Greenfield - Lorca's Theatre. A Synthetic Reexamination PDF

Lorca's Theatre: A Synthetic Reexamination
Author(s): Sumner M. Greenfield

Source: Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1977), pp.
31-46
Published by: Society of Spanish & Spanish-American Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27740759
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LORCA'S THEATRE: A SYNTHETIC REEXAM?NATION
Sumner M. Greenfield
University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Lorca was killed in 1936 some ten weeks after he had turned 38,
when his promise as a playwright was still enormous. Yet how that
promise might have been fulfilled, had he lived, in the desolation
of the Civil War and its aftermath is a speculation that provokes
an uneasy foreboding. Perhaps in one way or another he was no
less doomed than the characters of his plays, if not as an "espa?ol
integral" who couldn't conceive of living outside his own country
(O. C., p. 1817),l then as a playwright who was leaning toward
increasingly provocative themes and stylistic experiments. About
his projected La destrucci?n de Sodoma he said in 1935: "S?, ya
s? que el t?tulo es grave y comprometedor, pero sigo mi ruta.
?Audacia? Puede ser, pero ... soy un poeta y no he de apartarme
de la misi?n que he emprendido" (O. C., p. 1768). In that same
penultimate year of his life he was pondering an anti-war drama
(O. C., p. 1772) and a political tragedy (O. C., p. 1785), works which
had, according to the poet himself, "una materia distinta a la de
Yerma o Bodas de sangre, por ejemplo, y hay que tratarlas con
distinta t?cnica tambi?n" (O. C., p. 1772). In a 1936 interview he
spoke more about these new directions in connection with yet
another play he was contemplating but was having trouble com
posing: "Ya no ser? como las anteriores. Ahora es una obra en
la que no puedo escribir nada, ni una l?nea, porque se han desa
tado y andan por los aires la verdad, la mentira, el hambre y la
poes?a. Se me han escapado de las p?ginas. La verdad de la come
dia es un problema religioso y econ?mico-social" (O. C., p. 1812).
Implicit in all of this, of course, is a growing sense of social com
mitment which, along with radically innovative works like El p?
blico,2 would have made for a theatrical anomaly in the atmos
phere of aridity and repression of post-war Spain. But whatever
31
32 Journal of Spanish Studies
the speculation ? Lorca politicized, Lorca in exile, a Lorca stifled
into a tenuous apolitical position under the threat of censorship ?
and whatever the promise, the prematurity of his death leaves us
with the fact of a theatre made up of relatively few works ?13 of
them, depending on how one chooses to count3 ? and marked by
an extraordinary synthesis of tradition and modernity as well as
by a no less remarkable integration of the perceptions and craft
of a poet with a profound sense of theatre.
The austerity of the dramatic line in most of Lorca's plays
points to an esthetic that recalls the classical Racinian principle
of making something out of nothing, or, at most, out of not very
much.4 Lorca virtually eliminates the situational complexities of
conventional drama; dramatic "conflict" is based primarily on
circumstantial conditions rather than on the invention and con
trivance of events or coincidence. Few things "happen" in a Lor
quian play. La casa de Bernarda Alba is a crescendo of rebellion
of the youngest daughter against a tyrannical mother with a climax
of suicide provoked by a vindictive sister. The title of Bodas de
sangre contains in itself all the action of that tragedy: a wedding
is arranged and takes place, but before the marriage can be con
summated, the bride succumbs to an invincible passion and runs
off with her former suitor, thereby forcing the latter and the
offended bridegroom into a Sophoclean duel to mutual death;5
the climactic action sequence is not even represented on the stage.
Yerma, like Do?a Rosita la soltera, is merely a progression through
time. In the former, doubt tinged with hope passes into certainty
and despair; in the latter, hopeful waiting degenerates into the
reality of hopelessness. Time, as the title projects, is also the "hap
pening" of As? que pasen cinco a?os, and the multiplicity of action
and characters is in the final analysis the dramatization of a recol
lective psychic state in which, paradoxically enough, external time
stands still. In all of these plays, the inner complexities of Cinco
a?os aside, the dramatic structure is uncluttered, austerely lineal
and consummately simple; in a word, it is skeletal. The "flesh"
derives from the intensification of the circumstances and the in
tensity of poetic expression.
