Negotiating Woman: Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés and Pedro Calderón de la Barca's La vida es sueño

Readers of Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés cannot but notice the multiple connections between this play and Pedro Calderón de la Barca's acknowledged masterpiece La vida es sueño . Although the coincidence in the names of the female protagonists of the two plays, Rosaura, would seem to indicate a close relationship between both characters, a study of these works shows a complex pattern of similarities and differences that also links Caro's Rosaura with Calderón's Segismundo. These parallels, some of which will be analyzed in this paper, bring to the fore Caro's negotiation of the sociocultural construction of gender in her time. ¹

Caro and Calderón were contemporaries and produced their works in the so-called Golden Age of Spanish arts, an era renowned especially for its painting and literature. Although nowadays Miguel de Cervantes's novel, Don Quijote de la Mancha , is widely recognized as the most significant work of the time, for seventeenth-century Spanish people this was far from being the case. Theological or political treatises or poetry were considered more prestigious than either the Italianate novellas or the numerous plays performed in the local theaters, then called corrales. Whether dramatic or comic, these plays were grouped under the generic label comedia , a term still used to refer to them today . Comedias were considered light entertainment, and writers or, in the idiom of the times, comediantes often wrote many works and tampered with them while they were being performed. Thus, no claim of originality or artistry was assigned to those who, like Caro or Calderón, followed the trend set up by Lope de Vega, who is thought to have written from 400 to 1500 comedias . ²

Like most of their colleagues, both Caro and Calderón were comediantes as well as poets. Widely known during his time, especially for his religious plays, Calderón de la Barca became one of the most important writers of seventeenth-century Spain after Lope de Vega's death. Calderón produced some 120 plays, as well as 90 religious plays, which were called autos sacramentales . ³ His fame, however, waned in the following centuries until it was "rediscovered" by German Romantics, who effectively vindicated his work. From the twentieth century onwards Spanish critics reinstated Calderón's work to the national canon, where he now occupies the highest ranking in terms of critical work dedicated to him and one of the top places in the number of plays performed on the stage.

Unlike Calderón, Caro had to wait for the twentieth century to be rescued from oblivion, even though she had been reasonably renowned as a poet in her own time. As Lola Luna demonstrated, Caro was a professional writer during her life and was labeled the "tenth muse." This was an epithet she shared with other contemporary women, among whom Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz stands out today. The silencing of Caro's work has been redressed recently, especially from the 1980s onwards. Following upon decades of feminist reappraisal, work on women has begun to flourish, influencing the literary canon and school curricula. Scholarly studies highlighting the interest of Caro's work have grown exponentially, even though only a limited number of poems as well as two extant plays written by her, El conde Partinuplés and Valor, agravio y mujer , have been found.

Starting from the biobibliographical studies published in the 1980s, Caro has been approached from a variety of angles that have highlighted the little we know about her life and the scant works still preserved. Luna's discovery in the Sevillian archives of references to payments Caro received for her poetry suggests that she may have been one of the first women able to earn money from her literary skill. Alongside Luna's studies, scholars from Spain and the United States have explored the nuances of her plays, which are now part of the curricula of many universities in the United States. ⁴ Sadly, however, Caro's work is, by and large, only known to students of early modern Hispanic women. Recognition of her work from other scholars is, therefore, highly pertinent at this time, as the corpus of theoretical work that has reinterpreted and vindicated Caro has located her with María de Zayas and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz as one of the most important early modern women writers of the Hispanic world.

