Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre: 1772 to the Present (Continuum Shakespeare Studies)

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Author: Keith Gregor

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Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre

Continuum Shakespeare Studies Shakespeare’s Cues and Prompts, Murray J. Levith Shakespeare and Moral Agency, Edited by Michael D. Bristol Shakespeare in China, Murray J. Levith Shakespeare in Japan, Tetsuo Kishi and Graham Bradshaw Forthcoming titles in the series: Shakespeare’s Musical Imager, Christopher R. Wilson Shakespeare and the Translation of Identity in Early Modern England, Edited by Liz Oakley-Brown

Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre 1772 to the Present

Keith Gregor

Continuum International Publishing Group Continuum London Continuum New York The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704 11 York Road New York London SE1 7NX NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Keith Gregor 2010 Keith Gregor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-0-8264-9934-9 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Illustrations

vi viii

Introduction 1 The Taste for Tragedy 2 False Beginnings 3 The Birth of Character 4 Disaster and Regeneration 5 The Franco Years 6 The Transition and Beyond 7 Shakespeare on the ‘Periphery’ 8 New Horizons

1 7 26 46 66 85 104 123 143

Notes References Index

158 171 179

Acknowledgements

This book is my modest contribution to a research project, now in its tenth year, devoted to the study of the reception of Shakespeare in Spain in the framework of his reception in the rest of Europe. I am extremely grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (now the Ministry of Science and Innovation) for financing the project through concessions HUM-2005-02556 and FFI-2008-01969 and to the University of Murcia (Vicerrectorado de Investigación) for managing it so efficiently. Most of the groundwork for this volume was done at theatres, theatre archives and libraries up and down the country, and I owe a further debt of gratitude to the institutions and companies that have shown an interest in the project and to the individuals who have given their time to help me carry it through. In particular, I should like to thank the Centro de Documentación Teatral, Fundación Juan March, Archivo de la Villa, Biblioteca Nacional and Real Academia in Madrid; in Barcelona, the Institut de Teatre; in Seville, the Centro Andaluz de Teatro; in Almagro, the Museo Nacional de Teatro and its director, Andrés Peláez, and the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Centro Dramático Nacional, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Teatre Lliure and the Teatre Romea in Barcelona, the Centro Dramático Galego and Eduardo Alonso’s Teatro do Noroeste in Galicia have been responsive to my (at times) overly persistent demands for information and material. The list of individuals whom I would like to thank publicly for their assistance and support would be too long to print here; I must therefore confine myself to those who have given particularly generously of their time. Elena Bandín, Juanfra Cerdá, Laura Campillo, Nicolás Montalbán and Jesús Tronch have been mines of information and, without the material they so selflessly provided, there are whole swathes of this book which it would have taken me many more months to prepare. Clara Calvo, Paco Florit, Jorge Luis Bueno and David George were kind enough to read sections of it while Ángel Luis Pujante read the complete script. Most of their valuable suggestions I have taken on board though, needless to say, any responsibility for the errors and lacunae that remain is entirely mine. Pete Brew, Sukanta Chaudhuri, Dirk Delabastita, Paul Franssen, José Manuel González, Lawrence Guntner, Ton Hoenselaars, Glyn Pursglove, Fran Rayner, Gary Taylor and Jo de Vos have all been inspirational, either by being good enough to share their views on ‘foreign’ Shakespeare or by giving me the

Acknowledgements

vii

chance to air some of my own in a variety of forums. I should also like to acknowledge the assistance of Gloria Pérez and Nuria Clavero in the preparation of a complete database of Shakespearean productions (www.um.es/shakespeare) which I have drawn partly upon here. I am especially grateful to Continuum, and to Colleen Coalter, for having faith with this project and for responding so readily and speedily to my enquiries. Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife, Encarni, and my son, Alex, for their infinite patience and understanding. It is to them that this book is dedicated.

List of Illustrations

FRONT COVER. Alfredo Alcón (Lear) and Miryam Gallego (Cordelia) in the 2008 production of King Lear by the Centro Dramático Nacional, directed by Gerardo Vera. (Photo by Ros Ribes, courtesy of the Centro Dramático Nacional.) Figure 1.1 Isidoro Máiquez as Othello. Lithograph by José Ribelles y Helip, c. 1820. (Courtesy of the Museo Romántico, Madrid.) 20 Figure 5.1 Lady Macbeth (Mercedes Prendes) greets Duncan in the Español’s 1942 production of Macbeth, directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena. (Photo by Ortíz, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Teatral, Madrid.) 91 Figure 5.2 Kate (Nuria Torray) harangues the market-place in the 1975 production of La nueva fierecilla domada [The New Taming of the Shrew], directed by Juan Guerrero Zamora. (Photo by Manuel Martínez Muñoz, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Teatral, Madrid.) 103 Figure 6.1 Hamlet (José Luis Gómez) upbraids Ophelia (Ana Belén) in the CDN’s 1989 production of Hamlet, directed by José Carlos Plaza. (Photo by Chicho, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Teatral.) 111 Figure 7.1 The chess-board set in Teatre Lliure’s 1979 production of Titus Andronic (Titus Andronicus), directed by Fabià Puigserver. (Photo by Luis Cristóbal, courtesy of Teatre Lliure and the Centro de Documentación Teatral.) 127 Figure 7.2 Female bonding in Ur-teatro’s 1992 production of Sueño de una noche de verano (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), directed by Helena Pimenta for Ur Teatro. (Photo by Daniel Alonso, courtesy of the Centro Documentación Teatral.) 133 Figure 8.1 Xosé Manuel Oliveira as ‘Führer’ in the CDG’s 2004 production of Ricardo III (Richard III), directed by Manuel Guede for the Centro Dramático Galego. (Photo courtesy of the Centro Dramático Galego-Axencia Galega das Industrias Culturais.) 153

Introduction

In August 2004 the summer review of the Spanish national newspaper El País ran an article on what it called the ‘vital and renewed addiction to Shakespeare’. The article was a response to the fact that, at the time, a dozen or so different Shakespearean productions, including Helena Pimenta’s The Tempest, Calixto Bieito’s King Lear and Àlex Rigola’s Julius Caesar, were touring the country.1 This was ‘neither a fever nor an epidemic,’ the piece continued, but a ‘pure addiction to the strongest drug the theatre has ever known and whose name is William Shakespeare’. Even allowing for the hyperboles which are, after all, common practice in today’s cultural journalism, the article alludes to a phenomenon that can be easily verified: namely, that Shakespeare is today the most widely performed of all foreign playwrights; that in production terms, his work outscores the combined dramatic efforts of all of Spain’s classical authors, and that, contrary to the efforts of such reputable and inventive companies as the National Classical Theatre Company, his popularity shows no signs of waning. The reason for writing a book on Shakespeare on the Spanish stage was to address this phenomenon. Given the wealth and depth of Spain’s own dramatic tradition as well as the rigour and intensity of the efforts to recover it, how is it possible that the work of a contemporary foreigner – to boot, an Englishman – could be allowed to steal the theatrical limelight? What could modern producers possibly find in Shakespeare that was not crying out for attention or promised heaps of ‘relevance’ (and commercial success) in the plays of Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca or the prolific Lope de Vega? Why is it that the organizers of such spectacular theatrical events as the Almagro Classical Theatre Festival consistently bill more shows by Shakespeare than by any native author? What has taken place for Shakespeare to have been granted his own festival – the annual Shakespeare Festival in Santa Susanna (Barcelona) – when there is no such author-specific event for any of his Spanish contemporaries? Also, how is it that Shakespeare has risen so effortlessly to the position he now seems to hold when Spanish ‘Golden Age’ drama has, despite the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) season of Spanish plays billed at the same time audiences in Spain were getting ‘hooked’ on Shakespeare, failed to enjoy anything like the same success in the United Kingdom?2 It would be patently wrong, and I would be committing the same kind of exaggeration as mentioned above, to suggest that the current Shakespeare

2


‘addiction’ (if that is the appropriate term) is a ‘chronic’ or continuous condition. The article cited not only speaks of a ‘renewed’ addiction, the adjective hinting at the unquestionable ‘novelty’ of the work of directors such as Pimenta or Bieito but also at the fact that the condition has needed such fresh injections of imaginative power, new shots of inventiveness to revive what the same newspaper had called just over a decade earlier Spain’s unique brand of ‘Shakespearemania’.3 The more I reflected on the reasons for the recent upsurge of theatrical attention to Shakespeare, the more aware I became of the fragility of the phenomenon – its utter ‘dependence’ (to pursue the metaphor) on contingencies which, without doubt, have much to do not only with the ‘intrinsic’ artistic merits of Shakespeare’s work and with its ‘performability’ but also with the ‘extrinsic’ situation, the social, political and cultural ‘context’, in which that work has been received. In brief, the very transience of the Shakespeare phenomenon, its cultural belatedness when compared with the bard’s reception and diffusion in other countries, suggested that it may be necessary to historicize the phenomenon, to consider its roots and, perhaps more aptly, the circumstances in which it has been alternately repressed and revived. The sheer variety of the productions mentioned by El País – a variety in terms of genre and play, different ‘styles’ of production and modes of expression – points unequivocally to the plurality of approaches to Shakespeare that has been a facet of Spanish theatre since the 1990s. Again, it goes without saying that this has not always been the case; that generic, dramaturgical or stylistic pluralism is a comparatively recent avatar in the history of Spanish Shakespeare reception. For long periods, the latter was characterized by the restriction of performance to a limited number and type of plays (chiefly tragedy), a conventional approach to stagecraft (dominated by the precepts of neoclassicism) and a single language (Castilian), which were the inevitable products of a monolithic concept of culture and the hegemony of an official, ‘national’ concept of the theatre. These strictures were removed only when the erosion and replacement of the regimes that favoured them became a reality, a process that resulted in an expansion of the repertoires, the adoption of new production methods as well as the acceptance and promotion of the languages of the country’s ‘historic’ regions. The strong regional flavour of what I refer to as the ‘festival’ scene in Chapter 7 is equally a development of a post-transitional phase, when different political and cultural initiatives, which had been stifled by a succession of authoritarian regimes whose power base was the capital Madrid and whose idea of government was rigidly and, at times, aggressively centralist, were finally allowed to flourish. The book’s focus on productions in the capital is thus unapologetic: rather than a piece of wilful back-turning on theatrical developments in the ‘provinces’, it is an acknowledgement of the fact that, for years, the bulk of the productions that really made a difference to the way Shakespeare was conceived in Spain were the work of companies based in Madrid or that used Madrid’s

Introduction

3

stages to get themselves known. There have, of course, been notable exceptions to this rule – the beginning of the twentieth century, for instance, or the end of the Franco period, not to mention the period of the Transition and beyond – and a further aim of this study has been to attempt to do some justice to the truly innovative work produced in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia. (Other regions, such as Valencia and Aragón, could also stake a justifiable claim to having contributed to the spread of Shakespeare in Spain, but I did not have the space to consider them here.) The majority of the country’s Shakespeares have, however, had Madrid as their major venue, and this is inevitably reflected in the space devoted to theatre in the capital. Contrary to certain views that place Spain itself on the ‘periphery’ of the European reception of Shakespeare, casting it wrongly as both instigator and victim of its own isolation from the main cultural trade routes,4 what I also try to show is that, through Shakespeare, Spanish producers became extraordinarily alive to artistic currents and developments in other parts of the continent. Some of these ‘influences’ were, admittedly, imposed and at times regarded as utterly alien to the idea of an ‘essentially’ Spanish theatrical tradition – whence, for instance, the virulence of some early nineteenth-century defences of Spain’s ‘national’ drama. Similarly, many of the movements that facilitated Spanish audiences’ digestion of Shakespeare’s work might also be said to have done so at the expense of the plays’ recognizability as Shakespearean drama, despite the fact that they were often advertised as such in the play bills and manuscripts in circulation. A case in point is the very earliest of ‘Shakespearean’ dramas, the Hamleto of 1772, together with the string of Jean-François Ducis-authored versions that followed (see Chapter 1). The decision to discuss such plays alongside other, seemingly more ‘original’, works has been taken on the grounds that here, as in much of the rest of Europe, such carefully sanitized adaptations were the only form of access to his plays and that, in the case of the Ducis-Carnerero Otelo, for instance, their enormous popularity would whet the appetites of both audiences and translators for the ‘genuine’ article, even though the results were often disappointing. The openness to foreign versions of Shakespeare and also to foreign productions, such as the string of performances by Italian troupes that visited Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century (Chapters 3 and 4), would, as we shall see, extend even to the early, culturally most introspective and autarchic period of Francoism (the 1940s) with the conscious decision to structure the new national playhouses and the plays that were performed there on the dubious model of the Third Reich (Chapter 5). As well as exposing the limitations and constrictions on existing modes of performance, the ‘German’ experience of directors such as Cayetano Luca de Tena and the presence of foreign troupes such as the Shakespeare Festival Company in 1964 and subsequent tours by the RSC or Cheek by Jowl, or even the screening of the BBC Shakespeare series in the nation’s different languages, would all, I will suggest, serve to both stimulate and legitimize Spanish engagements with

4


the English bard. Where this is clearly the case – and the Festival Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or, some 30 years later, the Footsbarn’s Romeo and Juliet are instances – these non-Spanish productions are also discussed. That Shakespeare’s passage into Spanish culture was never as fluid or as plentiful as it was, say, in Germany or in France is evident in the much smaller number of productions.5 Difficulties with the texts, diction, the focus; the shortage of actors accustomed to his scripts; problems with set-design; considerable costs; dubious returns in the box-office have all been cited as obstacles to the sustained and successful staging of his work. A history of Shakespeare in the Spanish theatre cannot remain aloof to the very real, ‘material’ difficulties of staging his plays, difficulties which, until relatively recently, were compounded by the dearth of stage-worthy translations of his plays or an under-investment in theatrical training and in efficient schools of dramatic art. To these already formidable hurdles should be added the inflexibility of certain audiences who, according to director Cayetano Luca de Tena, tend to ‘hold their own opinions about the content of Shakespeare’s plays and [can be] as harsh as it comes when judging the plays, as if they felt they were the defenders of the purest Shakespearean orthodoxy’ (1993: 337). It is, as we shall see (Chapter 5), a problem Luca de Tena himself had to face when accepting the Francoist commission of presenting high-cultural Shakespeare to sate the elitist cravings of a post-war public. For centuries, deeply held preconceptions about what it was acceptable or unacceptable to show on stage – preconceptions often fed by a misplaced neoclassicism or brutally defended by institutions such as the Inquisition or its natural descendants, the Francoist censorship boards, or in media sympathetic to the regime – governed both the make-up of the repertoires at the country’s public playhouses and the manner in which the plays were presented. Thus, although women had never been discouraged from performing as in England, the mixing of both genre and gender – two staple elements of the Shakespearean ‘aesthetic’ – would struggle to gain any kind of recognition in Spain. Another major difficulty would reside in what might be termed the audience’s ‘historic memory’, that is, the degree of proximity to that image of the play and its author, which the spectator or critic holds in his memory. As Luca de Tena knew, ‘the question of Shakespeare’s popularity here can be measured by the number of plays which were never performed or which constituted isolated attempts with no perceptible trace’ (Luca de Tena 1993: 338). In a country where an enormous quantity of Golden Age classics have yet to be edited, let alone performed, variety was never likely to be to the fore in the performance of a foreign author such as Shakespeare. Indeed, up to the last three decades, Shakespeare’s name would be associated with barely one-third of the total corpus – three of the four ‘great’ tragedies (Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth as well as Romeo and Juliet), a handful of comedies (The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Merchant of Venice), a pair of ‘Roman’ plays (Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra) and two ‘chronicles’ (King John

Introduction

5

and Richard III).6 The neoclassical ‘taste’ for tragedy did not extend to the unwieldy King Lear or such unacceptably ‘hybrid’ work as Troilus and Cressida or Measure for Measure. Early comedies, such as The Comedy of Errors or Love’s Labours Lost, were almost completely ignored, as were so-called romances like Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. As far as Shakespeare’s English history plays were concerned, the rise of historical drama in the nineteenth century did not include an acknowledgement of English history, even when it came into conflict with Spain’s. The larger-than-life characterizations of King John and Richard III aside, the dynastic wrangles that are the backbone of Shakespeare’s histories would not, in general, be considered of dramatic interest. A play like Richard II was not premiered here until 1998 (Gregor 2004); other plays such as the two parts of Henry IV or the emblematic Henry V have, despite the cumulative cinematic efforts of Olivier and Branagh, never been performed. The history of Shakespearean performance in Spain is then, to a large extent, what I call in Chapter 2 a history of ‘false beginnings’, of sporadic and often eccentric attempts to swim against the theatrical tide, to present aesthetic alternatives before an institution weighed down with prejudice and – despite Spain’s own rich dramatic tradition – historically ill-prepared for the kind of revolution Shakespeare’s work entailed. The ‘dubious returns’ from productions by self-styled ‘illuminati’ such as José García Villalta and Francisco Luis de Retés in the nineteenth century, or by Adrià Gual and Gregorio Martínez Sierra in the twentieth century, should not be allowed to obscure their significance as landmark events in the emergence of what might be classed a ‘post’-neoclassical bard, whose work would be in such great demand today. In this book I try to honour those events with the importance which, despite their variable impact on the theatres of their time, they undoubtedly deserve. The structure of this book is strictly chronological: I begin with the first recorded performance of a ‘Shakespearean’ drama, the Hamleto of 1772, and end with the 2007–2008 CDN production of King Lear. (The only departure from this sequential structure is when I ‘pause’ to consider parallel developments in some of Spain’s regions.) In each of the chapters I try to give an account of the circumstances, aesthetic or otherwise, in which Shakespeare has been absorbed into Spanish theatrical culture and of the productions that best seem to illustrate changing fashions in the way his work is received, re-presented or, as in the case of regions like Catalonia, appropriated as a way of challenging the cultural hegemony of the centre. Though given the paucity of different Shakespearean productions in the period covered in the first two chapters, the likely ‘repertoire’ of plays to be discussed was fairly limited, the need to be selective from the mid-nineteenth century on will inevitably draw charges of arbitrariness and exclusion. My defence in this case would be that the object of this book was representativeness rather than exhaustiveness, the plays selected being those that I felt reflected most clearly a particular aesthetic, a particular ‘idea’ of Shakespeare or a particular usage of his work for political purposes. The inclusion of what are, technically, adaptations and even of plays

6


based, however loosely, on the ‘life’ of Shakespeare will also, I am aware, be contentious. Again, the justification for treating them here is their contribution, at times apologetic, at times iconoclastic, to the ‘story’ of Shakespeare as it has been written in Spain. Paul Julian Smith once referred to Spain as the ‘woman of European culture’, by which he implied its ostracism from the main currents of political and cultural power because of its alleged sensuality and emotionalism, the lack of that ‘serene classicism and rationalism that was once admired as the ideal’ (1995: 232). The exclusion of Spain from the making of what is traditionally called ‘civilization’ has arguably extended to its omission from major work dealing with the reception of one of the agents of that civilization, William Shakespeare, in Europe.7 This book may be seen as a modest attempt to set the record straight, acknowledging the sensuality of modern Spanish re-presentations of Shakespeare’s work but – and here I part company with Smith’s diagnosis – valuing also the ‘classical’ import of early engagements with the bard which are the pre-condition of his adoption by contemporary audiences as the most ‘vital’ and ‘renewable’ of addictions.

