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

Peter E. Thompson's historically, theoretically, and textually grounded study of Juan Rana is a much-needed contribution to a growing body of scholarship on gender and sexuality in Spanish Golden Age short theatre. Juan Rana, the alias of Cosmo Pérez, a popular actor between the years 1617 and 1672, was crowned by Pedro Calderón de la Barca as el máximo gracioso and also became the subject of over fifty short plays during the seventeenth century. As Thompson argues in The Triumphant Juan Rana: A Gay Actor of the Spanish Golden Age, Juan Rana's actions on and off stage reflect the complexities of Spanish theatre and its reception in the seventeenth century. Thompson's fresh approach is a critical milestone in the exploration of homosexuality, theatre, and theatrical reception in the seventeenth century.

The entremés, or theatrical interlude as Thompson aptly calls it, was performed between the acts of a play and engaged in parodic humor to simultaneously entertain the audience and critique official behavior. Much like the entremés, whose themes center around carnivalesque behavior, the critic argues that Juan Rana served to attract audiences to the play itself. Thompson devotes the first chapter to carefully studying the idiomatic, legendary, and mythological allusions apparent in the name Juan Rana. Thompson points to the marginality or in-betweenness embodied in the name that is central to defining Juan Rana. He focuses especially on the "irregular sexuality" of the actor who was punished for contra naturum acts and reveled in his physical, sexual, and moral ambiguity on and off the stage (10). In discussing the multiple masks the actor wears, he moves beyond Evangelina Rodríguez's La técnica del actor español en el Barroco: Hipótesis y documentos, pointing directly to Juan Rana's nefarious arrest as a central—and too often ignored— component of the masquerade. He sheds further light on the pecado nefando through Diana Fuss's theory on the limits of the "inside/outside" dichotomy. Thompson points to the polyvalence of the name Juan Rana as evidence of not only self-conscious ambiguity on and off stage, but also of the ways the entremesistas used this ambiguity to challenge the societal and theatrical limits of seventeenth-century Spain.

The second and third chapters deal with the implications of Juan Rana's ambiguity on the Spanish stage. In chapter 2, Thompson illuminates the contradiction between the uniqueness of Juan Rana and his prevalence on the Spanish stage through the rhetorical trope of the double. Building upon the theories of Albert Guerard and Carl Francis Keppler, the author argues that the doubling of Juan Rana opens a space in which forbidden moral, political, and sexual matters can be discussed more openly. In clearly distinguishing between the double (the act of doubling) and the Doppelgänger (the onstage presence of the double), Thompson points to the "unavoidable ambiguity" of Juan Rana (23). Perhaps one of the most significant revelations comes in his analysis of El triunfo de Juan Rana (1670), an entremés first performed with Calderón's Fieras afemina amor (1670) and later linked through self-referential parody to his La vida es sueño (1635). The multiple realities revealed in this entremés, the critic argues, lead to a new rendering of Calderón de la Barca's most celebrated motif, "life is a dream," placing greater emphasis on the dream-like ambiguity that allows the stage to question fixed orders. In the following chapter, Thompson analyzes how Juan Rana's cross-dressing challenges the legitimacy of gender categories by creating a space in which to ambiguously and unabashedly question traditional male and female roles. He convincingly demonstrates how Juan Rana's parodic ambiguity pushes the limits of the cross-dressing male to show how the restrictive societal conventions of class, status, sex, and gender can be rewritten.

In the final two chapters, Thompson turns his attention to...