However, it was in El si de las nihas (“A Girl’s Consent”), written in 1801 but not premiered until 1806, that Morat´ın provided the best formulation of the issues which concerned him most deeply: the upbringing of the young, relations between parents and children, and free choice in

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Marriage. It was the author’s greatest achievement. Written in prose, the work presented audiences with up-to-the-moment issues mixed with a dose of sentiment which was more to the fore than in his other plays. As in the earlier comedies there is a love triangle involving a young girl, a young man, and an older man who is the intended husband of the girl, as well as a difference in fortune between the girl and her potential suitors. This basic structure, with only a few additional characters, allows the author to set out a critique of the forms of behavior and evils mentioned above. Morat´ın’s comedies establish the foundations for the analysis of bourgeois modes of conduct.

As a man of the theatre, Morat´ın was acutely conscious of the state of drama in his time and wrote attacks on the popular genres normally preferred by audiences. He presented his ideas in dramatic form in La comedia nueva o el cafe´ (“The New Comedy, or the Coffee House,” 1792) in which he engineers a confrontation between the two ways of conceiving drama. The comedy enjoyed moderate success, settinginmotion arunning debate, since the playwright Comella believed himself the model for the character of don Hermo´genes. Again in this play Morat´ın refers to the issue of young people’s upbringing or lack of a good one, but he also highlights women’s roles, a constant theme in his works, making clear his traditional view of women, whom he did not see as cut out for a career in literature.

A woman who not only wrote a number of dramatic works but also saw them into print was Mar´ıa Rosa de Ga´lvez (1768–1806), a friend of Morat´ın who, like him, received patronage from the Prime Minister Manuel Godoy. Ga´lvez published most of her theatrical works in a collected edition of 1804. One of her comedies, Los figurones literarios (“The Literary Charlatans”), is critical of popular theatre and some scholars have seen it as a response to Morat´ın. Another of her works, La familia a la moda (“The Fashionable Family,” 1805), features contemporary social behavior in a bourgeois setting, and the unpublished Las esclavas ama-zonas (“The Amazon Slave Women”) was performed in Madrid in 1805.

There are certain genres which cannot easily be accommodated within Neoclassical categories. They share classical ideals to a considerable extent but do not belong within Neoclassicism since they use elements which purists proscribed. Sentimental comedies belong to Neoclassicism in their attention to social issues, the middle classes, and their problems, but they also feature sentiment and new currents of contemporary thought. The strong presence of sentiment and emotion combined with the urban setting alters the Neoclassical nature of theatre at the same time as poetry changed under similar psychological and social influences. The importance of the senses for empirical philosophy and the focus on the middle classes as a new subject matter for literature reinforced

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The Enlightenment and Neoclassicism

This dramatic style, which nevertheless had a precedent in Jovellanos’ El delincuente honrado (“The Honorable Criminal,” 1773), not forgetting Luzan’s translation La razon contra la moda (“Reason versus Fashion,” 1751). Sentimental drama advocates a new kind of human being whose ethical values include goodness, utilitarianism, sensibility, and a moral conscience. Jovellanos’ work confronts the legal world, the judiciary, and injustice. Trigueros took a similar stand in El precipitado (“The Imprudent Man,” 1773).

Both Jovellanos’ and Trigueros’ plays are ideological works that make use of emotion to achieve an impact on the audience. Just as novels used love to criticize the social system, sentimental drama used sentiment to produce a lesson about social failings. This style of drama did not have great success with audiences, who preferred popular sentimental comedies which dealt with similar issues but with notable differences in their treatment.

From the point of view of strict Neoclassicism sentimental drama was initially rejected but grew to be accepted, occupying a place in theoretical writings at the end of the century. In 1789 the theoretical text by the Italian critic Francesco Milizia was translated into Spanish as El teatro (“The Theatre”). The author included coverage of “pathetic comedy,” pointing out its didactic potential, achievable through sentiment and emotion as well as by the satirical alternation between serious and comic elements. In 1793, Santos D´ıez Gonzalez made similar claims in his Instituciones poeticas (“Poetic Institutions”) in which he singled out what he called “urban tragedy,” and, in 1798, Juan Francisco Lopez del Plano (1758– 1808) made reference to the “drama of passions.”

• Morat´ın emphatically Cambridge…

Concurrently with El Pensador, two plays by Nicolas Fernandez de Morat´ın (1737-1780), the comedy La petimetra (“The Fashionable Lady,” 1762) and tragedy Lucrecia (176-}), contained prologues advocating Neoclassical principles. The “Disertacion” preceding La Petimetra claimed that poetics is based on reason, and that the purpose of poetry was the Horatian

• Neoclassical comedy takes the form either of comedy of manners…

Not until the second half of the century did the best and most significant Neoclassical achievements take place. In the field of tragedy, Nicolas Fernandez de Morat´ın wrote Lucrecia (1763), which was never staged, while Candido Mar´ıa Trigueros managed to get La Necepsis (1763) performed, a play on an Egyptian

• Magic comedies enjoyed sustained popularity throughout the eighteenth…

This chapter has been translated from the Spanish by Philip Deacon and Alvin Sherman, Jr. 1 Joaqu´ın Alvarez Barrientos, “Siglo XVIII.” In Historia de los espectaculos en Espaiia. Ed. Andres Amoros and Jose Mar´ıa D´ıez Borque (Madrid: Castalia, 1999), pp. 69-86. 333 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 334 The Enlightenment and

• The effect of Enlightenment was to extend…

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 Spain and Enlightenment 305 The Enlightenment desire to communicate and reason had a multiple impact on culture. Feijoo’s writings revealed a wish to engage a large readership. In the Teatro critico universal, the traditional learned essay was stripped of the formality and pomposity of seventeenth-century

• However, as the eighteenth century ended, a variety…

Though Neoclassical aesthetic principles and practices continued to be advocated for over a century after Luza´n’s trailblazing text, they did little to diminish the appeal of popular drama, which flourished in spite of the absence of explicit theoretical underpinning.5 What the aesthetic debates made evident was the diversity of tastes