.