It's that time again when I look back on the best new productions that opened in New York City over the past year.
This list is only for plays in the five boroughs, so great productions farther afield like The Secret Theatre and Romeo and Juliet as well as the productions at the Shaw Festival are ineligible. My own play Capital which opened in Detroit this year doesn't qualify either, even though it was named one of the Best of the Season for southeastern Michigan.
Also not included are shows that opened in 2016 but that I didn't get to see until this year, like Dear Evan Hansen and the Broadway production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. Last year, A Doll's House, Butler, and Hadestown topped the list. But what were the best productions of 2017? Read on to find out!
10. The Liar - Truth is, this adaptation by David Ives of the classic comedy by Pierre Corneille was one of the best (and first) plays I saw in 2017.
9. Fucking A - Of the three Suzan-Lori Parks plays the Signature Theatre Company produced this year, this was by far the best. A riff off of The Scarlet Letter, the play had its first off-broadway run back in 2003, but its dystopian view of a society where abortion is legal but practitioners are literally branded seems all-too prescient.
8. Once on This Island - This beloved Ahrens-Flaherty musical is currently getting an amazing production, so get your tickets now. Lea Salonga is excellent as Erzulie, the goddess of love and beauty, but the rest of the cast is strong as well, and Dane Laffrey's set makes the most of Circle in the Square's intimate space. If you're concerned about seeing a play in the round, don't worry. Director Michael Arden makes sure there isn't a bad seat in the house.
7. The Government Inspector - The Red Bull Theater Company is dedicated to the aesthetic of Jacobean drama, but this year they put on Nikolai Gogol's nineteenth-century farce about a minor bureaucrat mistaken for the Inspector General from the capital. The split-level set was best viewed from further back in the audience, but even if you sat up front like I did, you got to see some amazing performances from the likes of Michael Urie, Mary Testa, Michael McGrath, and Talene Monahon.
6. A Midsummer Night's Dream - It wasn't too long ago (ten years) that The Public Theater previously did Shakespeare's supernatural romantic comedy in Central Park, but the 2017 production was indeed a dream. Annaleigh Ashford gave a stand-out performance as Helena, which is saying a lot, considering that the show's headliner was Phylicia Rashad as a queenly Titania. The most memorable aspect of this production was having the attendant fairies played by older actors wandering around the forest in what looked like their pajamas. It was creepy in all the right ways.
5. Ernest Shackleton Loves Me - Two-person musicals are hard to pull off, and it's difficult to imagine this one with anyone else in the lead but Val Vigoda, the show's lyricist who also acts, sings, and plays the drums, keyboard, banjo, and electric violin! The book by Joe DiPietro tells the story of a sleep-deprived single mom composing music for video games who tries Internet dating and ends up being matched with the early-twentieth-century explorer Ernest Shackleton. Who cares that they're 100 years apart and he's currently in Antarctica? This witty and wonderful piece was a ray of sunshine in a dark year.
4. Desperate Measures - Speaking of witty and wonderful new musicals, the surprise hit of 2017 was Peter Kellogg and David Friedman's Desperate Measures, which sadly closes today at the the York Theatre Company. Based very loosely on Shakespeare's problem comedy Measure for Measure, the play is reset in the Old American West, where an un-elected governor is able to abuse his power and try to force a virtuous young woman about to enter a convent to sleep with him. If she refuses, her brother will hang. That might not seem like the stuff of musical comedy, but joyous music and dialogue in perfect rhyming couplets keep the laughs coming even through bleak material.
3. Julius Caesar - No doubt the most controversial production in New York this year was also one of the best. Conservative snowflakes cried foul over a play showing a Trump-like figure being assassinated. (Never mind the numerous past productions of Julius Caesar with Clinton and Obama stand-ins as Caesar.) Few--if any of them--actually saw the production. Had they gotten off of their hypocritical high horses long enough to actually see the show, they would have witnessed a biting critique of the left, and a warning that political violence, as tempting as it may seem, only leads to more violence, and ultimately despotism. The brutal assassination scene left some audience members physically sick to their stomachs. Julius Caesar was truly visceral theatre.
2. HOME/SICK - This collaborative project by The Assembly has been around for a while. (The group first workshopped it in 2010.) However, the production that opened this year at JACK in Brooklyn benefited from a long incubation process and past exploratory runs across the country. The story it tells of the Weather Underground in no way romanticizes the movement. Instead, much like the Public's Julius Caesar, HOME/SICK presents a cautionary tale of what happens when well meaning people turn to violence. During intermission, the audience watched a recreation of an event members of the Weather Underground had planned to bomb. It was chilling. Director Jess Chayes deftly led her cast to explore the complexities of taking on the injustices of the world when you yourself might through your own strident militancy become part of the problem.
1. Sweeney Todd - While Ernest Shackleton Loves Me and Desperate Measures were massively entertaining, and Julius Caesar and HOME/SICK were deeply disturbing, the Tooting Arts Club production of Sweeney Todd at the Barrow Street Theatre managed to be both. The show is still playing through the end of May, though sadly not with Norm Lewis, who opened this New York production as Sweeney. Fortunately, you can still catch Carolee Carmello as a hilarious and horrifying Mrs. Lovett. The Stephen Sondheim musical has a brilliant score, and you might think a stripped-down version in a reproduction of an actual London pie shop would lose something. Instead, this intimate production allows you to appreciate the music in a deeply personal way. Having the actors literally leap up onto tables right in front of you is shocking, but no more so than some of the acting choices, which remind you of the true trauma some of the characters suffer in this story.
So those are my picks for this year. Honorable mentions go to The Tempest at St. Ann's Warehouse, Everybody at the Signature, and the Metropolitan Opera's production of Fidelio. Hopefully 2018 will be an even better year for theatre in New York City!
Showing posts with label Corneille. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Corneille. Show all posts
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
The Rival Sisters
Arthur Murphy was a successful playwright of the 18th century. He adapted Voltaire's The Orphan of China (itself an adaptation of the Chinese zaju play The Orphan of Zhao) in 1759, and later penned the hit tragedy The Grecian Daughter.
Yet after Murphy wrote The Rival Sisters in 1783, he chose to publish it without having it performed. Murphy knew full well that a good production was often crucial to a play being favorably received. He wrote in the preface to the play that the piece had not received "The pomp of splendid scenery, and the illusions of the skilful performer" without which a play "in the leisure of the closet is not always supported."
In fact, a play being perceived as a closet drama can "excite a prejudice not easy to be surmounted," Murphy wrote. Audiences might well ask: "If it be of any value, why was it not produced in the usual form of a Public Exhibition?" However, he was equally clear that "the Play was written with a view to the Stage." The play is not a closet drama, and Murphy was acutely aware of the stigma that came with such a label.
The Rival Sisters is based on a 1672 play by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of Pierre Corneille, author of The Cid and The Liar. The legendary actress Marie Champmeslé (who later became the muse and mistress of Jean Racine) played the lead in the first production of that play. Murphy seemed highly aware of the fact that if his own play were to succeed on stage, it would require a performer of similar ability. He wrote in his preface: "When this country could, with pride, boast of an Actress equally followed, and perhaps with better reason, it occurred that a Tragedy, with the beauties of the original, but freed from its defects, might, at such a season, be acceptable to the Public."
