Dancing in the Theaters of Seventeenth Century Spain 79
delinquents that is almost unintelligible to the modem Spanish reader. In the
dances, all characters are also very funny, something that in the long comedies is
reserved for the servants. Unlike what can be found in the dances, in the long
comedies only the servants tell jokes, make jokes, or suffer the jokes of others.
Another way the characters reflected their social status in the long plays that
disappears in the dances was through their different desires and expectations.
These desires and expectations were class-coded in the long plays, but not in the
dances. The long plays presented status divisions as natural, therefore it was
logical that members of different groups felt and wanted different things in
different ways. Nobility (except villains) experienced ideal and platonic love
and disregarded material wealth, while servants were mainly concerned with
sex, food, alcohol, and money. The higher classes had high pursuits and wanted
to nourish their minds and hearts; the lower classes wanted to indulge their
bodies. In the three dances by Moreto, the noble characters care mainly about
their corporeal needs. A good example of this can be found in the Dance o f
Lucretia and Tarquin. When Lucretia is about to die after having stabbed
herself, a woman offers to call a friar (for confession, we might assume), but
Lucretia tell her: “No, amigas, hacedme un baile / como es costumbre en las
fiestas” (“No, my friends, dance for me, / as it is habitual in the celebrations”)
(367). Thus Lucretia renounces salvation in order to have fun during the last
moments of her life; her priorities are the ones typical of a servant in a long
play, not of a noblewoman. It is precisely the impropriety of these reactions that
make the audience laugh. One needs to be familiar with the expectations of the
long plays in order to find the actions of the characters in the dance funny.
The staging of the dances was also conceived as a caricature of the
conventions of the staging of the long dramas. Even though it is very difficult
for the modem scholar to imagine how the actors acted and declaimed, we know
that the techniques used in the short pieces were more exaggerated than the ones
used in the long plays. Something similar happens with the dress codes. By no
means could one say that the costumes and decorations used in the dramas were
realistic. Anachronisms both in the staging and in the plays themselves were
very common. When, for example, an actress came on stage representing the
Queen Isabel la Catolica, her attire probably had no resemblance to anything the
Queen would have ever worn, but it reflected what was considered suitable
clothing for a queen. Spanish actors wore regular clothes (in a very broad sense
of the term), not deliberate costumes as they did in other theatrical traditions like
Commedia dell’Arte. Clothing was nevertheless conventionally coded, certain
pieces had certain meanings, and the audience was able to decipher the code.
For example, when a man was carrying a torch the public understood it was
night time, when someone was wearing a cape it meant they were on a trip, and
so on. In the dances, the actors used real costumes, that is, clothing that was
deliberately unrealistic and that portrayed them as carnival figures and jesters.
The clothing in itself was intended to be comical and ridiculous. In this manner,
the dances and other short pieces distance themselves from the main plays