Although differing in the volume of works written and preserved, both Caro and Calderón produced various types of writing, including drama and poetry. Both writers also seem to have enjoyed some degree of fame in their own time, waning soon after their deaths to reappear later. However, whereas many of Calderón's plays, especially La vida es sueño, have been performed on the stage numerous times, there has been no professional staging of Caro's plays, which is long overdue in the repertoire of the Spanish Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico. ⁵

To look at Caro's play in relation to Calderón's is not to propose that women's writing should be seen in opposition to contemporary, male-authored works, nor should such an approach suggest that Caro held a subversive or revolutionary attitude to gender. However, analyzing El conde Partinuplés alongside the play that has become the central representative of seventeenth-century drama reveals the cultural parameters embedded in both plays' construction of gender. As will be seen below, a study of Caro's drama that takes into account these intertextual links helps to illuminate the play's negotiation of the relationship between gender and politics. In this way, we can discern the continuous if subtle negotiations of women and agency taking place in El conde Partinuplés . ⁶ In using the term "negotiation," I am drawing upon Theodore B. Leinwand's observation that "unlike subversion, negotiated change is dependent on the agency of two or more parties that are not entirely content with the status quo." ⁷ Caro's play, I propose, discusses the contemporary perception of "woman," exposing a level of discontent with the existing status quo.

Christopher Weimer has argued that El conde Partinuplés reveals Caro's "desire to articulate a distinctly female voice and to challenge, rather than merely to echo, male voices of the patriarchal tradition." ⁸ By way of contrast, my analysis demonstrates that El conde Partinuplés does not defy patriarchy as such. Instead, the play represents a notion of woman that, while largely inscribed in a masculinist and patriarchal discourse, becomes a fluid concept subject to compromise and exchange. I also show how Caro questions the paradigm of passivity and "incompleteness" attributed to women by the dominant contemporary discourse. This is nowhere more apparent than in the problematical idea of motherhood associated with the protagonists. It is also visible in the exchange of features supposedly inherent in the opposite gender embodied by two of the play's main characters: Rosaura and Partinuplés.

* * *

In Calderón's drama, as is well known, humanity is presented as diametrically opposed to the animal world. The humanity of his "man" is considered to be an innate and inherited characteristic of noble men. By way of contrast, Caro's characters effectively question the parameters of this dichotomy between higher-class women and men. Moreover, this shifting of gender and social boundaries is also informed in El conde Partinuplés by the loyal friendship between the two main female characters, Rosaura and her cousin and confidante, Aldora, who significantly engineers most of the play's action and becomes instrumental to its dénouement.

One of the most interesting deviations from her culture's predominant treatment of female characters can be seen in the way Caro deals with the absentee mother of her protagonist. As often happens in seventeenth-century plays, the mother of the main character, Rosaura, is missing, and her death is explicitly mentioned. The first references to Rosimunda, mother of Caro's Rosaura, are early in the play, when we hear that she died as soon as her child was born. Clorilene, mother of Calderón's Segismundo, suffers the same fate. These two mothers are briefly alluded to as the victims of this feminine sacrifice, having succumbed on the altar of procreation. ⁹ They are surrogate victims in that their deaths offstage are necessary for the play's actions.

Caro's Rosaura laments Rosimunda's early death ("la temprana muerte de . . . Rosimunda," 1.142-44) in her first monologue. This soliloquy informs the audience of the play's background and situates the characters in relation to the forthcoming action. ¹⁰ Similarly, in La vida es sueño , Segismundo's mother, Clorilene, is mentioned early in the play when Basilio says:

En Clorilene, mi esposa,tuve un infelice hijo,en cuyo parto los cielosse agotaron de prodigios.Antes que a la luz hermosale diese el sepulcro vivode un vientre, porque el nacery el morir son parecidos.

(1.6.660-67)

With Clorilene, my wife,I had an unfortunate son,in whose birth the heavensran out of miracles,to whom, before the sun's lovely light,she gave the living sepulchre of her womb,for birth and death are alike.