For whatever reason (and Murphy remains quite coy in his preface), the author decided not to press The Rival Sisters to be performed by some grand British actress. Still, we can guess for whom it might have been intended. Murphy completed the play the year after the stunning appearance of Sarah Siddons at Drury Lane in the role of Isabella in Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage. Siddons, who later that year also starred in Murphy's The Grecian Daughter at Drury Lane, took the theatre world by storm. She likely was the actress Murphy had in mind who might equal the grandeur of Champmeslé.
In fact, Siddons did perform in The Rival Sisters, though not until 1793. A decade after the play's composition, it finally made its premiere. The piece tells the story of Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos in favor of her sister, Phaedra. Interestingly, Ariadne does not even appear until the second act, when she confidently proclaims:
No, from this day, from this auspicious day,
Theseus is mine; the godlike hero's mine.
With ev'ry grace, with ev'ry laurel crown'd,
The lover's softness, and the warrior's fire.
Ariadne trusts her lover and her sister, though both are false. Pathetically, she goes to Phaedra, entreating her help to win back her man from the temptress leading him astray:
You can detect the traitress; guide me to her.
If on this isle—ha!—why that sudden pause?
That downcast eye? why does your colour change?
Oh! now I see you know her: in your looks
I read it all.
Yet Ariadne still does not understand. She thinks Phaedra is concealing her rival, not that her sister actually IS her rival! When the truth becomes known and Theseus sails away with Phaedra, Ariadne starts to go mad, then stabs herself.
In many versions of the myth, Ariadne marries the god Dionysus after her abandonment. Murphy gives us no such consolation, but he does show his heroine rising to a higher plain as she exclaims:
Elysium is before me; let not Theseus
Pursue me thither; in those realms of bliss
Let my departed spirit know some rest.
Oh! let me feel ingratitude no more.
Keep Theseus here in this abode of guilt;
This world is his; let him remain with Phaedra;
Let him be happy; no, the fates forbid it:
They will deceive each other.
And as those who know other plays about Phaedra can tell you, she's right. Theseus and Phaedra will deceive each other, but that's a matter for a different play.
Yet after Murphy wrote The Rival Sisters in 1783, he chose to publish it without having it performed. Murphy knew full well that a good production was often crucial to a play being favorably received. He wrote in the preface to the play that the piece had not received "The pomp of splendid scenery, and the illusions of the skilful performer" without which a play "in the leisure of the closet is not always supported."
In fact, a play being perceived as a closet drama can "excite a prejudice not easy to be surmounted," Murphy wrote. Audiences might well ask: "If it be of any value, why was it not produced in the usual form of a Public Exhibition?" However, he was equally clear that "the Play was written with a view to the Stage." The play is not a closet drama, and Murphy was acutely aware of the stigma that came with such a label.
The Rival Sisters is based on a 1672 play by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of Pierre Corneille, author of The Cid and The Liar. The legendary actress Marie Champmeslé (who later became the muse and mistress of Jean Racine) played the lead in the first production of that play. Murphy seemed highly aware of the fact that if his own play were to succeed on stage, it would require a performer of similar ability. He wrote in his preface: "When this country could, with pride, boast of an Actress equally followed, and perhaps with better reason, it occurred that a Tragedy, with the beauties of the original, but freed from its defects, might, at such a season, be acceptable to the Public."
For whatever reason (and Murphy remains quite coy in his preface), the author decided not to press The Rival Sisters to be performed by some grand British actress. Still, we can guess for whom it might have been intended. Murphy completed the play the year after the stunning appearance of Sarah Siddons at Drury Lane in the role of Isabella in Thomas Southerne's The Fatal Marriage. Siddons, who later that year also starred in Murphy's The Grecian Daughter at Drury Lane, took the theatre world by storm. She likely was the actress Murphy had in mind who might equal the grandeur of Champmeslé.
In fact, Siddons did perform in The Rival Sisters, though not until 1793. A decade after the play's composition, it finally made its premiere. The piece tells the story of Ariadne, abandoned by her lover Theseus on the island of Naxos in favor of her sister, Phaedra. Interestingly, Ariadne does not even appear until the second act, when she confidently proclaims:
No, from this day, from this auspicious day,
Theseus is mine; the godlike hero's mine.
With ev'ry grace, with ev'ry laurel crown'd,
The lover's softness, and the warrior's fire.
Ariadne trusts her lover and her sister, though both are false. Pathetically, she goes to Phaedra, entreating her help to win back her man from the temptress leading him astray:
You can detect the traitress; guide me to her.
If on this isle—ha!—why that sudden pause?
That downcast eye? why does your colour change?
Oh! now I see you know her: in your looks
I read it all.
Yet Ariadne still does not understand. She thinks Phaedra is concealing her rival, not that her sister actually IS her rival! When the truth becomes known and Theseus sails away with Phaedra, Ariadne starts to go mad, then stabs herself.
In many versions of the myth, Ariadne marries the god Dionysus after her abandonment. Murphy gives us no such consolation, but he does show his heroine rising to a higher plain as she exclaims:
Elysium is before me; let not Theseus
Pursue me thither; in those realms of bliss
Let my departed spirit know some rest.
Oh! let me feel ingratitude no more.
Keep Theseus here in this abode of guilt;
This world is his; let him remain with Phaedra;
Let him be happy; no, the fates forbid it:
They will deceive each other.
And as those who know other plays about Phaedra can tell you, she's right. Theseus and Phaedra will deceive each other, but that's a matter for a different play.
Thursday, January 12, 2017
The Liar
Last night, I saw Classic Stage Company's production of The Liar, David Ives's adaptation of Corneille's 17th-century French comedy.
Carson Elrod, a veteran of Ives's work having appeared in Lives of the Saints and other comedies, begins the show with a curtain speech in rhymed iambic pentameter, warning the audience that the whole play will be... in rhymed iambic pentameter. That's not quite true, as at one point, Ives switches to prose, and with quite a lovely effect.
The plot follows the titular character of Dorante, played by Christian Conn. Though he has just arrived in Paris, the compulsive liar tells amazing stories of his extensive adventures there. Encountering a pair of women, Dorante convinces himself he's in love with one of them, though the audience wonders if this, too, is a lie. Ultimately, self-delusion can be one of the greatest dangers of games of deception.
Frequently, the play drops in references to lying politicians. This makes Dorante's pathological lying seem far from harmless. Recent events make Ives's light touch feel incongruous with the times, though few can dispute that the playwright has a wonderful way with wordplay. In spite of brightly colored period costumes, the play makes frequent anachronistic allusions, for instance referencing the Eiffel Tower though it won't be built for hundreds of years. In Ives's hands, these small twists can be rendered hysterically funny.
The stand-out performance in this production comes from Kelly Hutchinson, who was also in last year's The Crucible on Broadway. Playing the double role of the twin sisters Isabelle and Sabine, Hutchinson transforms herself from a bubbly sexpot to a humorless grouch and back again. Watching her switch between the two roles is itself worth the trip to the theater.