Chapter 1

The Taste for Tragedy

Hamlet, French-style The date was 4 October 1772. As the company of the Corral del Príncipe theatre in Madrid geared itself for a performance of Hamleto, rey de Dinamarca [Hamlet, King of Denmark], there would have been a buzz of expectancy among the 1000-strong audience at the nation’s foremost theatre. This, after all, was the Spanish premiere of a play which, barely two years before, had taken Paris by storm. It was to be the first time the work had been performed anywhere in Europe other than at the hallowed Comédie Française. The play’s author, Jean-François Ducis, may not have been that well-known, but its translator, whom most historians assume to have been Ramón de la Cruz, was a popular playwright who had translated widely; besides, he had written a sainete (a short comic piece, his favoured genre) to round off the evening’s entertainment.1 The kingly name ‘Hamleto’ had overtones of the rugged, Protestant north, although the final ‘-o’ gave it a more familiar, Mediterranean feel. Vicente Merino (Hamleto) and Catalina Tordesillas (Gertrudis) were better known as comic actors, but they were dependable enough performers and solid practitioners of the art of ‘declamation’, as acting was then known. The play could not fail. One name not on the lips of the spectators who sat facing the Príncipe’s new proscenium was that of William Shakespeare. Not that the company could be blamed for withholding the identity of their author’s English ‘source’.2 Although a confessed bardolater who kept a bust of Shakespeare in his study, Ducis had considered himself under no obligation to translate Shakespeare’s work directly because, (1) as he himself admits in his prologue to the first edition of Hamlet (1770), he read no English and (2) he had sensed that contemporary audiences were not yet ready for the indecorous excesses (what he called the ‘wild irregularities’) of the English original (Ducis 1879: 8). Picking the bones of Pierre-Antoine de la Place’s earlier synoptic version of the play and, for his later ‘definitive’ version, plucking details from Pierre Letourneur’s full prose rendering, Ducis had effectively produced a different play – a play which, he knew, would meet all of the conditions then passing for ‘good taste’ in the corridors of Versailles and at the theatre of the Comédie Francaise.3

8


In conformity with what Romy Heylen has called the ‘transition’ from the mode of Shakespearean tragicomedy to pure neoclassical tragedy (1993: 3), Ducis had omitted the comic episodes involving Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the gravediggers and the company of actors, whereas Polonius, the old and eccentric pedant, had been transformed into a conspirator and confidant of Claudius. Meanwhile the latter, who had been reinvented as the father of Ophelia, is second in succession to the throne behind Hamlet. To avoid offending decorum, Ducis, unlike Shakespeare, does not make him the brother of the former king and, despite Claudius’ intentions, Gertrude refuses to marry him. Gertrude is tormented by remorse at the crime she has committed and, after rejecting the political and also marital pretensions of Claudius, devotes herself in body and soul to seeing her son crowned (hence the ‘King’ Hamlet of the title) and, in the meantime, to discovering the reasons for Hamlet’s profound depression. The prince, who is an even more sickly, thought-tormented figure than Shakespeare’s hero, and whose sole obsession is to avenge his father’s death even if it means provoking his mother’s, is stopped in his tracks by the horror and disbelief he feels when faced with his father’s ghost – who, significantly, appears only to him – and later by an incapacitating excess of filial affection, when he discovers that the crime has been committed by his own mother. Intent as he had been on paring the play down to the bare essentials, seeking merely to ‘make an interesting role out of a parricidal queen and, above all, to portray in Hamlet’s pure and melancholic soul a model of filial tenderness’ (Ducis 1879: 8), Ducis had brought to bear the principle of the ‘unities’, confining the action of the play to a few hours and the same palatial setting. Implementing De la Place’s dictum whereby a single scene or situation from Shakespeare could, in the right hands, produce a five-act play for the French stage, Ducis had crafted a work that was little more than a variation on the longest of the scenes translated by De la Place: the closet scene between Hamlet and his mother. In reproducing Ducis’ Hamlet for a Spanish audience, De la Cruz, who was equally ignorant of English, was surely guided by a respect for the dramatic model the play seemed to represent rather than by a desire to domesticate Shakespeare. Furthermore, although making himself the butt of the critiques of cultural nationalists, who saw the imitation of French drama as a betrayal of Spain’s own extraordinarily rich tradition, in this De la Cruz was in no way unique among Spain’s progressive intelligentsia. For several decades French culture and fashion had been the ideal to which many Spaniards aspired. With the accession of the new Bourbon dynasty under Philip V in 1700, the acquisition of languages other than the native Castilian – chiefly French – was a prerequisite not just for dealing with high-ranking civil servants in the new Administration but, as Spanish society evolved, a way of expressing one’s commitment to the idea of Spain’s integration in European culture (Aguilar Piñal 1991: 197). Nor was the interest in all things French by any means limited


9

to polite conversation. The ‘affectionate union’ between the monarchies of France and Spain which otherwise sceptical thinkers like Friar Benito Jerónimo Feijóo, writing in the 1720s, saw as the key to future progress (1986: 174) would bear early fruit in the publication of numerous grammars of the French language and, for a period that would extend well into the next century, in the translation of French works on a dizzying array of topics (López 1995: 99–100). This process, which was already under way between 1750 and 1770, would intensify in the last three decades of the eighteenth century. Of the 1200 or so titles translated in eighteenth-century Spain nearly 65% were by French authors – way ahead of the number of books written by Italians (23%), Englishmen (7%), Portuguese (4%) and Germans (a little over 1%) (Aguilar Piñal 1991: 199). Although by no means evidence of a cultural servitude, as some nationalists and also later historians would contend, these figures attest not only to the absolute dominion of French as the foreign language to learn but also of French science and French culture as genuine objects of interest among the country’s literate. The coronation of Charles III in 1759 and the ‘Family Compacts’ that strengthened Spanish ties to France gave a kind of political legitimacy to those interests. As far as the drama is concerned the influence of French work over the efforts of writers in Spain is undeniable. French respect for the classical rules of composition which, for some critics, had involved the good taste to ‘regularize’ some of the better known Golden Age work (see Rodríguez Sánchez de León 1999: 83), proved a major incentive to read, translate and eventually perform a string of plays which, it was hoped, would encourage Spaniards to adopt the same dramaturgical principles. Although such flagrant ‘afrancesamiento’ (or ‘Frenchification’) initially made the reformers easy targets of the nationalist old guard, who insisted on the need to preserve the impressive body of ‘aureate’ drama, the idea would eventually catch on and, by the second half of the century, French plays had become enshrined as models worthy of imitation and as an inevitable point of reference for any playwright wishing to both please and instruct his audience. This, as Francisco Lafarga has shown (2003: 1741–1742), made the work of translators for the theatre a crucial factor in the propagation of the ‘new’ old drama, and very few of the authors who are normally associated with the aesthetics of neoclassical drama did not, at some stage in their careers, try their hand at translating from the French. For what tended to be socially well-established or upwardly mobile audiences, the plays produced – such as Beaumarchais’ Eugénie, Marivaux’s L’École des Mères, Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, Racine’s Phèdre or Voltaire’s Mérope – were seen as representing the very pinnacle of late eighteenth-century artistic achievement as well as indicating the directions, both aesthetic and ideological, the national drama ought to be taking. Here were plays that successfully combined the illusionist principles mapped out by the defenders of the new classicism and accompanied their conformity to the rules with an accurate diagnosis of the social and psychological predicament of their protagonists, both ancient and modern.

10


In the case of Beaumarchais and Voltaire they might even be said to ‘expose’ changes affecting the fabric of contemporary Spanish society and accurately ‘predict’ the sensibility that would ensue. Despite the predilection for comedy among audiences and, consequently, companies and impresarios, Spanish neoclassical theorists and critics tended to favour tragedy not just on formal grounds (as the purest embodiment of the rules) but as socially the most ‘elevated’ of dramatic modes, capable of touching and swaying the most authoritative of minds. As Ignacio de Luzán, the most influential of eighteenth-century Spanish critics, would state programmatically in his Poética of 1737: Tragedy is a dramatic representation of a great change of fortune befalling kings and queens, princes and characters of great quality and dignity, whose downfalls, deaths, disasters and dangers should arouse terror and pity in the minds of the audience, and cure and purge them of these and other passions, serving as an example and lesson to all, but especially to monarchs and to persons of the highest authority and power. (Luzán 1977: 433)

In the absence of a native tradition of tragedy, the classical French model presented itself as the most distinguished, and also the most congenial, model to follow (Ríos 1997: 71). Although there were more or less meritorious attempts to start a classical Spanish tragedy from scratch, many of its authors turned to France as the most appropriate source of inspiration. As the great political reformer and part-time playwright and translator Gaspar de Melchor Jovellanos would put it apropos of his play La muerte de Munuza [The Death of Munuza] in 1772: In composing this tragedy, I did not try to imitate the Greeks or the Latins. Our neighbours [i.e. the French] imitated them, copied them, took advantage of their enlightened ways and arranged the tragic drama to suit the tastes and customs of our times; it was more natural for me to imitate our neighbours than to imitate the Greek poets. [. . .] If [Homer] were alive today and had to give us rules to follow, he might well tell us to go read Racine and Voltaire. (Cited in Lafarga 2003: 1742)

The respect French tragedians showed for the rules was coupled with what was seen as the appropriateness of their work to the pacific ‘temperament’ of the nation. ‘Do you work for a delicate, diaphanous, sensitive nation?,’ Diderot would harangue the poets of his native France in his Paradoxe sur le Comédien [Paradox of Acting] of 1769. ‘[E]nclose yourselves within the harmonious, tender and touching elegies of Racine: that would save her from the bloodbaths of a Shakespeare’ (Diderot 1968: 137). The refusal to show the violent consequences of tragedy signified not so much a respect for the more squeamish members of the audience – although this was undoubtedly also at stake – as an


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understanding that death on stage could only be tolerated in such barbarous countries as England. The constant yearning to influence the rulers and policy makers of Bourbon Spain necessitated a form that involved high-ranking personages whose mistakes and changes of fortune had repercussions not just for their relations with other characters but for the state or dominion over which they presided. The references to tyranny and uprisings, to the overthrow of monarchs and the punishment of usurpers could, it was felt, be easily decoded by audiences and applied to native and contemporary scenarios without the need for unseemly displays of physical violence. Even such everyday, down-toearth emotions as love which, in the case of tragedy, was intimately entwined with the business of government, were best performed in a purely verbal, rather than physical, fashion. In this also French tragedy was viewed as exemplary. Respect for the model seemed to have been uppermost in the mind of De la Cruz, in his translation of Hamlet, although it would be wrong to suggest that ‘respect’ resulted in absolute fidelity. Apart from Spanishing the name of the eponymous hero of the tragedy and of the other main characters, or adapting Ducis’ alexandrines to the more conventionally Spanish eighteenth-century form of the hendecasyllabic line, De la Cruz’s version adhered to the same dramatic structure and to such theatrically striking and innovative touches as the scene in which Hamlet forces his mother to swear on her husband’s ashes that she had no part in the assassination of the king. On the other hand, there are significant departures such as the handling of the ghost which, in Ducis, is presented as nothing but a product of Hamlet’s imagination, visible to no-one but the ‘frightened’ hero. In De la Cruz’s version the ghost is given a real, physical presence – a bold transgression of established neoclassical dramaturgical practice, which left very little room for the presence of the supernatural, as well as an assault on the very sense of the original. Where Ducis had included two stage directions to the effect that only Hamlet sees the ghost, that is, that it does not appear on stage (‘Voyant l’ombre de son père’ [‘Seeing the ghost of his father’] and ‘Il voit encore l’ombre [‘He sees the ghost again’]), De la Cruz states explicitly that ‘Pasa la sombre de un lado a otro’ [‘The ghost passes over the stage’] and ‘Vuelve a pasar la sombra’ [‘The ghost passes over the stage again’]). Thirty-seven lines later a new stage direction is added: ‘Vase la sombra’ [‘Exit the ghost’] confirming not just the physical presence of the ghost but also the fact that it has been present on stage for the duration of this scene. Interestingly, De la Cruz acknowledges this presence in a scene where only Hamleto (and the audience) is allowed to see it, although his interlocutors Gertrudis and Ofelia do not, and this discrepancy with regard to the original becomes part of the dialogue. The dramatic irony which is created goes well beyond Ducis and recalls the closet scene of Shakespeare’s play. This, it has been argued (Pujante and Gregor 2005: 135–136), does not necessarily imply that De la Cruz took his inspiration from Shakespeare, whom he had never read, but rather points to a theatrical instinct or intuition that justified a break with neoclassical convention whenever the author found it useful or necessary.

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Whether the first-night audience at the Príncipe were convinced by the break is hard to verify, as there are no first-hand accounts of the performance. Writers such as José Cadalso, who had lambasted the uninformed admiration of Shakespeare in his satirical Los eruditos a la violeta [Wise Men without Learning] (1772) and may well have been drawn to see the staging of a work that he saw as deeply flawed, would later write as follows: Hamleto is supposed to be a king of Denmark. Something or other happened to this poor man to make him frightened by everything. His being frightened was made into a tragedy in England; this gave birth to another tragedy in France, and the French one miscarried yet another in Spain. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 8)

For Alfonso Par (1936a: 24), the production was doomed from the start, not so much because of its manifest Frenchness as because of the incompetence of the cast as well as the inadequacy of the play text, the work of an author who was regarded more highly as an exponent of light-hearted sainetes than of full-blown tragedies and whom Par would further accuse of padding out the French source text with ‘meaningless waffle’. Although there is a tendency even today to regard the production as a ‘fiasco’ (Portillo and Salvador 2003: 180), the figures relating to the number of performances and the takings on the door do not necessarily tally with that perception. Thus, for a play to run for five consecutive nights (4–8 October 1772) was in itself a significant achievement in the normally prolific and strongly profit-driven Madrid theatre scene of the early 1770s; for it to be revived for a further two-night run a couple of months later (16–17 December) could be considered a moderate success.4 French-hating critics might frown on the derivativeness of the Ducis/De la Cruz piece, while audiences might remain indifferent to the palatial intrigues of a Danish court or the verbal excesses of some of its protagonists, choosing instead, as they demonstrably did (Álvarez Barrientos 2005: 209–210), the homely innocence of the zarzuela (comic opera) or the spectacle of the ever-popular comedias de magia (plays involving magic and miraculous events effected by quite elaborate stage mechanisms). However, this did not diminish the importance of Hamleto as a Spanish audience’s first taste of something resembling ‘Shakespeare’, or indeed the impact the play made on audiences at the Corral del Príncipe. Spain, as stated before, was the first country outside France to play host to a Ducis adaptation of Shakespeare.5 Although this fact is undoubtedly of interest as an indication of how profoundly Spain was affected by France’s undoubted ‘cultural hegemony’ (Lambert 1993: 25–44), it leaves unanswered two equally pertinent questions: Why were no further adaptations by the Frenchman performed in Spain until 1802? What circumstances concurred to delay the real explosion of Shakespearean-inspired drama on the nation’s stages?


