More Than Faded Beauties: Women Theater Managers of Early Modern Spain

Due to their itinerant life in public, women who worked as actresses and managers in Spanish theater companies in the mid-sixteenth century were relegated to the margins of society and were almost always stigmatized.¹ Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship emphasized this stigma, giving little or no attention to the quality of their work as professionals, their influence on the success of Spain’s Golden Age theater, and the true extent of their contributions to the social, cultural, and financial aspects of staging early modern plays. The resulting lack of information is even more notable concerning those women who assumed the role of theater managers: women who conducted the business side of theaters, which consisted in employing, managing, and paying actors; purchasing plays from playwrights; and signing contracts with town councils and other institutions that hired them as performers.

Indeed, when women managers are mentioned, it is to blame them for their shortcomings or, if no documentary evidence to the contrary is available, to claim that they remained but briefly in their positions out of sheer necessity because their beauty had faded.² Only recently has this outdated history begun to be challenged, with the recognition of women’s contributions to the management, organization, and coordination of theaters throughout the dominions held by the Spanish monarchy.³ Women’s presence in the theaters of the early modern Hispanic world thus invites us to reflect on the innovations that, both from an artistic and socio-economic perspective, they brought to the theater, not solely as actresses whose physical attributes are still celebrated in current historiographies, but as workers, partners, and organizers of their company’s activities, and even as managers of companies of players.

Spanish women’s participation in theater is significant, therefore, especially if we compare their roles to those of women in other emerging commercial theaters in Europe, such as in France or England, where there was purportedly little or no participation of women until 1660.⁴ By contrast, in Spain from 1540 to 1710, approximately 11 per cent of all who directed and managed commercial theatrical performances were women.⁵ Their work as entrepreneurs may be divided into three phases: from the mid-sixteenth century to 1586; from approximately 1587 to 1670; and from 1670 to the end of the seventeenth century.⁶

During the first phase, the lack of any regulation of female activity on stage gave theater companies the opportunity to employ single women and wives of male managers, who then shared responsibility with their husbands, although very few became independent managers. The increasing participation of women gave rise to the “Junta de reformación de costumbres” (Conduct Reform Board), created in 1586 to ban them from the stage.⁷ During the second period (1587–1670), actresses were obliged by law to subject their professional activity to the control of a man, either their father or husband. The second period begins with the permit dated November 18, 1587 obtained from the Council of Castile by the Italian company I Confidenti that enabled their Italian actresses to perform,⁸ which would later set a precedent for local companies. From this date, theater companies were required to obey the Nueva Recopilación (New Legal Corpus [NC]) with regard to “honest” and “fallen” women, which specified that no single woman older than fourteen could act on stage.⁹ Women belonging to acting companies were therefore obliged to be married in order to be legally recognized as “honest” and enjoy certain rights, although even so they were compelled to always be subordinate to a man.

From the last quarter of the sixteenth century, however, in what appears to be a striking paradox, women are found everywhere managing theaters in full or in part, apparently working freely and independently outside the theoretical patriarchal model.¹⁰ Despite legal requirements preventing women from signing contracts or making commitments, the same legislation granted a permit to the husband allowing the wife to assume such responsibilities, and, if requested by the wife, a judge could compel the husband to provide the permit...