Federico García Lorca was born on 5 June 1898 in the village of Fuentevaqueros, near Granada, the eldest of the four children of Don Federico García Rodríguez and Doña Vicenta Lorca Romero. His father, a prosperous farmer, was a strong and active man who in later years would accept only reluctantly his eldest son’s dedication to poetry and theatre. Doña Vicenta, on the other hand, was a former schoolteacher whose interest in Federico’s early education proved to be crucial, for the fever which struck the boy down at two months affected his early attendance at school. Crucial too in relation to his development as a writer was his childhood contact with the Andalusian countryside, its people and its customs, all of which were an endless source of fascination to him. From his mother and the household servants he became familiar with the songs and stories of southern Spain that colour so strongly his poems and plays. His theatrical interest was stimulated too by the gift of a toy theatre. Surrounded by family, servants and local children, he presented entertainments of his own devising, manipulated the puppet figures, designed the costumes and controlled the whole performance in a way that already anticipated his future role as dramatist-director.
The family move to Granada itself in 1909, when Federico was eleven, was important in many ways. This fascinating city, distinguished by its exotic mixture of Arabic, Greco-Roman and gypsy tradition and boasting amongst its architectural delights the Palace of the Alhambra, became in a sense Lorca’s real birthplace and would occupy a central position in all his mature work. In addition, Granada was a city of culture, especially of music, and it allowed Lorca, under the guidance of Don Antonio Segura, to develop and display to a wider public his considerable talent as a pianist. An important consequence of this was an initial contact with the increasingly famous composer, Manuel de Falla, which led eventually to lasting friendship, a mutual interest in traditional Spanish music, and collaboration in the presentation of some of Lorca’s puppet plays. Furthermore, Granada contained many other highly talented people who would influence the young man in different ways: Fernando de los Rios, Professor of Political Law at the University, was one of the most distinguished humanists and scholars of the day; Martín Domínguez Berrueta, Professor of Art Theory, encouraged the writing of Lorca’s first book, Impressions and Landscapes, published in 1918; Juan Cristóbal was a talented sculptor; Angel Barrios and Andrés Segovia were brilliant guitarists; José Fernández Montesinos was a well-known literary critic, and José Mora Guarnido a successful journalist. At the same time Granada received amongst its foreign visitors writers and musicians as famous as H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Wanda Landowska and Arthur Rubenstein. It was little wonder that the teenage Lorca should be inspired by such talent, and he was clearly further stimulated by the regular literary meetings that took place at the Café Alameda where many of Granada’s ‘bohemian’ set discussed their current plans and projects. On the other hand, this was a time in which Lorca’s awareness of his homosexual tendencies fostered in him a sense of frustration and isolation – very evident in Book of Poems (1921) – and when others too became conscious of that aspect of his character to which a predominantly ‘macho’ society would react with hostility and horror. Significantly, his brother Francisco omitted all reference to Federico’s homosexuality in his important book, Federico and his World, published as recently as 1980.
In April 1919 Lorca left Granada for Madrid where he entered the Residence for Students, an academic institution of great prestige modelled on the Oxbridge college system and founded nine years previously. When Lorca arrived, Luis Buñuel had already been at the Residence for two years and they soon became close friends, and 1922 saw the arrival of Salvador Dali. The names are sufficient to conjure up an impression of the excitement, intellectual stimulus and creative energy with which the Residence abounded in those days, and there were others, too, connected in one way or another with the building: the poets Emilio Prados and Rafael Alberti; the musicians Ernesto Hallfter and Gustavo Durán; the writers José Bergamín and Rafael Martínez Nadal, and frequent foreign visitors such as François Mauriac and Igor Stravinsky. Needless to say, the various ‘isms’ of that time, from Dadaism to Surrealism, were debated with enthusiasm, the writings of Freud were seized upon by eager minds, and the creative writers and artists of the Residence, often neglecting their formal studies, threw themselves with abandon into their own projects. Lorca was to remain there for ten years and produce much of his best work, especially poetry.
