The Interlude of the Black Woman in the «Coloquio de Gila» by Lope de Rueda, and Other Black Women in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Theater

Abstract

The Coloquio de Gila by Lope de Rueda, which came to light less than a decade ago, presents the figure of the black woman Sofía with a number of identifying characteristics. Some of these characteristics are already found in poetic texts that contain a noticeable element of dramatisation and were written towards the end of the fifteenth century, such as those by Anrique de Mota and Rodrigo de Reinosa. But it is in the sixteenth century that the ‘black woman’ character type appears in literary works by Jaime de Huete, Feliciano de Silva, Gaspar Gómez de Toledo, Gil Vicente and Diego Sánchez de Badajoz. These works constitute a sufficiently wide repertoire to examine the black woman character type and to establish the characteristics of this type on the basis of the literary texts in which she appears.