“Inhospitable Desert”: Inhabiting the Inn in Early Modern Spanish Theater

Nowadays, a reflection on hospitality presupposes, among other things,

the possibility of a rigorous delimitation of thresholds or frontiers:

between the familial and the non-familial,

between the foreign and the non-foreign,

the citizen and the non-citizen,

but first of all between the private and the public,

private and public law…

—Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality

The city of Madrid represents an intriguing case study when considering early modern attitudes toward the effects of trade and demographic migrations and how they were scripted in the literary and theatrical imagination. How did madrileños perceive the social and cultural consequences of the urbanization of the villa after it became the reign’s capital and a fixed residence for the Court in 1561? How did Spaniards react to the new commercial identity gained by the city during the last decades of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth? Who was involved and what institutions accommodated their needs? How did old theatrical and literary formulas of representing urban spaces adapt to include visions of the rapidly transformed cityscape? Madrid was selected as capital of the Spanish territories and home of the king and Court in 1561, and quickly hosted considerable demographic flows resulting from global and internal trade and city-bound migrations.¹ From its walls to the plaza mayor, the city was a transient space that allowed many forms of commercial and interpersonal exchange. Hence, by the end of the sixteenth century the Spanish capital began to be conceived and portrayed in the literary imagination as a great dormitory, hosting thousands of travelers due to job opportunities, economic enterprises, and the resolution of pending legal matters or sinecures in the new Court.

The urban territory served as somewhat of a substitute for subjects traveling outside their domestic space, which explains why the inn caught the attention of dramaturges of this era. Inns may often be the focal objects of the urban image because they represent everything a city is: transience, fleetingness, movement, and traffic. Inns were at the core of the early modern literary imagination as well. They were vantage points from which to visualize the flow of subjects and objects and observe their impact on the commercial and bureaucratic metropolis. It comes as no surprise that the hotels of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were portrayed as thresholds that those in transit had to cross in order to gain access to the city. As such, they broach the important question of hospitality, because they were physical and symbolic mediators between the familial and the nonfamilial, the private and public, and the local and the foreign. They were codified, that is, theatrically codified, as material and metaphorical membranes that regulated systems of communication, of hospitable welcoming and inhospitable rejection to the outside from the inside.

This article explores how the representation of early modern inns reflects both the attitudes toward and the effects of the expansion of the courtly city of Madrid. We know that many urban inns, in Spanish mesones or posadas,² populated the city and that they were, along with community houses (casas de comunidad) and rooms for rent, one of the possible lodging options for long- or short-term visits. Housing censuses and other municipal documents allow us to recognize some of the historical features of the inns in Madrid: among other interesting details, we learn who owned them, where they were located, who managed them and lived in them, however fleetingly. Economic data from the municipal archives offer revealing information as to how many there were, who inhabited them, and what regulations served to control them. While theater may only hint at such laws, statistics, or censuses, it does a better job of illuminating contemporary attitudes and perceptions toward commerce and the increasing demographic flow, thus evincing social anxieties in response to the foreigners and to the idea of hospitality per se.

Utilizing picturesque characters, picaresque conflicts, and allegory, early modern dramaturgy was able to codify and symbolize anxieties that remain less visible in historical documentation. Hence, I would argue that plays bespeak social tensions...