Neoclassical and Romantic Theater: From Moratín to Lorca
The Neoclassical Theater
Primary Function: To find forms of human behavior that are fairly straightforward. It reflects the current figure: having to accept everything that has happened for some reason, everything I do has to pass by reason, but we need to make things happen. Do not believe in fate, or letters, or chance, it must act reasonably.
Key Features of Neoclassical Theater
- Plausible: It is close to reality; it must reflect reality in environments close to the author or viewer.
- Separation of Genres: What is sad is very sad.
- Balanced Style: Language and characters are very expressive.
- Bourgeois Comedy: A social critique of this kind.
Five Plays by Leandro Fernández de Moratín
Three of these plays address the same issue, defending the freedom of women to choose their husbands. In one of the plays, the characters are Don Diego and Doña Irene (the parents), Don Carlos (Don Diego’s nephew), and Doña Francisca (Doña Irene’s daughter).
Plot: The mother wants her daughter to marry Don Diego because of his inheritance, securing her daughter’s future and her own. The nephew and daughter fall in love when she leaves the convent.
Romantic Theater
First Half of the 19th Century
1. The importance of feeling in Romanticism. Theater shows the intention of causing sensations in the viewer.
2. Romantic individualism. In theater, it is manifested by the rejection of society: there are many rebellious, mysterious characters who go against social conventions.
3. The desire for freedom in Romanticism. In theater, it is manifested by the rejection of any rule, particularly that of the three units. The use of verse with different metric structures, even mixing prose if the author wishes.
4. The final taste of Romanticism is shown in historical and legendary themes.
5. Preferred environments are at night, in cemeteries, medieval ruins, during storms… all a bit out of the ordinary.
José Zorrilla (1817-1893)
Practiced three genres: poetry, fiction, and drama, in which he excelled the most. His major work, very popular: Don Juan Tenorio.
The Theater of García Lorca
1. Federico García Lorca, a poet of Generation ’27, was noted for his theater with innovative features. In addition to being an author, he was a founder and contributor to the group La Barraca, which performed classic and modern theater for the people of Spain in the 1930s.
2. In his theater, he showed two facets of his character: the most cheerful and friendly, with his farce (The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife), and the most serious and sad, in his tragedies.
3. His Tragedies:
Topic: Frustration: The desire and realization of individual desire collide with external forces, usually society, that impede their success and lead to the unhappy ending of the tragedy itself. Female characters dominate (the society of the time was much stricter with women).
Tragedies
Blood Wedding: Focuses on the clash between love and social obligations, which ends with the death of the protagonists.
Yerma: Focuses on female frustration caused by the impossibility of having children.
The House of Bernarda Alba: Shows the collision between the authoritarianism of the mother and the desire for freedom of her five daughters.
The Theater of the Second Half of the 20th Century
Antonio Buero Vallejo
1. Antonio Buero Vallejo is one of the leading playwrights of the postwar period. His History of a Staircase, 1949, represented a renewal at the time.
2. He always sought to reach a wide audience.
3. His theme revolves around the desire for human fulfillment, such as the pursuit of happiness and freedom. But these desires clash with the concrete world in which they live.
4. Double thematic level:
Existential: Meditation on the meaning of life and the human condition. Social: Denunciation of injustice, in an ethical and political sense.
History of a Staircase tells the life of a community of lower-middle-class people. All of it happens in the stairwell of the building. It has three acts: ten years pass between the first and second, and twenty between the second and third. The book shows, in a rather pessimistic tone, the inability to escape a dull life and the frustration of human desires. It uses colloquial language.