The Triumphant Juan Rana: A Gay Actor of the Spanish Golden Age (review)

The seventeenth-century Spanish actor Cosme Pérez achieved unmatched notoriety as the persona ‘Juan Rana’ in short comic interludes, or entremeses, typically performed between the acts of full-length plays. Major playwrights wrote dozens of entremeses specifically for him, and his popularity reached all social classes and endured throughout his fifty-year career. In Counter-Reformation Spain, Rana’s popularity is striking, since his homosexuality was public knowledge, and since many of the entremeses in which he starred exploited this theme.

In The Triumphant Juan Rana, Peter Thompson explores the confluence of Rana’s personal life and his public identity. He asserts that Rana’s homosexuality, his arrest in 1636 for sodomy, and the reputation that followed him afterward were essential to his success. He sets as his goal ‘to establish the gayness of Juan Rana the actor in order to provide a more enlightened revision of seventeenth-century Spanish theater and theatrical reception.’

To this end Thompson offers close readings of twelve entremeses written specifically for Juan Rana by six different playwrights. In addition to contemporary gay studies on gender identity, as points of departure he asserts the essential ambiguity of the character Juan Rana – as an amphibian, the rana or ‘frog’ possesses a dual nature – and the concept of ‘amphibolic’ uncertainty in the comedia, described by Lope de Vega in his Arte nuevo de hacer comedias. The entremés, he insists, presented a saturnalian, carnivalesque inversion of the accepted social order through parody, satire, and double meanings. Thus, ‘Transvestism, inversion of sexual roles, and allusions to gay sexual practices normally restricted by officialdom were tolerated within the framework of the minicarnival entremés.’ These notions guide Thompson as he sorts out the ambiguity, the double (and multiple) meanings of words and phrases, and the innuendos and symbolic allusions that lead to his ‘gay’ readings of the texts.

Thompson organizes his study according to three different manifestations of ambiguity. His second chapter treats the use of doubles and ‘mirror images’ of Juan Rana in Calderón’s El triunfo de Juan Rana, Moreto y Cavana’s Los dos Juan Ranas and La loa de Juan Rana, and Cáncer y Velaxco’s Juan Ranilla. His third chapter examines cross-dressing as a challenge to gender roles and identity in Cáncer y Velasco’s La boda de Juan Rana and Juan Rana mujer, and Lanini y Sagredo’s El parto de Juan Rana. In his fourth chapter he presents semantic and symbolic double meanings as a vehicle for phallic allusions in Calderón’s El desafío de Juan Rana, Quiñones y Benavente’s Los muertos vivos, El mundo al revés, and El pipote en nombre de Juan Rana, and Bernardo de Quirós’s Las fiestas del aldea.

The book is well crafted and relatively free of errata, and it provides ample notes, an index, and a useful bibliography. Thompson’s close readings are insightful and persuasive, as are his projections of the audience’s likely response to the double meanings, the irony, and the salacious, lowbrow humour of the entremeses. The focus on Juan Rana as a literary and social phenomenon rather than on the playwrights or solely on the works themselves is also refreshing.

Thompson challenges some conventional notions in finding a surprising level of ‘enlightenment’ and acceptance of homosexuality by seventeenth-century Spanish playwrights and the theatre-going public. As evidence he affirms their apparent complicity in the innuendos, jokes, and double meanings that constitute his ‘gay’ readings. Here and at other points, however, the author finds twenty-first-century views on gender roles and the social order manifested in seventeenth-century society. An alternative approach might very well posit that the function of these entremeses conforms to what the Shakespeare scholar C.L. Barber has called ‘the saturnalian pattern,’ where the inversion of the social order in festivals and holidays presupposes the return to...