This conscious and sustained rejection of the anecdotic doesn't
stop here. The majority of Lorca's characters are nameless. Their
identity derives from various factors, no one of which is the con
Lorca's Theatre: A Synthetic Reexamination 33
ventional practice of affixing arbitrary and meaningless names for
the convenience of the spectator. Some of these factors: their
generic role in the play's context (all but one character in Cinco
a?os, Bodas de sangre and La zapatera prodigiosa are nameless);
their essential characteristic (Yerma, Rosita); the symbolic value
of the name in a given context (Leonardo, V?ctor, Maria, Dolores);
popular tradition, both theatrical and poetic (Perlimplin, Cristo
bita, Arlequ?n, other figures from the tradition of farce).6 Other
characters are granted only a visual identification, i.e., through
color, object worn, physical aspect or some special stylization.
Only two plays have a cast of precisely named characters: Ma
riana Pineda, which draws its initial inspiration from historical
events of early nineteenth-century Granada, and La casa de Ber
narda Alba, which, according to the poet himself, is a deliberate
effort to put into play a disciplined, albeit poeticized, realism. Yet
even with the preciseness of nominal identity, plus a chronolog
ically-ordered listing of the ages of the characters and the illusion
of a black-and-white photographic documentary, the names of the
women in Bernarda Alba are ripe with symbolic overtones: Angus
tias, Magdalena, Martirio, Prudencia, Mar?a Josefa.7 Bernarda's
very surname symbolically reinforces her obsession with rep
utation, i.e., the unsullied whiteness of her house, while her Chris
tian name carries with it an intentionally ironic ring of masculinity
in a world made up exclusively of women. Bernarda's is the only
invented surname in all of Lorca's theatre; the others belong to
historical persons: Mariana Pineda and her betrothed, don Pedro
de Sotomayor, and Buster Keaton. The play's the thing. The char
acters are defined from within, and the spectators must identify
them through their attention and commitment to the theatrical
spectacle.
In keeping with his Avant-Garde perspectives, the theatre for
Lorca is not a humoristic or romantic diversion for the urban
middle class, nor a mirror of contemporary mores. It is a poetic
event of stylized theatricality with its own artistic integrity and
freedom from the tyranny of the expository word, which had
been for too long and in too many cases the theatre's only dramatic
resource. The conventional theatre-going public of Madrid and Bar
celona could scarcely see a mirror-image of themselves in these
plays, for Lorca is indifferent to both their tastes and mores and
offers them neither philosophical balm nor direct criticism. Nor
is he disposed to amusing them on their own terms. The play
wright here is in control of his own creations, fully cognizant of
his autonomy as a poet of the theatre and of the poetic autonomy
of the word as word, as image and as metaphor, conventional tastes
and values notwithstanding. Unless he is guided by some special
purpose (evocations of the past in Mariana Pineda and Do?a Rosita
la soltera, and the cinematographic composition of El paseo de
Buster Keaton), Lorca studiously rejects historically recognizable
contexts, particularly those of his own moment. The objective is
to project a vital but generic view of man and woman in ahistor
ical and elemental circumstances, unencumbered by demands of
specificity of time and place. The process is one of universalization,
i.e., a depiction not merely of a Spanish condition but rather an
elemental human condition in an atemporal Spanish context. To
see Lorquian theatre as merely a critical commentary on Spanish
national life is an egregious oversimplification. By the same token,
to see it in purely mythic terms and ignore the presence of its
underlying Spanish reality is equally simplistic and deceptive, since
the raw material for the fashioning of the universalizations have
profoundly Spanish roots. Lorca is never cerebral or abstract; he
is not a philosopher nor an ideologue nor, despite the occasional
presence of satire, a satirist. He is a lyric poet, at the same time
that he is a dramatic poet; moreover, he is a Spanish writer to the
marrow. The result of these integrated personal circumstances is
that, whatever the abstractions behind his generic view of the
human condition, the depiction is so intensely humanized that
the vital experience swallows up the universal meaning and rel
egates it to mere background. In the dramatic execution, conse
quently, the spectacle of the human action outstrips the abstrac
tion or archetype that initially provoked its composition. This
action, it bears repeating, is austerely skeletal and draws its dra
matic substance from the progressive intensification of circum
stances and the intensity of its poetic expression.