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The Sentimental Revolution Although it attracted the support of important and influential individuals in Spanish politics and culture, the projected reform of the Spanish theatre to bring it into line with European, especially French, patterns, was never likely to receive unanimous support. For a start, it had to contend with the stark realities of popular taste, and so commercial viability, which was still heavily weighted in favour of Golden Age classics (albeit adapted to contemporary canons) as well as more homely and spectacular forms of entertainment such as the zarzuela or the comedia de magia. True, the reformers did gain certain partial victories, such as official prohibition of the far-fetched and potentially blasphemous autos sacramentales in 1765 and of the comedias de magia in 1788. However, common sense as well as commercial realism pointed increasingly in the direction of a kind of compromise between the least polemical tenets of neoclassical thought, such as respect for the unities, which the representation of more solidly ‘middle-class’ values, such as the importance of marriage and relations within the (generally) bourgeois family. Such a compromise is evident in the theoretical work of Jovellanos, who in 1790 published a report on the present state of Espectáculos y diversiones públicas en España [Spectacles and Public Entertainments in Spain], which in many ways is a more emphatic statement of the ideas expressed in Luzán’s Poética and had been reprinted in a revised edition the year before. Hence, while applauding the government’s decision to ban the autos, Jovellanos, who had been commissioned by no less a prestigious body than the Real Academia de la Historia to produce the report, shares Luzán’s concerns about the moral effects on the audience of the ‘baroque’ drama that continued to be served up in contemporary playhouses: Do people really believe that innocent children, ardent youths, leisurely and blue-blooded nobles, the ignorant masses can, without danger, see so many instances of impudence and lewdness, of grossness and obtuse honour, of disrespect for justice and the law, of faithlessness towards one’s public and domestic obligations, set in action, painted with the gaudiest colours and animated with the spell of illusion and with the grace of poetry and music? (Jovellanos 1967: 93)

For Jovellanos, the answer was clearly in the negative, which prompted him to urge the government not to regard the theatre simply as an idle form of entertainment but as a powerful instrument, capable of ‘both instructing and misguiding the spirit, of both perfecting and corrupting the heart of the citizens’ (111). To delight and to instruct; to instruct by delighting: Jovellanos’ classical credentials were very much on display, as was the connexion he makes between the lofty aims of such a theatre and the elevated social status (‘the nobility and wealthy youths’) of its natural recipients (115).

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Such a theatre, if it existed (and the implication is that it did not), would perform a number of complex functions, and the onus would be on the authorities to promote work where it was possible to see continual and heroic examples of reverence for the Supreme One and for the religion of our forebears; of love of the homeland, the sovereign and the Constitution; of respect for hierarchies, for the law and the depositories of authority; of conjugal fidelity, paternal love, filial tenderness and obedience; a theatre which presented good and magnanimous rulers, humane and incorruptible magistrates, citizens full of virtue and patriotism, prudent and zealous parents, true and constant friends; in a word, heroic and hard-working men, lovers of the public good, jealous of their liberty and their rights, protectors of innocence and the ruthless enemies of iniquity. ( Jovellanos 1967: 114)

Like Luzán in his revised edition of the Poética, Jovellanos had no qualms about badgering the government to become actively involved in the reform of the stage. He too was convinced of the need to rewrite Spanish drama, to produce it from scratch, and to do so from a series of ideological postulates that ranked the respect for Authority, both spiritual and worldly, as the highest virtue to which any man can aspire. The novelty lay in his expanded definition of what, in practical terms, could be said to constitute such authority and also what class of human beings could be said to possess it and so what models of behaviour might be considered worthy of representation on stage. Especially revealing, and even daring given the recentness of the French Revolution, was not only his allusion to the need to safeguard one’s liberty and rights but also the mention of the middle-class values of virtuous and patriotic citizenship that were classed equally as qualities of the ‘heroic and hard-working’ men who, it is argued, had an equal claim to stardom in the new plays. This was a far cry from Luzán’s restriction of such ‘private individuals’ to the entertaining, although largely inconsequential, realm of comedy, at the same time as it admitted the possibility of representing actions and individuals hitherto considered incompatible with ‘serious’ drama. Only the ‘plebeian’ part of Spain’s theatre culture, by which Jovellanos refers to ‘quite a few of our older comedies, almost all of the interludes and several of the modern sainetes and tonadillas’, was considered unworthy of the stage (1) because its characters were ‘the heroes of the mob’ and (2) because of its appeal to the ‘roughest and most simple-minded sectors of the population, [which it delights] with its crude and clumsy tomfoolery, which is its sole merit’ (116–117). The few critical studies which make any reference to Shakespeare in the period could be said to share Jovellanos’ Voltaire-inspired distaste for the social content and potential addressees of his drama. ‘When one reflects upon the enormous faults,’ wrote Esteban de Arteaga symptomatically in 1789, the English poet’s scrupulous exactness in imitating nature gives rise to; when one comes across the gross expressions and coarse and bawdy language, fit only


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for the ale-houses and taverns, which he so often places in the mouths of princes and ladies; when one sees transgressions, not merely of the rules of unity of place, action and time, but of those of geographical and historical accuracy; when one notes the barbarism and indecency with which the most distinguished personages comport themselves, though both may be taken from history; when one considers the immoderate and irregular nature of most of his compositions; when one observes his style, now bloated and pompous, now lax and diffuse, now heavy and opaque, now cold, puerile and laden with antitheses and confusions, the reader cannot help but feel disgust, as he sees before his eyes such representations of imperfection and baseness. And this is why the cultivated nations of Europe [such as Spain], though appreciative of the fact that in Shakespeare is to be found a far more original and fertile wit than in the French dramatists, have almost totally abandoned him and turned to the imitation of the latter. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 30)

A few years earlier the cleric Father Juan Andrés, in his massive 10-volume study of the Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literature [Origin, Progress and Present State of All Literature] (1784–1806) had conceded that certain passages of Shakespeare could, if ‘corrected and reformed by a decent poet, be enacted before the severest audience’,6 only to voice the familiar doubts: Who has got the patience to see the appearance of a mouse, a wall, a lion and a moon who talk, act and converse with one another; to be privy to such low and vulgar speeches, to the sport of cobblers, tailors, gravediggers and the vilest, most deplorable riff-raff; to hear on the lips of princes and the most respectable personages vulgar comments, innuendo and common knavery; and, in short, to read continual rarities and intolerable eccentricities? (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 23)

It is a measure of this contempt – though here coupled with a grudging recognition of some of his virtues – that the only translation of Shakespeare’s work direct from the source, the 1798 rendering of Hamlet by Leandro Fernández de Moratín, should be headed by a preface7 that expounds the reasons why the English author is unworthy of the Spanish stage. ‘Lacking the sense of good judgement,’ Moratín would assert, ‘art can never attain perfection’, and although capable of painting the full range of human characters and failings, of handling delicate issues of politics and morality ‘with the utmost intelligence’, filling his plays with ‘interest, movement, variety and pomp’, expressed by the most graceful and witty of styles, Shakespeare could never be an exemplum for the budding playwright. Bereft of ‘principles’ and forced into writing ‘out of necessity rather than choice, dragged into it by the bad example set by his century and doomed to offer spectacles to a rude and ignorant public, whom he sought to please rather than to instruct’, Shakespeare would remain in the role of mere entertainer ‘until someone else, gifted with the same sensitivity and imagination, but more delicate taste and greater instruction . . . might give new shape to the drama of his age’ (Moratín 1798: n.p.). Rather

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surprisingly for such a prolific playwright, Moratín did not contemplate doing the job himself. Like Voltaire before him, his fear or contempt of the monster he risked unleashing prevented him from seeing his text through to performance.8 As the example of Shakespeare then shows, the ‘democratization’ of the theatre, even for such enlightened thinkers as Jovellanos, had its limits. For Loreto Busquets (1996: 153), there was no contradiction here because interventions like this may be seen as the ‘coherent expression of [a] revolutionary bourgeois ideology, which at its heart bears all the conservatism that ensures the survival of the system that it is trying to put in place’. The impact of the 1789 Revolution, which undoubtedly brought to the surface certain societal and familial tensions that had been latent in Spain for decades, was considerably softened by both government and Church – the latter through the agency of the Inquisition that saw to it that nothing of an inflammatory nature could be either published or, still less, performed there (López 1995: 79, 80). Spanish neoclassicists, following the proposals of the ‘Encyclopedists’ in neighbouring France, were certainly anxious to renovate and modernize all sectors of the society they had inherited – although the reform stopped short of challenging the existing monarchy or of questioning its right to rule. ‘Neoclassicism, however emotional it may be, could never countenance rebellion’ (Aguilar Piñal 1991: 208) Most of the reforms Jovellanos seemed to be advocating in the theatre and in other forms of public entertainment were not directed at the crown but at what he calls ‘the wealthy and proprietorial class’ that lay in danger of corruption and needed ‘instructing by means of pure and sublime maxims and of illustrious and virtuous examples’ (1967: 116). That such examples may be found among the hard-working bourgeoisie (although not the plebeians) was of course a recognition of how important the middle class had become, challenging and even supplanting the nobility as the most powerful social and economic group, though not capable of ruling on its own. Meanwhile, the search for new forms, which tended to ignore neat neoclassical divisions between tragedy and comedy, was already turning up alternatives to strict classical tragedy: in France, the ‘drame’, the ‘tragédie domestique’ or ‘bourgeoise’, the ‘genre larmoyante’, the ‘genre sérieux’; in England, ‘domestic tragedy’, ‘sentimental’ or ‘weeping comedy’ and so on. Like the novels with which they are often associated, such plays were fast becoming the preserve of the bourgeoisie – plays written by, for and about the class which dominated those countries’ economies. Although clearly distinguishable from each other in terms of treatment and, above all, ending, such forms could, according to Guillermo Carnero (1997: 123), be said to have in common the following: (1) the treatment of contemporary everyday life and their ‘private’, familial setting (marital problems, the relationship between parents and children, friendship, economic and professional problems); (2) the presence of bourgeois and popular characters (and occasionally high-ranking ones though ‘not presented in the exercise of conducts and prerogatives of their rank, but in their human,


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personal and private dimension’); (3) a serious, reflexive approach, focused in a non-comic, either sentimental, pathetic or lugubrious fashion. The popularity of a genre so thoroughly soaked in the emotions and so close to the audience’s concerns was never construed as superseding the conservatism of orthodox neoclassicism; on the contrary, the values the plays exuded – reasonable sanity, virtuous conduct, friendship and tenderness, good taste in everything, including the demands of sensibility and passionate love – were precisely the values the neoclassicists, and their political mentors, had been pursuing for decades. On the other hand, by reducing the social level of its protagonists, without delving too deeply into the ‘popular’ quarters, the new drama seemed to be speaking more directly to the classes that mattered. In brief, with its mixture of sentimentalism, close observation of everyday life and classical restraint, the ‘drama’, as it became known, seemed ideally suited to the changing social and economic circumstances of turn-of-the-century Spain.9

The Máiquez Othello In translating Ducis’ highly successful 1792 play Othello, ou le More de Venise [Othello, or the Moor of Venice], José María de Carnerero seemed to be on safe ground.10 As the sixth adaptation of Shakespeare by a man who now occupied Voltaire’s place in the Académie Française, the tragedy of the Moor of Venice combined the taste and unity of the classical masterpiece with the ‘sentimentalism’ Ducis admired in the work of Rousseau, and which had radiated out to other parts of Europe.11 A glance at the plot of Ducis’ play shows how both qualities were combined – as well as revealing the differences with respect to Shakespeare’s original: In the Venetian Senate, where the threat of an unspecified force is being discussed, Odalbert (Brabantio in Shakespeare’s play) enters to declare that the ‘valiant’ Othello has made off with his daughter Hédelmone (Desdemona). Othello is called upon to defend himself, as is Hédelmone, much to the chagrin of her father, who criticizes the Republic and warns Othello to keep an eye on his wife. Back at Odalbert’s palace Hédelmone, who recalls her dying mother’s prediction that she (Hédelmone) would die in tragic circumstances, is being comforted by her nurse. Enter Loredan (Ducis’ counterpart to Cassio, and later, it transpires, son to the Dux) pleading to be admitted to Othello’s service. Pézare (Iago), Othello’s trusty ensign, witnesses the scene and urges his General to take guard. In a soliloquy he then confesses his own unreturned love for Hédelmone. In the following act (III) Loredan reiterates his desire to die in Othello’s service, the result, he claims, of his own unrequited love for Hédelmone. In a desperate bid to save her father, who has been threatened with execution, Hédelmone signs a note to the effect that she will marry Loredan and gives him a diadem to show his father as a token of her love. At the start of Act IV the wedding between

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Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre Othello and Hédelmone is reported as having been interrupted by Loredan. Advising Othello to take Hédelmone off to his homeland and marry her there, Pézare then claims to have slain Loredan and produces the note and diadem as ‘proof’ of the liaison with Hédelmone’s infidelity. In the final act, alone in her bedroom, Hédelmone offers up her life to heaven, sings the ‘willow song’ and goes to sleep. She is woken by Othello who confronts her with the note and diadem and informs her that her ‘lover’ Loredan is dead. Hédelmone’s innocent tears convince Othello of her guilt and he stabs her to death. The play concludes with the Dux informing Othello and Loredan, who has not been killed after all, of Pézare’s plot against them and of his (Pézare’s) secret love for Hédelmone. Othello then shows the body of his beloved, takes the dagger and kills himself.

As well as reducing the number of characters and restricting the action to a single day and setting (although Ducis does allow some mobility within the confines of Venice), the play performs a number of other transformations on Shakespeare’s original, the most important of which may be summarized as follows: 1. The absence of the ‘minor’ characters Roderigo and Bianca means a loss of possible agents in the plot to undo the Moor, but at least it preserves the ‘propriety’ of a piece which, in other hands, could easily have fallen foul of the censor. 2. Perhaps for the same reason (propriety), Othello and Hédelmone never marry in the adaptation. At the end of Act III they are on the point, especially when Pézare voices his suspicions about the Dux’s son Loredan, but the presence of Loredan in church and, above all, the absence of Hédelmone’s diadem – a more ‘seemly’ version of the handkerchief – prompt Othello to temporarily call the whole thing off and to begin his interrogation of Hédelmone. Pézare’s advice to Othello to take her off to Africa and to marry her there is never taken up. 3. There is what looks like an attempt to flesh out the character of Hédelmone, who is provided with a sister and mother, unfortunately dead, and subjected to the same bitter logic that had afflicted Juliet in Shakespeare’s earlier tragedy or, more familiarly to Spanish audiences, Mariene in Calderón’s El mayor monstruo del mundo [Jealousy, the Greatest Monster].12 ‘Fate’ here, however, is represented not by an oracle, as it is in Calderón’s work but by the dying words of Hédelmone’s mother. Hédelmone’s prime concern is to get her father Odalbert’s blessing for the marriage and, when this no longer seems possible, at least to save him from the wrath of the Senate, an innocent enough desire which leads her to sign a letter in which she vows to wed Loredan and so (unwittingly) to fall into the trap prepared by Pézare. 4. Pézare, on the other hand, is considerably underdeveloped. His motives, according to Ducis in his ‘Avertissement’, should only be made explicit when the time comes since, in contrast to the English stage villain, ‘the French


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would be incapable of bearing his presence and even more so of seeing the full extent and depth of his treachery’ (1793: 45).13 5. Sharing Voltaire’s disgust at the nature of Desdemona’s death and especially her ridiculous if momentary resurrection (1967: 120), Ducis has Hédelmone killed with a brief but effective stab-wound. Othello uses the same knife to stab himself at the end of Act V, thus ensuring both verisimilitude and also an admirable economy of theatrical means.14 All of these changes suggest a reinterpretation of Shakespeare that probes towards a certain sentimentalism, albeit within the carefully defined parameters of classical reason. The spiritualized, strictly non-physical relationship between Othello and Hédelmone in which fidelity, rather than jealousy, is the focus of attention; the conflict between romantic love and filial duty in the case of both Hédelmone and Loredan; the allusions to dead parents and siblings; the expansion of the willow song to stretch the audience’s emotions to breaking point – all point to an attempt to add pathos to a plot that has been previously unburdened of anything smacking of grossness or – a particular preoccupation of the neoclassicists – implausibility. Even the question of Othello’s race, which has become a central issue and the chief mode of entry into Shakespeare’s drama, is reconfigured for reasons of theatrical verisimilitude. As Ducis noted in his preface of 1793, As for Othello’s complexion, I have taken the liberty of dispensing with the usual black visage which is the custom on the London stage. I felt that a yellow and coppery tinge, as well as befitting an African, would have the extra advantage of not repelling the audience and especially the women, and that the colour would allow them the fuller to enjoy what is most delicious about the theatre, namely the enchantment which the power, range and play of passions bring to the shifting, animated expression of a young actor who is simmering, sensitive and intoxicated with jealousy and love. (1793: 5)

As if such emotions, brilliantly exploited by the French actor François-Joseph Talma, were somehow invisible on the face of a Negro who, it is also suggested, could only inspire disgust and fear in the viewing public.15 It is difficult to know to what extent this change of pigmentation – Othello being cast as a North African rather than as the ‘blackamoor’ – was Ducis’ own invention or the result of the prompting of his leading man, Talma, who is known to have played a major part in the plays’ revisions, both pre- and post-performance (Golder 1992: 54–59). Neither one of them seemed interested in characterizing Othello as ‘ferocious’ but rather as ‘a wayward lover, a jealous African, a Moor who strikes that which he holds most dear and who will fail to outlive his victim’ (Ducis 1793: 6). In the Carnerero translation, the references to Otelo’s provenance are less oblique16 but, as in Ducis, tend to be articulated in terms of an ill-defined ‘foreignness’, rather than of a distinctive racial identity. In one of the few surviving

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Figure 1.1 Isidoro Máiquez as Othello. Lithograph by José Ribelles y Helip, c. 1820. (Courtesy of the Museo Romántico, Madrid.)

images of actor Isidoro Máiquez in the role of the Moor, it is Ducis’ and Talma’s coppery skinned North African, rather than the blackamoor, which seems to have been the model (see Figure 1.1). Although characters who were coloured or ‘half-caste’ appeared frequently in late eighteenth-century Spanish drama, they were more often than not used to set off the legitimacy of the ruling monarch (Pérez Magallón 2001: 91); in the case of Otelo, the hero’s moderate otherness is useful as a way of offering a critique of the moral conditions of the society in which he is immersed. Such moments of racial self-identification, although used sparingly, nearly always coincide with Otelo’s (late-discovered) contempt for the ‘host’ society of Venice. Take the speech that follows the killing of Edelmira (Hédelmone): Está bien hecho lo que acabo de hacer con esta ingrata. Su amor perverso queda castigado, y confundida su traidora infamia. Nunca hubiera creído en una joven tan tierna una altivez tan descarada: es efecto del clima; es necesario


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que toda la perfidia veneciana, para llevarla a extremos tan horribles, reunida en su pecho se encontrara . . . (Carnerero 1822: 27) [‘I have done the right thing with this ingrate. Her perversion has been punished and her treacherous infamy confounded. I should never have thought so tender a youth could have been so haughtily insolent: it must be down to the place. To have pushed her to such extremes, the full perfidy of Venice must have gathered in her breast.’]

