The Best Man in the Play: Female Agency in a Gender-Inclusive Comedia

Abstract

As an example of how newly reformulated, gender-inclusive Comedia canon demands that we reevaluate earlier assumptions made about the male-authored canon, this study engages two examples of the popular comic convention of the cross-dressed woman - Tirso de Molina's "Don Gil de las calzas verdes" and Ana Caro's "Valor, agravio y mujer" - in dialogue with one another. This comparitive reading suggests problems in traditional Comedia scholarship, in which the female protagonist of male-authored popular comedy indicates a "pro-woman" authorial stance. Because this critical tradition's influence is still notable today, we may continue to profit from the opening-up of the canon by recognizing the voices of women writers as fundamentally different by reconsidering the male canon as equally gender-inflected, and by revising earlier critical assumptions that the dramaturgas have revealed to be anachronistically progressive. (REB)