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 circumstances similar to La conjuracion, but Larra goes beyond Mart´ınez’s model by mixing personal misunderstanding and political conflict with suicide and murder. Elvira, in love with the troubadour Mac´ıas but convinced by her fiance don Tello that Mac´ıas has married someone else, plunges a dagger into herself, swearing that her tomb will serve as her impossible nuptial bed. Unlike Mart´ınez’s Laura, who merely faints, Elvira actively participates in her fate and in her rejection of a model of existence that prohibits happiness. Not only the linking of love and death, but also the recognition that death will become both the mechanism through which and the place where the unhappy lovers will finally be united, is central to the Spanish conception of Romanticism. Larra exploits it skillfully when the tomb and the marriage bed become one and the same, and both Mac´ıas and Elvira recognize that life without love is not worth living: “^Que es la vida? / Un tormento insufrible, si a tu lado / no he de pasarla ya. jMuerte! jVenganza!” (“What is life? / An insuffrable torture if I cannot live it by your side. Death! Revenge!”). Larra, searching for a new way to express aesthetically and symbolically the tensions he was sensing in his own life and circumstances, captures in his ill-fated lovers the impassioned and turbulent times in which he lived.
Romanticism in Europe had rediscovered, and reconfigured, historical drama. The best-known and most troubling play in the genre was clearly Rivas’ Don Alvaro o la fuerza del sino (“Don Alvaro, or the Force of Destiny”), which premiered on 22 March 1835. Drawing on more recent history (the eighteenth century rather than the more distant Middle Ages), Rivas, who had been a proponent of the use of history for theatrical ends since early in his career, captured in Don Alvaro all of the impassioned angst and symbolic fatefulness of Spanish Romanticism. “The force of destiny,” in its guise of absurd and chaotic fate and pure bad luck, marks
2 Javier Herrero, “Terror y literatura: Ilustracion, revolucion y los or´ıgenes del movimiento romantico.” In La literatura espaiiola de la Ilustracion. Ed. Jose Luis Varela (Madrid: Universidad Complutense, 1988), pp. 131-153.
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Every step taken by the play’s eponymous hero. Alvaro has come to symbolize tragic, Romantic Man, but his tragedy does not flow from a classical tragic flaw, but rather from the mere fact of his existence in a world controlled by whim and chaos. He is neither at fault nor in control of his fate. This is best exemplified in two stunning moments in the play. The first comes early, when don Alvaro, realizing that Leonor’s father, the powerful Marques de Calatrava, opposes their marriage, suppresses the rage he feels when the Marques insults his supposedly low-class background, and kneels before him in an act of resignation. As he tosses aside the gun he is carrying, it accidentally goes off and mortally wounds Leonor’s father, setting in motion a chain of events which will lead to his final, and devastating, act of cosmic defiance. The second comes in the final scenes of the play, when don Alvaro, after years of turmoil in which he thinks that Leonor is dead, discovers that she has in fact been living as a recluse in the craggy mountains near his own monastery (he took religious orders five years previously in an attempt to turn his grief and rage into good works). There, as he rediscovers her, he realizes that her brother Alfonso has just plunged a dagger into her. “;Te halle” - he screams -“por fin. . . s´ı, te halle. . . muerta!” (“Finally I found you. . . yes, I found you. . . dead!”). His spiritual death occurs at this very moment, but Rivas pushes him yet further, pushes him over a cliff in a dazed, diabolical act of suicide. As he leaps to his death he shouts, “Hundase el cielo, perezca la raza humana; exterminio, destruccion” (“Let the Heavens be buried, let humanity perish; extermination, destruction”), in an act of Romantic defiance that left Madrid audiences confused, angered, and in shock. Viewed as a symbolic drama rather than a realistic one, Don Alvaro becomes the first Spanish play to capture fully the step into the modern world’s conception of life as something chaotic, lacking reason, and unfair. It revealed to its audiences that there was not necessarily a connection between cause and effect, between misdeed and punishment, good behavior and just rewards. In fact, just the reverse seemed to be true: it demonstrated that good behavior could, for no apparent rational reason, be punished. Eugenio de Ochoa detected in this frightening new moment a “tipo exacto del drama moderno” (“an exact model of modern drama”). Such unnerving views expressed by Rivas and lived by don Alvaro apparently unsettled the author, too, since his post-Dow Alvaro work draws on more stable, more traditional touchstones. He quickly retreated from the extremist position he staked out in Don Alvaro and published work that more closely expressed conservative establishment values. Still, it remains, in Ermanno Caldera’s words, as “la obra de rup-tura, el primer drama romantico plenamente logrado... la obra maestra que llevaba a cabo el arraigo firme y definitivo del romanticismo en el teatro dramatico espan˜ol” (“the work which breaks the mold, the first
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