The Nineteenth Century Theatre In Spain

This is the first comprehensive study of the theater of nineteenth-century Spain, a country that produced more than 10,000 plays in the course of the century. David Thatcher Gies reevaluates the canon of texts, uncovering dozens of plays and authors previously ignored by critics, and placing them in the social and political context of their times. His book provides a readable overview of the known and unknown elements of Spanish nineteenth-century drama, and stresses the vitality of the theater at that time and the strong reactions it aroused in its audiences.

First Published in 2002. The present volume forms part of a major Bibliography of the Hispanic Theatre, forthcoming in several volumes by different specialists. As such, it is one of the products of a still larger computer-assisted Project of Hispanic Research Bibliographies. The aim has been to give as wide a coverage to the area as possible, listing not only books and articles in periodicals but also data of a documentary character such as items on playbills and the local regulation of theatres. Annotation is confined to information, and critical appraisal is excluded.

The Frenchman Juan de Grimaldi was instrumental in the development of the Spanish theatre in the 1820s and 30s, at a time when censorship, repression, and economic chaos had left it in a state of stagnation. As impresario and stage director, he trained actors in the new style of declamation, made physical changes in sets and lighting, translated recent French plays into Spanish, and encouraged the writing of original Spanish plays. His own magical comedy, La Pata de Cabra (1829), was outstandingly successful. Grimaldi was also a wealthy businessman and newspaper editor, and the patron of many important Spanish Romantic writers. He was active in politics, vigorously defending the moderate policies of the Queen Regent, María Cristina, and of Prime Minister Ramón de Nerváez. Even after his return to Paris, Grimaldi continued to work secretly as an agent of the Spanish government. Based on original archival materials, this is the first in-depth study of Grimaldi's involvement in the literary and political progress of nineteenth-century Spain.

Leading theater historians and practitioners map a theatrical history that moves from the religious tropes of Medieval Iberia to the postmodern practices of twenty-first-century Spain. Considering work across the different languages of Spain, from vernacular Latin to Catalan, Galician and Basque, this history engages with the work of actors and directors, designers and publishers, agents and impresarios, and architects and ensembles, in indicating the ways in which theater has both commented on and intervened in the major debates and issues of the day. Chapters consider paratheatrical activities and popular performance, such as the comedia de magia and flamenco, alongside the works of Spain's major dramatists, from Lope de Vega to Federico García Lorca. Featuring revealing interviews with actress Nuria Espert, director Lluís Pasqual and playwright Juan Mayorga, it positions Spanish theater within a paradigm that recognizes its links and intersections with wider European and Latin American practices.

This volume traces social drama in Spain from its beginnings in the works of Moratin, treats those continuing the Moratin tradition, and studies the social drama of Tamayo y Baus, Ayala, Eguilza, Echegaray, the minor playwrights, and Dicenta and Galdos.

In this study, Gould argues that it was in the imperial capital’s theatrical venues that the public was put into contact with the places and peoples of empire. Plays and similar forms of spectacle offered Victorian audiences the illusion of unmediated access to the imperial periphery; separated from the action by only the thin shadow of the proscenium arch, theatrical audiences observed cross-cultural contact in action. But without narrative direction of the sort found in novels and travelogues, theatregoers were left to their own interpretive devices, making imperial drama both a powerful and yet uncertain site for the transmission of official imperial ideologies. Nineteenth-century playwrights fed the public’s interest in Britain’s Empire by producing a wide variety of plays set in colonial locales: India, Australia, and—to a lesser extent—Africa. These plays recreated the battles that consolidated Britain’s hold on overseas territories, dramatically depicted western humanitarian intervention in indigenous cultural practices, celebrated images of imperial supremacy, and occasionally criticized the sexual and material excesses that accompanied the processes of empire-building. An active participant in the real-world drama of empire, the Victorian theatre produced popular images that reflected, interrogated, and reinforced imperial policy. Indeed, it was largely through plays and spectacles that the British public vicariously encountered the sights and sounds of the distant imperial periphery. Empire as it was seen on stage was empire as it was popularly known: the repetitions of character types, plot scenarios, and thematic concerns helped forge an idea of empire that, though largely imaginary, entertained, informed, and molded the theatre-going British public.

This is the first book to examine the rise of Spain's extraordinary national theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in all its aspects - the commercial theatre, the court drama and the Corpus autos, the organisation of theatrical life, the playhouses themselves and their public, the literary and moral controversies, and the plays as literary texts. The book has been written for students of drama as well as Hispanists: Spanish theatre is set in its national and international context; Spanish titles and theatrical terms are translated. Considerable space has been devoted to the experimental drama of the sixteenth century before Lope de Vega. At the core of the book is a highly distinctive, successful national theatre which mirrored the energies, beliefs and anxieties of a great nation in crisis, yet at the same time granted full expression to the individual genius of its greatest exponents - Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderon de la Barca.

Previously published as a special issue of The Bulletin of Spanish Studies, The Eighteenth-Century Theatre in Spain is the second in a series of research bibliographies on the Theatre in Spain. Representing ten years of searches and compilation by its specialist authors, this volume draws together data on more than 1,500 books, articles and documents concerned with Spanish eighteenth-century theatre. Studies of plays and playwrights are included as well as material dealing with theatres, actors and stagecraft. Wherever possible, items listed have been personally examined, and their library location in Britain, Spain or USA is provided. Scholars with interests in drama will find in this single-volume work of reference a wealth of reliable information concerning this specialist field.