The Talking Word, the Silent Voice: Voice and Gender in Early Modern Spanish Theater

Abstract

<bold>Abstract</bold>

<italic>The Talking Word, The Silent Voice</italic> begins with the peculiar simultaneity of the introduction of the printing press to the Iberian Peninsula and the emergence of the Spanish <italic>comedia</italic> as a popular form in the seventeenth century; my project thus reads symptomatically the intervention of theater as a technological displacement of orality, understood as the previously dominant vector for literary circulation. Subsequent centuries witness a transition from pre-mechanical technologies of reproduction to the word printed inside of the increasingly popular book. In the new space of theater--understood as both the physical site required for the organization of a public performance and as the conceptual redoubt that must be annexed from reality in order for theater to exist--the human voice is no longer a spontaneous participant in the oral transmission of the literary, written or not, and becomes a highly prescribed element in a delimited space. In other words, the voice becomes scripted and rehearsed. And yet, the performative nature of the drama, and the repetition it entail, results in an excess that is not fully confined by the script. In this way, in the realm of drama, the human voice lives on simultaneously as that which is outside the written word (the voice as pure sound) and as that which is contained within it (the voice as meaning). I therefore pay close attention to the ways in which the return of the repressed or muffled voice makes possible new dramatic resources and brings innovation to the early modern stage. Be it at the initial juncture of its development with its lesser-known forefathers such as Diego Sanchez de Badajoz or during its later manifestations in the Madrilenian <italic>corrales</italic> and court performances, which I engage through the works of Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca.