Victoria Rasbridge (UCL) - 2019-20 Students
victoria.rasbridge.19@ucl.ac.uk

Intersecting Identities: Representations of Queenship on the Early Modern Spanish Stage

My research explores the representation of queenship on the early modern Spanish stage, focusing specifically on the depiction of fictional queens in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century. Identity has long been acknowledged as the interaction between experience, allegiance, and community, constructed at the intersection of multiple ideological demands and social categorisations. Drawing on this understanding of the intrinsic multiplicity of identity, my research establishes a new intersectional framework through which the queen’s character and the crisis that her identity was undergoing as a result of tensions within Spanish imperial ideology can be understood. In so doing, it challenges existing critical typologies of female characters, and demonstrates how female roles cannot be neatly contained by static and one-dimensional categories of identity. By applying an intersectional lens to the study of the comedia generally, and to the figure of the queen specifically, my thesis identifies how playwrights variably utilise, manipulate, and invert interlocking systems of power in order to shape the creation of their characters.

Primary supervisor: Dr Alexander Samson (UCL)
Secondary supervisor: Prof. Catherine Boyle (KCL)