This delightful comedy is playing until February 26th. For more information and tickets, visit:
Classic Stage Company
Carson Elrod, a veteran of Ives's work having appeared in Lives of the Saints and other comedies, begins the show with a curtain speech in rhymed iambic pentameter, warning the audience that the whole play will be... in rhymed iambic pentameter. That's not quite true, as at one point, Ives switches to prose, and with quite a lovely effect.
The plot follows the titular character of Dorante, played by Christian Conn. Though he has just arrived in Paris, the compulsive liar tells amazing stories of his extensive adventures there. Encountering a pair of women, Dorante convinces himself he's in love with one of them, though the audience wonders if this, too, is a lie. Ultimately, self-delusion can be one of the greatest dangers of games of deception.
Frequently, the play drops in references to lying politicians. This makes Dorante's pathological lying seem far from harmless. Recent events make Ives's light touch feel incongruous with the times, though few can dispute that the playwright has a wonderful way with wordplay. In spite of brightly colored period costumes, the play makes frequent anachronistic allusions, for instance referencing the Eiffel Tower though it won't be built for hundreds of years. In Ives's hands, these small twists can be rendered hysterically funny.
The stand-out performance in this production comes from Kelly Hutchinson, who was also in last year's The Crucible on Broadway. Playing the double role of the twin sisters Isabelle and Sabine, Hutchinson transforms herself from a bubbly sexpot to a humorless grouch and back again. Watching her switch between the two roles is itself worth the trip to the theater.
This delightful comedy is playing until February 26th. For more information and tickets, visit:
Classic Stage Company
Friday, July 25, 2014
Playwriting in Post-Revolutionary France
What was it like for playwrights during the French Revolution? Though he wasn't born until 1801, the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve gave this account of Revolutionary writers:
When the Revolution came and disturbed these minor literary lives, instead of readings in the salons, one had "Sunday luncheons." For at least fifteen years, at these luncheons, the literary guests exchanged confidences... one told one's friends the subject and plan of one's work before a single line of it was written. No sooner had the first acts been scribbled down than a reading was given.
This rosy depiction of the Revolutionary era appears to be more or less accurate. The Chapelier Law of 1791 had struck down the censorship practices of the old regime, and over the next year the number of theatres in Paris more than doubled. Working-class people flocked to the theatre, and there was a tremendous demand for new work. Sainte-Beuve claimed that the old forms simply did not speak to a public that was living in a new world:
...if we were still living under a monarchy like that of Louis XIV or Louis XV, what more would we require, I ask you, than the admirable emotional analyses of Racine, or the philosophic dramas of Voltaire? Even after the Revolution, during the ten years of the Empire, wasn't the absence of freedom enough to revive, in the context of Austerlitz and Jena, the classical tragedy of the monarchy which, excepting Corneille, was so foreign and incongruous?
Writing in 1828, after France had embraced a constitutional monarchy, Sainte-Beuve saw the present as being closer politically and socially to those heady Revolutionary days. Still, he lamented the fact that the theatre was not as vibrant as it once had been. Politics, he said, had curbed art, since now audiences went to the theatre to escape rather than to debate important political questions. Still, he was optimistic about the future:
Free from the vortex, art, still youthful, yet ripe with experience, will pursue her peaceful work in solitude. This work will be animated with all life's colors and all mankind's passions. This product of leisure and meditation will doubtless encompass and intermingle in thousands of charming and sublime effects the true and the ideal, reason and fantasy, the observation of men and the poet's dreams.
Victor Hugo's breakthrough Romantic drama Hernani was still two years off, but Eugene Scribe had begun writing plays. Sainte-Beuve believed that Scribe's vogue was a good reason for optimism.
When the Revolution came and disturbed these minor literary lives, instead of readings in the salons, one had "Sunday luncheons." For at least fifteen years, at these luncheons, the literary guests exchanged confidences... one told one's friends the subject and plan of one's work before a single line of it was written. No sooner had the first acts been scribbled down than a reading was given.
This rosy depiction of the Revolutionary era appears to be more or less accurate. The Chapelier Law of 1791 had struck down the censorship practices of the old regime, and over the next year the number of theatres in Paris more than doubled. Working-class people flocked to the theatre, and there was a tremendous demand for new work. Sainte-Beuve claimed that the old forms simply did not speak to a public that was living in a new world:
...if we were still living under a monarchy like that of Louis XIV or Louis XV, what more would we require, I ask you, than the admirable emotional analyses of Racine, or the philosophic dramas of Voltaire? Even after the Revolution, during the ten years of the Empire, wasn't the absence of freedom enough to revive, in the context of Austerlitz and Jena, the classical tragedy of the monarchy which, excepting Corneille, was so foreign and incongruous?
Writing in 1828, after France had embraced a constitutional monarchy, Sainte-Beuve saw the present as being closer politically and socially to those heady Revolutionary days. Still, he lamented the fact that the theatre was not as vibrant as it once had been. Politics, he said, had curbed art, since now audiences went to the theatre to escape rather than to debate important political questions. Still, he was optimistic about the future:
Free from the vortex, art, still youthful, yet ripe with experience, will pursue her peaceful work in solitude. This work will be animated with all life's colors and all mankind's passions. This product of leisure and meditation will doubtless encompass and intermingle in thousands of charming and sublime effects the true and the ideal, reason and fantasy, the observation of men and the poet's dreams.
Victor Hugo's breakthrough Romantic drama Hernani was still two years off, but Eugene Scribe had begun writing plays. Sainte-Beuve believed that Scribe's vogue was a good reason for optimism.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Notes on Spain's Golden Age
Early Spanish Drama
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain asserted its power across the globe. It dominated Europe, conquered much of the Americas, and established footholds in Africa and Asia. Spanish literature and the arts flourished, and the theatre in Spain came into its own. Religious dramas grew into elaborate pageants called autos sacramentales that celebrated the sacraments of the Church. Secular drama, influenced by French farces and Italian commedia dell'arte, spread across the peninsula. These plays were frequently performed by traveling troupes that could consist of anything from a single actor reciting stock pieces to refined companies with as many as sixteen actors.
Both men and women acted, though there were fewer actresses on stage, and boys frequently played the lesser female roles. The most famous of these early strolling players was Lope de Rueda, the son of a goldsmith who rose to fame as an actor in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was famous for playing comic characters and also wrote many of his own plays. These works ranged from full-length sweeping dramas to short farces called pasos, for which he was most famous. Popular folk humor was the basis for many of these pasos, including The Olives, a play about a husband and wife arguing over how much to charge for olives that will grow from a newly planted shoot.
One of the many people to see Rueda was Miguel de Cervantes, who later recalled that when he was a boy he had witnessed the great actor perform a play on a simple stage made up of four or five boards on benches with a blanket used as a backdrop. Cervantes later became famous for his novel Don Quixote, but before that, he wrote numerous plays, including the four-act historical drama The Siege of Numantia. The play uses allegorical figures such as War, Hunger, Pestilence, and Fame, as well as historical figures like the Roman general Scipio. There are plenty of opportunities for pageantry, such as a woman representing Spain entering crowned with towers and bearing a castle in her hand. Stage directions also call for complicated special effects, including shooting off rockets to represent lightning and rolling a tub full of stones to create the sound of thunder.
In between the acts of such serious plays, performers often staged interludes called entermeses. Later on in his career, Cervantes published eight of these entermeses. One of the more famous of these, The Vigilant Sentinel, shows the author's ironic stance toward soldiers and chivalric values. In the play, a soldier courts a kitchen maid, chasing away any men who might even possibly be rivals. In spite of his efforts (or perhaps because of them) she rejects his suit and marries instead a sacristan who knows nothing of the arts of war.
The Spanish Stage
The improvised stages of traveling players continued throughout the Golden Age of Spanish drama. However, the larger cities in Spain established permanent playhouses. In 1574, the Italian architect Giovanni Bellini built Spain's first permanent theatre of the period in Seville. Others followed in Cordoba, Valencia, Madrid, and elsewhere. Spanish theatres tended to be built in preexisting courtyards, earning them the name corrales. In the town of Almagro, one of these corrales still exists and is used for theatre even today.
On one side of the corrale was the stage, which had a balcony or balconies for entrances from above. The Siege of Numantia calls for a character to leap from a tower, an effect likely achieved using one of these balconies. Like public theaters in England, these stages had few scenic elements, which allowed actors to travel across miles or years in the space of a few lines. Audience members wishing to be seen could sit on stage for an additional fee, occupying areas to the side of the stage referred to as mountains. At the back of the stage was frequently a discovery space where a curtain could open to reveal additional characters or a new scene.
Directly in front of the stage was an open courtyard known as the patio. Originally men stood in this area, though gradually theatres added benches. Only men were allowed in the patio, and these were the rowdy, lower-class playgoers known as mosqueteros. Frequently, it was the mosqueteros who decided the success or failure of a play, and writers were obliged to please them. If the mosqueteros did not like a play, they hissed and whistled until it could not be heard.
Facing the stage was an elevated gallery for women, who were kept separate from the rough men in the patio. This area, known as the cazuela, or "stew pot," had benches that were frequently fought over by the female playgoers. To sit in the front, where a woman could be easily seen by men, was considered brazen, but it was hard to see from the back rows, so women came early to the theatre to get one of the middle seats. Sometimes, there was another level above the cazuela reserved for dignitaries. Below the cazuela was typically the refreshment stand, or alojeria, which also sent sellers up to the cazuela to hawk snacks.
On either side of the patio were rows of seats rising up at an incline. These were known as the gradas, and an extra charge was required for these seats. Unfortunately, many playgoers felt they were entitled to such seats--and indeed to admission period--without paying. It was a constant struggle to keep order in the gradas as well as the patio. Also, actors did not own the corrales. They were either paid a flat fee or kept only a portion of the admission charge, so freeloaders could cut painfully into the income of performers.
Above the gradas were boxes known as aposentos. These originally connected to the houses on either side of the courtyard in which the corrale was built. They sometimes had private entrances through the houses, which led to complex arrangements with the homeowners, who typically took a cut of the admission for these seats. The aposentos were the only places where women and men could sit together, but a respectable woman would only go to the theatre in the company of family members. The top levels of aposentos were sometimes called attics, or desvanes.
Originally, theatres only performed plays on Sundays and during religious festivals, but beginning in 1579 authorities began making exceptions. Performances were not allowed at all during Lent, however, or during periods of national mourning. The corrales had to shut down for the hottest part of the summer, and they were closed as a matter of course during plagues or wars. This meant they could remain open fewer than 200 days out of the year. Since the corrales were open to the sky, rain could also spoil a performance.
Lope de Vega
The one man who shaped Spanish Golden Age drama more than anyone else was the playwright Lope de Vega. Born in Madrid in 1562, he came to write literally hundreds of plays and became so famous that most critics are now on a first-name basis with him, referring to him simply as Lope. Lope studied at the University of Alcala, but never completed his degree. He became a soldier and fought in numerous military expeditions, including the ill-fated Spanish Armada that launched in 1588 to invade England. Lope's ship was one of the few to make it back to Spain, an example of his prodigious good luck, which got him out of numerous scrapes and close calls throughout his life.
Before Lope's time, Spanish plays had any number of acts. Lope, however, found that three acts worked best for him. Once he established three acts as the standard for himself, both his tremendous skill and incredible output led other Spanish writers to adopt the three-act form as well. He specialized is so-called cape and sword dramas, which valued swashbuckling action and ingenious plot twists over complex characterizations or overly decorous poetry. This led many critics to attack his plays, frequently citing his failure to follow neoclassical rules.
In response, Lope published The New Art of Writing Plays for Our Time in 1609. Written in verse, this defense of free and inventive playwriting imitates the informal style of Horace's Ars Poetica. Though Lope apologizes for breaking neoclassical rules, he slyly counters that had he followed those rules his plays would not have been nearly so popular. While abasing himself before classical scholars, he also throws in jabs about how he actually has experience writing plays, and very successful ones at that. Anyone who does not like his plays need not come see them, he notes.
The New Art also gives a great deal of practical advice about playwriting. It recommends writing each act on no more than four sheets of paper, as any more would test the patience of the audience. Rather than condemning the entire play to take place in a single day, the poem recommends confining each act to a single day. The first act should set out the matter of the play, and the second act should weave together events, but only in such a manner that the audience will not be able to guess the outcome. Only in the final scene should the play's ending become apparent.
Unlike English drama, which settled upon blank verse as the standard poetic form for writing plays, Spanish Golden Age drama was written in a variety of styles. In fact, the verse form typically changed throughout a single play. The New Art suggests fitting the verse form to the mood of each scene. For instance, complaining characters should use ten-line stanzas called decimas. A character waiting in anticipation might speak in a sonnet, while grave matter might be related in three-line tercets.
One of Lope's most famous plays is Fuenteovejuna. The play is inspired by actual events in the town of Fuenteovejuna, whose name roughly translates to "The Sheep's Well." A sadistic commander torments the town, raping and torturing villagers with impunity. Eventually, a group of villagers kill the commander, and the king orders that the murderers be punished. Even under torture, however, the villagers refuse to name names, calling out only, "Fuenteovejuna did it!" Lope depicted an even more famous event from Spanish history in The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus.
Another play, The Dog in the Manger (or The Gardener's Dog), plays off of an old fable about a dog who will not eat hay but refuses to let others eat it, either. In the play, a noble woman falls in love with her secretary. While she does not want to marry him, she prevents him from marrying anyone else until a wily servant tricks everyone into thinking the secretary is the long-lost son of a noble. Lope created a darker outcome for The Knight of Olmedo, the story of a virtuous gentlemen who beats all of his rivals to win the heart of a lady in Medina. Out of revenge, the spurned lovers shoot and kill him as he is riding back to Olmedo.
Lope's reputation was beginning to fade when at the age of 68 he wrote the play Justice Without Revenge (sometimes titled in English Lost in a Mirror). At the time he wrote it, his daughter Marcela had already gone mad and was in the process of slowly dying. Though honor prevails in the play, it is at a great price, and the dark, passionate drama won new respect for Lope. Justice Without Revenge has many parallels with Jacobean revenge tragedy, and in fact Lope wrote his own version of the events depicted in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. In Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, however, the mood tends to be pastoral until the play's bloody final act.
