It was probably the Italian players of the commedia dell’arte who, in the late 1580s, introduced into the Spanish theatre the idea of using professional actresses. While it is difficult to believe that actors’ or actor-managers’wives before then were never recruited to perform, even if actresses were not hired specially, it remains the case that in 1587 an Italian company called Los Confidentes had to seek permission from the Council of Castile for its women to act. The licence, when granted, stipulated not only that actresses had to be married and were not to dress as men (a ruling promptly and thereafter consistently ignored) but that boys were no longer to play female roles. Actresses were obviously considered to be morally more acceptable than cross-dressed boys, and from then on they became an established feature of the Spanish stage. In England and France, by contrast, it was not until the second half of the seventeenth century that women were licensed to act in public, and even in Italy, where women did appear on stage in the second half of the sixteenth century, boys continued to play female roles into the 1630s.

In the context of the official silencing in the early modern period of women's voices, in the public record as well as in the domestic sphere, this wholesale emergence of female actors on to the Spanish stage at the end of the sixteenth century was a development more remarkable than it is easy now to conceive. That the new practice was permitted only because it was considered by the authorities to be the lesser of two evils does not change the fact that the very sex that was supposed to lead a confined, passive and generally silent life within the domestic space was now treading the boards of the playhouses and speaking out often at great length and with considerable eloquence. It is the prominence of these female voices in the comedia that is so striking. Women had been given both a voice and visibility, a public platform no less from which to represent the condition and experience of being female. Their behaviour on stage might belong to the world of imagination and popular entertainment, but from within that protected fictional space the words they spoke revealed what it was like to be a woman, and specifically what it was like to be a woman in a man's world.