Plot Twists and Critical Turns

Plot Twists and Critical Turns provides a reconsideration of a variety of works of seventeenth-century Spanish theater, both standards and those that are less well-known, from perspectives grounded in recent work in queer studies. Basing his readings on the ideas of such gender theorists as Judith Butlre, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Leo Bersani, Stroud advances the recent trend against closure in comedia criticism by showing that early modern Spanish theater, even given the limitations placed upon it by censorship, public tastes, and its own conventional precepts, is shot through with gaps and spaces that allow one to perceive at least the outlines of an absent queer object, if not overt examples of manifest challenges to gender conformity in Lope's La Hermosa Ester, Vèlez de Guevara's La serrana de la Vera, Moreto's El lindo don Diego, Cervantes's two Algerian plays, and Calderón's Las manos blancas no ofenden and El principe constante.

Matthew D. Stroud is professor of Spanish at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.