Lope's Contemporaries
Though Lope dominated the stage during his lifetime, Spain's Golden Age produced a number of other important plays and playwrights. The author Guillen de Castro transformed the epic Spanish poem The Cid into the play The Youthful Deeds of the Cid, which came in turn to inspire the French playwright Pierre Corneille. Castro also wrote plays based on classical mythology as well as some inspired by the prose of Cervantes. Lope dedicated one of his plays to him, and he dedicated the first volume of his plays to Lope's daughter. Unfortunately, Castro was not as successful as his friend, and he died in poverty.
The friar Gabriel Tellez, better known by his pseudonym Tirso de Molina, wrote a number of popular plays around the same time as Lope. His most famous work, The Trickster of Seville, introduced to literature the character of Don Juan, a charismatic womanizer who devotes his life to seducing women. In the play, Don Juan kills the father of a young woman he has seduced and later invites the dead man to supper. When the father does show up, Don Juan is dragged off to hell without the chance of repenting of his sins. Playwrights from Moliere to George Bernard Shaw to David Ives have retold the classic story, though often lending it very different interpretations.
The Mexican-born Juan Ruis de Alarcon churned out about 25 of plays, including The Suspicious Truth, about a compulsive liar. Like Castro, Alarcon later influenced Corneille. He was a friend of Cervantes, but won the enmity of Lope, who lampooned him. A short, hunchbacked redhead, Alarcon stood out in Spanish society. Eventually, however, he was appointed to the Royal Council of the Indies and achieved relative stability through his position in government.
By far the most important of Lope's contemporaries was Pedro Calderon de la Barca. By the time Calderon was born in 1600, Lope had already established himself as a playwright, so while the two were contemporaries, Calderon came from a very different generation. While Lope developed Spanish drama from its rough-and-tumble origins to the form it would take throughout the Golden Age, it was Calderon who refined it and brought out its poetry. Lope was the more influential writer, but most critics today consider Calderon to be the better dramatists. In fact, when Lope died in 1635, the young Calderon had already surpassed him in reputation.
Calderon
Like Lope, Calderon was born in Madrid. He was fortunate enough to receive a Jesuit education, but after his father died, Calderon was orphaned at the age of 15. He later studied law at the University of Salamanca. In 1622, he entered a poetry competition in honor of Saint Isidore, who was in the process of being canonized. Not only did Calderon's poetry win first place, it was specifically praised by Lope, who was one of the judges in the competition.
Shortly after that, Calderon's plays began appearing in the corrales. One early play, The Constant Prince, tells the story of the historical Prince Ferdinand of Portugal, who died imprisoned in Morocco due to Portugal's decision not to hand over the city of Ceuta to Muslim forces. The play is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of many Muslim characters, even though Christian forces are ultimately victorious. The role of Ferdinand is demanding, both emotionally and physically, as the young prince is systematically (and willingly) tortured to death. In the twentieth century, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski used the play to create one of his most famous productions.
In 1635, Calderon wrote his most famous play Life Is a Dream. The play follows the fictional Segismundo, the heir to the throne of Poland. Sigismundo's father, King Basilio, imprisoned the prince due to a prophesy he would bring disaster to the country. Having a change of heart, the king tests Segismundo, bringing him to the palace, but when the prince behaves abominably, King Basilio has him drugged and brought back to his cell where he is told the whole experience was a dream. In the third act, Calderon introduces new plot twists that leave a reformed Segismundo wondering whether all life might indeed be but a dream.
Though most critics consider Life Is a Dream to be Calderon's masterpiece, he continued to produce exceptional works for years afterward. His play The Mighty Magician influenced Goethe's Faust. In such dark plays as The Doctor of His Own Honor Calderon drew out traditions of honor in Spanish society to fantastic and chilling extremes. In 1651, Calderon became a priest. That same year, he wrote The Mayor of Zalamea, one of his last great secular plays.
After taking Holy Orders, Calderon focused on writing explicitly religious plays, the autos sacramentales for Corpus Christi and other religious feasts. However, the king asked him to write entertainments for the court, and Calderon could scarcely refuse. Teaming up with the composer Juan Hidalgo de Polanco, Calderon helped to create a new operatic form for the king, the zarzuela. These pieces are partially spoken and partially sung. Today, the zarzuela remains a popular dramatic form in Spain and many Spanish-speaking countries.
Autos Sacramentales
Autos sacramentales during the Golden Age of Spain could take many forms. Some told biblical stories, like mystery plays. Others recounted miracles or the lives of saints, like miracle plays. Most frequently, however, they contained allegorical figures similar to those found in morality plays. In any case, the finest dramatists available, including both Lope and Calderon, were chosen to write the plays.
Though older plays were sometimes revived, from 1647 to 1681 all of the autos sacramentales performed in Madrid were new works commissioned especially from Calderon. In fact, when Calderon died in 1681, he was writing one of the auto sacramentales for that year's Corpus Christi celebration. Of Calderon's many plays of this type, the most famous is The Great Theatre of the World. The play portrays God as a theatre director who casts individuals as King, Female Beauty, Rich Man, Poor Man, Worker, Discretion, and Unborn Child. God asks each to act his or her part as well as possible then sends them each to a final judgment.
The actors for these plays processed through the streets on two-story wagons called carros. There were usually two carros for each play, and actors would descend onto an acting area for the performance. The acting areas were originally also on wagons, though they were later replaced by fixed stages in various parts of the city. In addition to performing the autos sacramentales, actors danced and sometimes put on short farces, much to the dismay of religious conservatives. In 1765, the government officially banned the plays.
New World Performance
As Spain's culture spread throughout its empire, Spanish theatre spread as well. In the Americas, Spanish theatre blended together with indigenous theatrical practices. In Guatemala, the theatrical dance known as the Rabinal Achi became associated with the Feast of Saint Paul on January 25. Also known as The Dance of the Trumpets, it is still performed annually in the town of Rabinal on that day. The dialogue of the play is in Mayan, and the story recounts events prior to the conquest by Spain. Still, the fact that it came to be associated with a Christian religious holiday shows that there were attempts to bring together Spanish and indigenous cultures.
Given that indigenous Americans often already had theatrical traditions, many Christian missionaries found theatre to be an effective tool for evangelization. Beginning in the 1530s, the Spanish began performing their own plays in the Americas. These performances were usually religious in nature and frequently occurred on feasts such as Corpus Christi, as they did in Spain. The first great Spanish playwright to be born in the Americas was Juana Ines de la Cruz, a highly educated nun generally known as Sor Juana. Born in present-day Mexico, Sor Juana wrote both secular and religious plays and is considered the founder of Latin American drama.
The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Mexican woman of Spanish descent, Sor Juana learned to read and write Spanish at an early age. By the time she was a teenager, she knew Latin and Greek as well. She joined the court of the viceroy of New Spain, but in spite of receiving numerous marriage proposals there, she chose instead to enter a convent. Finding the rules in that convent did not agree with her, Sor Juana left after a few months, but in 1669 she entered another convent run by the Order of St. Jerome, where she remained until her death. It was there that she composed her best-known works, including most of her plays.
Sor Juana wrote (or at least collaborated on) some secular plays, but more critics have been drawn to her autos sacramentales. The most famous of her religious plays is The Divine Narcissus, a complex allegory of faith. The play contains a short introductory piece called a loa. In her loa to The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana portrays the conquest of the New World in allegorical terms. Occident and America are shown worshipping the God of Seeds, but are overcome by Religion and Zeal. Though Zeal wishes to slay America, Religion promises to convert the pagans by means of the play that follows.