‘Mi accion es mala,’ [‘My deed is bad’] he goes on to say, ‘solo propia de un bárbaro’ [‘the work of a barbarian’] – a barbarism that, the play implies, was present from the beginning but comes to the surface (and to Otelo’s consciousness) only in the oppressive ‘climate’ of Venetian society. Curiously, and clearly not unintentionally, Otelo thus finds a kind of common ground with the character he has truly outraged, Edelmira’s father Odalberto. In Act II we find Otelo hesitating over his decision to marry Edelmira because the image of the outraged father ‘me aflige y enternece’ [‘grieves and moves me’]. A few lines later this vicarious sense of duty is transformed into a reflexion on the ubiquitous nature of Venetian power: ‘en fin, la vigilancia/del gobierno se extiende a todas partes;/de mil modos su astucia se disfraza’ [‘and so the vigilance of the state extends to all corners; its cunning wears a thousand masks’] (11). No-one knows this better than the unfortunate Odalberto who, robbed of his daughter and his first-choice suitor Loredano, must face the ultimate ignominy of losing his titles, lands, citizenship and, if the Assembly has its way, his head (16). As Pésaro puts it wryly two scenes later: ‘en Venecia estamos’ [‘We are in Venice’] (18). The vigilance of the State is essential to protect it against the violation of its norms not only by characters like Odalberto, who puts political and economic self-interest (Loredano is the Dux’s son) before his daughter’s true wishes but also by characters like Otelo, who induces Edelmira to disobey her father. Otelo’s recognition of his fault is also his recognition of his own irredeemable nature as outsider, an outsider in moral, rather than racial, terms. Race, that is, is merely the excuse by which Otelo is put – or rather puts himself – outside the law, becomes the agent in an infraction of what Loreto Busquets (1996: 161) calls ‘the supreme law of the bourgeois order: obedience to one’s parents’. This sentimental departure from Shakespeare is marred by the play’s heavy-handed treatment of the jealousy question. Ducis, sharing Thomas Rymer’s contempt for Shakespearean motivation, had already dispensed with the handkerchief as a feeble excuse for Othello’s green-eyed attack and had concocted an outbreak of parental anger on the part of Odalbert, with insults levelled at the Senate included, and the intervention of Loredan to appease his father at the expense of Hédelmone’s hand. Hardly surprisingly, Othello feels a twinge of suspicion when Hédelmone resists the invitation to go to the altar, and his doubts are multiplied when later it is discovered that she has been

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prevented from marrying by a strange young man, whom Pézare identifies as Loredan. As Alfonso Par would tartly observe: Nothing else is needed, it seems; indeed Othello, who up to now had been a meek little lamb, all of a sudden feels jealous and his confidant [Pézare] has no trouble providing him with immediate proof. Without the slightest progression to help us track the psychological development of the characters, Ducis thrusts us into the midst of a mad fit of jealousy. (1936a: 28)

The protagonist’s jealousy does indeed resemble a kind of unconvincing, Pavlovian response to a series of overloaded, clumsily laid-on stimulants, particularly the note and the diadem. Carnerero’s version respects its French source to the full here, which may explain why one critic of the first performance had this to say of the murder scene: ‘The Moor kills his wife in such way that he looks less like a jealous husband than an ungrateful one’ (cited in Rodríguez Cánovas 1968: 72). This response, although isolated, is itself symptomatic of a general class reaction against such crude emotions as jealousy. On the one hand, a Spanish Othello was always likely to suffer in comparison with that paradigmatic national jealousy play, Calderón de la Barca’s El mayor monstruo del mundo [ Jealousy, the Greatest Monster]. On the other, and despite the continued popularity of Calderón and the honour-passion dialectic of Golden Age dramatists such as Lope de Vega at lower-class venues, jealousy, with its implication of unrefined behaviour and the degradation of the sufferer as well as the threat to the suspect partner, were rapidly going out of fashion with the middle and upper classes. As José Blanco White would write a few years later: ‘I can assure you that if Spanish husbands have ever been as they are portrayed in novels and old comedies, there’s not a race in Europe that has undergone so radical a change’ (cited in Aguilar Piñal 1991: 57). For enlightened liberals like Blanco White and the champions of the theatrical reform, what was at stake here was much more than a literary fad: emotions such as jealousy were ignoble because they detracted from the ideal in marriage that was the mutual trust and comprehension between both partners. The critique of the characters’ motivation and of the outmoded jealousy motif was matched by the objections to the poverty of Carnerero’s Spanish rendering. In 1806 G. Romo, writing in the Memorial Literario (20 February 1806), compared it unfavourably with Moratín’s translation of Hamlet; four years earlier; when the play was first performed, a certain ‘Taranilla’ published a full-out attack, printing lines from the French adaptation with the corresponding lines from Carnerero’s translation and asserting waspishly: ‘Far from rendering the thoughts of the original, it distorts them, weakens them, or else it replaces them with others, which are extremely languid, extremely miserable and, at times, extremely different.’ As for the language used, Carnerero’s


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version is written off in the Diario de Madrid (29 and 30 December 1802) as both ‘humble, ridiculous, full of deadwood and waffle, not to say of capital solecisms’ employing verse which ‘is neither verse nor can possibly hope to be, but rather monotonous lines which defy pronunciation and the ear’. Such an attack was typical of a movement which was opposed to translation tout court. None of this diminished the success of a production which, notwithstanding Par’s response to the original plot and numerous contemporary testimonies to the poverty of the translation, received nothing but plaudits for the performance of its leading actor, Isidoro Máiquez. Máiquez, who thanks to a generous allowance arranged by the then chief minister to Charles IV, the all-powerful Manuel Godoy, had recently studied the art of interpretation under Talma in Paris, has been credited with introducing to Spain a style of acting that owed more to the ‘naturalism’ applauded by Diderot and perfected by Talma than it did to the declamatory mode then prevalent in Spanish theatres. The style has been described as that of the ‘justo medio’ (or ‘middle ground’), a studied and at the same time characteristically bourgeois selfrestraint, based on both the actor’s observation of everyday life and an application of the methods acquired through specialized training, whose equivalent in literary terms are the rules which constitute ‘good taste’ (Vellón 1997). With the rise of ‘sentimental drama’ in England, France and eventually Spain, the coolness the style implied became more and more tempered by a form of ‘sentimental communication’, the expression of emotions not, as in the past, by verbosity or exaggerated gesticulation but increasingly by means of ‘declamación interior’ (or ‘inner acting’) involving silence and the (controlled) display of grief. Although the repertoires continued to include a number of plays, many of them Golden Age, which were largely divorced from common everyday experience, were dominated by long rhetorical speeches that bourgeois audiences found hard to digest, complex motivations that challenged verisimilitude, out-of-date conventions and so on, actors like Máiquez brought a sensitivity and savoir-faire to even the most ‘un-natural’ of parts, showing, in Javier Vellón’s words, that he had thoroughly analyzed it with a view to teasing out all of its characteristic features, and even imperceptible nuances. . . . Thus, not only did he earn applause in the tensest of situations, in violent imprecations and apostrophes, in floridly overwrought and sonorous speeches, but in a straightforward transition, a certain reticence, a smile, a simple glance. (1997: 331)

An example of that art, and the reason why even the deficiencies of the Carnerero translation failed to impact on the play’s popularity, can be seen in Máiquez’s brilliant portrayal of Otelo. One of the lines most hated by the critics, ‘Está bien hecho lo que acabo de hacer con esta ingrata’ [‘I have done the right thing with this ingrate’], which is spoken immediately after Otelo has taken the life of Edelmira was, according to the late nineteenth-century actor Antonio

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Vico, who is drawing on contemporary accounts of the production, precisely the line that sparked the most spontaneous applause: That Othello about whom we know . . . that, having mortally wounded the innocent Edelmira, his dusky visage was seen to grow pale! His eyes began to acquire slow but huge proportions, his pupils to glow with bright red light, the contractions of his face to increase from one moment to the next, his muscles to twitch in a clumsy, cowardly way, an extremely deep but slow anguish to slowly issue from the depth of his bosom, that copious weeping to augment with each sob, directly to overflow like an impetuous torrent in howls of grief and bitter, bitter dejection, and when his mind is once again afflicted with the justification of his vengeance, to recover his calm and to overcome his grief, to gradually pull himself together and to exclaim serenely, but in the most dreadful and ferocious accent: ‘Está bien lo que acabo de hacer con esta ingrata!’ To hold the whole audience spellbound for the six to eight minutes which, I surmise, the maintenance of the action so superlatively performed by an actor must have lasted, one needs to be a superhuman genius. (Cited in Calvo Revilla 1920: 52–53)

The extraordinary complexity of the (silent) emotions described here is paralleled by the actor’s voice which, according to the same account, uttered Edelmira’s name in such a way that it was able to combine both affection and dread: The means of expressing affection needs no explanation (anybody knows what it is), only the other feeling that is attached to it, and this Máiquez achieved by depriving his voice of timbre and vibration, rendering it completely opaque, which is the accent of dread, very similar to the accent of fear; it is achieved by holding one’s breath when one speaks. (Calvo Revilla 1920: 53)

For Alfonso Par, Máiquez’s interpretation of Otelo marked not just Shakespeare’s first success on the Spanish stage, albeit in an untidy translation of a defective French adaptation, but the revelation of the finest tragic actor to tread its boards (1936a: 31). To the universal praise of the critics who attended the performances should be added the recognition by Talma, who in a rare show of modesty is reputed to have acknowledged that Máiquez’s Othello surpassed his own and by John Kemble, then visiting Spain, who is recorded as stating that Máiquez, the ‘Spanish Garrick,’ stood (literally) head and shoulders above the rest of his rivals: His stature was high and well-proportioned; his mien a noble one, at times imposing and severe; his eyes a lively, penetrating black; his voice was neither clear nor sonorous, but with deliberate study he managed to modulate it, making it not just a tolerable one, but highly tragic and fit to express the sublimest accents


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of suffering; a voice, I say, that must have been a prodigious aid in uttering the hoarse imprecations of that Moorish throat. (Cited in Par 1936a: 33)

Such was the identification between Máiquez and the Moor – the novelist Benito Pérez Galdós would later make it the leitmotif of the second of his Episodios Nacionales, La Corte de Carlos IV [The Court of Charles IV] (1873) – that, as well as compensating for the deficiencies of the play text, it tended to overshadow other no less significant aspects of the production. One of these was the rise of the actor-manager as the centre of the production, a figure more significant than the author in terms of billing and, under the terms of the 1799 Reform of the Public Theatres in Madrid, no longer subject to a system of typecasting by which the main roles were allotted even before the play had been read. Although the theatres were now firmly under the control of the municipal authorities, individual actors such as Máiquez were, censorship permitting, able to choose and direct the plays that made up the repertoires. The choice of Otelo was undoubtedly a boost to the ailing and decidedly non-illusionist Caños de Peral, one of the first coliseum-style theatres to be built in the ashes of the old corrales de comedias and which, from 1787, had been used almost exclusively for Italian opera. Another frequently forgotten fact is that the actress playing opposite Máiquez was none other than Antonia de Prado, Máiquez’s own estranged wife, something that must have lent an extra piquancy to the performance. Par suggests that her typically Andalusian poise and grace must have lent the role of Edelmira just the right amount of ‘sentimental sweetness needed to bring out the passionate nature of her husband’ (1936a: 37) – the unintentional ambiguity in this comment perhaps corresponding to contemporary audiences’ knowledge of current theatre talk, which may have confused the troubled relationship of Otelo and Edelmira with the turbulent facts of the Máiquez-de Prado marriage. Be that as it may, the success of the production, which led to a virtually unprecedented 19 performances in 1802 alone, 7 of them on successive nights (1–7 January) as well as to a long series of revivals in both the capital Madrid and Barcelona and Seville, sparked the first stirrings of interest in an author (Shakespeare) whose original tragedy had, it was felt, been so grievously traduced by Ducis and his Spanish translators.

Chapter 2

False Beginnings

A Return to the Golden Age? In Chapter 1 I considered the great cultural debates of the latter half of the eighteenth century, which confronted proponents of the perpetuation of a classical Greco-Roman aesthetic such as Luzán with defenders of Spain’s national drama, the cultural nationalists or so-called casticistas. I also considered how the neoclassicists, most of whom were driven by a genuine concern to renovate and modernize the nation’s means of production – including cultural production – managed to push their reforms through at a political level but failed to significantly modify public taste, which stayed loyal to the tried and tested forms of popular entertainment (the comedia, although adapted, and the autos sacramentales) and spectacular modern forms such as the comedia de magia. As well as professionalizing the Spanish stage, the great reforms of the theatre propounded by figures such as Jovellanos and Santos Díez González, the proponent of the 1799 Reform, were plainly designed to re-direct that taste, putting the playhouses in public hands and, if necessary, pricing the lower classes out of their stalls. The only palpable effect this had on the repertoires, however, was a rash of bourgeois comedies, translated or inspired from the French, and ‘domestic’ tragedies such as Ducis’s Othello, whose sole concession to ‘classicism’ was its respect for the sacred unities of time, place and action. In the political sphere, the reforms largely foundered against a tragic series of events whose outcome would be a redrawing of the nation’s identity. The failure of Charles IV to carry through the reforms introduced by his father, Charles III; the unpopularity of the ‘dictatorship’ of Máiquez’s patron Manuel Godoy, who succeeded in alienating both the aristocracy, whose age-old prerogatives were seen as being under threat, and the lower classes, which were crippled by inflation; and above all the intrigues of Charles’s heir apparent Ferdinand, all served to undermine Spain’s political might, which had already been challenged by defeat at the hands of the British at Trafalgar and a succession of uprisings in its poorly managed colonies in America. This already volatile situation was aggravated by widespread suspicions of Godoy’s own designs on Portugal and public knowledge of his affair with the Queen. Seeing the opportunity to extend his dominions, Napoleon summoned both Charles

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and his heir apparent Ferdinand to Bayonne where they were persuaded to renounce their rights to the throne. The French occupation and Napoleon’s attempt to put his brother Joseph on the throne sparked a wave of anti-French sentiment and, with British military support, a period of popular resistance that would culminate in 1813 with the enthronement of Ferdinand VII. Among the measures first introduced by Ferdinand after the restoration of ‘legitimacy’ was the revocation of the liberal constitution passed by the Cortes of Cadiz in 1812: the so-called sacred codex of nineteenth-century democratic liberalism, which had advocated severe restraints on monarchical power and a democratically elected assembly, was portrayed by Ferdinand and his followers as a replica of the revolutionary Constitution of Bayonne, that is, a duplication on Spanish soil of the conditions that had provided a rationale for the Napoleonic occupation. The anti-liberal purge that followed Ferdinand’s accession to the throne and that would intensify in the so-called Ominous Decade (1823–1833) was predicated on the equation of liberalism with ‘afrancesamiento’, an unacceptable Frenchifying of the Spanish nation, which had opened the door to foreign influences and – the step was but a short one – to occupation by a foreign power. That Ferdinand’s triumphant return had been successfully abetted by the ‘Hundred Thousand Sons of St Louis,’ the army of the French king Louis XVIII, or that he placed afrancesados in key positions to secure foreign loans, was not allowed to cloud his portraiture as ‘el Deseado’ (the Desired One), the king who would restore the country to its ancient, pre-Enlightenment glory. The closure of the theatres throughout Spain, which was one of the first consequences of the Napoleonic invasion, put the brakes on any further reforms in the sector, leaving many to wonder whether the new Junta that had been appointed to govern performances in Madrid, still the centre of dramatic innovation, would, in René Andioc’s words, get ‘a better reception than its predecessor or . . . whether it was even beneficial for the art of drama’ (1988: 552). The fact remains that, when the conflict came to an end in 1814 and when, one by one, the theatres reopened their doors, the neoclassical project of reform seemed to have reached a dead end. Early proponents such as Luzán and Moratín’s father Nicolás had long since passed away; for later ideologues such as Jovellanos, who had been offered the post of Interior Minister under the French king Joseph Bonaparte, and Moratín, who had been appointed onto the influential juntas teatrales, or national theatre board, the idea of the purity of classical tragedy had now given way to an acknowledgement of the unique appeal and necessity of bourgeois drama. In cities such as Barcelona and Valladolid, which were among the first to be occupied by the French forces, the early post-war repertoires were dominated by French comedies, many of which were performed in the original as they were intended mainly as entertainments for French troops and functionaries now residing in these cities. This was the case of Shakespeare amoureux [Shakespeare in Love], a rather demure dramatization of an incident in the life

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of the English playwright. Written by Alexandre Duval in 1804, the play was first staged in Spain at the Barcelona Teatro in August 1810 to commemorate the birthday of ‘Napoléon le Grand’. The success of the play, which was performed extensively in Barcelona and moved Ventura de la Vega to produce a Spanish version in 1828,1 is all the more striking given that it is the first to present Shakespeare as a dramatic character, when so little of his writing had been translated and hardly any of it – at least in its original form – had been performed (Gregor 2003: 45). Barcelona’s Francocentrism was reaffirmed the following year with a production of Ducis’s original Othello by the same French company. As for Madrid, there seems to have been no clear theatrical policy, although in May 1809 Joseph did decide to permanently subsidize the Corral del Príncipe playhouse, and there seems to have been a more or less concerted attempt to Frenchify the Madrid stage, crystallized in a decree of 1810. With an ample diet of plays in translation, some of them belonging to the political drama of the Revolution, there was, as Ana Freire has noted, clearly some effort to transmit the idea that ‘this is France, this is its dramatic literature, this, this is French taste, and Spain had better get used to it if it wants to get on’ (1996: 389).2 In her study of the plays written and produced in the cities not immediately under the sway of France – Palma de Mallorca, Cartagena and especially Cadiz, seat of Spain’s ‘shadow’ government and the birthplace of the nation’s first truly democratic constitution – Freire discovers a theatre that was essentially popular in tone, indifferent to the dramatic precepts, displayed a clear preference for comedy over tragedy, for verse over prose and which ‘together with the desire for historical verisimilitude [a preoccupation of the classicists and one of the recurring critiques of seventeenth-century drama], [made] use of spectacular effects in the performance’. Heavily patriotic, including heroes resurrected from Spain’s legendary past as well as emulating old and technically outlawed forms like the autos sacramentales, such theatre, she concludes, ‘was the nail in the coffin of the old, and by now forgotten, projects of reform’ (1996: 392). Among critics, there would be a considerable nostalgia for an older, pre-Enlightenment order, which was given a new stimulus by the deposal of Joseph and the coronation of Ferdinand VII in 1813 and found philosophical expression the following year in the first renderings into Spanish of some of A. W. Schlegel’s reflections on art and drama. The opening shot, published on 16 September 1814 in the pages of the Cadiz paper Mercurio Gaditano by a ‘passionate admirer of the Spanish nation’, the former consul to Cadiz, Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber,3 set the tone for a debate which often went beyond the narrow limits of the aesthetic: It is only natural that critics who only study models of antiquity will play down the importance of English and Spanish drama. They may, perchance, admire a few of its most striking features, but not for that will the overall economy cease to strike them as barbarous and absurd. In vain will they endeavour to reduce such

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original creations to their rules, and they had rather condemn them as heretical than cast doubt on the infallibility of Aristotle.