The question of Lorca’s homosexuality evidently preoccupied many of his friends, even in an atmosphere as liberal and open as that of the Residence. Given the nature of Spanish society and its hostility towards homosexuals, Lorca did little to draw attention to himself in that respect, and some of his closest friends appear not to have been aware that he was in any way different. Others, however, suspected him and, in the words of José Moreno Villa, ‘kept their distance’. One of the residents, Martin Domínguez, appears to have spread rumours about Lorca which on one occasion prompted a disturbed and disbelieving Buñuel to confront him directly with the question: ‘Is it true you’re a queer?’ Buñuel has described Lorca’s sense of hurt and shock, but he did not answer the question and Buñuel himself insists that there was nothing effeminate about him. Pepín Bello, another close friend, has emphatically denied that Lorca was homosexual, though he notes that he did not share most of the other students’ obsession with the opposite sex. The evidence suggests the extent to which he managed to conceal his homosexuality, for there is little doubt that he did have homosexual relationships. His close friendship with Salvador Dalí contained a strong element of sexual attraction on his part, if we are to believe Dalí’s subsequent affirmations, but there is no suggestion of an actual physical relationship between them. For the most part Lorca’s feelings were clearly suppressed, but his sense of frustration and uncanny understanding of the female mind were both to surface in his plays.
The performance of Lorca’s first play, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell, took place in Madrid on 22 March 1920. The hostile reception of a work whose characters are a butterfly, cockroaches, a scorpion and glow-worms was a bitter blow to him, and when he returned to stage-writing with Mariana Pineda, completed in 1925 and premièred in 1927, it was not with a subject that was risky or a treatment that was boldly avant-garde, but with the traditional story of a liberal heroine of Granada, her opposition to the King, Ferdinand VII, her doomed love for another liberal, Pedro, and her final execution. The play’s success compensated for the earlier failure. In 1926 Lorca started work on another play, The Shoemaker’s Wonderful Wife, first performed in 1930 and then in a revised form in 1933, while in 1928 he completed The Love of Don Perlimplin, premièred in 1933. In both plays Lorca employed a traditional subject – the young wife married to a much older man – expressed in the traditional forms of puppet play and farce, but there is clear evidence now both of a new confidence in his own ability and of a desire to push beyond the limitations of tradition. On the one hand, farce often slips into tragedy. On the other, Lorca’s stage technique, combining setting, costume, movement, dialogue, music and lighting, is part of that exciting theatrical experimentation of the first quarter of the century, exemplified by such European innovators as Maeterlinck, Yeats and Edward Gordon Craig.
As far as Lorca’s other writing is concerned, the 1920s saw the publication of three volumes of poetry: Book of Poems in 1921; Songs in 1927, and the outstandingly successful Gypsy Ballads in 1928. His fame grew too with the important lectures he gave in these years, especially, ‘The Poetic Image in Don Luis de Góngora’ and ‘Imagination, Inspiration and Evasion in Poetry’, but towards the end of the decade he became strangely and deeply depressed. Whatever the cause – and a homosexual relationship with a young sculptor, Emilio Aladrén, has been suggested – the decision was taken that Lorca should leave Spain for a while. In the summer of 1929 he arrived in New York with his friend and former teacher at the University of Granada, Fernando de los Ríos.
New York, far from lifting Lorca’s spirits, presented him with a spectacle of tasteless commercialism and, in the case of the Blacks of Harlem, of people oppressed by their poor circumstances, removed from their natural environment, and often attempting to imitate their white masters in a desperate effort to improve their lot. Unable to speak English – his few phrases included ‘Tim-es Esquare’ and ‘ham and eggs’ in a thick Spanish accent – Lorca found himself largely alienated and isolated in a city markedly different from his beloved Granada, and was glad to escape to Cuba in the spring of 1930. Nevertheless, the New York experience led to the composition of three very striking and ambitious works: the difficult but moving poem, Poet in New York, first published in its entirety in 1940; and the two extremely bold ‘surrealist’ plays, The Public and When Five Years Pass, completed in 1930 and 1931 respectively, and which Lorca regarded as being far ahead of their time.
His return to Spain in the summer of 1930 coincided with the fall of the seven-year dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, while the election of a republican government in 1931 created an atmosphere of political and artistic freedom in which Lorca’s talents flourished as never before. His appointment in 1931 as director of a governmentsponsored touring theatre company, commonly known as La Barraca, allowed him to perform to rural audiences many of the great plays of the ‘classic’ Spanish dramatists Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón and, more importantly, to evolve a style of performance involving music, dance and simply stylized sets that shook off the dust of years of stuffiness in relation to their presentation. The inter-relationship of Lorca’s experiments with La Barraca and his own creative writing cannot be overemphasized, for nowhere is the mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern dramatic technique better exemplified than in the four great plays written at this time: Blood Wedding (1933), Yerma (1934), Doña Rosita the Spinster (1935) and The House of Bernarda Alba (1936). With the performance of Blood Wedding, Lorca became the most celebrated Spanish dramatist of his day, acclaimed in his own country and in South America. At the same time he continued to write poetry, notably the great poem of 1934 occasioned by the death of a bullfighter friend, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, and the poems, influenced by Arabic poetry, that would become the Diván del Tamarit.
