Plot Twists and Critical Turns: Queer Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Theater (review)

164 Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 Stroud, Matthew D. Plot Twists and Critical Turns: Queer Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2007. 267 pp. MATTHEW STROUD’s interpretations of early modern Spanish plays in Plot Twists and Critical Turns are somewhat polemical and quite personal. Stroud, like many of us, came of academic age when it was standard for our scholarly elders (Maravall et al.) to decree that seventeenth-century Spanish theater is state-oriented and monolithic. But, he notes, scholarship during the past twenty-five years or so has opened up to subversive subtexts, thanks to such alternative theoretical orientations as feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory. He himself is a gay man whose treatment of the plays includes this self-disclosure and who uses the tools of the profession, both venerated traditional philological and historical ones and current cultural studies, to tease out new and sometimes provocative readings. Stroud’s views are unashamedly postmodern, oriented toward twenty-first-century reader-response, and informed by queer theory, buttressed by Freud, Lacan, Butler, Foucault, and those who follow in their intellectual footsteps. “Here it is enough,” Stroud writes, “for a text to ‘read queer,’ or for a play to resonate with a modern gay [or] lesbian spectator, or for one to notice theatrical themes currently associated with alternative sexuality (such as cross-dressing and the like)” (24). His analyses deal with issues as resonant today as pride, shame, and passing. Stroud discusses in detail Lope’s La hermosa Ester, a comedia based on the Old Testament story of Esther. The discussion is inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s observations about the figure’s passing in The Epistemology of the Closet and relies on Isaac Asimov’s biblical scholarship. Stroud works on performativity and cross-dressing (in Calderón’s Las manos blancas no ofenden), the masculine fear of penetration (Fuenteovejuna), and camp (in Moreto’s El lindo don Diego and Sor Juana’s Los empeños de una casa). The author deals in the sixth chapter with the wonderful character Gila of Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la Vera. She is a cross-dressing mujer varonil who rejects men and loves women; the object of her desire is Queen Isabel, whom Gila also impresses favorably (133). Men are fascinated by and pursue the serrana, to her misfortune and theirs. Eventually embittered by mistreatment and deception, for revenge she lures men to have sex but kills them instead. Before being executed for the deaths of 2,000 men, she bites off her father’s ear because he had brought her up too Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 165 Reviews____________________________________________________________________ indulgently (138). (That Stroud calls her a “monster” [137] uncannily recalls the 2003 movie by that name that won an Oscar for Charlize Theron.) In death, Gila is said to resemble St. Sebastian who, Stroud reminds us, in his image of martyrdom became a gay icon (139). While traditional contexts are not of primary concern to Stroud, he brings them in to make important points. This is the case, for example, in chapter 8’s linguistic exploration of the various double- and triple-entendres in the Juan Rana entremeses, demonstrating persuasively that, in fact, “the ‘sin that dare not speak its name’ was apparently not so silent after all” (177). Chapter 9 applies Foucault as well as Freud’s death wish to Cervantes’s Algerian plays, El trato de Argel and Los baños de Argel. The consideration of Francisquito’s martyrdom in the latter comedia sets up the tenth chapter’s comparison of the spectacle of Fernando’s martyrdom in El príncipe constante with sadomasochistic gay pornography. Stroud points out that Christian iconography “has a long history of images and stories that are both devotional and sensual, if not overtly sexual, at the same time” (203). One might disagree with Stroud’s characterization, following John Champagne, that martyrdom, like pornography, is “nonproductive expenditure” (205), or having “no future,” to cite Lee Edelman’s phrase. Nevertheless, the discussion is fascinating. The religious martyr attains honor by a total letting go of the ego, by complete...