The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Theater

The rise of a popular and professional theater industry in early modern Spain (roughly 1580 1700) generated a cultural polemic: while popular comedy was mass-produced for a paying public for the first time in Spain, both secular and religious authorities became concerned with the ways in which such plays might negatively influence the behavior and values of its consumers, especially women. This book contextualizes this polemic in literary, cultural, and ideological terms; it recognizes both the unique cultural circumstances of the early modern Spanish theater and the long-standing underlying artistic tensions influencing its practitioners. These cultural and literary circumstances inform the varied and often contradictory ways in which desire is represented and performed onstage. By engaging in dialogue the voices of both male and female writers who participated both in the broader courtly love tradition and in the theatrical production of early modern Spain, this book demonstrates that all representations of desire, whether of male or female authorship, are gender-inflected.