For Böhl von Faber, whose passion for Spain was not confined to its literature, which he collected avidly, but included its religion (he had converted to Catholicism the year before), Schlegel’s defence of the ‘organic’ relationship between literature and society and his consequent rehabilitation of the authors of the Spanish ‘Golden Age’, particularly Calderón, were a necessary antidote to what he considered the mechanical imposition of a system of rules which stunted and disfigured the ‘natural’ flowering of a truly national literature. His defence of a ‘modern’ mode of composition that cannot be reduced to the rules and which, polemically, he claims is to be found in both Spanish and English drama, led him to coin the term ‘romancesco’ or ‘romantic’. Paraphrasing Schlegel, he writes as follows: It is . . . absurd to try and classify modern productions by the rules that have been abstracted from the ancients. It will be agreed that the English and the Spanish have neither tragedies nor comedies in the ancient sense of the word, but have created a genre of their own which we shall call ‘romantic’. Ancient art drew harsh distinctions between all the species; modern art seeks to reconcile opposites, and so is content to combine nature and composition, poetry and prose, memory and expectation, the soul and the senses, the earthly and the divine, life and death. Ancient art is simpler, plainer, and closer to nature in some particulars; modern art comes closer to the secret of the universe, though at times it offers little more than chaos. Ancient tragedy is a sculptural ensemble; romantic drama, a painting, in which, besides the brilliant colouring of its figures, may be seen what lies around and afar.

In the case of Spain, ‘modernity’ was linked, as in Schlegel, to the rebirth of chivalry in the decadent phase of the reign of Philip II, to a kind of quixotic cultural patriotism, whose main ingredients were its profound religiousness and a sense of heroism, honour and love. Nowhere were these qualities more evident than in the religious compositions and autos of Calderón, whose poetry was a ‘continuous hymn to the glory of the Creator’. If only the Spanish were able to attend to their hearts and to awaken from the errors of their submission to the false god of Reason, they would, assures Böhl von Faber, again citing Schlegel, ‘learn to admire by conviction what hitherto they have loved by inclination; and paying no heed to the bastard criticism of the philosophical century, will put all their efforts into composing in the same way as the great models of their Golden Age’. Central to Schlegel’s revaluation of the baroque authors, and to Böhl von Faber’s appreciation of it, was the historicist notion that different literatures could be distinguished by the peoples who produced it and for which it was written. In the later words of the critic and director of the Biblioteca Nacional,

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Agustín Durán, great art is, in each country, the ‘poetic and ideal expression of its moral necessities and of the pleasures best suited to the mode of existence, of feeling and judgement of its inhabitants’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 83). If Calderón’s comedias were the ideal expression of the Spanish temperament, it was equally the case that for the English, a nation as ‘pensive as it was passionate’, that honour should be shared between Shakespeare, as the perpetual ‘interpreter of the greater part of the emotions’ and Alexander Pope, as ‘spokesman for the reasonable’ (cited in Par 1935: 153–154). The ‘discovery’ of Shakespeare, via Schlegel, and the rehabilitation of Calderón, brought with it the recognition that for decades his native genius had been hemmed in and bastardized by adapters such as Ducis and the obsession with the dramatic rules.4 The feeling that France’s anachronistic adoption of classical aesthetic rules somehow ran counter to the spontaneity of Shakespeare’s art would be echoed a few years later by José Joaquín de Mora, who in a letter to Böhl von Faber’s wife confesses: I should add that I have been reading some of Shakespeare these last few days and I believe him the most beautiful genius that has ever existed and of all the poets the one who comes closest to the region of ideal beauty. What are the rules and the ‘convenances’ [‘conventions’] and the trammels of these apes next to his sublime outbursts? I love it when people say he is a barbarian, a savage, a ruffian; because if these men understood and praised him, would he be what he is? The further he strays in his poetry from everything which smacks of drama in this country, the better. He is the greatest of poets. His only rule was his inspiration, he created another nature, he penetrated human nature as if he had discovered himself in his creation, and no one can match him in the way he encases in one line of verse a series of ideas that would provoke whole hours of meditation. (Cited in Llorens 1979: 19)

The notion of Shakespeare as a ‘free spirit’, his work untrammelled by the demand to conform to a set of outdated foreign rules, would return with a vengeance later in the century. In the meantime, that work would be cited frequently as counterpoint to the worst excesses of prescriptive neoclassical criticism and, pace Schlegel, as the supreme expression of the indomitable English spirit, which clung to the traditions of its own ‘golden age’ as a kind of buttress against the changes being ushered in across the Channel (Taylor 1991: 123). The defence of the comedia and of Shakespeare’s poetic drama, coinciding as it did with the installation of the ‘legitimate’ monarch Ferdinand VII, must have sounded like a vote of confidence in the continuity of the Old Regime and, arguably, a projection of the Christian conservatism of the Hapsburg dynasty as a model for that of Ferdinand.5 ‘Romanticism’, as Schlegel seemed to conceive it, or as Böhl von Faber faithfully transmitted it, was the restoration

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not just of a lost cultural heritage but of a whole way of life which, it was felt, had been sacrificed to the new-fangled, falsely enlightened, falsely ‘progressive’ transformation of Spain into a satellite, politically and culturally, of France. It is perhaps a measure of the marginality of what would be the first blast of Romanticism in Spain that it had very little impact on the Spanish stage. Despite the enthusiasm of Schlegel’s revaluation of Calderón and of his ‘discovery’ of Shakespeare, directors and impresarios up to the vastly influential, French-born Jean-Marie (‘Juan’) Grimaldi, who from 1824 took control of the Teatro del Príncipe in Madrid, continued to follow mainstream criticism and to plug the tried and tested formulae of foreign, particularly French, comedy as well as a staple diet of melodrama and magic. Political instability, coupled with a severe post-war economic depression, meant that the revitalization of the theatres had to be put on indefinite hold (Calvo 2008: 114), and a glance at the repertoires of plays produced in the country’s two cultural capitals, Madrid and Barcelona, reveals very little in the way of new material or even new appropriations of established texts.6 The persistence of the French dramatic paradigm, albeit in its post-Revolutionary bourgeois strain, was, to all appearances, not diminished by the traumas of the occupation or by the fiercely anti-liberal campaigns conducted under Ferdinand. It was certainly not troubled by the nostalgia for an earlier, pre-Enlightenment mode of drama whose chief exponents, Calderón and Shakespeare, were the focus of a theoretical strain defending a new, less rule-bound aesthetic. ‘There is a sect of German littérateurs,’ warned the critic and grammarian José Gómez Hermosilla in 1821, ‘whose principles in matters of poesy are opposed to those that in the most civilized nations have been set down by good taste’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 64). The uses to which ‘Shakespeare’ was being put in theatres in the period suggest that so far the sect had made little headway in Spain.

Othello Travestied In the case of Shakespeare, the Ducis-adapted Othello was, thanks largely to the charisma of its leading actors, Máiquez and his successors, to prove particularly durable, accounting for a creditable 70 productions in the period 1814–1833 in Madrid and Barcelona alone, 51 of these in Madrid. As Alfonso Par would assert in relation to the 1814 revival of the play at the Corral del Príncipe: The horrors of [Ferdinand’s] absolutism were not sufficient to dampen the desire, if not to enjoy oneself, at least to seek some distraction, felt by Spaniards after the French occupation. True, there was a great deal of sadness amongst the more enlightened social classes, following the exile of the afrancesados and the persecution of the liberals; but there are no signs of abnormality in the activities of the theatres. (1936a: 58)

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The primacy of Othello, which continued to be performed in the much-maligned ‘De la Calle’ version till the very end of Ferdinand’s reign in 1833, was challenged only by Ducis’s reworking of Romeo and Juliet, which inspired a number of different renderings in the early nineteenth century. The play has an interesting history in Spain, as it is arguably the first recognizably ‘Shakespearean’ drama to be produced on the Spanish stage, its failure and subsequent re-translation pointing to the limitations of pieces that followed other than canonical French lines. Thus, as early as 1803, the company of the Teatro de la Cruz in Madrid staged a version based not on Ducis but on the literal prose translation of the play by Letourneur, one of the first authors to render as much of Shakespeare’s work as was known into another European language. In the spirit of turn-ofthe-century bourgeois drama discussed in the previous chapter, re-translator Manuel García Suelto had labelled his text, which was called Julia y Romeo, an ‘urban tragedy’, appending the Latin poet Virgil’s phrase ‘Omnia vincit amor’ to emphasize the personal, amorous nature of the conflict at stake. The style, plain and less grandiloquent than most classical tragedy and couched in the octosyllabic measure of Spanish romance, helped lighten up the tone of the work, which reflected some of the gaiety and innocence of the Shakespeare original. The quantifier ‘some’ is, however, necessary here, as García’s plot was inspired on only part of the original7 and keeps most of the remaining play within the rigid confines of the unities. The exception is the last act, where the action is unexpectedly shifted from a room in the palace of the Capelios (Capulets) to Julia’s tomb. Not insignificantly, the uproar this act occasioned on the first night of the production stemmed less from this perceived ‘affront’ to the unity of place than from García Suelto’s poorly constructed and pathetically incongruous happy end, which has Julia (played by Rita Luna) wake up just as Romeo seems to be about to expire, something neither of them achieves since the ‘deadly’ potion taken by Romeo is completely harmless – a revelation made just in time to prevent Julia from falling upon Romeo’s sword. Although apparently untroubled by the distinctly middle-class ambience of the Capelio household and by the lachrymose mood of the play as whole, what the first-night audience seemed most riled by was, according to Par (1936a: 44), the lack of consistency between the ‘mood’ created by the sepulchral last-act setting and the farcical denouement of the harmless potion. Although this unpardonable breach of credibility would be corrected in García Suelto’s rewrite of the tragedy for a production in 1805, the play would disappear from the Madrid repertoires until 1818, when Dionisio Solís, a collaborator of Máiquez’s and well-known adapter of Spanish Golden Age drama, particularly that of Calderón, would resurrect the Ducis version of 1772 for what would be one of the actor’s last roles. His hendecasyllabic rendering of the play, which would be deceptively billed as a ‘five-act tragedy by the immortal Shakespeare, adapted to the Spanish stage’,8 follows Ducis in decentring the relationship between the two lovers to focus almost exclusively on the feud between the two families and Montegón’s (Montague’s) determination to avenge the death of

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his four children at the hands of Capuleto’s brother by persuading Romeo to murder Julieta. While adopting as his own the typical Ducisian test of filial loyalty – in this case, Juliet’s choice to defend her father against Montegón’s bloodthirsty designs – although possibly with one eye on the unfortunate death of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, Solís has Romeo accidentally run through by Montegón and Julieta commit suicide with the same dagger. The Solís version of Roméo et Juliette was, as mentioned, the theatrical swan song of the formerly tireless Máiquez who, sick and penniless, and under constant surveillance for his liberal sympathies, would never again perform the role with which his name had become virtually synonymous: Otelo. His place would be occupied by a series of successors, none of whom entirely managed to erase the mark he had left. Andrés Prieto, Máiquez’s understudy who had played Romeo the year before in Barcelona, gave just one performance in Madrid (May 1819), although he did receive a slightly warmer reception in Barcelona, where he was to replace Agustín Llopis from 1817; Nicanor Puchol, who fared slightly better and played the part till 1825 was noted by critic Mariano José de Larra as short on both feeling and nobility, vocally monotonous and, when on the move, given to ‘a certain prancing gait which causes nothing but mirth in the audience’ (cited in Par 1936a: 61–62). Without doubt, Máiquez’s most successful replacement was Carlos Latorre, who played the role from 1824 till the play was eventually grounded in 1833. Despite the fact that they both followed Diderot’s counsels on acting in his Paradoxe, Máiquez and Latorre had radically different conceptions of their art. Talma and the actors of Paris were the inspiration for the former, helping him to discover himself and to develop his own artistic personality, while the latter adapted so completely to the school of French classicism that, together with its excellences in the fields of prosody, interpretation and plasticity, he inherited some of its defects, such as over-emphasis and conventionality, of which he found it extremely difficult to rid himself. (Par 1936a: 63–4)

Latorre’s rhetorical excesses were balanced by the more restrained mode of Concepción Rodríguez, pupil and future wife of the energetic and visionary Grimaldi, whose view of tragedy was that its power to move the audience lay ‘less in its heightened mode of expression than its solemnity’: The actions of its characters are neither impetuous nor impulsive, but rather philosophical, the fruit of reflection; they end up committing a crime, a catastrophe, but not with the lack of foresight of the person whose only guide is passion, but in the understanding of what they are doing, with the complete awareness of where it is they are heading. (Cited in Calvo Revilla 1920: 67)

It is just these qualities of solemnity and self-restraint that Rodríguez seems to have brought to the character of Edelmira, a role that confirmed her position as the foremost actress in 1820s Spain, an interpreter allegedly capable of

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provoking wild applause simply by the sound of her footsteps approaching the stage (Calvo Revilla 1920: 66). The enduring success of Otelo is all the more surprising given the flaws in the Carnerero translation – Luciano Francisco Comellas and José Orgaz had both tried unsuccessfully to improve on it for the play’s productions in Barcelona – and also the resistance to France, and by extension to French culture, in the wake of the War of Independence. Its survival, however, was far from problematic. Indeed, parallel to its consolidation as one of the most successful plays in ‘absolutist’ Spain, and possibly a consequence of that same popularity, was its reworking as a pithy low-life sainete at theatres such as the Teatro de la Cruz in Madrid in 1828 or the Santa Cruz in Barcelona in 1830. Burlesques of Othello as well as other popular Shakespearean dramas had, as Manfred Draudt has shown (2005: 294), been common in Europe from as early as the last two decades of the eighteenth century. While appearing to ‘tidy up’ the original, by removing such ‘improbable’ motifs as the handkerchief or lightening the colour of the play’s protagonist, the Ducis version would, as we have seen, incur fresh mockery by simultaneously overloading the ‘proof’ Othello is given of Hédelmone’s infidelity (the diadem and the letter) and greatly simplifying the Moor’s response. In Spain, the botched translation of Carnerero could be seen as a further incentive to possible parodies which, in the rarefied climate of the ‘ominous decade’, were not long in coming. The first and most famous of these was, without doubt, Carnerero’s own Sainete nuevo, titulado Caliche, ó el Tuno de Maracena [New Sainete, Titled Caliche, or the Rogue of Maracena] of 1828 or, in a slightly later version (1831), Caliche, la parodia de Otelo. Sainete trágico [Caliche, the Parody of Othello. A Tragical Sainete].9 How the translator of the completely serious Othello could, some 26 years later, turn the play on its head and produce such an irreverent spoof is perhaps a measure of how mechanical and mercenary the art of translation could be at the turn of the eighteenth century. Given the journalist Carnerero’s political evolution, from ardent supporter of Napoleon at the start of the century to born-again absolutist in the decade of the 1820s (Rokiski Lázaro 1987), the switch of genre might also have obeyed a more overtly ideological impulse. Whatever the reason, there is surely some truth to Par’s evaluation of the piece as ‘the only original work in the period and the most valuable’ (1936a: 19) – if only because, from Par’s militantly anti-French standpoint, it was at the very least a stab at something like a genuinely Spanish Shakespeare. The Spanishness is evinced not only in the very form of the drama, the oneact farce or sainete, but also and most conspicuously in the setting and type of characters introduced. ‘Incultos campeones del Senete’ [‘Uneducated champions of the Senete’] pipes the beginning of the 1828 version, an address which is modified to ‘Incultos héroes del fuerte Lavapiés’ [‘Uneducated heroes of fort Lavapiés’] for the version that would settle in Madrid some three years later, both references to the insalubrious districts of the towns (Granada and Madrid) where the action is set. As the invocation of such addressees makes clear,