By the beginning of 1936 the hopes that had accompanied the inauguration of the Second Spanish Republic five years earlier lay in tatters and the country found itself in a state of political crisis. When, on 18 July, Franco’s military rebellion against the Madrid government set the Civil War in motion, Lorca was in Granada. It was not long before the rebel troops occupied the city and, with the eager assistance of fascist supporters, began to ‘clean up’ the town and its surrounding areas. Lorca’s brother-in-law, Manuel Montesinos, mayor of Granada and a steadfast supporter of the Republic, was one of the first to be shot, and Lorca himself was soon obliged to take refuge in the house of a friend and fellow-poet, Luis Rosales. On the afternoon of 16 August he was arrested and taken to government headquarters where he was held for two more days. From there he was driven away, probably in the early hours of 19 August, and shot in the countryside outside the village of Viznar. In a time when political and personal differences were inextricably mixed, the combination of Lorca’s republican sympathies, his homosexuality and his enormous fame was more than sufficient to afford his enemies the opportunity of ridding Granada and Spain of one of her most illustrious sons.
II
Blood Wedding, undoubtedly the greatest of Lorca’s plays, was read by the dramatist to his friends on 17 September 1932, and premièred at the Teatro Beatriz in Madrid on 8 March 1933. Acclaimed by theatre critics and public alike, it signalled his growing fame at home and abroad, was soon translated into French and English and was performed in both the United States and South America. It is, clearly, the play on which Lorca’s international reputation has been built and yet, for more than twenty years after the end of the Civil War, political circumstances, the general stagnation of the Spanish theatre, the nature of Lorca’s death and the opposition of his family prevented the performance of any of his work in Spain. Blood Wedding was not presented there again until 10 October 1962, and there have been few productions since. It is a curious fact in this respect that Lorca’s play has achieved more publicity in recent years through Carlos Saura’s film of Antonio Gades’s flamenco-dance version which, good as it is in its own right, omits Lorca’s marvellous last act. In 1986 Blood Wedding was, however, performed both in Spain and at the Edinburgh Festival by the company of José Luis Gómez in a production which clearly did justice to the play, and was much praised by Michael Billington in the Guardian:’Grieving motherhood and Greek sense of fate are also at the centre of Lorca’s masterpiece Blood Wedding; and José Luis Gómez’s spare, lean, highly musical and deeply moving Madrid-based production at the Royal Lyceum captures a sense of tragic inevitability.’ As far as productions in English are concerned, it was directed by Peter Hall at the Arts Theatre, London in 1954, but has never been part of the repertoire of either of our national theatre companies. The great challenge which Lorca’s play offers to British actors and directors in relation to the performance of its songs, its dances and its passionate poetry, has still to be taken up.
The source of Blood Wedding was an account in a Granada newspaper of an actual event: on 22 July 1928, in the Andalusian village of Nijar, Francisca Cañadas Morales was to marry Casimiro Pérez Morales, a young farmhand, but eloped with her cousin, Francisco Montes Cañadas, before the wedding could take place. Ambushed on the road by Francisca’s sister and brother-in-law, who had arranged the marriage, Francisco Montes was murdered and Francisca left for dead, victims of a powerful mixture of greed, offended honour and vengeance, though the girl was to survive the attack and the murderers subsequently confessed their crime. Five years after the event, Lorca worked its essential details into the plot of his own play, but, that being so, was also influenced by many other factors. It is not insignificant, for example, that the composition of his own tragic trilogy, Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, should have coincided with spectacular outdoor performances in Barcelona, Madrid, Mérida and Salamanca of classical tragedies such as Seneca’s Medea. From 1931 to 1935 Lorca was also the artistic director of the government-sponsored touring theatre company, La Barraca, with whom he produced many outstanding seventeenth-century Spanish ‘classics’: Lope de Vega’s The Sheep Well and The Knight of Olmedo and Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville among them. Another important influence was undoubtedly J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea which Lorca knew well. It is a play in which, as in Blood Wedding, a mother’s sons are taken from her, and it has too that dark vision of the world and a way of transforming characters and objects into more universal metaphors which came to distinguish Lorca’s work. In this respect the symbolic realism of Ibsen must also be mentioned as a general influence, and so must Shakespeare, for Romeo and Juliet appear as characters in Lorca’s The Public, and the family feud of Shakespeare’s play has echoes in Blood Wedding. In the end, though, Lorca’s vision of humanity’s tragic helplessness in a hostile universe was a response to his own circumstances: society’s victimization of ‘outsiders’, especially homosexuals; New York’s appalling impassivity in the face of poverty and suffering, and his own increasing awareness of the gulf between reality and human aspiration. In his three tragedies, Lorca expressed in particular the clash between the individual who follows the path of instinct – in Blood Wedding, the Bride and Leonardo – and the forces of convention and tradition which stand in his or her way, a conflict of which he was only too keenly aware.
