Post-Franco Theatre

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, or, at the very least, an end to drama as we know it

Rivas and \u3ci\u3eDon Álvaro\u3c/i\u3e: From the Comforts of \u3ci\u3eCostumbrismo\u3c/i\u3e to the Cages of Romanticism

Critics of Rivas’s Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino have developed numerous approaches to the play and its place in the canon of Spanish theatrical production. Two areas of concurrence appear in more or less unanimous fashion, at least in those studies carried out during the last fifty years. First, many of the play’s elements lend it pronounced qualities of the costumbrismo practiced in Spanish culture, in particular that which evolved from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Second, the play serves as one of the most representative works of Spanish Romanticism, specifically that brand of Romanticism described by Donald Shaw above, in which there is a manifestation of the “collapse of previously established absolute values.”1 In the process of arriving at these conclusions, critics such as Casalduero (1962), Pattison (1967), Cardwell (1973), Andioc (1982), Shaw (1986), Catalán Marín (2003), Iarocci (2006), and Surwillo (2010) have examined the play’s innovations and explored widely varying readings of Rivas’s work, including the play’s scandalous ideology, its revolutionary use of language and form, its place in the transatlantic dialogue on colonialism, and its importance as a marker in definitions of racial identity, along with questions of ethnicity as it relates to nobility. Each of these analyses delineates Rivas’s advancement of the Romantic experiment and his representation, for good or bad, of Romanticism’s moment in general. However, no study to date has tied together the threads that run from costumbrismo to Romanticism in Don Álvaro. That is, no critic so far has shown how Rivas utilizes costumbrista material as the basis for developing a decidedly rebellious Romantic worldview in the play

Benito Pérez Galdós

In Galdós\u27 time, the tensions between such diverse phenomena as coins and credit, free trade and protectionist tariffs, factory work and domestic economy, masculine and feminine, and private and public exacerbated friction among peoples—those of pueblo and rural origins, whose voices rasped and whose bright colors raked the eye, and a nascent, insecure bourgeosie who, fearful of the masses, strove to imitate the aristocracy. Old and new converged also with the question of suffrage and citizenship to aggravate social malaise and political upheavals—Carlist wars, palace intrigues, the Revolution of 1868 and overthrow of Queen Isabel, the brief reign of Amadeo of Savoy, the aborted First Republic and the Bourbon Restoration (1875-1885), which reached Spain from England in the imported person of Alfonso XII. These turbulent events undergird the cultural, historical, and political events of the novels by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) to be discussed in this chapter. Galdós is the author of seventy-seven novels, twenty-six original plays, and numerous occasional pieces, written between 1867 and 1920. These divide into two main categories: the historical and the contemporary social novels, now more appropriately described as novels of modernity The forty-six historical novels, called Episodios nacionales, make up five series, each consisting of ten interconnected novels, except the fifth series, left unfinished. The thirty-one novels of modernity, published between 1870 and 1915, also divide into two groups: Novelas de la primera época ( Novels of the Early Period, 1870–1879) and Las novelas de la serie contemporánea ( The Contemporary Social Novels, 1881–1915). The novels of the early period comprise Galdós\u27 first attempts at novel writing, as well as four so-called thesis novels : Doña Perfecta (1876), the sequel Gloria (1876–1877), Marianela (1878), and La familia de León Roch ( The Family of León Roch, 1878–1879). The next group of novels represents what Galdós called his segunda manera —his second style, a different kind of writing ... a more sophisticated and varied mode of narrative presentation