The association of womb and tomb embedded in the oxymoron "sepulcro vivo" establishes Calderón's view of the relationship between motherhood (that is to say, life) and death. As Ruth El Saffar has shown, this reference establishes the coordinates within which the characters operate. El Saffar's summary is worth quoting at length:

By the end of Act 1 the story of the courtly treachery has been fully exposed: Basilio, his wife Clorilene having died in childbirth, has rejected his son, banishing him to the life of a beast in the mountains at the kingdom's border; Clotaldo, having seduced Violante, the Muscovite mother of Rosaura, has abandoned both woman and child to find power in Poland; and Astolfo, having seduced and abandoned Rosaura in Moscow, has also come to Poland, hoping to become king by marrying his cousin Estrella. All of the men, having experienced the attractions of the flesh, have left women and children out of their lives in favor of a place of rule at court. ¹¹

The absent mothers in both plays have offered their lives so as to give children to their husbands, thereby ensuring the continuity of the patriarchal name and the survival of the family line. However, as their names suggest, these women foreground different approaches to motherhood and to feminine roles. Whereas Rosimunda holds in herself an image of the beauty in civilized nature (rosa) and its relation to a feminized world (munda), Clorilene's name suggests the pastoral world of purity and utopia. ¹² Her son, then, inherits the masculine world of his father, as his own name, Segismundo, made up of sequi (to follow, or to second) and mundus (world), shows.

The choice of names indicates how Caro's play subtly undermines the gender ideology of the time, which emphasized the weakness and submissiveness of women. The most widely accepted notions followed the Aristotelian paradigm, which, according to Ian Maclean, relies on "dualities in which one element is superior and the other inferior. The male principle in nature is associated with active, formative and perfected characteristics, while the female is passive, material and deprived, desiring the male in order to become complete." ¹³ Indeed, Aristotle's idea of the incompleteness of women and their need for men, equated to the dependence of matter on form, appears often in early modern discourse, and prominently, for example, in Lope de Vega's plays. ¹⁴ Aristotelian thought, furthermore, established the correspondence of "woman with mother earth, nutrition, fruitfulness and the fluctuations of the moon" (Maclean, p. 44).

Despite the constraints imposed on women by the prevalent considerations of mental and physical inferiority, women were more active in early modern Spanish society than we tend to think. Like some other playwrights of her time, Caro was realistic in depicting active and highly visible women, even if not all these writers conveyed approval of such behavior. As Mary Elizabeth Perry has cogently argued, the tendency of much early modern literature to dwell on gender taboos reflects increasing uncertainty about gender roles:

gender beliefs that women required special protective enclosure seemed to be even more strongly invoked as men's preoccupation with wars and colonizing required women to participate more actively in the life of the city. The emphasis on gender prescriptions reveals deep social ruptures in this period, and the tension between real and ideal infused everyday immediacy into larger concerns about disorder. ¹⁵

Caro's female characters conform to a type of entrepreneurial, self-assertive, and determined woman that we see also in many dramas of the time, including those by men such as Tirso de Molina, Rojas Zorrilla, Guillén de Castro, Vélez de Guevara, and, perhaps more famously, Lope de Vega. In fact, Rosaura can well fit into Melveena McKendrick's category of mujer varonil (virile woman), especially her mujer esquiva (elusive woman) and the "amazon, leader or warrior." ¹⁶ Early in the play, the audience learns that Caro's plot will unfold around the pressure put on Rosaura by courtiers and populace alike that she should marry so that they will have a suitable ruler and assurance of monarchic continuity. The play actually begins with Rosaura's refusal to bow to this pressure, rejecting all her suitors and thus all candidates for king.

Following her rejection of the aspirants, a crowd gathers to urge her to marry. One of her courtiers, Emilio, reminds the crowd that "Rosaura es vuestra señora / natural" (1.10-11; Rosaura is your natural mistress), but this does not prevent them from putting her on notice that either she should marry or she will lose her crown. Rosaura complains about the violation of her privacy and invokes the sacred law that gives rulers immunity, using the words "desecrate" and "sacred law" to emphasize the association of kingship with divine law: "Pues, ¿cómo de mi palacio / el silencio se alborota / la inmunidad se profana, / la sacra ley se deroga?" (1.19-22; Therefore, how in my palace / silence is broken / inmunity is desecrated / the sacred law is abolished?). These divine rights, however, are disregarded, we understand, only because of her gender, for she insists that she is courageous and willing to offer her life to lead her people whenever necessary. As Teresa Soufas has proposed,