For all its apparent realism – source, setting and characters – Blood Wedding is Lorca’s most poetic play. In the first place the tendency of his earlier work to ‘universalize’ the characters is now very marked, for generic instead of real names give them an archetypal and symbolic quality: the Mother, the Father, the Bride, the Bridegroom, the Wife, the Neighbour, the Girl. Only the Bride’s lover, Leonardo, has a real name, but even this is strongly symbolic, its first half suggesting the strength of a lion, its second the fire or passion (Spanish ‘león’ means ‘lion’, ‘ardo’ I burn’). Secondly, although the characters are individualized and differentiated, their experience is never merely their own. When, for example, the Mother laments the death of her husband and her elder son and expresses her fears for the younger, her grief and apprehension are quickly linked to the experience of other characters: in Scene One to the Neighbour’s grief; in Scene Two to the isolation of the Wife; later on to the Bride’s grief and the weeping of the neighbours. Furthermore, the human characters are constantly linked to the natural world – to the earth, flowers, crops, plants, water, animals, sun, cold – in a way which sets them in the greater context of Nature’s inevitable rhythms, positive and negative, creative and destructive, and sharpens both a sense of human destiny and human helplessness. The Bride’s attempt to explain her elopement with Leonardo is a very powerful statement indeed of her and others’ inability to escape their fate: ‘Your son was my ambition and I haven’t deceived him, but the other one’s arm dragged me like a wave from the sea, the butt of a mule, and would have always dragged me, always, always …’ (Act III, Scene Two).
While Acts I and II focus on the human characters, albeit in the heightened way described above, Act III projects the action on to a higher poetic level. Here, in a scene that has its origins in the final act of When Five Years Pass, the three woodcutters and the figures of the Moon and Death appear on stage, and the unseen forces spoken of earlier – fate, destiny – assume a physical form and presence as they go about their deadly business. Lorca’s stylized treatment of the episode serves to universalize it, but this is achieved too by the way in which we, the audience, are made to feel the icy coldness of death – especially through the figure of the Moon – and thus its relevance to ourselves. In one way the scene is strongly symbolist, for it evokes the mysteries that lie beyond human perception; in another it is surrealist, for the dark wood and its ghastly inhabitants may be seen as the ‘exteriorizations’ of the lovers’ fears, as well as our own.
Lorca’s own stage directions, far from being naturalistic, point to deliberate stylization. It is not, for example, the detail of the setting for Act I, Scene One, that should predominate in performance but the overall effect, the image of grief and foreboding created by the interaction of yellow walls, starkly suggested – Room painted yellow, the black of the women’s dresses and the lack of physical movement for most of the scene. Lorca’s love of stagepictures whose resonances go beyond what is actually seen on stage characterizes the play as a whole, either developing the sense of fatality or, as in Act I, Scene Three, contrasting it with the optimism of the Bride’s father’s house with its lace curtains and pink ribbon. In short, stage settings should suggest those contrasts and tensions that lie at the very heart of the play – harmony/discord, grief/joy, aspiration/frustration, that build relentlessly towards the climax of the wedding celebrations, Act II, Scene Two, and dissolve into the pessimism of Act III.
