Lorca, Alberti, Valle-Inclán: Pillars of Spanish Theater & Poetry
Federico García Lorca: Renowned Spanish Playwright
Federico García Lorca is one of Spain’s most famous playwrights. His theatrical production began with The Butterfly’s Evil Spell. Lorca believed theater should serve to raise social awareness and also believed in the poet’s power to transform reality through words. His poetic language, influenced by Valle-Inclán, is central to his work. His plays blend poetry and symbolism, integrating text, set design, music, and dance to create a total Lorcan spectacle. His work is classified as follows:
Classification of Lorca’s Works
Farces
Including Tragicomedy of Don Cristóbal and Señorita Rosita and The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal (both puppet plays), and works for actors: The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife, and The Love of Don Perlimplín and Belisa in the Garden. These fuse the lyrical and the grotesque.
Impossible Comedies
So called by Lorca himself. Two symbolic, surreal works that are difficult to interpret and represent: The Public and If Five Years Pass (which is incomplete).
Social Tragedies
These are his most represented works. Blood Wedding, written based on a real event, reflects the tragedy of a bride kidnapped on her wedding day by a former lover and explores a world of symbols: the horse, the moon, the knife. The House of Bernarda Alba is subtitled ‘Drama of Women in the Villages of Spain’. The action takes place entirely inside Bernarda’s house, where the conflict unfolds among the daughters, who have just lost their father and are subjected to an 8-year mourning period by Bernarda. In this closed space, the only escapes are death or madness.
Rafael Alberti: Poetry and Theater
Alberti’s Theater
Rafael Alberti’s theatrical works reflect the concerns found in his poetry. During the pre-Civil War, avant-garde period, he wrote The Uninhabited Man. In exile, he wrote El Adefesio, close to the esperpento style, and Night of War in the Prado Museum.
Alberti’s Poetry
His poetry is characterized by masterful handling of rhythm and musicality, rooted in Spanish tradition.
Poetic Stages
- Works using traditional and popular forms: Marinero en tierra (Sailor on Land), La Amante (The Lover), and El alba del alhelí (The Dawn of the Wallflower).
- A second phase beginning with Cal y canto (Lime and Stone) and culminating in Sobre los ángeles (Concerning the Angels), a surrealist book prompted by a personal, ideological, and religious crisis.
- A third period where his verses become more humanized during the Republic, Civil War, and exile, serving political ideas or expressing solidarity: Sermones y moradas (Sermons and Dwellings), Entre el clavel y la espada (Between the Carnation and the Sword), and Coplas de Juan Panadero (Ballads of Juan Panadero).
Ramón del Valle-Inclán: Theatrical Innovator
Ramón del Valle-Inclán was an innovative genius of Spanish theater. Valle-Inclán rejected the bourgeois realism of previous theater, proposing a total renovation of the Spanish stage.
Valle-Inclán’s Theatrical Cycles
Mythical Cycle
Set in a timeless, archaic Galicia, featuring amoral, sacrilegious, and ferocious characters within a world of passion, superstition, the supernatural, and mysterious death. Divinas palabras (Divine Words) is a rural tragicomedy; the main character is a hydrocephalic dwarf whom his mother displays at fairs in exchange for money.
Farce Cycle
In this stage, Valle contrasts the sentimental and the grotesque to deal with reality and demystify traditional society, using increasingly ludicrous language.
Esperpento Cycle
The esperpento presents monstrosity born from specific historical situations, following the Spanish tradition of Quevedo and Goya. It systematically distorts reality to create a grotesque vision: a new aesthetic and way of seeing the world from a critical stance, protesting against bourgeois society by exposing its corruption and inauthenticity, while renewing language and literary forms. It mixes the refined with vulgar expressions and mundane jargon.
The cycle begins with Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights): The action takes place in Madrid, and its protagonist, Max Estrella, accompanied by Don Latino, wanders through the city before dying at home. Characters appear like puppets tossed about by life. The work critiques the situation in Spain, denouncing falsehood and hypocrisy.