Myriad gardens: Landscape and gender in two Old Testament plays by Tirso de Molina (Spain)

My dissertation explores the symbolic function of the garden in seventeenth-century Spanish drama and seeks to uncover the religious, social, and gender implications of this motif. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, my analysis draws on landscape architecture and plant iconography in both literature and the visual arts. It offers close readings of La venganza de Tamar and La mujer que manda en casa and is informed by a careful study of numerous autos sacramentales and full-length comedias. I have also relied on traditional biblical exegesis, contemporary devotional literature, treatises on gardening and agriculture, and on a study of Renaissance painting and religious iconography. For the theatrical audience of the era, plant names resonated with common uses in cooking, perfumery, and religious worship, and exotic herbs evoked powerful associations with witchcraft and medicine. The Christian iconography of gardens ranges from the Eden of Genesis to the hanging gardens of Babylon and the New Jerusalem of Revelation, a heavenly city imagined as a garden-city centered around the Tree of Life.; My discussions of the plays examine the staging of Tirso's scenes, the use of stage props, and the probable postures of the actors to uncover important allusions that have heretofore been neglected in critical analyses of these masterpieces. I show how Tirso manipulates audience response by positioning the female protagonist against the backdrop of archetypal garden figures such as Venus, Eve, the Virgin Mary, the pagan goddesses of the Old Testament, and a wide variety of female figures drawn from classical myths, popular legends, and Jewish folk belief. Recognizing parallels and contradictions to biblical events, the audience reads the conflicts in the psychology and morality of the Old Testament figures on stage and compares these men and women to their foretypes and successors elsewhere in the Bible.; This study also explores issues such as the following: voyeurism, the reversal of gender roles, coded condemnations of certain sexual practices, the historical gardens of Spain as part of the imagined landscape of the plays, and the practical, mechanical, and symbolic significance of such features as garden fountains and garden hydraulics.