Margaret E. Boyle. Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain

Margaret E. Boyle. Unruly Women: Performance, Penitence, and Punishment in Early Modern Spain. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 171 pp. $55. Review by ELIZABETH R. WRIGHT, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA. Margaret Boyle's two-tiered study explores and illuminates incongruity that resulted when rigid ideals or precepts of female virtue collided with lives of women in seventeenth-century Spain. On one level, Boyle analyzes institutions founded to rehabilitate prostitutes and other women accused of crime. On second, she assesses theatrical representations of wayward women. Thus constructed, concise study is richly suggestive of two vital and interconnected scholarly practices: women's history and a cultural-studies focus on early-modern Spanish theater. A few points of background are in order for readers of this journal, in particular as concerns emergence of dedicated playhouses (corrales de comedias), standing professional theater companies, and so-called new in last two decades of sixteenth century. The comedia nueva--three-act dramas in polymetric verse in which playwrights gleefully dispensed with classical strictures--was wildly popular with city dwellers across Spain and just as problematic for a small if vocal group of moralists concerned with potentially negative influence of love plots on population. A key justification for allowing playhouses to remain open was that ticket receipts supported charitable institutions, including those founded to house and rehabilitate wayward women. Hence author's juxtaposition of unruly women in context of custodial institutions and professional theater. Boyle's point of departure is fascinating story of Barbara Coronel (1643-1691). A professional actor from early adolescence, Coronel gained popular renown for representing a kind of stock heroine critics today classify as manly woman (mujer varonil); such characters resisted marriage, defended themselves at sword- or knife-point, and often dressed as men. But Coronel also travestied gender roles off stage. As well, she managed a troupe of actors, as did a good number of other women of theater. But when her husband was murdered, Barbara Coronel's public displays of manly strength seem to have made her a natural suspect. Intriguingly, Coronel's defenders at this point included an uncle who performed in comic intermezzi under stage name Juan Rana (John Frog) and was himself famously tried for sodomy by Inquisition. This opening anecdote is useful to give scholars of seventeenth-century England an idea of multifaceted and often controversial public profile of women who earned their living in Spanish theater business of era. In contrast to prohibitions against women acting in professional theaters in England, a crown ruling in 1587 had allowed for actresses to perform in corrales de comedias provided they were married and did not dress as men. Boyle notes that restrictions were honored as much in breach as in practice. Not surprisingly, women's undeniable prominence in all aspects of theater business never ceased to be a point of anxiety. Coronel's case suggests to what extent such worries spanned seventeenth century. Her story, briefly glimpsed as a point of departure, leads Boyle to her central argument and overarching goal. She thus states: the early-modern Spanish subject was constructed through a variety of competing discourses, which both enforced and critiqued expected social behavior (4). Part 1 is comprised entirely of first chapter, Gendering Recogimiento in Early Modern Madrid, in which Boyle examines institutions that emerged in Spain's court city in response to a perceived epidemic of unruliness. To illustrate this issue, Boyle analyzes 1623 procession organized to celebrate relocation and expansion of one of foundations that sought to confine and then reform prostitutes, Casa de Santa Maria Magdalena de la Penitencia. …

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