The elements of protest and satire found in Lorquian theatre
have sometimes led to the conclusion that he is fundamentally an
anti-bourgeois writer. One critic has even gone so far as to see
him as a kind of Marxist dialectician.8 This kind of parochial
categorizing does him a serious disservice. The social protest of
Lorcas Theatre: A Synthetic Reexamination 35
his plays is anti-bourgeois only to the extent that our world is
dominated by values and vices which we take to be the exclusive
property of the middle class, but which are not: status-seeking,
postures of respectability, hypocrisy, obsession with reputation,
greed, self-aggrandizement. Thematically speaking, Lorca's theatre
is not anti-bourgeois; it is non-bourgeois, just as it is non-aris
tocratic and non-proletarian. In short, it is unconcerned with social
classes as such. What does concern this playwright is society, not
in an abstract way but in terms of that endemic, entrenched self
righteousness that infringes upon the integrity of the individual.
Lorca's hostile view of society is persistent enough, but it is a
factor of variable importance and intensity and takes on varying
guises from play to play. If it dominates in some (e.g., La casa
de Bernarda Alba and La zapatera prodigiosa), it is peripheral in
others (e.g., Bodas de sangre, Perlimplin). In all cases it is indeed
a Lorquian preoccupation; nevertheless, it is rarely the reason
for a play's being. The thematic essence of Lorca's theatre is the
cry of protest against whatever restrictive circumstances threaten
to doom the individual's struggle for elemental integrity, fulfill
ment and, ultimately, survival. Freedom, in a fundamental, apolit
ical and non-ideological sense, is the basic Lorquian theme, freedom
within the natural order, and fulfillment with social order. When
the right to this elemental freedom is thwarted, whether by social
or personal circumstances, the trap of tragedy is sprung. And with
the exception of the farces, which by tradition call for happy
endings, the Lorquian vision of man and woman is essentially a
tragic one.
The entrapment of Lorca's protagonists stems from the viola
tion of their inherent right to participate in the order they are
by nature meant to share: union of woman with man and through
that union procreation and continuity. Each of the famous "three
tragedies" projects a carefully calculated variant of this denial of
basic freedom: the mother denied her progeny through the pre
mature death of her only surviving son; the wife condemned to
childlessness in a world rich with fecundity; the unmarried woman
denied her right to a husband and doomed to an abortive rebellion.
The order of the progression of the variants?mother, wife, virgin?
is by no means gratuitous, for on it rests Lorca's schematized
vision of the three works as a trilogy: Bodas de sangre (1933),
Yerma (1934), La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936). Moreover, the
trilogie unity is more precisely articulated than we have suspected.
The ultimate sense of the whole is communicated in Bernarda Alba,
among the last words the poet wrote. The voice is that of the octo
genarian Mar?a Josefa who expresses, in poetry disguised as senil
ity, the ultimate anguish over the fatidic denial to them all
? virgin, bride, mother, grandmother ? of their legitimate right as
women to the waters of fecundity and generational continuity. The
will to integrity, however, is not enough, so that each woman, and
virtually all those related to them, are inexorably doomed to steril
ity and death.
The three tragedies ? and we unequivocally take them to be
just that, tragedies ? are no doubt the major expression of the
great Lorquian theme of elemental freedom, but virtually every
other play, with the exception of the puppet farces, is predicated
thematically on the same problem of right, integrity and the threat
of unfulfillment or sterility. The circumstances of a simplistic, op
eretta-like world of the 1890's deny Rosita her betrothed, then time
and a changing world leave her behind, inexorably abandoned to
spinsterhood and the sterility of hopelessness. Mariana Pineda is
similarly abandoned by the man she loves and goes to the gallows
ever faithful to her absent lover, even though it spells her ruin.
On the few occasions when the protagonist is a male, the perspec
tive does not seriously change. The young man of As? que pasen
cinco a?os is caught in a web of indecision and sexual ambivalence
leading, literally or metaphorically, to disaster and death. Perlim
pl?n is trapped by sexual incompetence and manages to rescue his
erotic integrity only by the highly imaginative but drastic ploy of
a self-imposed schizophrenia which brings with it inevitable self
destruction. The fragmentary dramatic sequences which go to make
up the Teatro breve project similar dimensions of incapacitation
and aridity.
Whatever the intensity of anguish and protest against the viola
tion of their natural freedom, Lorquian protagonists rarely seek a
disruption of social order as compensation for the injustice of
their circumstances. They are neither anarchists nor romantic
rebels. Nor does Lorca write with the doctrinaire mission of a
reformer bent on provoking a rupture in the basic design of
society. He is, we repeat, apolitical and non-ideological, and his
vision of the human condition is elemental, not programatic. More
over, the delineation of his protagonists, whatever their personal
flaws, is not motivated by a will to censure when they choose not
to retaliate against their circumstances. Lorca's personal attitude
is one of deep compassion for them, whether circumstances or
their own integrity preclude action, or whether, if they attempt
to rebel, their aggression is aborted.