Rosaura, as woman, is physical body and cannot stand as royal body without a male counterpart. Unlike so many moral-political treatises and literary and dramatic representations concerning kings, Caro's play does not address the question of how Rosaura rules; the work's audience and readership are not asked to consider her governing abilities. She is never represented in administrative moments since what is at issue is not her execution of the royal office but her suggested natural incompleteness for rule as a female-gendered human being. ¹⁷

Rosaura questions her people's refusal to accept a solitary female ruler. In a speech reminiscent of Queen Elizabeth I, famously remembered for her successful association of virginity and authority, Rosaura asks her subjects:

Decidme qué es; porque yo,atrevida y fervorosa,con vosotros, imitandolas ilustres amazonas,saldré a defender, valientede estos reinos la corona,y aun ofreceré la vidacon resolución heroica.

(1.29-36)

Tell me why it is so; for I,bold and passionatelike the illustrious Amazons,will go forth with you, valiantly,to defend the crown of these kingdoms,and will even offer up my lifewith heroic resolve.

Emilio answers Rosaura's questions, insisting on behalf of her vassals that she is "obliged" to "take estate." ¹⁸ In so doing he strategically brushes aside her claims to Amazonian heroism and valour and focuses instead on her beauty, an obviously irrelevant quality to her position as princess and ruler:

Rosaura hermosa. . .Ya sabes la obligacióncon que de estos reinos gozas,y que por ella es precisotomar estado.

(1.58, 61-64)

Beautiful Rosaura . . .You already know the obligationthat goes with the enjoymentof these kingdoms, and for thatreason it is essentialto take estate.

The use of the word "estado," which in Spanish means both political "state" and marital "estate," allows us to see the impossible paradox Rosaura faces. Rosaura can never rule, for she cannot do so as a single woman and, if she marries, she relinquishes her right to rule to her husband. ¹⁹ In any case, she appears unable to access power directly, as Soufas has noted in Dramas of Distinction , "Rosaura is urged to marry or else she is to forfeit her inheritance to the throne, whereas Segismundo is supported as legitimate heir with no conditions attached. Caro's play reveals the difficulty, if not the impossibility, faced by a female monarch of ever occupying a legitimate place in the males' authorizing hierarchy" (p. 41). As a woman, Rosaura cannot transfer the family lineage and needs a male to continue her family line; she has therefore a "defect" that renders her unable to maintain power and ensure its continuation.

Given this state of affairs, Rosaura can do nothing but complain about the "atrevimiento" (1.95) of her people, though she has to accept the terms of their bargain. Her friend and companion, Aldora, realizing that the only way out of this dilemma involves using her cunning and the deployment of her magical skills, suggests that she ask for a deadline of a year (1.109). This condition is accepted, and the magic tricks enacted by Aldora ultimately engineer the play's dénouement. Aldora's magic becomes not only necessary, but also the only outlet allowed to women who want to exercise their abilities and acquire authority. As Frederic A. de Armas writes, Aldora acts "as analog of the playwright," contesting "those patriarchal aspects of culture that entrap the feminine . . . Aldora as playwright invites the male into a space no longer ruled by the lord of the mansion, into a space of her own." ²⁰ In this play, magic is a feminine strategy of power that threatens the tenets on which male dominance rests.

Whereas magic does play an important role in Caro's play, in Calderón's La vida es sueño , Basilio uses astrology so as to determine the future of his son, Segismundo, therefore associating the ability to read the stars with inheritance rights and fatherhood. Basilio seeks advice beyond the confines of the terrestrial in order to guide his behavior and consults the stars as though their influence was absolute. Instead of recognizing astrology's and his own limitations, Basilio claims that he knows this "science" and boasts of being recognized for his knowledge as "doctor": "Ya sabéis que yo en el mundo / por mi ciencia he merecido / el sobrenombre de doctor" (1.6.604-06; As you all know, in the world, / I, because of my scientific knowledge, have earned / the title of doctor). His excessive faith in astrology and in his own capacity to read the stars leads him to imprison his own son (1.6.734-35). The play's subsequent events belie Basilio's pseudo-scientific powers, as well as the accuracy of his interpretation regarding Segismundo's future. ²¹ Basilio's blind faith in his own knowledge becomes, in fact, Calderón's way of addressing the complexities of libre albedrío (free will) within the contemporary Catholic paradigm in which libre albedrío was contrasted with predestination, and associated with Protestantism, especially following the Counter-Reformation.

