The first comprehensive study of Tirso de Molina and his work in English Tirso de Molina (c.1583-c.1648) may not have written El Burlador de Sevilla, but the works of this prolific author, one of the three pillars of Golden Age Spanish theatre, are notable for their erudition, complex characters, and wit. Informed by a multidisciplinary critical perspective, this volume sets Tirso's plays and prose in their social, historical, literary, and cultural contexts. Contributors from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Spain offer a state of the art in current scholarship, considering such topics as gender, identity, spatiality, material culture, and creative performativity, among others. The first volume in English to provide a richly detailed overview of Tirso's life and work, Tirso de Molina: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Twenty-First Century grounds the reader in canonical theories while suggesting new approaches, attuned to contemporary interests, to his legacy.

During the Golden Age of Spanish theater Tirso de Molina was especially well known for his prortrayal of women and his use of female disguise and crossdressing on stage. This work examines how this tendency can be understood as a mechanism for females in the play, and in society as a whole, to skirt societal rules and gain power to act and achieve their goals. Although crossdressing has typically been understood in psycho-sexual terms, I argue that an analysis using power mechanisms is a better fit. The dificullty that results in the use of disguise and cross-dressing is a tendency for Tirso's charachters to lose control of themselves and their created identity. This highlights the dangers inherent in the use of masquing behavior. This work is designed for those working with Spanish Golden Age theater. It is also applicable as a companion to studies in English theater of the period, and can be read in comparison with feminist and psychological analysis of theater. Because in deals with cross-dressing, this book may also be of use to gender and sexuality studies.