The role and import of order in the austerely elemental world
of Lorquian theatre is most sharply defined in Bodas de sangre,
where that order is conveyed by the identification of characters
precisely through their role in the social context: Mother, Bride
groom, Father, Bride, Wife, Mother-in-law, etc. Nominal identifi
cation is reserved exclusively for the antagonist, Leonardo, the sym
bolically leonine incarnation of male virility whose uncontrollable
passion disrupts the social order and causes the blood of fecundity
to run fruitlessly into the earth. But for Leonardo's infant son,
whose existence fades inconsequentially into the background, no
thing remains after the death of the bridegroom and the raptor
but four incomplete women whose legitimate rights have been
violated. They are not only doomed to barrenness but also de
prived of their identity and place in the social order. The wife
of Leonardo is no longer wife, the mother-in-law no longer mother
in-law. Their identity will subsequently depend on the child, not
on the male of the family. If in these cases the sterility is partial,
for the central figures in the tragedy it is total. Through the death
of the son-bridegroom the life cycle is definitively curtailed. She
who was once both wife and mother is now a solitary woman left
alone to face death and oblivion. The bride too is reduced to un
fulfilled woman, and therein lies what is perhaps the consummate
irony of this work. By submitting to the passion she shares with
Leonardo and joining him in flight, the bride consciously leaves
her marriage unconsummated. However, the rebellion itself has
its limits and is no less abortive sexually than the marriage. What
intervenes is the bride's sense of order and personal integrity. The
contradictory forces of inexorable passion and responsibility as a
social being combine to weaken the willfulness that led her initially
to abrogate the marriage contract. She vacillates in the tragic en
trapment and despite her passion for Leonardo does not submit
to him, so that this union too remains unconsummated. Only with
her integrity as a woman inviolate can she return to share in the
anguished resignation of the mother of her dead husband, whose
ultimate barrenness she is also destined to share. Bodas de sangre
presents the unusual spectacle of a tragedy with two protagonists.
Personal integrity is a primary factor in the character of the
other Lorquian protagonists as well, and each one seeks to sustain
it without rupturing the fabric of social order. Adela is the only
exception. Her right, like that of her sisters, is to marry. When
that right is unjustly denied her by the tyranny of arbitrary social
convention, her integrity demands fulfillment of her sexual needs,
even, if need be, via an extramarital relationship. Adela is a true
rebel. Nevertheless, Lorca makes it clear that it would be fully
natural for this 21-year-old girl to marry Pepe el Romano, just as
it is unnatural for Bernarda to insist, for the sake of social pro
priety, that her oldest daughter, who is almost 40, be his wife.
From this we can justly conclude that it is Bernarda herself who
violates the order of this social context, not her daughter, and that
Adela is exerting her will rightfully and legitimately in establishing
a sexual liaison with Pepe. Not with anyone at all, but only with
Pepe el Romano. Lorca's heroines are never promiscuous. They
cannot be. Their integrity as women simply does not permit it.
Moreover, we should bear in mind that this personal integrity is a
principal source of their heroic dimensions, and all Lorquian pro
tagonists, with the possible exception of those in works of surreal
proportions (Cinco a?os, La doncella..., Quimera), are indeed meant
to be heroic.
If in the final analysis sexual license is alien to the nature of
unmarried and rebellious Lorquian heroines, to those who are in
fact married, i.e., Yerma and the shoemaker's prodigious wife,
adultery is little less than sheer anathema. For Yerma to accept
the lewd proposition to submit to some unknown male simply to
have a child is inconceivable both to her and to the playwright,
just as it should be to those of us who wish to understand her.
