Spanish Golden Age Theater: Plays and Playwrights
Representation in the Spanish Golden Age Theater
The theater was a spectacle of great social significance, lasting between two and three hours and encompassing all social groups. It used to observe a fixed order beginning with the Loa, followed by a small interlude, then the first act of the play, an appetizer course, then the second act, after a dance or a jácara, then the third act, and finally a masquerade.
Elements of Theatrical Representation
Visual and auditory elements were used to enhance the performance.
- Visuals:
- Costume
- Scenery
- Symbolic elements
- Lighting (torches and candles were used)
- Auditory:
- Attempts to simulate environments (parties, bulls, horses running, etc.).
- Background music was used.
Advanced Scenic Resources
The most important theaters could have other, more complex scenic resources:
- Stage machinery: Machines that moved across the stage simulating different things (a mountain, a castle).
- Appearances: Painted canvas simulating a sea storm, a forest, or a battle.
- Manholes: Traps or vents to enter or exit the stage from below.
- Slapsticks: Gadgets to get rid of objects and characters.
The Three Major National Comedy Playwrights
Lope de Vega
Lope de Vega wrote over 300 plays. Of humble origins, he was the author most beloved by the people, who flocked to his performances. He wrote all kinds of plays:
- Rural comedies
- Tragedies
- Swashbuckling comedies, dramas, and comedies of honor.
His representative works were:
- Fuente Ovejuna: A rural drama whose hero is collective, in which the action revolves around a tyrannicide (murder of a tyrant) against the injustice of the Commander Fernán Gómez. The people rebel against the tyrant and unite with the slogan “Fuente Ovejuna, all together!” The Catholic Monarchs appear at the end of the work to impose justice.
- El Caballero de Olmedo: A tragedy of love, death, and doom.
- Peribáñez: A drama of honor.
- La Dama Boba: A comedy of the court and swashbuckling with an urban environment.
Tirso de Molina
Tirso de Molina was a follower of Lope de Vega and wrote along the lines Lope proposed for making comedies. He added a deepening of the psychological and intellectual aspects of his characters.
He gave great importance to female characters, who, in addition to being smart, were courageous and bold, a new feature in comedy.
He was the master of the “sitcom” with works such as:
- Don Gil of the Green Tights
And the “palace comedy” such as:
- The Shame in the Palace
He used his plays to criticize the corruption of the court and bad government policy. But his best-known and most influential work in Spanish literature was:
- The Trickster of Seville: Where the character of Don Juan Tenorio first appears, the universal myth of the seducer of women, amoral, a hardened gambler, moved only by his sexual desires, using deception and even murder. Unlike Zorrilla’s Don Juan, Tirso’s character does not repent and sinks into hell. The stone guest appears for the first time. With this work, Tirso criticizes a kind of nobility of moral laxity that represents the corruption of this class.
Calderón de la Barca
Calderón de la Barca had two different stages in his work, marked by the decision to become a priest.
- In the first stage, he wrote plays to be represented at comedy theaters.
- In the second, he only wrote works for the palace and autos sacramentales (religious literature).
Calderón’s dramas, called “Calderonian dramas,” have a high philosophical and intellectual tone, providing a pessimistic and disillusioned view of life, and are of great linguistic complexity.
His main works were:
- The Physician of His Honor: A drama of honor with a tragic ending, in which a jealous husband kills his innocent wife to wash his honor, using a doctor who bleeds her to death.
- The Mayor of Zalamea: Tells the true story of Pedro Crespo, Mayor of Zalamea, who decides to avenge the abduction and rape of his daughter by an army captain who had stayed at his home. This drama unfolds the theme of injustice and the impunity of the nobles.
- Life is a Dream: His most important work, a philosophical comedy that tells the story of Prince Sigismund, imprisoned by his father in a tower to avoid enforcing a false prophecy that came with his birth. The themes of this work are destiny, the dream of life, power, justice, and free will.