By way of contrast, Caro creates two female protagonists, Rosaura and Aldora, who utilize but interrogate their magical abilities rather than simply accepting them. ²² Caro presents the death of Rosaura's mother, Rosimunda, in the same speech in which Rosura explains that her father, like Basilio, relied on astrology's powers to interpret God's designs. Rosaura informs Aldora of the "dire events" forecast by the stars to "the emperor" (1.149), who:

quiso de mis dichas mal seguroinvestigar del tiempo lo futuro.Consultó las estrellas . . .me pronostican de opinión igualesmil sucesos fatales . . .

(1.163-65, 173-74)

Unsure of my fortuneshe wished to know the future.He consulted the stars . . .They all predicta thousand eventssimilarly dire . . .

The following words demonstrate that Rosaura does not consider this prediction to be intractable; she will look for a solution to escape the foreseen fate so as to become the agent of her own destiny:

busquemos modo o suertepara huir el influjo adverso y fuertede aquella profecía esquiva, acerba,cuyo rigor cobarde el alma observa.

(1.228-31)

Let's seek a way or chanceto flee the strong and adverseinfluence of that sly and bitter prophecywhose rigor the pusillanimous soul obeys.

In El conde Partinuplés , magic is a tool for women to confront their supposedly fixed destinies. Readers can safely infer that Aldora's magical devices are statements of female agency. ²³ In this way, Caro gives women not only agency but also the moral upper hand, just as Aldora's effectiveness vindicates women's role in magic. ²⁴

* * *

The two plays also display different approaches to the dilemma of human agency versus destiny. The depiction of humanity, as opposed to that of the animal world, is exemplified in the ambiguous use of the beasts ("fieras") in both plays. In La vida es sueño, Basilio attempts to dominate the instincts of his son, Segismundo, who is described as a "fiera." The play has introduced Segismundo from the beginning as having such an upbringing that, covered with furs and animal skins, he appears to be more a "fiera" than a human being. ²⁵ Ultimately, however, he decides that he is nothing but a "composite" of man and beast: "ya informado estoy / de quién soy, y sé que soy / un compuesto de hombre y fiera" (2.6.1545-47; I am already informed / of who I am, and I know that I am / a composite of man and beast). ²⁶ Throughout the play he shifts between both existential alternatives, only reaching his full humanity when he is shown as master of his desire. ²⁷

In El conde Partinuplés , the "fiera" imagery is also associated with love and desire as encoded in the chase of Rosaura by Partinuplés. Aldora changes Rosaura into a "fiera" and this makes Partinuplés assume the role of hunter and chase "her." As soon as Partinuplés reaches her, however, Rosaura regains her humanity, appearing to him as a woman. The stage directions after line 577 dictate that Partinuplés follows a "fiera" covered in furs and, when he is about to hit her, a tramoya (a piece of stage machinery) reveals Rosaura exactly as in a portrait that he had received previously: "Sale el conde tras una fiera vestida de pieles, / vale a dar y vuélvese una tramoya, y aparece / Rosaura, como está pintada en el retrato" (1.577-79; Enter the count following an animal covered in pelts. He is about to strike when a piece of scenery turns, and Rosaura appears as she is painted in the portrait). This is the first glimpse that Partinuplés has of Rosaura, and she appears, thanks to Aldora's magical prowess, as the transformed object of the hunt. However, as she changes into herself, we realize that Rosaura escapes the fate of the prey to become the hunter with Partinuplés the object of the hunt. This scenario creates a sense of reciprocity in the relationship of hunted and hunter, normally embedded in strict gender constraints at this time. Caro's presentation of the hunt and the portrait effectively reverses subject and object, thereby renegotiating the relationship between man and woman.

