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

Scholarly attention to the staging and performance of early modern Spanish theater has illuminated comedia scholarship in recent decades, and the study of major theatrical works has profited substantially from analysis of the brief comic interludes, or entremeses, that entertained audiences between the acts, as Eugenio Asensio and Hannah E. Bergman demonstrated nearly half a century ago. It has taken considerably longer for comedia performance studies to dismantle the view of Spanish Baroque theater as a hegemonic art of propaganda. A superb example of the potential of this growing field is Peter Thompson's study of the career of the comic actor Juan Rana (Cosme Pérez), known not only for his cross-dressing as a woman onstage, but also for his 1636 arrest on charges of homosexual acts and his subsequent release, apparently because of his popularity with the royal household. Much of the material in Thompson's study has been available to scholars since the early twentieth century, but the social and legal history of early modern sexuality, together with comedia performance studies and queer theory, has only recently made it possible to view the gracioso Juan Rana's biography, and the references to homosexuality in the entremeses written for him, as pertinent to early modern cultural history and to comedia studies in particular, rather than merely anecdotal.

In his analysis of a dozen of the fifty entremeses written for this spectacularly celebrated actor — including El parto de Juan Rana (Juan Rana Gives Birth), published as an appendix in Sherry Velasco's study Male Delivery (2006) — Thompson draws upon the resources of what Adrienne Martín has termed the "philological erotic approach," as well as performance studies and queer theory. Since impersonation, theater's fundamental trope, involves the illusory transformation of the actor's everyday identity through costume, language, and gesture, early modern dramatic performance implicitly parodied the boundaries of social caste and, not surprisingly, gender roles. After women were allowed onstage beginning in the mid-1580s, female-to-male cross-dressing became a reliable crowd-pleaser. Thirty years of scholarship have documented and analyzed the enthusiastic reception and cultural significance of female characters dressing as men in dozens of full-length plays, while the reverse phenomenon received very little attention until the publication of Sidney Donnell's Feminizing the Enemy (2004), the study of a handful of plays in which male characters disguised themselves as women.

Thompson addresses two contradictory aspects of Juan Rana's career. First, an impressive number of entremeses were written for him up to the last year of his life, by such distinguished playwrights as Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Agustín Moreto, Luis Quiñones de Benavente, Luis de Belmonte Bermúdez, Jerónimo de Cáncer y Velasco, and Bernardo de Quirós. Juan Rana's amphibian surname, meaning frog, alludes to the gender ambiguities that were staged, if briefly, in his comic performance. His phenomenal success was only enhanced by his 1636 arrest, which inspired an entremés by Quiñones de Benavente, produced between 1636 and 1640. The entremés in Thompson's study exemplify three comic tropes: comic confrontations with doubles, portraits, and mirror images; cross-dressing as bride, wife, and pregnant woman in labor; and phallic humor stemming from the ambivalent significance of the sword and dueling in a court culture rife with anxieties of masculinity. Despite the popularity of Juan Rana's homosexual persona, Thompson is careful to frame the audience's enjoyment of homosexual double entendres within the spatial and temporal limits of the upside-down world of comic performance, and weigh it against the audience's "laughter at the expense of the 'other'" (153).

Any study of early modern sexuality confronts the impossibility of choosing terminology among unstable usages. Thompson's choice of the term gay — as opposed to the equally controversial queer — in his title, and his use of Gail Bradbury...