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35 4 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century

Fully successful Romantic drama. . . the masterwork that carried off the complete and definitive rooting of Romanticism in Spanish dramatic theatre”).3

Rivas’ play surprised the public with its revolutionary and disquieting message, but when Joaqu´ın Francisco Pacheco (1808-1865) staged his vibrant if overwritten Alfredo two months after Don Alvaro (23 May 1835), the reaction veered between hostility and indifference. Like don Alvaro, Alfredo feels pursued by fate, demonic powers, and a “fantasma” (“ghost”) that threatens to take over his life. “^,Sera por ventura la fatal-idad la unica ley del mundo?” he asks (“Can it be that destiny is the world’s only law?”). He, too, suffers from a frenetic, “infernal” love, but his passion is not for an innocent young thing but rather for Berta, the “widow” of his absent father, and the suggestion of incest sets this play apart from its predecessors. If the play ultimately fails, crushed by the weight of too many lugubrious images, energetic screams, and precipitous emotional changes, it nevertheless still captures the Romantic mindset. Alvaro sums this up: “Y ^es acaso culpa m´ıa, si el mundo esta dominado por un principio malefico?” (“And is it my fault that the world is governed by a malevolent principle?”). Alfredo’s terrible end echoes don Alvaro’s as he takes out a dagger and, with a furious scream of “jMaldicion sobre m´ı!” (“Damnation upon me!”), plunges it into his breast. This is the new man, the anguished Romantic hero pushed to the limits of his existence.

Similar angst informed the play destined to become one of the most famous phenomena in Spanish theatrical history. The shock produced by Antonio Garc´ıa Gutierrez on 1 March 1836 with El trovador (“The Troubador”) is stuff of theatre lore. The play’s attention to detail, beautifully conceptualized characters, and Romantic message generated a clamorous ovation and, for the first time in recorded theatre history in Spain, demands that the author come out on stage for public recognition. Garc´ıa Gutierrez’s rebellious hero Manrique pushed the limits of Romanticism into areas that even Larra and Rivas had not gone when he declared that not even God would stand between him and his true love Elvira. El trovador is both deeply disturbing and deeply satisfying. It is disturbing because his lovers are crushed by the force of destiny (as happened in Don Alvaro), made to abandon even the slightest glimmer of hope or redemption. Evil reigns supreme in Manrique’s world, created and sustained by powers - political, social, ecclesiastical, biological, existential - bent on insuring mankind’s unhappiness. The tender yet frightening gypsy

3 Ermanno Caldera and Antonietta Calderone, “El teatro en el siglo XIX (1808-1844).” In Historia del teatro en Espan˜a. Vol. II: Siglos XVIII y XIX. Ed. Jose Mar´ıa D´ıez Borque (Madrid: Taurus, 1988), p. 458.

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Azucena fuses (and confuses) love with vengeance, and her final scream – “¡Ya esta´s vengada!” (“Finally you are avenged!”) – is spoken as much to the spirit of her mother as it is to herself, for she has allowed her obsessive bitterness to bring tragedy and death to everyone in her life, including her own son (whom she mistakenly threw into a fire in a rage years before). The play’s pessimism goes even deeper, if this is imaginable, than that of Don A´ lvaro, whose final act of suicide can at least be interpreted as a final confirmation of his existential freedom. Garc´ıa Gutie´rrez offers us no such possible redemption. Yet the play is oddly satisfying, too, since the depth of the characters (Azucena in particular), the care taken in the writing, and its uncanny capture of the tenor of the times earned it a place in the minds and hearts of theatre audiences. The newspaper El Artista (“The Artist”) underscored how it addressed “e´pocas de revueltas intesti-nas como la presente, en que las pasiones son todo” (“periods of domestic upheavals like the present one, in which passions become everything”). Inhabitants of Madrid became obsessed with El trovador, lined up at the box office to buy tickets, suffered scalpers’ high prices, bought out the first printed edition within two weeks, and wandered around repeating selected verses and scenes from it.

Garc´ıa Gutie´rrez had two more Romantic hits with El paje (“The Page”) and El rey monje (“The Monk King”) in 1837. Both plays return to the role of fate in the lives of men, and both present heroes dominated by passion, daring, and emotion. The opening scenes of El paje present a dizzying amount of information, mystery, secrets to be revealed, and tension, which culminate later in the play with the breaking of yet another social taboo: the restriction against incest. Symbolically, both plays address man’s failed struggle for love, happiness, and existence, ideas

• Death! Revenge!”). Larra, searching for a new way to express…

Larra’s own incursion into the field of Romantic drama came just months after the premiere of La conjuracion. Macias, a historical drama, debuted on 24 September 1834 and took the Spanish Romantic theatre one step further toward authenticity. The play is an accomplished blend of love, fate, and adverse political

• Looking back over the century, the theatre tells a tale…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 446 The Forging of a Nation: The Nineteenth Century One of the most notable, and not to be forgotten, characteristics of Spanish nineteenth-century drama is its penchant for parody, satire, and slapstick. High Art became, naturally, the subject of literary discourse, theatre criticism, and

• Tapping into Spain’s theatrical history, he wrote…

Other dramatists focused on gritty social themes in the second half of the century, most notably Sixto Camara (1826-1862) in Jaime el Barbudo (“James the Bearded,” 1853) and Fernando Garrido (1821-1883) in Un dia de revolution (“A Day of Revolution,” 1855). It was Eugenio Selles (1842-1926) and Joaqu´ın Dicenta (1862-1917)

• Ed. Luis Gonzalez-del-Valle. Anales de la hiteratura Espaiiola…

This interest in puppets is also reflected in a collaboration with the composer Manuel de Falla, then resident in Granada, which resulted in a domestic entertainment staged on the eve of Epiphany 1923. Lorca’s main contribution was his puppet-play adaptation of a folk tale, La nina que riega la albahaca

• Its “desenlace… en extremo dramatico y terrible” (“extremely…

Still, Romanticism in Spain was hardly an imported affair, nor would it be restricted to a narrow time period in the first half of the nineteenth century. As I. L. McClelland and Russell P. Sebold have amply demonstrated,1 the cosmic preoccupation with the self, the obsession with death, and man’s