While providing a resolution of the scene, the juxtaposition between hunted animal and portrait also says much about Caro's attitude toward desire and creativity. She presents artistic creation and human passion as innate aspects of a humanity that is unmarked by gender. In El conde Partinuplés , as in Caro's second extant play, Valor, agravio y mujer , a portrait induces a viewer to fall in love with the object it represents. ²⁸ In fact, Aldora sends a portrait of Rosaura to Partinuplés so as to captivate him:

yo haré que un retrato tuyosea brevemente objetode su vista, porque amorcomience a hacer sus efectos.

(1.425-28)

I shall procure that your portraitflash before his eyes,so that love may begin todo its work.

Caro's attitude towards the portrait stands in opposition to Calderón's play, in which a portrait underlines conventional notions of gender, creation, and seduction, reinforcing the objectification of women by threatening to overshadow or replace them. In La vida es sueño , Astolfo presents alternative paradigms in his attitude towards Rosaura's portrait, which he wears as a reminder of his seduction of her. Thus, when his new paramour, Estrella, notices the portrait, she challenges him:

aunque no está satisfechomi amor de que sois ingrato,si en cuanto decís sospechoque os desmiente ese retratoque está pendiente del pecho.

(1.5.570-74)

although my love is not convincedthat you are disloyal,as soon as you speak I suspectthat this portrait hanging aroundyour neck will give you the lie.

Like Estrella, the audience already knows Rosaura's plight and also doubts the truth of Astolfo's words. These suspicions are confirmed when, later on in the play, he tries to reassure Rosaura that her "image" can easily replace the representation in the portrait that he carries on his own body: "Yo haré que el retrato salga / del pecho, para que entre / la imagen de tu hermosura" (2.12.1768-70; I shall take this portrait from / my breast, so that the image / of your beauty may enter there). A portrait, Astolfo says, can be replaced by an "image" of beauty. He does not, however, say that Rosaura herself can stand in the place of her or another woman's image. Afterwards, Segismundo stresses the correspondence between a mental image and the actual woman he had met, Rosaura, when he affirms that he does not know whether she is real or is a dream. Segismundo actually goes so far as to doubt whether a line can be drawn between them: "¿Tan semejante es la copia / al original, que hay duda / en saber si es ella propia?" (3.10.2947-49; The copy is so like / the original that doubt / exists as to which is real?).

Segismundo's identification of the mental image that he preserves of Rosaura with the real person reduces Rosaura to a silent, two-dimensional person similar, if not equal, to his own mental representation of her. By way of contrast, Caro presents but also ridicules this confusion in El conde Partinuplés and, more incisively, in Valor, agravio y mujer . In this play, Don Juan fails to recognize Leonor, who, dressed as a man, presents him with her own portrait. ²⁹ Leonor carefully informs the audience that Don Juan cannot see the "original" because he has been "diverted" to the extent of falling in love with a "portrait":

( Aparte ) ¡Ah, bárbaro, ingrato, tan ciego, tan divertidoestás, que no me conoces!¿Hay más loco desatinoque el original no miray el retrato ha conocido? (3.2232-37)

( Aside) Ah! Thankless wretch, so blind, so preoccupiedare you that you do not know me!Can there be a crazier foolishnessthan to recognise the portrait,and fail to see the original?

