Subject Stages: Marriage, Theatre, and the Law in Early Modern Spain (review)

Carrión states the premise of this study clearly and succinctly in her opening introduction: "that marriage circulated between the stages of theatre and the law, which in turn informed (and were informed by) stages of subjectivity in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spain" (3). Furthermore, she will argue that in that period, "State and Man did not wholly rule over Stage and Woman" (4) despite the "foundational fiction" of indissoluble heterosexual marriage for reproductive ends as the site for upholding the Catholic Monarchy values of a unified faith, race, and kingdom. She traces a long history of traffic between legal tribunals and theater back at least to the Greek New Comedy of the fourth century BC and the Justinian Institutes of the sixth century CE. Furthermore, she defines key usages in her study: "Law," used to refer to legal codes and theories, and "law" to refer to their concrete application; "subject stages," which invokes both the fluid nature of a nonessentialized subjectivity, and the relations of production and power operating in and on the legal and theatrical stage and the systems of signification they exchanged.

Chapter I, "Marital Law and Order in Early Modern Spain," traces how Sebastian de Covarrubias in his 1611 Tesoro de la lengua española fuses and manipulates definitions in Latin and Spanish, and Roman Justinian and ecclesiastical Law in defining marriage in patrilinear terms as a transcendental, indissoluble heterosexual union that places the primary responsibility on women for bearing and raising children until they reach an age to be disciplined by fathers. Carrión then examines the sources and sociopolitical objectives of the 1569 Nueva recopilación authorized by Philip II to organize and synthesize a welter of earlier codes, civil and ecclesiastical, into a "foundational fiction" for justice and order in his fractured geopolitical dominion. Letrados, she says, occupied a privileged role in negotiating between Law and its application as law through the institutional hierarchy that implemented the king's authority. By publishing the Tridentine rules of marriage and making Catholic faith its first tenet, the Nueva recopilación blended as one source the civil code that regulated material aspects of marriage and canon law concerned with its sacramental and moral regulation, and the interaction of Church and State confused the distinction between crime and sin. While Law and conduct manuals aimed at disciplining women, theater and marital litigation, in what Kagan called the "Cretan labyrinth" of the law and corruption in its application, allowed some space for resistance to their enclosure.

The "Marriage Scenes in the Archives" that Carrión presents in her second chapter are fascinating demonstrations of how various early modern subjects performed their resistance to the confines of marriage law and to abuses of it, using language strategically to negotiate a voice of authority. She describes the material formalization of the "collective imaginary" of a paternalistic marriage structure in key bureaucratic documents: the capitulación matrimonial (prenuptial agreement), facultad de mayorazgo (license to found an estate), and escrituras de censo (deeds). Around them, she recounts the archived drama she found in a series of court cases, ranging from high-born women to servant girls who successfully defended themselves against male abuse, and others that bore witness to male resistance to marital enclosure, or in which Carrión locates implicit queer desire.

In chapter 3, citing varying accounts of the "birth" of the Comedia, Carrión states that hers "seeks to underscore the possibilities of reproduction of political and aesthetic difference at a time and place where difference was strictly prohibited" (56). Theater permitted this, she says, in performances that allowed what José Muñoz labelled "disidentification," for subjects disempowered in the hierarchy. As an example...