The Best Man in the Play: Female Agency in a Gender-Inclusive Comedia

Abstract

The critical landscape of Comedia studies has been reconfigured in recent years by the recovery and dissemination of plays written by women, and it continues to evolve and revise itself in what we may call the post-dramaturga age. Women-authored dramas are now out of the closet in our field, even though evidence is often scarce as to their public or private reception in the seventeenth century. The works of dramaturgas reflect and refract the "Golden Age" itself in new ways for us, shedding new light on this construct of literary historiography and the male playwrights who dominate its canon. Critics who first brought these alternative early modem voices to our attention were essentially feminist, insofar as they primarily focused on the feminine authorship of such plays as a distinguishing feature, promoting a critical practice of reading women-authored plays as a departure or deviation from the patriarchal norm; this tendency continues in current practice.' While still recognizing the alterity ofthe dramaturgas as a vital element of their work's ideological dynamics, it is possible to critically engage their texts vis-à-vis the male canon in a way that does not stop with establishing their difference. With a focus on the dramatic convention of the cross-dressed woman, in this study I will advocate a reconsideration ofthe critical function of these women writers, who were undeniably marginalized in seventeenth-century society and in literary history until the very end of the twentieth century, in the now gender-inclusive field of Comedia scholar- 303