Early modern Spanish theater is known for acting out the culture's anxieties about such issues as honor, religion, politics, and gender. Because comedies obligatorily end in marriage, thereby normalizing gender relations and restoring social order, marriage is visibly structured as a theatrical scene as well as a social and religious ritual. María Carrión's lively look at these intricate alliances begins by contextualizing the union of these two acts. Her synthesis amply if untidily draws on its secular institutionalization, from Roman law, the medieval Alphonsine laws, the Council of Trent decrees, on to Philip II's Nueva recopilación or “new laws.” Because Spanish society also followed time-honored customs, conventions, traditions, and privileges, she distinguishes between these unwritten laws and formal “Law.” According to Carrión, this amalgamated “legal body” held sway over all sexual relations, bringing together church and state to regulate women's behavior. Such standardization calls out for resistance, and it is through the theatricalization of marital law that women (and, one supposes, at times men) find the space in which to challenge its oppressive rule.

Carrión's extensive search in archives has produced a wealth of legal documents such as premarital agreements, marriage contracts, census deeds, and primogeniture, demonstrating that these “marriage scenes” resemble theatrical productions. Litigation gives form to theatricalization, as litigants stretch the Law's “arbitrary definitions” (47) in their cases. Their histrionics could well be put on stage, as they narrate scenes entailing rape, cohabitation, dowry disputes, and other accusations in order to either secure or dissolve marriages. However, Carrión is most interested in tracing marriage as a theatrical performance on the real stage. She therefore seeks the origins of the Golden Age comedia not in medieval mysteries or performances at the Duke of Alba's palace, but in the spectacles celebrating Philip II's wedding to his fourth wife and niece, Anna of Austria, during her 1570 Burgos entrance.

Carrión suggests that the play shown the new queen, whose marriage was intended to produce the desired royal heir, instead dismantled the Spanish empire's expectations. Anna watched the staging of an episode from the chivalric romance Amadís de Gaula in which Oriana rejects Emperor Patín's marriage proposal and is kidnapped by the Romans. For Carrión, Oriana's disappearance has at its center the eschewing of marriage. (As Amadís fans knew, however, Oriana never disappears entirely, but is rescued by Amadís, whom she had clandestinely married.) Carrión sees the play shifting attention from marriage as both the comedia's formal ending and the culmination of a woman's life history. It stands for early modern theater's subversive exploration of difference, which she analyzes in her chapters on Calderón's uxoricide drama El medico de su honra; the transgressive redefinitions of marital prescriptions, such as racial and social mismatches, as in Lope de Vega's El perro del hortelano; and the gendered phenomenon of cross-dressing, on stage (Don Gil de las Calzas Verdes) and in the streets (Catalina de Erauso).

Yet difficulties arise when we intend a historicist reading of these same plots while maintaining an ideological stance toward the culture. By combining religious doctrines and legal mandates, early modern Spain officially held spiritual and secular power over society. That it exercised most of that power in attempting to control women's behavior has been one of the main tenets of feminism; certainly, as all laws are perforce conservative, no one doubts their constraints. Yet the Law also defended women from unwritten laws such as the honor code and customs. By forbidding clandestine marriages, the Tridentine doctrine actually protected women from abuse in situations when it was their word against a man's. And since class and wealth often gave women the sexual emancipation impugned by moralists, as scholars unearth new data, there emerge distinctly different interpretations of women's lives. Social historians have led these recent research efforts. Similar liberties have been attributed to Galician peasant women, and studies of Basque canon law confirm that women could independently prosecute husbands at ecclesiastical courts, which granted separations and annulments (which is perhaps why Cervantes's secular judge in El juez de los divorcios ends by sublimating women's desire). Husbands turned to wives to manage their property and systematically named them their children's guardians. Numerous noblewomen rejected marriage or convent life, remaining unmarried; some became mistresses with children out of wedlock.

I mention these examples not to criticize Carrión's analysis of marriage, whose concern it was to impose society's view of moral order—as it still is today—but to observe that legal proclamations frequently failed to submit women to their rule. Early modern society manipulated legal codes to its benefit, often against their moral intentions. Carrión's laudable conclusion works best when it does not insist on the “monologic prescription legislated by the Catholic Universal Monarchy” (167) and makes the case for theater as a space that registers more of quotidian reality than previously imagined.