THEBANDOLERAOF GOLDEN-AGE DRAMA: A SYMBOL OF FEMINIST REVOLT

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Abstract
One of the most interesting manifestations of the mujer varonil so beloved of Golden-Age dramatists and audiences alike is the female bandit, the woman who is driven by internal and external pressures into open rebellion against authority. Lope de Vega's La serrana de la Vera contains the first authentic woman bandit of the Golden-Age theatre. Virués's La infelice Marcela had sketched such a character a few years earlier. But his Felina is a mere shadow; her motives are unexplained, and her own bragging is all that tells us about her infamous career. We wonder whether she is drawn after some other female bandit in a play—or series of plays— now lost. Her brief and shallow part, her behaviour and the way she talks are conventional. We can safely forget about her and study instead Lope's serrana—a superb creation adapted from the traditional serrana to explore the theme of the aggrieved woman, who was to lead on to the characteristic seventeenth-century type of female banditry.

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