SPANISH GOLDEN AGE THEATER
By the start of the 17th century, commercial theater in Spain had become a bustling business and a vital part of the economy. Major Spanish cities like Madrid began to house public theaters where theater companies or troupes would perform for a public heavily invested in witnessing live performances.
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Many types of theatrical works existed during the Spanish Golden Age such as the highly religious autos sacramentales (short allegorical plays) performed during the Corpus Christ festivals and the comedia, full-length dramas that were performed at public theaters called corrales.
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Other prominent Spanish Golden Age writers and dramatists include Lope de Vega, María de Zayas, and Rojas Zorrilla.
THEATER COMPANIES
Similar to the traveling troupes that predated them, theater companies were made up of actors. apprentices, and actor-managers or autores, who were in charge of managing the group, obtaining performance gigs, and purchasing scripts from dramatists. Despite theater companies being highly venerated by the public, they were still subject to government regulations meant to prevent audience members and theater practitioners from engaging in "outlandish" and immoral behavior.
COMEDIA
Written in a combination of Spanish and Italian verse, the Spanish comedia is typically broken down into three acts (jornadas) and separated by a farcical interlude in between called an entremés.
Pulling directly from its Italian inspiration the Commedia Dell'arte, the comedia conventionally employs stock characters such as the Dama (lady), the Gracioso (conniving servant), and the Galan (young cavalier). In addition to representing the social classes that organized the hierarchy of Spanish society, the use of stock characters helped keep actors employed since most members of a troupe specialized in one type of character.
Stock-characters of the Italian Commedia Dell'arte.
Comedias were largely written for public entertainment and greatly reflected the sentiments of Early Modern Spanish citizens. Known for its rejection of Neo-Aristotelian dramatic unity (time, place, and action), the comedia combined tragedy and comedy as it explored themes of honor, love, jealousy, and vengeance within a story that often transpired in more than one day and in multiple locations.
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Caro and her contemporaries engaged with the more specific comedia nueva, a nuanced form of the comedia that Spanish Golden Age dramatist Lope De Vega systematized in his treatise Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias. The Courage to Right a Woman's Wrongs largely reflects many of the conventions Vega set out.
CORRAL DE COMEDIAS
At the same time that commercial theater was becoming more popular, public theaters called corrales had begun to pop up in some of Spain's major cities. Corrales were built out of rectangular courtyards (taken from courtyard performances) and were surrounded by buildings on three sides. At one end of the court stood the elevated stage with a permanent backdrop where the actors would perform.
The preserved Corral de Comedias in Almagro
In front of the stage was the lower patio where audiences of the lower class stood and watched, whereas those of the nobility sat in the surrounding buildings. Although commercial theater attracted a wide range of Spanish citizens from different classes, seating was based on one's social positioning. Female audience members were seated separately from male audience members in a special section referred to as the “cazuela” (stewpot). Clergy also sat in a separate section of the theater. Spanish theater audiences were known for their active, and rowdy, spectatorship.
A cut-away drawing of the Corrale de Príncipe from the rear of the theater
A drawing of the front of the Corrale de Príncipe in Madrid.
The corrales were largely controlled by charitable organizations called brotherhoods who then used the money to fund hospitals for the poor. This partnership gave the theaters a moral justification to continue existing, which would prove beneficial to future attempts by the government to regulate and limit the freedoms of theater companies.