No course of action would be a greater violation of her integrity
as a woman. To have her own child by her own husband is her
right and her destiny according to every norm of natural and social
order, and the fecund world around her supports this contention
at every turn. Not any child, not anyone's child, but her own, and
by her own husband: "Lo tendr? porque lo tengo que tener. O no
entiendo el mundo_Yo pienso que tengo sed y no tengo liber
tad_No lo quiero [a Juan], no lo quiero y, sin embargo, es
mi ?nica salvaci?n. Por honra y por casta. Mi ?nica salvaci?n"
(O. C, pp. 1328-29). What is at work here is not the social phenom
enon of "honor" to sustain the appearance of respectability or a
veneer of impeccable conduct to avoid slanderous gossip. Yerma's
"honra" is an inner, personal matter that transcends social stric
tures and the fa?ade of respectability. It is integrity and freedom,
but with order, just as it is for the Zapatera. Neither woman is
concerned with "el qu? dir?n". Yerma, like the shoemaker's wife,
is something of a free spirit. She likes to walk barefoot to feel the
touch of the fertile earth, and she takes pleasure in talking freely
with whomever she meets, whether male or female. She has no
qualms about discussing her own predicament with others, draws
exquisite pleasure from the pregnancies of her neighbors and is
capable of facing them without a drop of envy. She has a consum
mate maternal sensibility, which, of course, heightens the tragic
dimensions of her predicament. Her husband, on the other hand,
like the Zapatero and Bernarda Alba, lives in deep fear of what
people will say and severely rebukes his wife for her freedom of
conduct. He brings his sisters to spy on her and protect the family
honor, which after all is simply a matter of keeping his name off
the tongues of his neighbors. The arbitrary norms of social honor
intensify those hostile physiological and psychological factors which
combine to deny Yerma her natural right to bear her child. The
murder of Juan, however unpremeditated, is Yerma's definitive act
of protest, the only means, in fact, available to her to affirm what
is left of her personal integrity. She herself administers this coup
de gr?ce, thereby eliminating by herself the last vestige of her own
hope. A heroic act, indeed, in this context of inexorable tragedy
which, like Bodas de sangre, ends with a definitive catharsis: the
death of the male and the anguished certainty of sterility and
oblivion.
The prodigious Zapatera is the prototype from which Yerma
and the other women are drawn. Like Adela, she is young, pas
sionate and a willful rebel whose cause is freedom and integrity in
the face of the self-righteousness of a village very much like that
of Bernarda Alba. There are two major differences, however. The
shoemaker's wife is a poetical creature of farce, and, like Yerma,
she is married. The farcical context allows Lorca to give free rein
to his wit and stylistic creativity, free of the formulae of the puppet
farces, and free as well of the austerity required by tragedy. What
results is perhaps the most explicit expression of his attitude
toward society and of how he perceives his heroines. The Zapatera
is an audacious flirt and an irrepressible free spirit who challenges
the hypocrisy of social conventions at every turn. She is never
intimidated by slanderous neighbors, nor does she ever compromise
her integrity, either as a woman or as a wife. Four months after her
husband has abandoned her, she challenges the covey of local Don
Juans who hover about her sensing a sexual coup with the resolute
declaration: "...no ceder? a nadie jam?s, porque una mujer ca
sada debe estarse en su sitio como Dios manda_Decente fui y
decente lo ser?. Me compromet? con mi marido. Pues hasta la
muerte" (O. C, pp. 942-43). She cares nothing about consecrated
norms of social conduct ? reputation, respectability, appearances.
What matters is not "honor" but personal integrity, and by the
end of the farce even her prodigal husband has adopted this per
suasion. In the final confrontation it is not one but two against
the world: husband and wife, together. Freedom, even rebellion,
but always with order and, through order, integrity.
In the light of the characteristics we have noted, it is not
surprising that the principal forms of Lorca's theatre are tragedy
and farce, two traditional genres which are characterized by those
same attributes: skeletal dramatic line, generic identification of
characters, absence of historical specificity, free recourse to estab
lished formulae, a minimum of plot improvisation, a generic view
of man and woman in atemporal and ahistorical circumstances.
Two ancient phenomena made Lorquian: the classical tradition of
tragedy, ritualistic, mythic, charged with tension and anguish, and
the popular tradition of farce, simplistic, hyperbolic, permeated
with an iconoclastic spirit of play; both of them classless, stylized,
eminently theatrical and, each in its own way, an ironic commen
tary on man and his circumstances. This kind of "new" traditional
ism is, of course, not unique with Lorca. He shares it with other
great poets of the modern theatre ? Cocteau, Yeats, Eliot, and
others9 ? whose artistic perspectives could scarcely content them
selves with the conventionalisms of realistic drama or the topical
diversions of the comedy of manners. Moreover, it situates him
prominently in the great current of revival of classical themes and
forms that persists throughout the century by way of reaction to
the tired trivia of bourgeois theatre.