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this would be low-life comedy at its most tawdry and popular, and indeed a glance at the dramatis personae is revealing: the Doge of Venice becomes ‘Rabón’ (‘Bobtail’), the inn-keeper; Desdemona-Edelmira becomes ‘Garduña’ (a small weasel-like creature), whose outraged father is a character called ‘Chispas’ (‘Sparky’); the falso amigo (or ‘false friend’) Iago-Pésaro is now called ‘Pelitre’ (’Oxeye’, a bitter tasting plant used for medicinal purposes), whereas ‘Lagartija’ (‘Wall-lizard’), the play’s equivalent for Emilia-Hermancia and ‘Gavilán’ (‘Sparrowhawk’; Cassio-Loredano) complete the ‘uncultivated’ cast. The plot, although distorted for parodic ends, is vaguely familiar: Garduña has fallen in love with Caliche (‘Saltpetre’, an ironic reference to his skin-colour; Othello) on hearing him relate the story of his crimes; Chispas demands justice from the Senete although – and here Carnerero apes the original – neither he nor they can be sure the affair has ended in marriage. Garduña confides to Lagartija her qualms at the marriage, as her late mother had forewarned: ‘Muérete en este instante, pues me huelo/que tu fin ha de ser muy desastrado,/y en horrorosa y mísera tragedia/morirás deshonrada y a trancazos’ [‘Drop dead, because I have a feeling that your end will be a disastrous one and that you will be dishonoured and clubbed to death in some horrible, wretched tragedy’] (1831: 8). The entrance of Gavilán, with death wish included, and Chispas with a document for Garduña to sign (‘Fírmalo sin tardar, o este guijarro/los sesos me hará echar por las narices’ [‘Sign it straightaway or my brains will be dashed out with this stone’][12]) are both further broadsides at the improbability of the Ducis-Carnerero design. To save Chispas, who has already incurred the wrath of his neighbours, Garduña decides to give Gavilán the headband Caliche bought her so that he can pawn it and, with the money, buy wine to distract her father’s persecutors. No brighter than Edelmira is, she also hands him the compromising document. Pelitre, who has already expressed his love for Garduña, provokes the jealousy of Caliche by insisting on the headband. Beside himself with rage, Caliche vows to turn Garduña’s body into ‘almóndigas’ (a low-class or uneducated form of the word ‘albóndigas’ or ‘meat balls’) (Carnerero 1831: 16) but when Garduña faints in his arms, he quickly forgets his promise. At this point, enter Pelitre to announce he has murdered Gavilán and to show the fateful note and headband. Caliche is beside himself again. The scene then shifts to Garduña’s bedroom, where Garduña relates her fears to Lagartija, before falling asleep. Enter Caliche, who wakes her up and, in a witty critique of the ‘indecorousness’ of the Ducis-Carnerero scene where Othello/Otelo enters the bedroom of his bride to be, is rebuked with: ¿qué quieres? ¿Pues no sabes/que aun no eres mi marido? [‘What do you want? ‘Or have you forgotten you are not my husband yet?’] (21). But when she fails to satisfy Caliche’s curiosity about the headband and the note, Caliche goes on the offensive: ‘Te disculpas muy bien; pero qué importa,/no me convenzo’ [‘A good excuse. But who cares? I am not convinced’] (22). When Caliche mentions the death of Gavilán, she weeps and Caliche goes wild. ‘Muere’, [‘Die’] he barks. ‘Tente un solo instante,’ [‘Hold on a moment’]

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she pleads, ‘me iré hacia mi jergón aproximando/para que cuando caiga no me duela’ [‘Let me get closer to the mattress, so I will not be hurt when I fall’] (22–23) – a metatheatrical reference to the straw mattress used to break the fall of actors. The entrance of the neighbours of the Senete forces Caliche to the climactic decision: . . . pues me han de ahorcar sin falta alguna, por ahorrarme de las costas y un mal rato me voy a asesinar: nadie me tenga: a Dios, amigos; este fin infausto es preciso que tengan las tragedias. Y si habéis de contar aqueste caso, al instante que yo me dé en un buen sitio, tocar el pito y el telón abajo. (24) [‘As I am going to be hanged an innocent man, I shall save myself the expense and the pain by killing myself first. Do not try and stop me. Farewell, my friends. This miserable end is necessary in tragedies. And if you ever tell this tale, the minute I find the spot, blow the whistle and down with the curtain.’]

For Clara Calvo (2006: 127), through this parodic reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello, ‘eighteenth-century tragedy is subverted and rewritten as comedy’. Although the appropriation ‘is not political or ideological sensu stricto, as it does not project a clear political message, . . . it is ideological insofar as it is operating within the cultural politics of its time’. Carnerero, whose ‘political and ideological’ preferences had suffered such a radical shift, was also, curiously, the author of a ‘straight’ translation of Ducis’s Hamlet in 1825 for a production which, for reasons unknown, does not seem to have reached the stage (Pujante and Gregor 2005: 133). Whatever the circumstances of this nonperformance, the existence of the parody, like the Italianate titles of later sainetes,10 did nothing to undermine the acceptability of the model whose aura, if anything, it reinforced, albeit from a more domestic, grass-roots perspective that was alive to a vibrant pre-Napoleonic native tradition.11 Caliche’s otherness is, in this respect, neither racial nor social as it was for Shakespeare or Ducis, but a demand of the form of the sainete whose inherent realism ‘requires that Otelo be not an African but a native inhabitant of a Spanish workingclass quarter’ (Calvo 2006: 127). Chispas may, echoing Carnerero’s earlier Odalberto, dub him a ‘vil estrangero’ [ ‘vile foreigner’] (4), but the fact is that his foreignness is merely that of a different barrio (or ‘district’), his jail-bird past lending him the same dubious stature as the inn-keeper’s son Gavilán. As Lagartija makes clear (8), this is Spain, the Spain of ‘fandango,/castañuelas, guitarra, baile y boda’ [‘fandangos, castanets, guitars, dances and weddings’], which nonetheless owes nothing to the exoticism of orientalizing approaches of writers such as Merimée. Just as Garduña is no Carmen, so Caliche (Chispas: ‘ese Caliche/de raza vil y nacimiento bajo’ [‘that ill-bred, low-born

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Caliche’] [12]) is conspicuously very much at home in a social milieu of drunkards, thugs and notorious celestinas.

Romanticizing the Stage The death of Ferdinand VII and the succession of his three-year-old daughter Isabella, under the regency of his widow, María Cristina, had two important consequences for the development of the drama in the 1830s and 1840s. One was the return of many of the liberal exiles who had fled for their lives during the purges of the 1820s and early 1830s. The other was a new receptiveness to the very latest in continental, especially French, literature, which had already been waging its own particular war against the oppressive strictures of classical culture. Of course, the two events are not unrelated: the freedom of thought and action that the Spanish liberals felt they were regaining with the demise of the ancien régime epitomized by Ferdinand and his government had, it was fervently believed, its aesthetic corollary in the removal of all artificial constrictions on the poet’s capacity to give full vent and scope to his imagination. The Restoration, according to erstwhile classicist Antonio Alcalá Galiano (1969: 37), had been ‘doubly damaging’ for Spanish letters, first by punishing the writers who produced it, and secondly by putting multiple obstacles in the way of those who might devote themselves to it in the future. In a country that still looked to France for spiritual, if not political guidance, the shift in cultural authority from Voltaire to Victor Hugo, or from Classicism to Romanticism, was heralded as the dawning of a new age of both artistic and political liberty. For what is Romanticism, Hugo would state provocatively in his preface to Hernani, but ‘liberty in art, liberty in society’? To which Spanish critic Mariano José de Larra, with slightly less ardour, would respond: ‘Freedom in literature, as in the arts, as in industry, as in commerce, as in conscience. This is the sign of the times, this is our insignia, this is the yardstick we shall use to measure things’ (cited in Flitter 1992: 103). If freedom was the yardstick, Calderón and Shakespeare were at the top end of the scale when it came to dramatic liberty. ‘Say what you will about the muchsung precepts of Aristotle,’ wrote the critic Eugenio de Ochoa in the pages of the pro-Romantic periodical El Artista. For men who . . . judge the arts on instinct and do not resort to codes to see if they should give praise or not, the works of Calderón and Shakespeare will be a constant source of pleasure, regardless of the fact that all their comedies and tragedies last more than the mysterious twenty-four hours, which, like ancient cabalistic signs, have the virtue of making good a play which (oh! the power of white magic) would be hateful if it lasted twenty-four hours and three minutes. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 98)

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Ochoa, who had translated Hugo’s Hernani as well as work by other idols of the new Spanish Romantics such as Dumas and Sir Walter Scott was of course being tongue-in-cheek, but his waggish remark nonetheless reflected a serious objection to the Aristotelian school of thought which, given that many of the liberals who had gone into exile had been nourished on the classical cultural tradition exported by France, continued to have an impact on critical writing about the theatre. A few of these liberals, such as Alcalá Galiano, who had been a regular playgoer in early nineteenth-century England, were favourably struck by the new style of dramaturgy. Alcalá Galiano’s contribution to the debates over the true path of literature at the Madrid Ateneo on his return to Spain in 1834 reveals a certain impatience with such formerly untouchable principles as the unity of place (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 120). Meanwhile, Alcalá Galiano’s appreciation of some of the strictures of Aristotelianism includes the recognition that the neoclassical critique was unfairly applied to ‘all that was original and full of life in [the critics’] own national literature’ (Alcalá Galiano 1969: 115). The contribution of other liberals writing outside Spain was vital in the reappraisal of non-national figures such as Shakespeare – none of them more vocal in their support for the English bard than José Blanco White who in 1837 would argue that Shakespeare’s chief fault had ‘not so much been the absence of rules as the novelty and audacity of his metaphors’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 105). That said, the out-and-out rejection of a predetermined standard of ‘taste’, guided by the play’s degree of conformity to the ‘rules’ of classical dramaturgy – especially the three unities – and the appeal to the critic’s ‘instinct’ as a criterion for determining the quality of the product must have sounded, at best, hopelessly subjective, at worst, dangerously anarchic in a cultural formation still densely populated with the self-appointed heirs of the eighteenthcentury ‘preceptistas’. Such was the obduracy of the classical model that, in the theatres, the ‘rediscovery’ of Spain’s own native Golden Age dramatic tradition, which the liberals undoubtedly helped initiate, led not, as might be expected, to the production of joyously unadulterated baroque classics but rather, as Vicente Llorens has shown (1979: 386), to rather staid performances of carefully adapted texts on the assumption that, if they were going to work, then certain passages needed altering, certain scenes needed shortening, certain characters needed suppressing and the passages of the original text needed replacing while ‘the adapter could add whatever he saw fit’. The cause of freedom that Larra saw as the benchmark of the new times and was responsible for the reception of work by Hugo and Dumas on the stage or, for instance, by Byron in the lyric, failed to extend to the reception of Spain’s own aureate drama which, outside of printing, was available only in tidied-up, carefully regulated stage versions that bore only a passing resemblance to the original. Shakespeare himself had, as we have seen, suffered much the same fate at the hands of Ducis and his Spanish translators, and to judge from the repertoire of plays produced immediately after the death of Ferdinand, continued to be subject to the same

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crippling strictures that had prevented all but a handful of the tragedies (heavily doctored) from reaching the Spanish stage. One of the most popular of these in the Regency period was without doubt the reworking of an episode from Shakespeare’s Richard III by Casimir Delavigne, Les Enfants d’Edouard [The Children of Edward], translated into Spanish as Los hijos de Eduardo by Manuel Bretón de los Herreros and first performed at the Príncipe theatre in Madrid in October 1835. What in Shakespeare’s chronicle is presented as further proof of Gloucester’s vindictive urge to ‘prove a villain’ and eliminate the competition – the murder of the princes in the Tower – is worked up by Delavigne and Bretón into the climax of a story that interprets history sentimentally, rather than politically, and foregrounds the ‘human’ implications and suffering occasioned by Richard’s irresistible rise to power. For both the Madrid production and the run the play enjoyed in Barcelona the following year, the part of the princes was played by two actresses, Matilde Díez and Concepción Rodríguez, both nearing the end of their careers but whose status and, above all, gender promised to lend the parts and the play as a whole the kind of pathos Delavigne and Bretón desired. Although the play would be periodically revived and eventually inspire a sequel called Ricardo III, and although it did seem to appeal to the tastes of both older classicists and new Romantics alike, the first productions were slammed for the tedious dialogues and lack of (visible) action, a slowness which, as one reviewer put it, meant that the spectators were ‘already tired and ill-at-ease when all the interesting business began’ (cited in Par 1936a: 206). This impatience, which was a familiar and well-documented reaction to the remnants of neoclassical tragedy in the early nineteenth century, was mingled with a certain disgust at the killing of the two children. The role of Gloucester was played by Julián Romea, and the impact he appears to have made in both Madrid and Barcelona brought praise not recalled since the days of Máiquez’s interpretation of Otelo. Sighs Luis Calvo Revilla: I remember him as if I were seeing him now, the instant Teodora Lamadrid [the actress who played the elder of the two princes in the Príncipe production] tears Gloucester’s hat from his head, tosses it to the ground and says: ‘Off with your hat, off with your hat, I say, in front of her’. Oh, the face on Don Julián! Pride, anger, hatred, the desire for revenge, all in stark contrast with the sweetly spoken words of his gentle retort. I confess I have never seen a better actor in Spain or anywhere else. (1920: 119–120)

The effect on audiences was such that the performance was to extract the following hyperboles from the same anonymous reviewer who had savaged the production a few months earlier: At the mere sight of his entrance, the whole audience was won over. His figure is noble, majestic; his bearing, graceful and elegant, while his whole face expresses the life, the power, the energy of a privileged being. . . . He played the disgusting

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Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre figure of the murderous Gloucester with all the inimitable truth of the consummate actor. The celebrated successor of Talma, whom we saw playing the same part [an allusion to a performance by Carlos Latorre in 1826], was nowhere as good. In the first act he was given two rounds of applause; in the second, the signs of approval reached their apex: Sr Romea’s gestures, the way he gives voice to the disorderly passions of a villain with neither brusque transitions nor icy pauses, produced a kind of fervour in the audience which it is useless to try to explain. (Cited in Par 1936a: 208–209)

The naturalness that had been the hallmark of Máiquez’s art was brought by Romea to a pitch of perfection, the ‘truthfulness’ of his performance putting the seal of credibility and verisimilitude on a part (Gloucester) with which audiences were still largely unfamiliar. It was the critic Juan Valera who would rate Romea’s contribution to Spanish acting as breathing a certain ‘naturalness’ into the roles he played and of doing so ‘with discretion and skill, being able thereby to move his audience and to express the most vehement passions with no raising of the voice, no elaborate gestures and no inflexions or tedious cadences’ (cited in Par 1936a: 157). As one of the few Spanish actors with the capacity to sit back and take theoretical perspective on their art,12 the man who had been instrumental in the premiere of Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch’s Romantic tragedy Los amantes de Teruel [The Lovers of Teruel] (1837) in a benefit performance for his former master Carlos Latorre, Romea followed Diderot’s idea that, as well as ‘inspiration’ and an ‘exquisite sensibility’, the actor should be a keen observer of life. His concept of truth and naturalness derive precisely from what he calls ‘the particular instinct for observation’, an instinct that is nonetheless the product of his meticulous reflections on the actor’s craft.13 There was, as Jesús Rubio has noted (1988: 274), something very eighteenthcentury about Romea’s notion of the ‘truth’ of his profession and of the naturalness it entails. But no less classical is the actor’s notion of the theatre’s capacity to teach its audience, to provide the ‘school of manners’ other kinds of moral discourse had proved incapable of yielding. If the theatre had any worthwhile function, Romea argued (1859: 25): [It was] to portray the passions, the virtues, the vices, the habits and, in short, whatever it is that forms those manners, teaching us what is good about them so that we might pursue it, and what is bad so that we might shun it, whether it be through the large proportions of tragedy and drama or through the laughter and piercing ridicule of comedy.