Particularly important too in this respect, both here and in Yerma, is the play’s music: its songs, poetry and poetic prose. It goes without saying that only in Spanish can Lorca’s effects be fully realized and only then by actors with a knowledge of the traditional folk-music and dances of Andalusia. Thus, the lullaby of Act I, Scene Two, should capture the play’s darkening mood and throw its shadow over the scenes that follow; the vibrant songs of the wedding scenes, enveloping the central characters, should dispel that darkness, like the sun the clouds, and the heavy monotonous intonation of the woodcutters should establish the final sense of inevitable tragedy. Not for nothing did Lorca’s feeling for music reveal itself in his piano playing, his love of the guitar and his readings of his own plays and poetry.
Throughout Blood Wedding Lorca’s instructions for the lighting of the stage should also be noted. As in all his theatre, lighting combines with other aspects of stage performance to reinforce the impact of key moments. So the wedding guests set off for the joyful ceremony as the sun rises and the stage is filled with light. So the darkness of the forest accompanies and intensifies the fears of the lovers, while the sudden invasion of the stage by an intense blue light, illuminating the white face of the moon, allows us to feel in our very bones the icy chill and menace of death. The brilliant combination of lighting, costume and poetry here is a perfect example of the theatrical style which Lorca devised in the 1930s with La Barraca, and which he simultaneously practised in his own plays.
III
Yerma, the second of the rural tragedies, quickly followed Blood Wedding, receiving its first performance at the Teatro Español in Madrid on 29 December 1934. The first-night audience, which packed the theatre, contained many distinguished people, but there were those too who resented Lorca’s growing fame and others who objected to the friendship shown by the leading actress, Margarita Xirgu, towards a former government minister, recently released from gaol. But early disruption of the performance quickly changed to rapt attention and admiration both for her performance and for Lorca’s play. By the end it was a triumph, applauded by Enrique Diez-Canedo, literary critic and theatre reviewer for the Madrid newspaper, La Voz:’We have a new poet-dramatist. Those who still doubted it… cannot deny it now. Yerma is the work of a poet, but not only of a poet… it is the work of a dramatic poet… In this tragic poem I see an action that gradually unfolds, with a protagonist and antagonist; but even if there were only the protagonist and the chorus, we would be in the presence of tragedy in its pure and ancient form …’
Condemned, like Blood Wedding, to years of subsequent neglect, Yerma burst dramatically on the world theatre scene again in the early seventies – ironically while Franco was still alive – in the controversial production of Victor Garcia. Taking the play’s sub-title – Tragic Poem in Three Acts and Six Scenes – as his starting point, Garcia sought to express its poetic qualities through stylization of movement, action and song and, above all, by placing the action on a huge canvas trampoline that, lowered or raised at a given moment, could suggest either desert, valley, mountain or womb. This production, presented in London in 1973 as part of the World Theatre Season, was described by J.W. Lambert in Drama as ‘obtrusive vulgarity’ and by John Peter, in the same journal, as ‘a self-indulgent and ostentatious piece of work’ which ‘used crude and haphazard physical symbolism where Lorca offers … only dark glimpses of the soul’. Such a reaction, indicative perhaps of excessive reverence for Lorca and of a failure to respond to full-blooded passion, should be set against the reception of Garcia’s production, revived in Madrid in 1986 and recently seen at the Edinburgh Festival. Michael Ratcliffe, writing in the Observer, acknowledges both the universality of Lorca’s play and the achievement of Victor Garcia: ‘The astounding design – an enormous grey trampoline slung inside a pentagonal steel ramp that thrusts out over the front stalls – is pulled by hawsers into a rolling landscape through which the fertile women of the village tread in triumph like horses, or into a steep precipice of the writhing damned.
‘At the end of the play it collapses and withers into a dark sleeve of oblivion which pulls Yerma and the husband she has strangled into the earth like trash. Garcia and Espert [Nuria Espert] take Lorca far beyond the confines of Spain, linking him with his precursors in the north and west, and Yerma herself with the wasted unlived lives in Hedda Gabler and The Playboy of the Western World.’ This recognition of the poetic and universal quality of Lorca’s theatre is exactly right.
In terms of its themes – especially longing and frustration – Yerma has much in common with Blood Wedding, but the tragedy of a family is now the tragedy of a single woman beside whose suffering the other characters seem almost insignificant. Trapped in a loveless marriage to the farmer, Juan, who takes more interest in his fields than in the child his wife longs for, Yerma is trapped too by social attitudes and conventions. On the one hand, the childless wife is an easy target for the mockery and scorn of village women for whom childbearing is the most natural thing in the world. On the other, although Yerma is drawn instinctively to another man, Victor, she is prevented from taking him as a lover both by her own conscience and by the social conventions of honour. Driven to a growing realization of the pointlessness of her life without a child, Yerma ensures that empty future by murdering her husband.
