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Article Excerpt
Lope de Vega's play, La varona castellana (1617), is based on a historical conflict that unfolds during the twelfth-century political and military confrontation between the two most powerful Christian kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula: Castile-Leon and Aragon. After the death of her husband, Raimundo de Borgona, dona Urraca (1109-1126), Queen of Leon and Castile, was forced by her father, Alfonso VI, to marry her cousin, Alfonso I, King of Aragon. (1) The lack of children from this marriage made those around her suspicious about this marital union, and it was brought before Pope Pascual II, who annulled the marriage because of their blood relationship. This decision triggered the beginning of a war between the two kingdoms. (2)
This war serves as the backdrop to La varona castellana with its protagonist the legendary Baroness of Castile: warrior, cross-dresser, and beloved public servant, still famous in Sofia. The battle to which this play refers took place in Los Altos de Barahona. According to the legend and the ballad, "La Doncella que rue a la guerra," (3) Maria Perez, the Baroness of Castile, participated in this war and defeated the King of Aragon. Maria was married to don Vela, Prince of Navarra, and brother of three Aragones kings. After this war, she stayed visibly active and ordered a number of houses, a church, a bridge, and a palace to be built in the region of Palencia. She spent her last years in a convent in the province of Burgos, where she died at the age of seventy-three. (4)
One can argue that by the seventeenth century, the Castilian audience had to be familiar with the political context of La varona castellana, since the military conflict between the two kingdoms lasted until the fifteenth century. This hostility gave historical context to the creation of a legend and a ballad and lastly it inspired Lope to write his play creating one of the best developed female cross-dresser warriors in his comedia.
La varona castellana presents a testimony of a society in political, religious, and cultural crisis. This article explores the hostility between Castile and Aragon and Moors and Christians, but more importantly, it focuses on dona Maria Perez's cross-dressing and her gender and sexual transgression which threaten men's homosocial culture and causes anxiety not only by awakening their homoerotic desires but also by usurping male status.
As Carmen Bravo-Villasante explains in La mujer vestida de hombre en el teatro espanol, we cannot ignore the literary tradition of the warrior woman. She finds traces of this character in Latin literature with the Amazons and in Virgil's Aeneid XI. The tradition continues with chivalric novels, such as Amadis de Gaula (dated to the end of the thirteenth century), Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato (1487), Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), and in 1575 Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, whose warrior women imitate the female heroes of Orlando Furioso. The Italian Renaissance--Dovizio Bibbiena's La Calandria (1513), Gli Ingannati (anonymous 1537), and Bandello's Gl'Ingannati (1554)--was also of great influence in the Spanish Theater. In Spain, Lope de Rueda's Los Enganados (1567) and Montemayor's Los Siete Libros de la Diana (1559) demonstrate that they were very aware of the long literary tradition of the warrior woman and followed it closely in their work. Seventeenth-century Spanish writers preferred to draw from national sources and yet by doing so they could not avoid Italian influence since it was imbedded in the Spanish literary tradition of the sixteenth century (33-59).
In addition to literary influences, Spanish theater represented and made popular the sociological reality of cross-dressing taking place in the North of Europe, particularly in the streets of London. (5) Thus, in the case of the warrior woman, Spanish drama used also real-life inspiration in Europe and America, such as Joan of Arc in France, Catalina de Erauso in Spain, Maria de Estrada, who in Mexico "hizo maravillas con la espada y rodela ... yen la batalla de Otumba peleo a caballo" (Malveena Mckendrick 42), dona Isabel Barreto, who "captained a fleet that sailed from Spain to the Philippines" (Mckendrick 43), the popular Queen Christina of Sweden, and many others who, with their intellect or actions, demonstrated varonil qualities with or without male clothing. (6)
The motivations of the female cross-dresser on the Spanish stage were usually the opportunity to go to war, to travel, to gain an education and economic independence, to love and to revenge. These plays assigned to women significant roles in the dramatic structure, roles that materialized women's dreams and fantasies, that offered new possibilities for self-growth.
These real-life warriors and the extended literary tradition of this character inspired Spain's seventeenth-century drama and female actresses to be the transvestites of the time. They were idolized by the Spanish audience not only for the excitement of their bodies in tights, but also for what the...
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