Women’s Acts. Plays by Women Dramatists of Spain’s Golden Age ed. by Teresa Scott Soufas, and: Dramas of Distinction. A Study of Plays by Golden Age Women by Teresa Scott Soufas (review)

REVIEWS Teresa Scott Soufas, ed. Women's Acts. Plays by Women Qramatists of Spain's Go~den Age. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky , 1996. 326 pp. ISBN: 0-8131-1977-4 (HB); ISBN: 0-8131-0889-6 (PB). Teresa Scott Soufas. Dramas ofDistinction. A Study ofPlays by Golden. Age Women. LexingtoJJ., Kentucky: The University Press ofKentucky, 1997. 216 pp. ISBN: 0-8131-2010-1. With the first of these two volumes, an anthology of eight plays written by fivewomen writers, Teresa Soufas affords us a sutp!is~g new perspective on the literary life of Golden Age Spain. The surprise is not that sorne of the plays are a real pleasure to read-many readers will already have leamed that from individual editions of sorne of their works-but rather that the cumulative effect of reading the eight plays together is a different and richer experience thqn that of making their acquaintance separately . The anthology itself is, in f~ct, the most powerful arm for securing the kind of reading that Soufas advocates in her critical study, Dramas of Distinction. Therein, she appeals for a consideration of women's works that is not always anchored comparatively to comedias by the canonical male playwrights. Yet however much we might wish to consider every work we encounter solely on its own merits, we inevitably read with sorne standard in mind, whether it be a implicit genertc model, other works by the same or other writers, or º\U image of sorne extra-textual referent, either the society in which the author lived or another possible world evoked by his or her fiction. As we read through these plays, however, the anthology itself becomes their most salient context, an increasingly nuanced image of how talented women of Golden Age Spain might reshape the most popular cultural artifact of their era, the comedia, to make it communicate their personal views of gender and power relationships. In a short introductory essay, Soufas sets out a number of significant issues, later explored more extensively in Dramas ofDistinction. She notes that these women, penning plays for public theaters, tran~cended at least in potentiality the prescribed restriction of women to private domestic spaces. Other limits were harder to cross, however. Although the plays all center on a female character or characters, they study disorderly men rather than transgressive women, because these women were harder than men to reincorporate into the social fabric; hence, we rarely find an anagnorisis for feminine figures. She con5iders the "social and emotional double bind" in which women were caught, criticized if they were unresponsive to male desires and in danger of dishonor and social exile if they yielded to them. Recognizing the women dramatists' familiarity with a broad range of CALÍOPE Vol. III No. 2 (1997): pages 97-120 98 ro REVIEws 03 comedia conventions, Soufas focuses particular attention on the nature of their use of the gender-destabilizing use of cross-dressing. The five playwrights that Soufas includes are Angela de Azevedo, Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, Leonor de la Cueva y Silva, Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán and María de Zayas y Sotomayor. For each writer, she gives us a brief biography, a short preliminary commentary on their work or works and a bibliography including any earlier editions and significant critica! commentaries. The biographies are necessarily brief because so little information about these women's lives is available; not even documented birth or death dates have been found for most of the women. Still they reflect a diversity of feminine experience. Leonor de la Cueva was part of the minor nobilify in Medina del Campo while Azevedo, bom in Portugal, served as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabel in Philip IV's court, married "un caballero de ilustre alcurnia" and retired to a convent with her daughter onher husband's death. Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, bomin Seville, twice married, twice widowed and, left impoverished in her later years, was forced to accept the charity of an Augustinian order with which her brother-in-law was affiliated. Ana Caro was the only woman who was accorded at least a'limited semi-professional recognition...