For Lorca, however, even richer than tragedy in poetic potential
for theatrical innovation is popular tradition, not only the farce,
which like tragedy identifies him solidly with the Vanguard cur*
rents of his time, but also the folkloric heritage of the Spaniards
as a people: children's songs, ballads, legends, the ambulatory the
atre of the titiriteros and bulul?es, all of them, whether transcribed
or not, rooted in memory through the ancient practice of oral
transmission ? in short, those traditional forms of theatre and
poetry from the fairs and plazas of the provinces, remote in more
ways than one from the institutionalized theatre of the would-be
sophisticates and casticistas of Madrid. In Lorca's case, one must
also include the theatre of cultured popularists like Lope de Vega,
whose works he was instrumental in reviving for the people
through the itinerant company of La Barraca. This sustained Lor
quian commitment to popular tradition as a primary means for
the revitalization of the theatre in Spain forms a major link, on
the one hand, between him and Valle-Incl?n, and, on the other,
between him and the current generation of Spanish vanguardistas
whose so-called teatro subterr?neo is very much predicated on the
same tradition of popularist, anti-institutionalized theatre. On this
count ? and in other ways as well ? the renovating currents in
twentieth-century Spanish theatre, although ruptured and repressed
from time to time by the events of history, show a striking con
sistency of attitudes and esthetic impulses, despite the obvious dif
ferences in style and execution between generations. In the final
analysis, Valle-Incl?n's burla de cornudos, Lorca's "vivo ritmo de
una zapaterita popular" and the animalized allegories of Ruibal or
the mimes and farsantes of Romero, are not far apart, either in
their roots or artistic motivations. They are all efforts to fill the
theatre with "espigas frescas" through the richness of the char
acters, language and techniques of the old farces "donde sigue
pura la vieja esencia del teatro" (O. C, p. 1043). In 1934, in the
context of the Republic and the success of La Barraca, Lorca was
saying in Santander: "El teatro es ... el bar?metro que marca su
grandeza o su descenso [de un pa?s] .... un teatro destrozado, don
de las pezu?as sustituyen a las alas, puede achabacanar y adorme
cer a una naci?n entera_Un pueblo que no ayuda y no fomenta
su teatro, si no est? muerto, est? moribundo ... no hay autoridad
ni esp?ritu de sacrificio para imponerlas [las innovaciones verda
deras] a un p?blico al que hay que domar con altura y contrade
cirlo y atacarlo en muchas ocasiones. El teatro se debe imponer
al p?blico y no el p?blico al teatro" (O. C, pp. 150-51). In 1969, a
time of both personal and national repression, Ruibal published
his terse manifesto "Escribir contra el p?blico" 10 in which he does
homage to Valle-Incl?n and declares, in part: "Un autor que se
arriesga a escribir contra el p?blico ? contra la rutina y la pereza
mental de su tiempo ? no pretende degradar, sino que intenta con
tribuir a elevar a ese p?blico, a medida que tambi?n ?l se eleva ....
un pueblo que carece de teatro es un pueblo incapaz de superarse
espiritualmente a trav?s de la cr?tica. Carece de madurez men
tal _una sociedad sin teatro es una sociedad sin pensamiento."
The voices, the times and the tone are all different, but the message
is the same. Both men are a "conscience", as Ruibal would put it.
So, of course, is Valle-Incl?n.
Three tragedies. Three farces. Two of the latter are of the t?te
res-gui?ol variety. The third, despite all its charm and wit, reaches
the heights of authentic high comedy through a potentially tragic
climax: a budding stoning-of-the-adulteress situation which con
stitutes the culminating "violent" note of the sustained motif of
violence which guided Lorca in the composition of the Zapatera
and led him to caption it with the term "farsa violenta." But farce
is farce, and the reconciliation of the shoemaker with his wife
supplies the happy ending, even though the confrontation with the
villagers is yet to take place when the final curtain falls. All three
farces are variations on the ancient theme of the old man who
marries a young girl and in so doing invites the horns. So, too, is
Perlimpl?n, which at the outset has all the earmarks of traditional
farce but which quickly takes on new dimensions of poetic intensi
ty and thematic seriousness while still preserving its prominent
element of play. But the original inspiration for Perlimpl?n, as
Lorca tells us in the play's caption, is a different element of
popular tradition, that of the aleluya, the miniature lithographic
print of eighteenth-century origins and initially of religious inspi
ration, which came to be secularized a century later as a kind of
cartoon-strip narrative depicting the life of an ugly guignolesque
type character known principally, although not exclusively, as Don
Perlimplin. n Lorca, of course, substantially sensualizes the old raw
material ? the precise caption is "aleluya er?tica, versi?n de c?
mara" ? and builds it into a capital Avant-Garde work, taking
advantage of the eighteenth-century aspects of the traditional fig
ure of Perlimplin to effect many of the play's caricaturesque styl
izations.
