Valle-Inclán: Exploring His Dramatic Works and Literary Cycles
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán: A Theatrical Journey
Ramón María del Valle-Inclán‘s plays faced staging challenges during his time, impacting their representation. His extensive dramatic work is often categorized into cycles:
Modernist Cycle
This cycle encompasses works influenced by the modernist movement, which shaped his early aesthetic. Ashes, his first drama, explores adultery with a focus on morbid aspects. In 1908, he retitled it The Wilderness of Souls. The amplification of stage directions, characteristic of his plays, appears here. The Marquis de Bradomín adapts Autumn Sonata. This work contains elements of his next stage, such as multiple spaces and a chorus of Galician beggars. An anti-realist aesthetic dominates these works.
Mythic Cycle: The Barbaric Comedies
This trilogy features characters from a lineage marked by cruelty. Galicia becomes a mythical space where humans are dominated by instincts and brutal tendencies. The Haunted presents greed and sex as instruments of domination, leading to tragedy. The setting remains in Galicia. The final installment, Divine Words, deals with family disputes over a subnormal child exploited for profit. Adultery is a central theme, resolved with the sinner’s acquittal through “divine words.” This work, approaching the grotesque, spans multiple locations and presents significant staging challenges.
Cycle of Farce
It starts with The Child Farce of the Dragon’s Head, featuring children and characters from Cervantes’ world. Valle-Inclán critiques power and institutions. The Marquesa Rosalinda is the first farce written in verse. The cycle concludes with The Queen Castiza License, also in verse, presenting a grotesque vision of Elizabeth II’s reign, bordering on the absurd.
Grotesque Cycle: The Esperpento
Valle-Inclán pioneered the grotesque genre. These works shift from rural settings to urban Madrid. He described three aesthetic viewpoints: “kneeling” (heroic characters), “standing” (equal characters), and “raised in the air” (diminished characters). Valle-Inclán adopted the latter in his esperpentos, distorting reality. He believed that only aesthetic deformation could accurately reflect Spain’s tragic and absurd reality. The esperpentos caricature Spain to reveal its true self. Luces de Bohemia is the first work in this cycle. The three works included in Tuesday Carnival are also called esperpentos: The Trappings of the Dead, Don Horns Friolera, and The Captain’s Daughter. The first explores a degraded Don Juan in a setting of prostitutes and pimps. The second depicts marital infidelity and a soldier’s honor. The latter was banned for its perceived offensiveness to respectable classes.