Gender relations in Spanish theatre during the Silver Age: a quantitative comparison of works in the Spanish Drama Corpus

Abstract

One of the many changes witnessed by Spanish society at the beginning of the 20th century was the early reshaping of the role of women, including in the realm of theatre. During the first three decades of the new century, Spanish theatre was thriving, favouring the emergence of new gender roles: there were new female playwrights, professional actresses, stage designers, costume designers, theatre company directors, etc. Against this background, i.e. the awakening of female consciousness, it is worth exploring whether the growing position of women in public life goes hand in hand with a greater presence of female characters in the plays composed at that time. With a view to assessing the position of women in playwriting in the Silver Age of Spanish literature, twenty-five stage plays by nine playwrights written between 1878 and 1936 have been analysed, taken from the Spanish Drama Corpus, which forms part of the DraCor project. The distribution of male and female protagonists on stage and the influence of female presence in dramatic conflict have been traced based on quantitative textual factors. The study thus tests the potential of quantitative methods and their scope for the structural analysis of plays and studies on dramatic corpora from a gender perspective.