Lorquian incursions into popularist tradition to fashion his
theatre are more extensive than we have perhaps realized. Three
other plays, in addition to the four already noted, are similarly
rooted in folk elements. El maleficio de la mariposa is an anthro
pomorphic fantasy of humanized insects redolent of children's
fables and suggestive of the equally juvenile romanticism found in
Dario 's depiction of young poets in several narratives of Azul,
among them "El s?tiro sordo" and "El p?jaro azul". Lorca ex
plicitly calls Mariana Pineda "romance popular en tres estampas"
and proceeds to dramatize the romance, which is sung by children
in the prologue, precisely in accordance with one child's percep
tion of the events poeticized by the song. The source of the subtitle
of Do?a Rosita la soltera, "El lenguaje de las flores", is perhaps
more an example of cultured tradition than the popular, but the
inclination to identify specific flowers as symbols of human senti
ment, especially the rose, is well implanted in the popular imag
ination and was in fact an especially popular pastime of Restora
tion society in Spain when genteel sensibility was given to such
sentimental cursiler?as. n La belle ?poque, of course, is precisely
the period evoked in Rosita. Like the latter, Mariana Pineda is an
evocation of nineteenth-century Granada, albeit a half-century or so
earlier than Rosita. What ties the two plays together, besides the
profound omnipresence of lo granadino, is Lorca's own boyhood,
which is the time both of Rosita and of those real women ? cria
das, amas de casa, members of his family ? who did so much to
immerse him in the popular tradition of Granada and cultivate
his sensibility for traditional songs, verses and Andalusian music.13
It is highly probable, even likely, that one of these women, or a
composite of them all, was the inspiration for the creation of the
little girl of the year 1850 who sings the delicate verses on the
death of the heroine in the prologue of Mariana Pineda. It is also
very possible that one or more of these same women, so dear to
the poet, served as the prototype for the creation of Rosita herself.
Thirteen works: three tragedies, seven plays inspired wholly or
in part in popular tradition, three others stemming from Lorca's
own innovative impulses and reacting to the impact of an over-all
climate of artistic restlessness and widespread zeal for experimenta
tion and esthetic adventure. New vanguardist directions are in ev
idence in all of these plays, from the dynamic revitalization of the
classical and the folkloric to the new dynamism of cinematography
and surrealism. In every case the execution is a vigorous affirma
tion of the principle that the theatre is a celebration of poetic im
agination. 14 Lorquian theatrical poetry is not merely a matter of
the use of verse, poetic interludes or an occasional image or pe
ripheral metaphor. It is, rather, a disciplined integration of an in
finity of poetic elements ? verbal, visual, aural, sensory, temporal,
countless others ? which are shaped and unified by a systemat
ically conceived inner design. Little, if anything, is gratuitous or
merely a show of virtuosity; virtually everything is poetically func
tional and relevant. More often than not ? in eight cases, specif
ically 15 ? the key to the way in which the play is conceived and
poetically designed is the caption or subtitle Lorca deliberately
appends to the title. It is in this intensely poetic approach to
theatre as a fully autonomous art form and in the simultaneous
rejection of the persistent mediocrity of the commercial stage and
the middle-class public to which it was directed that Lorca is au
thentically an aggressive enemy of conformism and the status
quo ? as an artist and a humanist rather than as a rebel with
an intellectual or social cause. The concerns of his theatre ? the
joyous vitality of the free spirit and the anguished condition of
man and woman when that vital force succumbs to repression and
isolation ? are communicated through an irrepressible poetic elab
oration. Lorquian theatre wears the Janus-like double mask of
ancient theatrical tradition: the mask of laughter and the mask
of sorrow. The door between is poetry.
NOTES
1 All quotations are taken from the eighth edition of th

completas (Madrid: Aguilar, 1965).
2 Since the text of this play has never been published, our judg
ment is based on Rafael Martinez Nadal's invaluable book "El p?blico";
Amor, teatro y caballos en la obra de Federico Garcia Lorca (Oxford, 1970).
Mart?nez Nadal knows for a fact that two complete versions of the work
were in existence in the 1930's. Moreover, he is himself in possession of an
incomplete rough draft, which is the basis of his own analysis of the play
{pp. 19-20).