Although his suitability for tragedy has been disputed (Calvo Revilla 1920), the softly spoken Romea appears to have energized the off-centre figure of Gloucester in Los hijos de Eduardo, giving the character a centrality the plot does its level best to deny. This is not to suggest that he was in any way responsible for the furore the character of Richard would cause among the Romantics. For

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if Romea could be credited with anything it was what Par refers to as his ‘heroic’ resistance to the worst excesses of Romanticism, ‘performing with sobriety what was written with disorder, with concentrated emotion what had been imagined with a great deal of fuss, and with purity of intention what was deliberately tainted with turbulent passions’ (1936a: 159). By interpreting Romantic drama, not in the manner of the Romantics but ‘in conformity with life’, Romea was unwittingly laying the foundations of the new school of theatrical realism. It is perhaps symptomatic that, as in Máiquez’s time, the appeal of the main actor overshadowed both that of the play text (Delavigne’s original and Bretón’s translation) and indeed that of the original work (Richard III) from which it derived. If theatrical practice in Romantic Spain had inherited anything from its neoclassical predecessor, it was the absolute centrality of the main actor at the expense of the author whose work was being brought to life. The lack of material resources, in the shape of well-conditioned and well-equipped playhouses and a solid investment in the accoutrements of theatrical representation (costume, lighting, scenery, etc.), was never allowed to detract from the skill and savoir-faire of these actor-cum-artistic directors, whose dedication and often self-taught accomplishments did more than anything else to revitalize the Spanish stage (Hormigón 2004). As we have seen, Shakespeare’s part in that process of revitalization was, prior to the production of Otelo in 1802, little more than tangential. The return of the liberals following the death of Ferdinand VII helped position him at the centre of the ‘quarrel’ with the ancients that Spanish intellectuals had imported from France and, through the highly productive and often imaginative criticism of exiles like Blanco White, given Spanish readers a sense of how provocative and challenging his work might actually prove. As the Macbeth experiment was to demonstrate, however, the chances of that work doing anything to revolutionize the theatres were still remote. At the most, it could find only sentimental echoes, as in the Delavigne amplification of the episode of the princes or, as the Othello years began to draw to a close, in pointedly brief and, by all accounts, atrociously hammed-up performances of the death-scene (by stabbing, not suffocation) of Edelmira, which would spawn a whole subgenre of its own – the ‘set scene’ – in later years (Gregor 2002: 339). The fact that even authors such as Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, who is generally credited with having ‘romanticized’ the Spanish stage with his La conjuración de Venecia [The Conspiracy of Venice] in 1834, found plays such as Macbeth ‘disgusting’ and ‘absurd’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 96), is a sign of how resilient the decorum and rationalism of an earlier age really was when it came to adapting them to Spanish tastes. Although thanks to the French adaptations of Ducis, Shakespeare could be said to have provided writers for the stage with a viable content, it was the form of his dramas which, in the 1830s at least, was still the site of most resistance. There was, thus, a great deal of expectation, and not a little trepidation, when on 13 December 1838 the first ‘original’ Shakespeare was performed at the Príncipe in Madrid. With Julián Romea and Matilde Díez, for whose ‘benefit’

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the production was intended, in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth; a set involving an almost unprecedented pair of distinct vistas, richly painted by Francesco Lucini; and a fourth-act witches’ chorus composed for the occasion by maestro Basilio Basili, the management of the Príncipe had spared no expense for a production that it clearly hoped would mark a turning-point in the fortunes of Shakespeare and the new ‘Romantic’ drama, which one critic defined as ‘a drama which, distancing itself from the strict laws of classical Greek and Roman, is freer in its forms, less certain in its development and richer in adventitious adornments’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 127–128). The pre-production hype, orchestrated chiefly by the Diario de Madrid, seemed to point to just such a loosening-up of the stage. ‘On announcing a play which has been universally applauded in Europe,’ the paper declared just a few days before the performance, [I]t would be to demean the enlightened public to dwell in praise on the sublime genius by whose audacious pen it was created. Cadalso, Moratín and many other Spanish authors of greater or lesser renown have given appreciative notice of that great poet, as original as he was powerful. (Cited in Llorens 1979: 379)

At the same time as the Diario declared its passion for (despite the alleged plaudits of so many, significantly unnamed, admirers) the evidently little-known playwright, it also considered it prudent to warn potential spectators that Macbeth contained [f]requent transformations, rapid changes of fortune, powerful and magnificent scenes in which the passions are painted with unequalled vehemence; and as in Shakespeare everything is animated, everything personified, there is a place in the action for witches and spirits who embody criminal passions, ghosts who precipitate, stir up and sustain the full force of remorse, while the drama unwinds towards its climax, not avoiding the obstacles, but overcoming them, as genius does the impetuous rush of the torrent. (Cited in Llorens 1979: 379)

Difficulty – non-linear plots, sudden reversals of fortune, the appearance of characters, living and dead, to disrupt audiences’ notions of ‘the real’ – was not something Spanish playgoers were comfortable with or indeed used to. For decades, the country’s most influential critics and indeed whole journals had promoted a ‘proper’ way of doing theatre whose tastefulness was proportionate to its respect for the tried and tested ‘rules’ of dramatic production. To do anything different was not only risky, but to recklessly court aesthetic disaster. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as translated by José García de Villalta, was, in the spirit of Hugo and Dumas, an unadulterated challenge to artistic and theatrical respectability. Members of the first-night audience expecting a re-run of the Ducis Macbeth in the 1803 version by Carnerero or the heavily acculturated, poetically tighter

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1812 Macbé by Manuel García, both of which had starred Isidoro Máiquez, would have been dismayed to find not only no traces of the Rousseau-esque subplot of the boy-king (Walcomo) raised in rugged highlander innocence and very few signs of regret in Macbeth but a play that begins with the diabolic presence of three witches, who are all but sidelined in the earlier plays. Equally disorienting, and an enormous risk theatrically, given the strongly neoclassical horizon of expectations that continued to govern critical taste, would be the appearance of Banquo’s ghost. Not only had Ducis’s Macbeth dispensed with the ghost, but it pointedly excluded any character who might, even remotely, fulfil the role of the distrustful fellow in arms and sire of future monarchs, Banquo. The dismay is implicit in the only substantial critique of the performance, a text that has added interest because it also proffers some possible reasons for the utter fiasco of the ‘Villalta’ Macbeth. Thus, while recognizing the utter inadequacy of the ‘classical lens’ for exploring the full range of emotions stirred by Shakespeare’s gothic fantasy, Enrique Gil y Carrasco, in a two-part article published in the Correo Nacional (19 and 20 December 1838), judged the play unsuitable and irrelevant to this particular juncture in Spanish history, or indeed to Spanish customs, beliefs and ‘civilization’: The mists of Scotland, the country’s wildness, its magicians, apparitions and the visionary, abstract nature of the men of those times, are truly at an infinite remove from our fiery sun, our blue skies, our sweet-smelling fields, our free and open nature, the wholly outgoing, confident turn of the southern imagination. There are too many discords between the exteriors of the English dramatist and of our own opulent playwrights to ever bring them into line with our manner of feeling. (1954: 421)

As well as suggesting a radical difference of sensibility between the Shakespearean/Scottish mindset and contemporary Spain – a common strategy in contemporary criticism given to exploring the differences between the English playwright and his natural Spanish ‘counterpart’ Calderón (see Pujante 2001) – the reviewer points to the aesthetic backwardness of an audience which has signally and, at times, noisily failed to honour the sanctity of a memory which has ‘crossed the dark passage of time translucently and sublimely, and which will ever illumine the world of art and beauty’. The failure to recognize the greatness of Shakespeare’s art is, he implies, to discredit Spain’s own aureate tradition enshrined in the work of Calderón. Where both the Germans and the Italians revere him ‘we have denied our hospitality on the very soil of this self-same Calderón to the prince of dramatic literature’ (422). Despite the brilliance of Shakespeare’s characterization – a Macbeth who moves from nobility, valour and simplicity to bitterness and resolute solitude in the space of five acts; a Lady Macbeth, whose combination of diabolic intensity and utter remorse in the sleepwalking scene would warrant ‘a play on its own’ (423) – the production was dropped after only 4 nights.

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Characteristically, Alfonso Par (1936a: 166–167) lays much of the blame for the failure of the production on the translation by Villalta who, he claims, ‘lured by the siren of poetic vainglory’, felt induced to amplify and paraphrase to such an extent that ‘far from making the original clearer and more precise, saw the spirit of the tragedy evaporate between his hands’. But there was clearly more to it than that, as Macduff’s terse ‘He has no children’, harmlessly although perhaps over-explicitly rendered by Villalta as ‘Macbeth no tiene hijos’ [‘Macbeth has no children’] brought giggles from many of the spectators. The unsolicited mirth – possibly also provoked by the fact that both Romea and Díez were better known as comic actors or that, like Máiquez and Antonia de Prado before them, they formed a less than happily married couple (see Calvo Revilla 1920: 107) – and general indifference that met the performance must, I think, be seen against the audience’s unreadiness for anything (especially tragedy), which stepped outside the expected bounds of dramatic performance. Gil y Carrasco attributes the reaction to the utter ‘incompatibility of Spain’s theatrical resources with the pomp and circumstance that should accompany such lofty pieces’, likening the efforts to adapt the play to the Spanish stage to ‘laying a giant in a child’s cot’ (1954: 424). To the material difficulties of staging such a demanding play in such a poorly equipped theatre, he adds the disorientation of the actors, with no surer guide to Shakespeare than the ‘ham-fisted and incomplete translation of Hamlet’ by Moratín. With nothing but their own talent and sensitivity to refer to, Romea and Díez appear to have turned in creditable performances. Though the latter is criticized for appearing too irresolute in the decision to kill Duncan, the description of the sleep-walking scene suggests she did come some way to generating the horror of the original: Those machine-like movements, those staring, moistureless eyes like the eyes of the dead, that dreadful incoherence of thought and speech, those sighs wrenched up from the depths of the soul, drill into the heart and freeze the blood in our veins. Mrs Siddons herself would not, we believe, have played this scene so well. (425)

Díez’s sleep-walking scene and the sense of abandon and despair evinced by Romea in the final scenes (‘so obscure and so full of bitterness’) were the highpoints of a production, which otherwise failed to live up to the expectation created by an over-enthusiastic press. Macduff, pitilessly heckled and jeered by an audience which failed to forgive him for the line cited above, was described (perhaps not surprisingly) as lacking ‘warmth’ (425); with the exception of Banquo and the two murderers, the rest of the actors are described as only ‘middling’, quite a few of them ‘not even as good as that’ (426). Writing in El Laberinto a few years later, Evaristo San Miguel could reflect complacently: Some sixty years ago it would have been unthinkable to give a clear idea of the works of Shakespeare to an audience accustomed to the order, to the regularity of

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what was called classicism, to ousting from the stage whatever infringed the precepts of Aristotle which were so rigorously set down, so respectfully and even boastingly abided by. Now that those ideas and tastes have changed, the task is not so arduous, though always complicated by the nature, difficulty and range of genres which are mixed in his productions. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 173)

In the conclusions to his review of Macbeth, Gil y Carrasco firmly believed that, by translating Shakespeare directly from the English, ‘Señor Villalta has opened up a new world of poetry and sensation’ to which the imagination of the young might turn without losing any of ‘its spontaneous and national development’ (1954: 427) – a call to his contemporaries to redirect their talents towards romanticizing their work, something he claims is not incompatible with the national ‘temperament’. But the evidence, at least the theatrical evidence, pointed in a very different direction and the ‘Villalta’ Macbeth, with its onstage deaths, ghostly apparitions and only partly repentant heroes – would be the only semblance of ‘authentic’ Shakespeare the Spanish public would encounter for another 30 years.

Chapter 3

The Birth of Character

The Realist Turn Spanish theatre in the period 1833–1868, that is, from the death of Ferdinand to the abdication of his successor, Isabella, has been celebrated for its variety, with a whole array of genres available to the different audiences at the playhouses that were to mushroom in the capital and in the more affluent of the provincial capitals. As far as the drama was concerned, the end of absolutism marked what has been presented as the dawn of aesthetic freedom, one of its most distinguished casualties being the figure of the theatrical censor (Rubio 2003: 1807). Jean-Louis Picoche (1995: 77–78) has distinguished no fewer than six distinct ‘developments’ in dramaturgy, each inspired by a distinctive model and each designed to meet the needs and demands of a particular constituency: 1. Despite the cultural nationalism of the Fernandine period, there continued to be a proliferation of translated work, most of it French, with a special penchant among spectators for the comic vaudevilles of Eugène Scribe, the most popular and eagerly performed of French authors. 2. Among the home-grown products, the ‘classical’ comedies of Leandro Fernández de Moratín continued to be in vogue. Even purportedly ‘Romantic’ authors such as Francisco Martínez de la Rosa, José de Espronceda or Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch dabbled with what was considered this most sophisticated of comic subgenres (Shaw 1973: 119). 3. Meanwhile, the traditional comedia, with Calderón as its most highly rated exponent, would experience a minor revival, although from the start of the century the plays had been subjected to a rigorous process of ‘adaptation’ to prevailing tastes. 4. Neoclassical tragedy, particularly by Racine and his successors, Voltaire and Alfieri, was still given an occasional outing, although for increasingly select audiences and without the political edge the works received in Cadiz, during the brief period of the Constitution. 5. The French Romantic drama of writers such as Alexandre Dumas, Delavigne and Hugo would enjoy a brilliant, but short-lived, success among the country’s bourgeois intelligentsia, which was tired of the mind-numbing


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restrictions of the Aristotelians and longed for release from the strait-jackets of decorum and the unities. 6. Finally, the dramas of Shakespeare – together with Alfred de Musset, the ‘most neglected’ of foreign influences – made a timid appearance on the Spanish stage, although the more ‘radical’ aspects of dramatic form and the more ‘unseemly’ elements of style were studiously avoided. To these different developments should be added the newly reinstated subgenre of the comedia de magia, at which most of the mainstream Romantic authors tried their hands (Vallejo and Ojeda 2001: 17) and also the lyric, whether in the middle-brow form of the zarzuela or, increasingly from 1850, the unashamedly high-cultural mode of the opera. As far as the companies were concerned, actors remained a relatively insignificant part of a corporate structure under the tutelage of a ‘director de escena’, who was also often an actor in the company and was responsible for hiring and firing members of the cast as well as for choosing the repertoires. The abundance and variety of the latter, which in festive periods included a number of sessions ‘por horas’ [‘by hours’], with four separate functions per day and dancing during the interval, meant that the companies were submitted to a gruelling repertory schedule where most plays lasted no more than 3 or 4 performances and where 10 or more successive productions could be counted a resounding success. Accounts of how the plays were actually performed are scant, although the treatises available on acting suggest that interpreters such as Máiquez, and later Latorre and Romea, edged gradually towards a greater naturalness of performance and tone than in the past. ‘It may then be inferred,’ concludes Picoche (1995: 80) ‘that up to 1815 acting was highly affected and excessive, but that after that date the tendency was towards a relative sobriety of style’. With the foundation of the Madrid Conservatory in 1830, that ‘sobriety’, which might be interpreted as the (largely instinctive, self-taught) avoidance of high-blown diction and mannered gestures in favour of a more low-key, ‘realistic’ approach, gained increasing currency. We have already seen how Julián Romea, one of the many celebrated actors to impart his experiences at the conservatory, would define the art of acting in terms of the ‘truthfulness’ and ‘naturalness’ of the representation, a concern to approximate as closely as possible the mannerisms of ‘real life’, which is achievable only after years of observation of human conduct as well as a serious sense of the actor’s profession. A few years earlier, in his Noticias sobre el arte de la declamación [Insights into the Art of Acting] (1839), another eminent Shakespearean, Carlos Latorre, had struck a similar note, stating explicitly that ‘[N]ature is the model the actor should always set out to imitate and so should be the constant object of his study’ (8). What Diderot referred to as the ‘paradox’ of acting – the art of making ‘natural’, and at the same time exemplary, what is actually the object of study and loaded with artifice – was, as Jesús Rubio has shown (1988: 279), at the heart of the treatises written around the middle of

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the century, where by rationalizing the often unconscious techniques of an earlier generation of performers, actors, dramatists and academics could be said to be laying the foundations of the later realism. For Rubio, the mixture of scientific (or ‘pseudo-scientific’) observation and overt moralizing contained in these rarely read documents never fails to reproduce a sense of ‘the period’s desire to understand the most it could of human nature, the better to represent it, but without overlooking the basic bourgeois axiom that saw the theatre as first and foremost a school of manners’. The professionalization of the actor’s art heightened his/her responsibility for the length of a play’s run in an increasingly competitive theatrical scene. As Irene Vallejo and Pedro Ojeda put it in their introduction to a study of the 1854–1864 programmes in Madrid: ‘The success or failure of the production could be said to hinge upon the performance of the actors’ (2001: 19). Naturally enough, it also depended upon the receptiveness of the audiences to the programmes on offer. Some scholars, like Donald Shaw, have been sceptical in this regard. ‘Romantic lyrical dramas and anti-Romantic satires, Moratinian comedies, classical tragedies and historical melodramas followed each other in quick succession in the theatres of Madrid,’ he writes (1973: 121), ‘though the audience remained indifferent to them all’. The reaction to the Villalta Macbeth is, in this light, a symptomatic, if somewhat extreme, example of how demanding a Madrid Regency audience could prove as well as of how dismally even such a lavishly prepared and star-studded production could fail to impinge upon received opinion. However, there were exceptions to this general rule, such as the enthusiastic responses to Martínez de la Rosa’s Edipo [Oedipus] or García Gutiérrez’s El trovador, while the construction of new Italianate theatres with increased capacity and the healthy attendance figures recorded in the period suggest that the reign of Isabella II was one of the most fertile and economically productive passages in Spanish theatrical history. The rash of laws passed in the period regulating not just the financial structure of the theatres and the companies which played at them, but the behaviour of the audience, implies that that the attitude of spectators was anything but ‘indifferent’ (Rubio 2003: 1805–1809). There may, for different reasons, be occasional slumps in numbers, but audiences were always extremely ‘active and enthusiastic’ (Picoche 1995: 80). At times, that enthusiasm might be expressed by means of unprompted applause or, alternatively, vocal contempt for a particular play, or passage, or actor; however, in this respect Spanish spectators were no different from their contemporaries in any of the other major European countries. Indeed, in terms of public patronage of the performing arts, Spain’s main cultural centres, Madrid and Barcelona, which together boasted less than a million inhabitants, and the even more sparsely populated provincial towns, easily outscored other cities and towns in the rest of the continent. Among the welter of entertainments on offer to audiences as hungry as their seventeenthcentury predecessors for spectacles of any kind, ‘None was as important and as socially available as 19th-century theatre’ (Rubio 2003: 1803).