The loa to The Divine Narcissus shows just how ambitious a writer Sor Juana was. Unfortunately, her plays were mostly forgotten before the twentieth-century poet Octavio Paz brought renewed attention to Sor Juana's work. Today, however, historians credit Sor Juana with laying the foundations of all Latin American drama that was to come. The roots of drama in the Americas extend back much further than the nineteenth-century, as past historians might have us believe. Instead, the Golden Age of Spain quite clearly extended to the Western Hemisphere, having a lasting impact on the other side of the globe.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, Spain asserted its power across the globe. It dominated Europe, conquered much of the Americas, and established footholds in Africa and Asia. Spanish literature and the arts flourished, and the theatre in Spain came into its own. Religious dramas grew into elaborate pageants called autos sacramentales that celebrated the sacraments of the Church. Secular drama, influenced by French farces and Italian commedia dell'arte, spread across the peninsula. These plays were frequently performed by traveling troupes that could consist of anything from a single actor reciting stock pieces to refined companies with as many as sixteen actors.
Both men and women acted, though there were fewer actresses on stage, and boys frequently played the lesser female roles. The most famous of these early strolling players was Lope de Rueda, the son of a goldsmith who rose to fame as an actor in the middle of the sixteenth century. He was famous for playing comic characters and also wrote many of his own plays. These works ranged from full-length sweeping dramas to short farces called pasos, for which he was most famous. Popular folk humor was the basis for many of these pasos, including The Olives, a play about a husband and wife arguing over how much to charge for olives that will grow from a newly planted shoot.
One of the many people to see Rueda was Miguel de Cervantes, who later recalled that when he was a boy he had witnessed the great actor perform a play on a simple stage made up of four or five boards on benches with a blanket used as a backdrop. Cervantes later became famous for his novel Don Quixote, but before that, he wrote numerous plays, including the four-act historical drama The Siege of Numantia. The play uses allegorical figures such as War, Hunger, Pestilence, and Fame, as well as historical figures like the Roman general Scipio. There are plenty of opportunities for pageantry, such as a woman representing Spain entering crowned with towers and bearing a castle in her hand. Stage directions also call for complicated special effects, including shooting off rockets to represent lightning and rolling a tub full of stones to create the sound of thunder.
In between the acts of such serious plays, performers often staged interludes called entermeses. Later on in his career, Cervantes published eight of these entermeses. One of the more famous of these, The Vigilant Sentinel, shows the author's ironic stance toward soldiers and chivalric values. In the play, a soldier courts a kitchen maid, chasing away any men who might even possibly be rivals. In spite of his efforts (or perhaps because of them) she rejects his suit and marries instead a sacristan who knows nothing of the arts of war.
The Spanish Stage
The improvised stages of traveling players continued throughout the Golden Age of Spanish drama. However, the larger cities in Spain established permanent playhouses. In 1574, the Italian architect Giovanni Bellini built Spain's first permanent theatre of the period in Seville. Others followed in Cordoba, Valencia, Madrid, and elsewhere. Spanish theatres tended to be built in preexisting courtyards, earning them the name corrales. In the town of Almagro, one of these corrales still exists and is used for theatre even today.
On one side of the corrale was the stage, which had a balcony or balconies for entrances from above. The Siege of Numantia calls for a character to leap from a tower, an effect likely achieved using one of these balconies. Like public theaters in England, these stages had few scenic elements, which allowed actors to travel across miles or years in the space of a few lines. Audience members wishing to be seen could sit on stage for an additional fee, occupying areas to the side of the stage referred to as mountains. At the back of the stage was frequently a discovery space where a curtain could open to reveal additional characters or a new scene.
Directly in front of the stage was an open courtyard known as the patio. Originally men stood in this area, though gradually theatres added benches. Only men were allowed in the patio, and these were the rowdy, lower-class playgoers known as mosqueteros. Frequently, it was the mosqueteros who decided the success or failure of a play, and writers were obliged to please them. If the mosqueteros did not like a play, they hissed and whistled until it could not be heard.
Facing the stage was an elevated gallery for women, who were kept separate from the rough men in the patio. This area, known as the cazuela, or "stew pot," had benches that were frequently fought over by the female playgoers. To sit in the front, where a woman could be easily seen by men, was considered brazen, but it was hard to see from the back rows, so women came early to the theatre to get one of the middle seats. Sometimes, there was another level above the cazuela reserved for dignitaries. Below the cazuela was typically the refreshment stand, or alojeria, which also sent sellers up to the cazuela to hawk snacks.
On either side of the patio were rows of seats rising up at an incline. These were known as the gradas, and an extra charge was required for these seats. Unfortunately, many playgoers felt they were entitled to such seats--and indeed to admission period--without paying. It was a constant struggle to keep order in the gradas as well as the patio. Also, actors did not own the corrales. They were either paid a flat fee or kept only a portion of the admission charge, so freeloaders could cut painfully into the income of performers.
Above the gradas were boxes known as aposentos. These originally connected to the houses on either side of the courtyard in which the corrale was built. They sometimes had private entrances through the houses, which led to complex arrangements with the homeowners, who typically took a cut of the admission for these seats. The aposentos were the only places where women and men could sit together, but a respectable woman would only go to the theatre in the company of family members. The top levels of aposentos were sometimes called attics, or desvanes.
Originally, theatres only performed plays on Sundays and during religious festivals, but beginning in 1579 authorities began making exceptions. Performances were not allowed at all during Lent, however, or during periods of national mourning. The corrales had to shut down for the hottest part of the summer, and they were closed as a matter of course during plagues or wars. This meant they could remain open fewer than 200 days out of the year. Since the corrales were open to the sky, rain could also spoil a performance.
Lope de Vega
The one man who shaped Spanish Golden Age drama more than anyone else was the playwright Lope de Vega. Born in Madrid in 1562, he came to write literally hundreds of plays and became so famous that most critics are now on a first-name basis with him, referring to him simply as Lope. Lope studied at the University of Alcala, but never completed his degree. He became a soldier and fought in numerous military expeditions, including the ill-fated Spanish Armada that launched in 1588 to invade England. Lope's ship was one of the few to make it back to Spain, an example of his prodigious good luck, which got him out of numerous scrapes and close calls throughout his life.
Before Lope's time, Spanish plays had any number of acts. Lope, however, found that three acts worked best for him. Once he established three acts as the standard for himself, both his tremendous skill and incredible output led other Spanish writers to adopt the three-act form as well. He specialized is so-called cape and sword dramas, which valued swashbuckling action and ingenious plot twists over complex characterizations or overly decorous poetry. This led many critics to attack his plays, frequently citing his failure to follow neoclassical rules.
In response, Lope published The New Art of Writing Plays for Our Time in 1609. Written in verse, this defense of free and inventive playwriting imitates the informal style of Horace's Ars Poetica. Though Lope apologizes for breaking neoclassical rules, he slyly counters that had he followed those rules his plays would not have been nearly so popular. While abasing himself before classical scholars, he also throws in jabs about how he actually has experience writing plays, and very successful ones at that. Anyone who does not like his plays need not come see them, he notes.