This rhetorical question encapsulates Caro's attitude to humanity and to mimesis, and it informs her understanding of gender. Just as a portrait must not be allowed to obscure the original person portrayed, gender roles must not be allowed to overshadow and inhibit women's abilities and desires. This comic critique in turn has applicability to El conde Partinuplés. Through its use of magic and its ridicule of those who confuse the portrait with the portrayed, the play challenges received ideas of gender roles. This interrogation of gender roles also takes place through its depiction of some of the characters, especially Partinuplés. Unlike other contemporary men, he is presented in a role that could be easily seen not only as passive and feminine but also as uninteresting when compared with those of his suitors, Lisbella and Rosaura. In fact, his feminization embodies his most important trait—he becomes throughout the play the victim of Rosaura and Aldora's plot. This "weak" characterization will culminate when Rosaura and his previous fiancée, Lisbella, command their respective armies to win him, while he remains powerless and puzzled. As Whitenack has remarked, " El conde Partinuplés works as a denunciation of male perfidy, although at the cost of presenting a weak, unappealing hero who, unlike his medieval predecessors, shows no signs of having learned anything from his errors" (p. 71). What Whitenack terms a "cost" of the play, however, might also be understood as a factor contributing to Caro's effort to revise or at least reconsider conventional gender attributes.

The roles of Lisbella and Rosaura appear paradigmatically masculine in that they are rivals competing, even in battle, for an object of their desire. Rosaura has become a victim of "mimetic rivalry" and will fight for the object of her attention, like many men before her. ³⁰ This rivalry is, however, attenuated with the display of generous friendship and loyalty between Aldora and Rosaura, a relationship that suggests the importance of women's friendship to female writers such as Caro or her friend and colleague, María de Zayas. ³¹ The solidarity of Aldora and Rosaura certainly stands out when compared with the solitude faced by both Rosaura and Segismundo in La vida es sueño , during and, one can safely assume, after the play ends. The solitude of Calderón's Segismundo and Rosaura and the friendship of Caro's Rosaura and Aldora are the source of some of the most enduring images of both plays. As with the writings of Zayas, El conde Partinuplés cannot but create in audiences and readers alike the lasting impression that women should act in solidarity in this misogynist world. El conde Partinuplés , then, not only tests received notions of hegemony and kingship but also vindicates magic and female powers, including the power to question the Baroque engenderment of notions such as identity, subjectivity, friendship, and agency.

Caro's El conde Partinuplés demonstrates that the concept of woman prevalent in the early modern comedia is, by no means, the monolithic patriarchal design we may be given in other plays of the time. As Sharon D. Voros remarks, "gender relationships," such as those played out in El conde Partinuplés , "often entail intense negotiations, sometimes bordering on a transgressive or even subversive form of discourse." ³² The notion of woman, I have suggested, was the subject of continuous negotiation on and off the stage, and some of those shifts can be appreciated by the main female characters of Caro's play, Rosaura and Aldora. A feminine Amazon, Caro's Rosaura is able to manipulate the limitations imposed on her with the help of her cousin Aldora. Ultimately, however, Caro retreats from subversion to acknowledge the imperative that women marry and occupy their designated social space.

Rosaura, therefore, finds in marriage the locale where her role is to be played. She is constrained by a narrative that imposes on damas (ladies) and galanes (gentlemen) the happy acceptance of a destiny alongside a partner of their choice. Marriage, in these cases, provides a "negotiated space" for women, as David Román has noted in relation to another Calderonian play, No hay burlas con el amor (Love Is No Laughing Matter): "Surprisingly, however, in this seemingly conventional comedy [ No hay burlas con el amor ], marriage is offered as a place where women find a negotiated space within the usual constrictions of patriarchy that characterizes early Spanish culture." ³³

In any case, Caro's Rosaura is, at the play's end, better off than Calderón's Segismundo, whose acceptance of his role implies the subjugation of his feelings and the recognition that marriage is merely one of his princely duties. The world of Caro's comedia is regulated by conventions that include masculine and feminine sacrifices as well as rewards. For men, it implies relinquishing their role as masters to become equal partners in matters related to the choice of partner. Likewise, for women, it entails the demonstration that they could be active beings, even if only in the domestic arena. For a contemporary female audience, there are also some rewards, including an appreciation of strong women and their assertion as agents of their own destiny, even if it is often only limited to marital choice. This is important, no doubt, in a world where marriages were largely determined by sociopolitical interests and not romantic ones. Above all, in El conde Partinuplés the attempt to fix the meaning of "woman" can be frustrated by real and fictional women who, like Caro or Rosaura, write and are written upon both as subjects and objects of "the chase."