Between 1585 and 1631 the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega wrote numerous plays dealing with the theme of conjugal honor. Drawing on recent feminist theories and touching on literary, social, and anthropological aspects Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano demonstrates that hierarchical relations of gender race and social status mutually inform one another as structuring principles of these plays.

She takes into account plays that reveal their conventional, formulaic views of the Christian feminine ideal as well as those whose variety and flexibility present women subverting their expected roles. By identifying moments of resistance and subversion in the texts the author argues against excessively monolithic interpretations of such discourses of containment.

1. For the male character, a crisis of masculinity is provoked by the pressures of forging satisfying bonds with other men and performing a gender ideal that calls simultaneously for predation on, and protection of sexual property. Yarbro-Bejarano highlights his conflicted relationship with the symbolic father, as well as the texts obsessive representation of his loss of control, caused by the very codes that purport to secure it.

Yarbro-Bejarano's provocative conclusion explores the ways in which the plays' production and consumption conform to the author's role as cultural mediator and to the audience's potential for multiple and contestatory responses. The pleasure of such negotiations and of witnessing the predicaments of both male and female characters trapped by contradictory constructs of gender and sexuality, helps explain the popularity of this subgenre.