The New Art also gives a great deal of practical advice about playwriting. It recommends writing each act on no more than four sheets of paper, as any more would test the patience of the audience. Rather than condemning the entire play to take place in a single day, the poem recommends confining each act to a single day. The first act should set out the matter of the play, and the second act should weave together events, but only in such a manner that the audience will not be able to guess the outcome. Only in the final scene should the play's ending become apparent.
Unlike English drama, which settled upon blank verse as the standard poetic form for writing plays, Spanish Golden Age drama was written in a variety of styles. In fact, the verse form typically changed throughout a single play. The New Art suggests fitting the verse form to the mood of each scene. For instance, complaining characters should use ten-line stanzas called decimas. A character waiting in anticipation might speak in a sonnet, while grave matter might be related in three-line tercets.
One of Lope's most famous plays is Fuenteovejuna. The play is inspired by actual events in the town of Fuenteovejuna, whose name roughly translates to "The Sheep's Well." A sadistic commander torments the town, raping and torturing villagers with impunity. Eventually, a group of villagers kill the commander, and the king orders that the murderers be punished. Even under torture, however, the villagers refuse to name names, calling out only, "Fuenteovejuna did it!" Lope depicted an even more famous event from Spanish history in The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus.
Another play, The Dog in the Manger (or The Gardener's Dog), plays off of an old fable about a dog who will not eat hay but refuses to let others eat it, either. In the play, a noble woman falls in love with her secretary. While she does not want to marry him, she prevents him from marrying anyone else until a wily servant tricks everyone into thinking the secretary is the long-lost son of a noble. Lope created a darker outcome for The Knight of Olmedo, the story of a virtuous gentlemen who beats all of his rivals to win the heart of a lady in Medina. Out of revenge, the spurned lovers shoot and kill him as he is riding back to Olmedo.
Lope's reputation was beginning to fade when at the age of 68 he wrote the play Justice Without Revenge (sometimes titled in English Lost in a Mirror). At the time he wrote it, his daughter Marcela had already gone mad and was in the process of slowly dying. Though honor prevails in the play, it is at a great price, and the dark, passionate drama won new respect for Lope. Justice Without Revenge has many parallels with Jacobean revenge tragedy, and in fact Lope wrote his own version of the events depicted in Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. In Lope's The Duchess of Amalfi's Steward, however, the mood tends to be pastoral until the play's bloody final act.
Lope's Contemporaries
Though Lope dominated the stage during his lifetime, Spain's Golden Age produced a number of other important plays and playwrights. The author Guillen de Castro transformed the epic Spanish poem The Cid into the play The Youthful Deeds of the Cid, which came in turn to inspire the French playwright Pierre Corneille. Castro also wrote plays based on classical mythology as well as some inspired by the prose of Cervantes. Lope dedicated one of his plays to him, and he dedicated the first volume of his plays to Lope's daughter. Unfortunately, Castro was not as successful as his friend, and he died in poverty.
The friar Gabriel Tellez, better known by his pseudonym Tirso de Molina, wrote a number of popular plays around the same time as Lope. His most famous work, The Trickster of Seville, introduced to literature the character of Don Juan, a charismatic womanizer who devotes his life to seducing women. In the play, Don Juan kills the father of a young woman he has seduced and later invites the dead man to supper. When the father does show up, Don Juan is dragged off to hell without the chance of repenting of his sins. Playwrights from Moliere to George Bernard Shaw to David Ives have retold the classic story, though often lending it very different interpretations.
The Mexican-born Juan Ruis de Alarcon churned out about 25 of plays, including The Suspicious Truth, about a compulsive liar. Like Castro, Alarcon later influenced Corneille. He was a friend of Cervantes, but won the enmity of Lope, who lampooned him. A short, hunchbacked redhead, Alarcon stood out in Spanish society. Eventually, however, he was appointed to the Royal Council of the Indies and achieved relative stability through his position in government.
By far the most important of Lope's contemporaries was Pedro Calderon de la Barca. By the time Calderon was born in 1600, Lope had already established himself as a playwright, so while the two were contemporaries, Calderon came from a very different generation. While Lope developed Spanish drama from its rough-and-tumble origins to the form it would take throughout the Golden Age, it was Calderon who refined it and brought out its poetry. Lope was the more influential writer, but most critics today consider Calderon to be the better dramatists. In fact, when Lope died in 1635, the young Calderon had already surpassed him in reputation.
Calderon
Like Lope, Calderon was born in Madrid. He was fortunate enough to receive a Jesuit education, but after his father died, Calderon was orphaned at the age of 15. He later studied law at the University of Salamanca. In 1622, he entered a poetry competition in honor of Saint Isidore, who was in the process of being canonized. Not only did Calderon's poetry win first place, it was specifically praised by Lope, who was one of the judges in the competition.
Shortly after that, Calderon's plays began appearing in the corrales. One early play, The Constant Prince, tells the story of the historical Prince Ferdinand of Portugal, who died imprisoned in Morocco due to Portugal's decision not to hand over the city of Ceuta to Muslim forces. The play is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of many Muslim characters, even though Christian forces are ultimately victorious. The role of Ferdinand is demanding, both emotionally and physically, as the young prince is systematically (and willingly) tortured to death. In the twentieth century, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski used the play to create one of his most famous productions.
In 1635, Calderon wrote his most famous play Life Is a Dream. The play follows the fictional Segismundo, the heir to the throne of Poland. Sigismundo's father, King Basilio, imprisoned the prince due to a prophesy he would bring disaster to the country. Having a change of heart, the king tests Segismundo, bringing him to the palace, but when the prince behaves abominably, King Basilio has him drugged and brought back to his cell where he is told the whole experience was a dream. In the third act, Calderon introduces new plot twists that leave a reformed Segismundo wondering whether all life might indeed be but a dream.
Though most critics consider Life Is a Dream to be Calderon's masterpiece, he continued to produce exceptional works for years afterward. His play The Mighty Magician influenced Goethe's Faust. In such dark plays as The Doctor of His Own Honor Calderon drew out traditions of honor in Spanish society to fantastic and chilling extremes. In 1651, Calderon became a priest. That same year, he wrote The Mayor of Zalamea, one of his last great secular plays.
After taking Holy Orders, Calderon focused on writing explicitly religious plays, the autos sacramentales for Corpus Christi and other religious feasts. However, the king asked him to write entertainments for the court, and Calderon could scarcely refuse. Teaming up with the composer Juan Hidalgo de Polanco, Calderon helped to create a new operatic form for the king, the zarzuela. These pieces are partially spoken and partially sung. Today, the zarzuela remains a popular dramatic form in Spain and many Spanish-speaking countries.
Autos Sacramentales
Autos sacramentales during the Golden Age of Spain could take many forms. Some told biblical stories, like mystery plays. Others recounted miracles or the lives of saints, like miracle plays. Most frequently, however, they contained allegorical figures similar to those found in morality plays. In any case, the finest dramatists available, including both Lope and Calderon, were chosen to write the plays.