3 This calculation includes El p?blico and accepts the arbitrary
grouping of the three experimental fragments (El paseo de Buster Keaton,
La doncella, el marinero y el estudiante and Quimera) under the title Teatro
breve, taking the latter as if it were one work. We recognize the possible
existence of other plays but, for lack of texts, leave them in the realm of
conjecture. The other eleven are: El maleficio de la mariposa, Mariana Pi
neda, Do?a Rosita la soltera, Amor de don Perlimplin con Belisa en su jard?n,
As? que pasen cinco a?os, the three farces (La zapatera prodigiosa, Los t?teres
de Cachiporra, Retablillo de don Crist?bal), and the three tragedies (Bodas de
sangre, Yerma, La casa de Bernarda Alba).
4 See the preface to B?r?nice.
5 Eteocles and Polyneices, the sons of Oedipus, kill each other in
the struggle over the crown of Thebes, thus setting in motion the confron
tation between Antigone and Creon.
6 There are, of course, some exceptions, although even in these
cases the selection of the name may not be as arbitrary as it seems at first
glance. Yerma's "Juan" may stem from the simple intention to give that very
ordinary man the most commonplace name possible. Don Martin in Rosita
is modeled on a real person out of Lorca's youth (O. C, pp. 1419 and 1695).
Others in this ambivalent category are Belisa and Marcolfa in Perlimplin and
Enrique in Quimera.
7 In his book, La tragedia en el teatro de Unamuno, Valle Incl?n
y Garc?a Lorca (New York: Eliseo Torres and Sons, 1975), p. 163, Luis Gon
z?lez del Valle sees an equally calculated symbolism in the selection of the
names of Amelia and Adela. The former is the weakest-willed of Bernarda's
daughters and the most inclined to tolerate their mother's tyranny without
protest, hence the idea of "amelioration" implicit in her name. The aggressive
"Adela," on the other hand, suggests to Gonz?lez del Valle the apocopation
of "adelante". Given Lorca's strong propensity to be purposeful in any and
all esthetic circumstances, Gonz?lez del Valle's interpretation is very plausi
ble. A similar instance of calculated word play is evident in the acronymic
quality of the ordered listing of personajes in Bernarda Alba according to
the characters' ages, from Mar?a Josefa to Adela. The initial letters spell out
"MAMAMA". However one chooses to interpret its meaning, the formation
of this acrostic hardly came about by accident.
8 Carlos Rinc?n, "Yerma de Federico Garc?a Lorca ? Ensayo de
interpretaci?n". Weimerer Beitr?ge. Romanische Philologie, I (1966), 66-98.
Similar thinking makes its way into another article by Rinc?n: "La zapatera
prodigiosa de F. Garc?a Lorca ? Ensayo de interpretaci?n". Ibero-romania,
IV, 2 (1970), 290-313.
9 The relationship is well established elsewhere. See, for example,
Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker (New York, 1946 and 1955), Chap. 8,
and Francis Fergusson, The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York,
1957), pp. 85-97. This Fergusson chapter is his often reprinted study "Don
Perlimplin: Lorca's Theatre-Poetry".
10 The article first appeared in ABC (Madrid), 12 March 1969. It has
since been reprinted several times, most recently in Jos? Ruibal, Teatro
sobre teatro (Madrid: Ediciones C?tedra, 1975), pp. 211-213.
11 The source of these details on the aleluya is Helen Grant's
superlative article "Una aleluya er?tica de Federico Garc?a Lorca y las ale
luyas populares del siglo xix" in F. Pierce and C. A. Jones, eds., Actas del
Primer Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas (Oxford, 1964), pp. 307-314.
12 See Daniel Devoto, "Do?a Rosita la soltera: Estructura y fuen
tes," Bulletin Hispanique, 69 (1967), pp. 407435.
13 For details of this aspect of Lorca's boyhood, see Jos? Luis
Cano, Garc?a Lorca (Barcelona, 1962), pp. 10-16.
14 The "miracle" of poetry on the stage, as Lorca himself suggests
in the prologue to La zapatera prodigiosa through the analogy of the biblical
miracle of the fishes (Matthew, 15: 32-38).
15 Seven have specific captions or subtitles: Mariana Pineda, Rosita,
Perlimpl?n, La zapatera prodigiosa, Bodas de sangre, Yerma, Cinco a?os. In
the case of La casa de Bernarda Alba, the title itself carries the key to the
work's poetic substructure.

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Lorca's Theatre: A Synthetic Reexamination

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1 All quotations are taken from the eighth edition of th

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