The Comedia of Virginity: Mary and the Politics of Seventeenth-Century Spanish Theater

Conclusion

105 Conclusion The Virgin’s staged avatars, as discussed in detail here, reveal that Hapsburg Mary was considerably more than a mere static pillar of the early modern Spanish imagination. In a genre that traditionally excluded leading and inspiring women, we find an extraordinarily sinuous and protean female figure. Behind the curtains of Hapsburg theater, one finds a potent respect, even a deep and abiding passion, for femininity in all its glorious complexity snuggled into the folds of Mary’s gown. The playwrights examined unfold an empowering vision of femininity in multiple, secularized reinterpretations of the Virgin’s womanhood. As expected, they construct her as a trusty maternal protector, the non plus ultra of the unremitting intercessor before God, the militant defender of human souls against the devil. For these playwrights, she is the quintessential female exemplar of Catholicism, and they represent her, quite expectedly, as the holiest of peacemakers, even as a kind of priestly diplomat brokering treaties that end not only vertical, human-to-God conflicts, but also horizontal , human-to-human conflicts. Dramatically emphasizing this aspect of Mary’s femininity, however, these playwrights quite unexpectedly turn Mary’s immaculate purity to unanticipated, less-than-pure worldly ends. They refigure Mary’s virginity, her ideal cleansing agency in an age of rampant patriarchal misogyny, into a promiscuous inclusiveness. Mary of 106 The Comedia of Virginity the Hapsburg stage is far more permissive of impurity, of the “dirty” blood of Jews and Moors, than anything one might have expected of an Inquisitorial Spain that burned off reviled racial, theological, and cultural impurities in the Church’s favorite drama, the auto de fé. Also unexpectedly, these dramatists fashioned the Virgin Mary into a calling-card symbol for the Hapsburg Crown. By using the full arsenal of the sensual resources of theatrical presentation to make her symbolic presence palpable at court, playwrights buttressed the political aspirations of their own sponsoring institutions, the very institutions that commissioned the Marian plays and celebrations from which they earned their daily bread. In this regard, they cleverly employed Mary to strengthen their own sponsoring institutions’ resolve to support the Hapsburg monarchs and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. If these playwrights employed Mary, in a sense, as part of their own self-aggrandizing campaign, they could only do so by depicting a strong, proactive, multivalent female. In Mary-centered dramas, they envisioned an idealized, triumphant Spanish Empire. Their Mary provided a legitimate means to praise, exalt, and comment upon the state of the empire. Their Mary’s dramatic persona even provided much-needed release of the court’s many anxieties about the instability of their Hapsburg regime. Ultimately creating the dramatic illusion of imperial harmony, an immaculate kingdom based on the assertion of a cultural resiliency that supposedly included far-flung transatlantic colonies, these playwrights were masters of staging virginity, a secularized virginity in which the imperial community was bonded together by the Virgin’s purity. Their dramatic works crucially illustrate the precarious and fluctuating boundaries merging and severing religion and politics, monarchy and academia, and religious feast and theater. Mary’s various avatars illuminate the importance of public feasts and performance in early modern Spanish religious practice and illustrate the strategic use of theater to secure academic power. This study has amply shown that festival books deserve closer attention for their unique capacity to recreate the ephemeral experience of public feasts. They are crucial for reconstructing a supple, nuance-rife context in which to explore other Marian theatrical performances. These unique texts offer new empirical evidence that points to the intense cultural divisions over the doctrine of Immaculate Conception. As seen here, their careful scrutiny reveals that Conclusion 107 opposition and dissent determined the choice of urban spaces integrated into the celebrations. Like their Marian dramatic counterparts, festival books silence disagreement over the viability of Mary’s purity. They foster an illusion of a Hapsburg Spain united under a consensus of religious beliefs, an empire creatively cloaked in Mary’s dramatic folds, feminine folds meant to reconcile competing attempts to influence and manipulate monarchs and readers alike. This page intentionally left blank ...