Though older plays were sometimes revived, from 1647 to 1681 all of the autos sacramentales performed in Madrid were new works commissioned especially from Calderon. In fact, when Calderon died in 1681, he was writing one of the auto sacramentales for that year's Corpus Christi celebration. Of Calderon's many plays of this type, the most famous is The Great Theatre of the World. The play portrays God as a theatre director who casts individuals as King, Female Beauty, Rich Man, Poor Man, Worker, Discretion, and Unborn Child. God asks each to act his or her part as well as possible then sends them each to a final judgment.
The actors for these plays processed through the streets on two-story wagons called carros. There were usually two carros for each play, and actors would descend onto an acting area for the performance. The acting areas were originally also on wagons, though they were later replaced by fixed stages in various parts of the city. In addition to performing the autos sacramentales, actors danced and sometimes put on short farces, much to the dismay of religious conservatives. In 1765, the government officially banned the plays.
New World Performance
As Spain's culture spread throughout its empire, Spanish theatre spread as well. In the Americas, Spanish theatre blended together with indigenous theatrical practices. In Guatemala, the theatrical dance known as the Rabinal Achi became associated with the Feast of Saint Paul on January 25. Also known as The Dance of the Trumpets, it is still performed annually in the town of Rabinal on that day. The dialogue of the play is in Mayan, and the story recounts events prior to the conquest by Spain. Still, the fact that it came to be associated with a Christian religious holiday shows that there were attempts to bring together Spanish and indigenous cultures.
Given that indigenous Americans often already had theatrical traditions, many Christian missionaries found theatre to be an effective tool for evangelization. Beginning in the 1530s, the Spanish began performing their own plays in the Americas. These performances were usually religious in nature and frequently occurred on feasts such as Corpus Christi, as they did in Spain. The first great Spanish playwright to be born in the Americas was Juana Ines de la Cruz, a highly educated nun generally known as Sor Juana. Born in present-day Mexico, Sor Juana wrote both secular and religious plays and is considered the founder of Latin American drama.
The illegitimate daughter of a Spanish captain and a Mexican woman of Spanish descent, Sor Juana learned to read and write Spanish at an early age. By the time she was a teenager, she knew Latin and Greek as well. She joined the court of the viceroy of New Spain, but in spite of receiving numerous marriage proposals there, she chose instead to enter a convent. Finding the rules in that convent did not agree with her, Sor Juana left after a few months, but in 1669 she entered another convent run by the Order of St. Jerome, where she remained until her death. It was there that she composed her best-known works, including most of her plays.
Sor Juana wrote (or at least collaborated on) some secular plays, but more critics have been drawn to her autos sacramentales. The most famous of her religious plays is The Divine Narcissus, a complex allegory of faith. The play contains a short introductory piece called a loa. In her loa to The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana portrays the conquest of the New World in allegorical terms. Occident and America are shown worshipping the God of Seeds, but are overcome by Religion and Zeal. Though Zeal wishes to slay America, Religion promises to convert the pagans by means of the play that follows.
The loa to The Divine Narcissus shows just how ambitious a writer Sor Juana was. Unfortunately, her plays were mostly forgotten before the twentieth-century poet Octavio Paz brought renewed attention to Sor Juana's work. Today, however, historians credit Sor Juana with laying the foundations of all Latin American drama that was to come. The roots of drama in the Americas extend back much further than the nineteenth-century, as past historians might have us believe. Instead, the Golden Age of Spain quite clearly extended to the Western Hemisphere, having a lasting impact on the other side of the globe.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Thoughts on Corneille
By the time Cardinal Richelieu chartered the French Academy, Pierre Corneille had already become a successful playwright. His first play, the comedy Melite, was a success when it was performed in 1629. Corneille continued to churn out a series of plays, mostly comedies, for several years. Most notable was The Theatrical Illusion, a meta-theatrical comedy in which a man seeks out the aid of a magician to find his lost son. In a series of illusions, the magician shows the man scenes from his son's life. The scenes become increasingly disturbing to the man until he finds out that his son is actually an actor and the scenes he has been watching come from plays. In the twentieth century, Tony Kushner successfully adapted the play as The Illusion.
In 1636, Corneille began working on a new play, The Cid, based on a legendary figure from medieval Spain. His immediate source was a Spanish play that did not conform to the unities of time and place that had become increasingly important for the French stage. Undaunted, Corneille compressed events that took place across Spain over a period of years into a single town in a single day. The play features duels, invading armies, and star-crossed lovers. Confined within strict neoclassical rules, the play virtually bursts at the seams. At the end, the play's heroine Chimene agrees to marry the hero in spite of the fact that he killed her father in a dual earlier that day. Audiences were thrilled, but critics were not amused.
Attacks on The Cid were so virulent that it became a national issue. Seeing a chance to use his new Academy to assert central authority, Richelieu asked the scholars he had chartered to give a definitive ruling on the merits of the play. Corneille agreed. The Academy gave its ruling in 1638, and the results were devastating.
The Academy gave Corneille credit for at least nominally adhering to the unities of time and place, but it attacked him for choosing a subject in which he could not plausibly comply with those unities. The ruling found that The Cid contained no true unity of action. Even worse, it impugned not only the play's believability, but also its morality in having Chimene marry the hero on the same day he had killed her father. Playwrights should make dramas compatible with the rules of decorum, even if it is at the expense of historical truth, the Academy found.
In some ways, what the Academy decided was not as important as the fact that it had ruled at all. In France, a government-chartered society was now responsible for deciding the artistic merits of a work of drama. This went far beyond censoring politically and religiously offensive plays, which happened everywhere. This was a challenge to the very notion that a writer knew what was best for his own play. The fact that The Cid was a hit with audiences didn't matter. The Academy had spoken, and the French establishment would now hold the play in contempt no matter how loud the applause might be in the theatre.
After his humiliation by the Academy, Corneille abandoned drama for a while, but in 1640 he wrote two classical dramas, Horace and Cinna, both of which conformed to the neoclassical rules espoused by the Academy. Though not as exciting as The Cid, these plays still managed to contain the tremendous passion and dramatic reversals characteristic of Corneille. In Cinna, for instance, conspirators plotting the assassination of Emperor Augustus constantly shift tactics and radically alter their rhetoric, keeping the play interesting in spite of the fact that there is little on-stage action. Though Corneille called the play a tragedy, a nearly unbelievable clemency from Augustus resolves the play happily, making Cinna, like The Cid, more of a tragicomedy.
Corneille continued to write dramas off and on into the 1670s. One notable play, the tragedy Polyeucte, which premiered in 1643, tells the story of an early Christian martyr whose death inspires his pagan wife and father-in-law to convert to Christianity. Two years later saw the first performance of Rodogune, a tragedy set in the Hellenistic period. Rodogune maintains the unities so precious to the Academy, but lays bare adulteries, poisonings, and Machiavellian political maneuverings. It culminates in a terrifying mother bringing down curses upon her one remaining son. This time, the academy did not reproach Corneille for his lack of decorum. He had proven he could play by the rules, and his tragedies would now be accepted.
In 1647, the Academy elected Corneille to join them, a final mark of his acceptance by the establishment. Corneille's younger brother Thomas also wrote numerous plays and became one of the most successful playwrights of the 1670s. After the elder Corneille died in 1684, the Academy selected Thomas Corneille to take his brother's seat on what was now the greatest artistic fraternity in Europe.
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