In contrast to Blood Wedding, Yerma has neither the heightened poetic symbolism of that play’s final act nor the same amount of poetry. According to his brother, Lorca believed that his theatre would benefit from a greater austerity and fewer lyric elements, and Yerma does indeed have only seven examples of poetry, all of them songs, five of them short and sung by Yerma herself. But to regard this as an indication of the play’s greater ‘naturalism’ would be quite wrong.
Once more the characters’ names have an archetypal ring. Yerma itself is not, in fact, a real name but an adjective meaning ‘barren’, ‘empty’, ‘bare’, ‘uninhabited’, which is normally applied to the land and which, used in relation to the play’s protagonist, describes not so much the woman as the state of physical and emotional emptiness which is her lot and, by extension, the lot of other women like her. The two men, admittedly, have real names -Juan and Victor – but otherwise embody virility, in Victor’s case, or its opposite, in Juan’s. And, grouped around the central trio, the other characters personify to a greater or lesser degree the fertility which they have, aspire to, or lack: the Old Woman, the First Girl, the six village women, the Male, the Female. In addition, the human characters are firmly placed in the context of Nature seen as part of it, and related to the cycles of birth, death, fertility and barrenness that are part of the natural world. As in Blood Wedding, the interweaving of Man and Nature invests the characters and events of the play with a truly universal and even mythical significance.
The poetic and symbolic thrust of Yerma may be gauged, too, by Lorca’s indications for its staging. In his stage directions for physical locations, there is a notable starkness and lack of realistic detail. Thus, Scene One is set in Yerma’s house, but the stage direction has no description of a room, only a reference to an embroidery frame: When the curtain rises, Yerma is asleep, an embroidery frame at her feet. Attention is focused only on an object which represents the inescapable reality of her domestic tasks and thus the traditional nature of her role. Later, in Act II, Scene Two, stage directions draw attention to the door of the house which Juan has instructed must now be closed and which, therefore, signposts Yerma’s growing sense of imprisonment. Similarly, pitchers brimming with water are a mocking reminder of Yerma’s sterility, while the settings for outdoor scenes, all reduced to the very minimum of detail, evoke the freedom and space which are slowly denied her. In short, Lorca’s intention was to pinpoint only those elements of staging which he considered significant in relation to Yerma’s emotional and psychological life.
The lighting of the stage has the same function. At the outset it is brightly lit, corresponding to Yerma’s hopeful dream of a child. As her hopes slowly fade, the scenes move into twilight – Act II, Scene Two – and then darkness. In contrast, the episodes in the fields and at the stream – Act II, Scene One – are full of sunlight, the physical counterpart of the joy and vitality of the village women as a whole. The visual patterns of the play – and these involve movement too – can be seen as emotional graphs designed to plot its evolving pattern and to draw the audience along with it.
Finally, the play’s stylization can be noted in its patterned and structured dialogue. Yerma and Juan are people obsessed – Juan by land and profit, Yerma by the need for a child – and their words revolve constantly around those issues, rarely touching on anything else. The dialogue is repetitive, concentrated, stripped of extraneous matters and, as the play unfolds, it is more and more concerned with Yerma’s uselessness, ugliness, worthlessness and – in her own eyes – badness. The range is narrow, a closed circle of language whose pattern reflects the way in which, emotionally, she turns in on herself. In contrast, the gossip and songs of the village women at the stream are expansive and vibrant, the rhythms springy, the images replete with life and colour. In a sense it is possible to talk of the play’s language in terms of a piece of music in which a passage in the minor key is suddenly transposed to the major – bright, dazzling, inspiring – before returning again to the minor. But there is more than that to it in Lorca’s play, for the language is but a single element in a unified composition of stage setting, movement, lighting, song and speech in which each reinforces the other and none can be considered in total isolation.
