Rasbridge, Victoria Jane; (2025) Intersecting Identities: Representing Queenship on the Early Modern Spanish Stage. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Identity has long been acknowledged as the dynamic interaction between experience, allegiance, and community, between difference and belonging – it resides at the intersection between multiple ideological demands and social categorisations. Building on this understanding of the multiplicity of identity, this thesis examines the representation of queenship in the Golden Age comedia. Focusing specifically on fictionalized depictions of queenship in the period 1598–1665 this study provides a series of detailed analyses of selected plays by three major playwrights – Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and Pedro Calderón de la Barca. These case studies inflect the changing representation of queenship on stage across the seventeenth century, tracing the identity of the queen as bride-to-be, queen consort, and finally as royal mother through an intersectional framework of analysis. It analyses how these representations interact with changing discourses around gender and political power, many of which can be linked to contemporary queens. This historicist approach is supplemented by literary analysis of theatre as a space of play that allowed dramatists to explore how popular ideas of gender interacted with the construction of power and social distinction. The aim of this thesis is two-fold: firstly, to unpack and expound the multiple socio-political and ideological demands at work in the representations of powerful royal women as given in public theatre; and, secondly, to develop a new intersectional framework through which queenship can be read as an identity under increasing pressure in the context of the crisis and tension within Spanish imperial ideology in the seventeenth century.

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