Spanish Theater Before 1936: A Golden Age of Dramatic Literature

Spanish Theater Before 1936

A Unique Literary Genre

The theater is a unique literary genre where the connection between sender (author) and receiver (audience) isn’t immediate. From the moment a play is written until it’s performed, significant intermediation occurs. Theater is not only an art form but also a business with diverse interests influencing its development. In Spain, the bourgeois public often rejected plays addressing significant social or ideological issues, as well as those with experimental forms.

Late Nineteenth Century: A Shift in Focus

In the late nineteenth century, several attempts were made to break away from rhetorical and melodramatic theater. Playwrights sought to depict realistic environments, explore more contentious themes, and use less rhetorical language. Jacinto Benavente shaped this new theater, catering to audience demands with a successful formula that included a slight dose of social criticism, a formula he repeated frequently. His most valued work today is Vested Interests. In 1922, he received the Nobel Prize.

Comedy of Manners

Another successful theatrical trend was the comedy of manners, which emphasized the picturesque qualities of specific geographical locations. These plays featured archetypal characters, colloquial language, and folk elements with a touch of humor and a conservative ideology. Carlos Arniches and the Álvarez Quintero brothers are the most representative writers of this trend. The “Astrakhan” comic genre, created by Pedro Muñoz Seca, also falls within this category.

Poetic Drama

corresponds to a type of verse drama marked by historical issues that evoke nostalgia. Marquina and cultivate this theater Peman. Renovating the theater: Some authors aroximan to playwriting with a desire for change and renewal, which will cause the public dle rejection and marginalization of the scenarios. Estubieron In Unamuno, Azorin, Grau, Gomez de la Serna. Faced with the authors of 98 and 14, at 27, took a combative stance, trying to create a new audience by bringing the theater to the people. C vuncuó his theater Albertí guidelines for an engaged literature. Approach to theater Salinas and Hernandez. The figures that truly renew the Spanish scene are: Valle Inclan: his works are relegated to “theater to read” because of its characteristics. As in his novels, the first theater in Valley falls within the modernist, to pass the mythical cycle of plays barbarian trilogy, Eagle heraldry, Romance of wolves and Face Plate. Simultaneously, he wrote a series of farces where the grotesque and caricature to make puppets and puppet characters in an altarpiece ruthless Elizabethan satirist of Spain.

All this theatrical production results in a literary genre, the espertento. The grotesque is a way of seeing the world, a distorted reflection of reality and distorted in that the characters are grotesques in a grotesque world. Luces de Bohemia (1920), is his masterpiece. The formal features that are defining the grotesque in this work are: “Contrasts: the tragic and the comic, how painful and grotesque. -Richness of language, with the presence of varied registers. – Annotated impresionaltes poetic, literary value itself. -Changes in space and time. Valley is one of the great figures of Spanish literature of all time. Rutura forge an art, free, with an astonishing command of language, a figure that has no equivalent in Spanish literature from Quevedo. He argues for a theater of numerous scenarios and free. Lorca:His theater bay at a height of partner to his poetry and is one of the summits of the Spanish theater and universal. The frustarción of Lorca’s characters includes a double flat “metaphysical. Social-Plano. Since 1932 directed “La Barraca”. The dominant theme in his plays is always the same: the clash between the individual and society. The roots of his plays are diverse: the classics, popular forms, Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and experimental theater and avant-garde. Turns to verse and prose, a swarming type songs … The evolution of Lorca’s theater can be divided as follows: a) score in the 20s: The Haunting of the butterfly and Puppet blackjack. In the line of farce. b) Experience cutting edge: From a dual crisis Lorca rethinks the foundations of his creation, looking for a new language influenced by Dali and Bunuel, and launched himself into the surreal. c) Time of fulfillment: Lorca repeatedly stated his desire for wider communication and a social orientation. The three have common features:-sexual nature of the problems discussed. -women as protagonista.-setting in the Andalusian countryside. -tragic ending. The House of Bernarda Alba was Lorca’s theatrical summit.