IV
Doña Rosita the Spinster was completed in June 1935 and received its triumphant première in December of that year at the Teatro Principal Palace in Barcelona. Less well known than the three tragedies, it is a supremely accomplished piece. Lorca himself observed that the play had already been written in his mind in 1924 when a friend told him the story of a mutable rose, described in a seventeenthcentury book about roses. According to his brother, Francisco, the public success of Mariana Pineda in 1927 had done little to compensate a private sense of failure and dissatisfaction with the play, a feeling that was finally overcome with the composition of Doña Rosita eight years later. Like the earlier play, it is concerned with a woman who waits in vain for her lover’s return, though it lacks Mariana Pineda’s political dimension, and it is set too in Lorca’s beloved Granada. Thematically there are links with When Five Years Pass where passing time and love’s frustration figure prominently, and also, of course, with Yerma. Like Yerma, Rosita advances from hope to a growing sense of isolation, but she is Yerma in another key, more muted and restrained, and although the play’s sadness frequently moves one to tears, it is offset by the most delightful comic moments. In Doña Rosita Lorca is, in fact, not unlike Chekhov. At the end of the play the famiy leaves the house it has lived in for many years to the sound of a door banging in the wind. Comparisons with The Cherry Orchard are inevitable, and Lorca’s play has in abundance Chekhov’s characteristic mixture of laughter and tears. But no one with any knowledge of Lorca’s theatre could fail to recognize how truly Lorquian Doña Rosita is in its themes, its poetry and its anguished portrayal of the central character.
In terms of dramatic technique, the play looks back to Yerma and Blood Wedding and forward to The House of Bernarda Alba, for on the one hand it is distinguished by passages of poetry, often extremely lyrical, and on the other by a greater degree of realism. Directions for the costumes of the characters are, for example, precise and detailed, and locate them firmly in a specific period of time. Such is the case when Rosita first enters: She wears a rose-coloured dress, in the style of 1900, with leg-of-mutton sleeves and trimmed with braid. Again, when the three spinsters and their mother appear in Act II, the stage direction reads: The THREE SPINSTERS wear huge hats with tasteless feathers, ridiculous dresses, gloves to the elbow with bracelets over them, and fans dangling from long chains. The MOTHER wears a faded black dress and a hat with old purple ribbons. A consideration of the dialogue also points to a greater realism, for it is frequently concerned with the everyday affairs of Rosita and her family, be it the Uncle’s obsession with his flowers, the Housekeeper’s gossip, or the young women’s chatter about current taste and fashion. Conversations of this kind, desultory and often commonplace, occur much more often in this play than in either Yerma or Blood Wedding, and it is not therefore difficult to understand why Doña Rosita has often been regarded as more naturalistic. But it is a view of the play which requires qualification.
The apparent naturalism of sets and costumes is in actual fact a piece of highly effective stylization, for each individual act presents a picture and the three acts together a succession of images of passing time and inevitable change. It is a symbolism caught above all in the key association of Rosita’s costume, changing through the play from red to pink to white, and the mutable rose that at noon is red, by evening pink, by nightfall white and dead. The play as a whole is thus a metaphor of life’s passing, of dreams and disillusionment, and of human fragility. Moreover, close consideration of the dialogue suggests that even if it seems to dwell on day-to-day affairs, these are invariably part of the play’s central themes and, inasmuch as they preoccupy the characters, have precisely that obsessive quality that is so characteristic of the tragedies themselves. The seeming naturalness of the dialogue conceals an artfulness which is as great here as in any of the major plays, and by Act III, where Rosita’s despair is fully borne in on her, the expression of her feelings in repeated phrases and insistent rhythms links her very firmly to Yerma:
One day a friend gets married, and then another, and yet another, and the next day she has a son, and the son grows up and comes to show me his examination marks. Or there are new houses and new songs. And there am I, with the same trembling excitement, cutting the same carnations, looking at the same clouds …
The fact that Rosita makes us think of Yerma indicates, moreover, that while she is a strongly delineated individual, she is also part of that long line of despairing and abandoned women who fill Lorca’s plays and poems.
Above all, the play’s symbolic resonances spring from its poetry and, in particular, the poem about the mutable rose. Highly effective in itself, the poem’s effectiveness is doubled through its haunting relevance to and implications for Rosita as she grows progressively older. In this respect the ending of the play is quite magical, for Rosita, pale, dressed in white, almost fainting with emotion, is the rose at the end of its life, and, as she walks out into the darkness of night, the white curtains fluttering in the wind become the rose’s falling petals. The central image of the poem has become, in a quite brilliant and evocative moment, the entire stage-picture, the naturalistic moments of the play transformed into a final, breathtaking piece of symbolism.
Gwynne Edwards, 1987