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Authors were naturally interested parties in this boom and, in general, were quite prepared to subordinate personal aesthetic convictions to the easy option of repeating tried and tested formulae that were guaranteed to succeed among the middle classes who frequented the new venues. On numerous occasions, these involved products that had triumphed elsewhere and were simply rendered into Spanish – with or without acknowledgement. In other cases, the foreign text served as a model that Spanish playwrights followed but also adapted to the particular tastes of their audiences, on the assumption that what works abroad should, with the necessary adjustments, work equally well at home. From the beginning, Shakespeare was, as we have seen, the object of such a process of acculturation; the Romantic interrogation of the principles of classical dramaturgy, or perhaps the excessive nature of such challenges, failed to swerve Spain’s dramatists from their adherence to the principles of good taste, while they did not hesitate to colour them with the sentimental, ‘human’ elements so beloved of the modern bourgeoisie. There is, in this respect, a kind of inevitability about the emergence in the late forties and fifties of a string of derivations and ‘sequels’ to Delavigne’s vastly successful Los hijos de Eduardo [The Children of Edward] in which even the larger-than-life figure of Richard III is eclipsed by a series of sympathetic, more down-to-earth characters who appear within the play. Once again, Ducis supplied the dramatic pattern with his early adaptation of Shakespeare’s King John, which he called Jean sans Terre [Landless John] (1791), a play that was then dutifully dressed up in the 1840s by arch-Romantic José María Díaz to recall both ‘Shecspeare’ whom, as the misspelt name suggests, he had probably never read, and also Bretón de los Herreros, whose translation of Delavigne I considered in the previous chapter: the conscience-stricken figure of one of the murderers; of the disloyal Buckingham; Salisbury’s doffing of John’s hat; tear-jerking encounters between mothers and sons, with Constance leading her blind son Arthur around the stage, were all clear derivations from the earlier piece, deliberately designed to tug at the audience’s heart strings. As for the misplaced patriotism of Shakespeare’s monarch, Ducis and Díaz would make John personally responsible for the cruel killing of the mutilated child, so that ‘the perversity of the [latter] tyrant is not far behind that of Richard III’; indeed, the fact that both kings usurp the throne and slaughter their own nephews ‘provide them with features and situations which are identical, so that in the hands of their French and Spanish adapters two dramatic figures who are originally distinct are endowed with the self-same character’ (Par 1936b: 180).1 A fundamental concern of mid-nineteenth-century dramaturgy was the ability to construct character, and as in every other dimension of the actor’s trade, the key to success was close observation of ordinary human conduct. This applied as much to the past as it did to the present; for the former, the treatises advised not just the study of the appropriate language, poetical and oratorical skills but an immersion in general history, both ancient and modern. As one theorist, Luis Lamarca, would put it in 1841:

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Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre The natural history of man cannot help but be useful to the actor; because as the object of his continual study and observation should be man, it is important for him to understand the way he organizes himself, his physical and moral faculties, the way he is affected by external objects, the origin of his passions, in brief everything which can help him form a precise idea of human nature: and I chiefly recommend the part which relates to the causes and effects of the passions, since the adequate expression of the latter is the foremost, nay the only object, of the actor’s art. (1841: 4; my emphasis)

The neoclassical legacy of fidelity to nature and of imitation is given here a positivist, scientific turn in the stress on empirical observation and on an understanding of the laws of causality. Although this was hardly a recipe for improvisation, the importance given to the passions, adequately expressed, reveals a new focus of attention in the concept of dramatic character. ‘A person’s character wields so strong an influence,’ François Riccoboni had written as early as 1750 in his L’Art du Théâtre [The Art of Theatre], that he who is controlled by it acquires a particular expression, a posture which is his alone, an air in which the very way he which he thinks has in itself become a habit and above all a voice, whose tone would be unsuitable for anyone else. (Cited in Rubio 1988: 277)

Where theorists and a great many actors performing at the start of the century had stressed the importance of ‘declamation’ and gestural prowess, these later tracts can be seen as keying in to the pre-Revolutionary ideals of authors such as Riccoboni, encouraging a view of the actor as an all-rounder, capable, by dint of careful observation of others, of theatrically impersonating a series of unique and unforgettable ‘human beings’.2 The Shakespearean spin-offs, Los hijos de Eduardo and Juan sin tierra, undoubtedly played a part in the promotion of the category of character – notably Gloucester and his ‘reincarnation’, John – although it is a third ‘Richard’ play, Ricardo III, which helped to cement this people-centred view of the drama. Between 1850 and 1853 there were, strikingly, no fewer than three separate versions of Richard III, the last two used in productions by the same company for two successive five-night stints (10–15 and 16–21 February 1853) at the Príncipe in Madrid. In the first version, a reworking by Antonio Mendoza of Act IV of Díaz’s Romantic Juan sin tierra, which was premiered at the Alhambra theatre in Granada, the character of Richard (José María Fuentes) is butchered by the same assassins of Los hijos de Eduardo, most of the play’s dramatic weight being shifted to the figure of the widowed queen and her daughter Isabel. The play soon attracted the attention of Julián Romea, who commissioned a translation of a French adaptation by Victor Séjour, which had proved a smash hit in Paris, casting himself in the role of Richard and Matilde Díez as the widowed queen. The centre-piece of the production is the character of Scroop, played by


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Romea’s son, in this benefit performance. Posing as the queen’s fool, Scroop is in fact one of Richmond’s spies, whereas his associate, the alchemist Hawkins, who seems to have been plucked directly from the ever-popular Romeo and Juliet, prepares the potion to be taken by Isabel, the daughter of Edward IV, to feign death and be taken to Leicester where, it is hoped, she will awake in the arms of Richmond. The plot is almost foiled by Richard, who tricks the alchemist into adding some poison to the draft, but when this ruse fails and Richard is mortally wounded, Richmond assumes his rightful place as king and husband to Isabel. As well as Romeo and Juliet, the adapters appear to have had Shakespeare’s own Richard III in mind, not so much in the sentimental allusions to the murdered princes, whose death is the starting point for this play and which they could easily have culled from the Delavigne-De los Herreros Los hijos de Eduardo, as in certain verbal echoes such as the much-cited ‘A horse, a horse . . .’ line, reworked as ‘Un caballo, pronto, un caballo!’ [‘A horse, quick, a horse!’]. Despite a creditable five-night run at the usually overworked Príncipe, the production seems to have been a flop, the character of Richard being dismissed, significantly, as ‘a truly melodramatic traitor, puerile even in his crimes, a man without character’ (cited in Par 1936b: 192; my emphasis) – a damning critique in a period in which ‘character’ was precisely what dramatists were called upon to create. No doubt conscious of the play’s shortcomings, Romea had it instantly rewritten by Antonio Romero, who removed some of the longer speeches and omitted characters like the Duchess of York, though the critical response was equally cool: In Ricardo III no character stands out as either interesting or uninteresting. The audience remains indifferent to the action inspired by the capricious desire of the poet, bent on causing an effect by means of extravagance. The king who at first is so intent on marrying his niece and then tries to degrade her by means of a monstrous slander, all of this so ill-prepared, resembles one of those ridiculous Eastern tyrants who commits atrocities for the sole reason that God made them capable of such acts. The mother who lends herself, also with insufficiently motivated necessity, to the unholy and dreadful farce of the alleged death of her beloved daughter; the Jewish alchemist who does not know whether he is good or bad, but who is definitely absurd . . . ; the incessant deaths . . . are things that cannot be redeemed by planting half a dozen intrepid claques in the second and third rows of stalls. (Cited in Par 1936b: 193–194)

The Author as Character It is one of the paradoxes of the reception of Shakespeare on the Spanish stage that the difficulties of performing original Shakespearean work, even in the full élan of Hugoesque Romanticism, did not diminish the appeal of the author

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himself. The failure to install ‘authentic’ Shakespeare on the stage did not dampen an interest in the playwright himself, and the few known ‘facts’ of his biography, together with the more succulent legends that had been added to it, were quickly seized upon by Spanish critics and artists seeking to establish a connection between the ‘life’ and the ‘works’. It hardly seemed to matter that only two of these works, Hamlet and Macbeth, had been translated from the original and that, of these, only the second had ever reached the stage. Shakespeare’s ‘image’ – his foreignness, his apparent authority in his own country, his seemingly colourful existence and, of course, the ‘genius’ attributed to him by those who had read and seen his plays – provided sufficient material for a series of incursions, both biographical and fictional, into the various ‘lives’ of the English Bard.3 While rarely reaching the ‘cultic’ proportions attained in other European countries such as Hungary (Dávidházi 1998), the early to mid-nineteenth-century Spanish admiration for Shakespeare resulted in a number of works either purporting to introduce him to a Spanish readership or directly fictionalizing him as a character in someone else’s work. Of the second of these phenomena it was the theatre, through a natural affinity with the kind of work that Shakespeare was most renowned for, as well as its ability to present him in corporeal form, that provides some striking examples. It was precisely a ‘biographical’ incident – the diarist John Manningham’s report of the ‘William the Conqueror’ episode in which Shakespeare is said to have beaten his leading actor Richard (‘Richard III’) Burbage to an amorous rendezvous – which, it will be remembered (see Chapter 2), had inspired Alexandre Duval’s comic Shakespeare Amoureux [Shakespeare in Love], and its standing among early nineteenth-century works rests largely on the fact that it incorporates Shakespeare himself as a character. The plot of Duval’s play is quite straightforward and in many respects anticipates the ‘high’ comedy that would enjoy such a vogue in Spain in the latter half of the century. Shakespeare, a successful young playwright, is auditioning his beloved young Caroline for a part in his tragedy Richard III. Caroline’s servant Enriquette has an alternative suitor for her, the aristocratic Lord Wilson, whom she plans to admit incognito on a pre-arranged password, which is none other than ‘Richard III’. Shakespeare, who has been hiding during this scene and is convinced (by Enriquette) that Caroline is not in love with him, emerges and taunts her that he has another aspiring actress for the part. When Caroline expresses her doubts about the moral standards of the theatre, Shakespeare makes a passionate defence of the rectitude of his profession and also of his intentions. They proceed with their rehearsal of a scene from Richard III that ends with the words ‘Je vous aime’ [‘I love you’]. Claiming she has spoken them badly, Shakespeare utters the words himself and, in what Caroline assumes to be an excerpt from Othello, adds how, if necessary, he will seek out her lover and put him to death. Only after Shakespeare’s abrupt departure does Caroline realize that he is the man who occupies her heart. But her discovery is cut short by Enriquette who comes to prepare the liaison with Lord Wilson. Caroline sits down to write him


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a letter when there is a knock on the door and, after the password is correctly given, there enters a disguised figure who is . . . none other than Shakespeare. Shakespeare reads the letter Caroline has written for Lord Wilson, in which she gives her excuses to the unfortunate aristocrat and declares her true love for Shakespeare. At this point, Lord Wilson arrives and gives the password: ‘Richard III’, which allows Shakespeare to lean out of the window and deliver a garbled version of his celebrated ‘biographical’ put-down: ‘Richard III is too late; William the Conqueror has already taken the fort’. The Argentinian-born Ventura de la Vega, a confirmed neoclassicist, whose fierce opposition to the ‘Vandals’ invasion’ of the stage led by Victor Hugo helped gain him entry into the Spanish Royal Academy in 1842 and who was to write off Shakespeare as a disorderly ‘arch-Romantic’ in 1863, was one of the first authors to capitalize on the commercial opportunities of the Shakespeareas-character vogue.4 His translation of Duval’s piece, Shakespeare enamorado, first staged in 1828, would go on to become one of the most frequently restaged of a generally featherweight dramatic output, with both Latorre and, later, Romea taking the role of the English dramatist. These actors’ standing in the Spanish star-system as well as the pre-production hype that billed the play rather tepidly as ‘not devoid of dramatic interest, even without the prestige of such a celebrated character’ (cited in Par 1936b: 75), undoubtedly exceeded the merits of a work which, like the Ducis–Carnerero Othello before it, enjoyed an uncanny popularity at the newly refurbished Teatro Príncipe in Madrid and the Teatro Santa Cruz in Barcelona, where it would be a massive box-office success in the late 1830s and the 1840s. The success of Shakespeare enamorado, together with the appeal of lachrymose ‘histories’ such as Los hijos de Eduardo or Juan sin tierra, was almost certainly the inspiration for another incursion into the Shakespeare legend in 1853: an original four-act drama by Enrique Zumel, inspired on a French novel by Clémence Robert and called, simply, Guillermo Shakespeare. Drawing on shreds of plots of plays such as the well-known Othello and Romeo and Juliet, and with liberal citations from the (as yet) unperformed The Tempest as well as references to the sonnets and The Passionate Pilgrim, Zumel, who played the role of Shakespeare himself, weaves an improbable fantasy around a love quadrangle involving the poet, Isabel (daughter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton), Lord Clarinsson and Ariela, the actress Shakespeare has chosen for the role of Juliet. Complicating the plot, which ends with the death of Ariela and Isabel’s internment in a convent, is Shakespeare’s nemesis, Medianoche [Midnight], a Caliban-like figure who, shortly before his death in Act IV, reveals himself to be the poet’s brother. The play is preceded by a prologue in which Shakespeare, sheltering from a storm in Ariela’s rooms, gives the bare bones of his biography: his flight from Stratford, where his parents wanted him to become a tradesman, with the son of the Earl of Southampton;5 his ‘profession’ as a poacher before being apprehended by the gamekeeper, Medianoche; his acquittal and subsequent

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journey to London to become a soldier and then a poet. The conversation soon moves to love – Ariela’s lack of it, despite being courted by Lord Clarinsson; Shakespeare’s surfeit of it, despite the indifference of Isabel, Clarinsson’s fiancée – only to be interrupted by the entrance of an impresario called Tohnsson (a confusion with the printer Jacob Tonson?) and three poets, Marlow [sic], Green [sic] and Middleton, who are impressed by Shakespeare’s recital of an excerpt from a tragedy called Spartacus. Set a year or so before the main action of the play unfolds, the prologue provides an Elizabethan ‘frame’ for the action, while cementing Shakespeare’s reputation, already suggested in Shakespeare enamorado, as a passionate lover whose ‘unwise’ obsession with the object of his desire, Isabel, will have disastrous consequences for both lover and beloved. At the same time, the freeand-easy nature of Guillermo’s youth, living by his wits as poacher and poet, an easy prey to unrequited love, arguably strengthens his standing as a lateRomantic anti-bourgeois icon. Although the production did not extend beyond four nights, its interest surely lies in the fact that it was produced at all, confirming Shakespeare’s status not so much as an author of a series of works that only the most erudite or travelled of readers had read – let alone seen – as a character whose vicissitudes, most of them imagined, were seen as offering interesting, ‘novelistic’ anecdotes which audiences, avid for such frissons, could imagine as their own. The rather unsuccessful Guillermo Shakespeare was overshadowed some 14 years later by the immensely popular, as well as original, Un drama nuevo [‘A New Play’] (1867) by Manuel Tamayo y Baus. From a well-known theatrical family,6 Tamayo is regarded as one of the founders of the new Spanish ‘high comedy’, which was to cast a realist eye on contemporary social ills, particularly those affecting the family, but from the conventional perspective of the Moratinian well-made play. The title Un drama nuevo alludes to the imaginary tragedy of jealousy by an unnamed writer, in which Count Octavio, goaded on by the manipulative and envious Landolfo, discovers and determines to avenge the infidelity of his young wife Beatriz with Manfredo who, to add insult to injury, has lived as friend, ward and virtual son to Octavio. Despite his initial reservations, Shakespeare, who in Tamayo’s work, is the established playwright and director of the ‘mature’ years, agrees to let the company fool Yorick play the main role, only to discover that the ‘fictional’ plot of the new play bears an uncanny resemblance to the ‘real’ nature of the relationship between the ageing Yorick, his wife Alicia and her Platonic lover Edmundo. In a fatherly gesture of understanding and good old-fashioned Christian charity, Shakespeare takes the young lovers under his wing and vows to find a solution to their dilemma: ‘If I could only do this one good deed, I would gladly forego Othello and Macbeth, and all those foolish things’ (1979: 88). Act I ends with the still ignorant Yorick, goaded on by the manipulative and envious Walton (for whom the Octavio role was originally intended) reciting his pivotal ‘Tremble, unfaithful wife!’ speech to a guilt-ridden Alicia who can only plead for forgiveness, before swooning.


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Shakespeare’s self-appointed role as protector of Alicia and Edmundo leads in Act II to Yorick’s suspicion that his wife’s lover is none other than his old friend, the playwright. In an Othello-like fit of madness, Yorick threatens his wife with physical violence, only to be stopped by the timely intervention of Shakespeare who, ‘with imposing serenity’ (Tamayo 1979: 111), calmly but authoritatively conducts Alicia to the safety of her room, leaving the deranged Yorick to muse: What is this? Has life’s reality become a wondrous comedy, whose end’s uncertain? Am I the victim of the dark machinations of witches, elves or demons? . . . Shakespeare! . . . Ay, there’s no doubt. . . . Nay, nay, it’s impossible! What suffering it is to live in perpetual darkness! The light, eternal God, the light! And he’s gone with her! They’re together! . . . Damnation! I’ll force them apart! (112)

Yorick’s threat is defused by the entrance of Walton, who has promised to reveal the true identity of Alicia’s lover. Yorick’s Calderón-like meditation on the fragile boundaries between dream and reality, life and the theatre, now switches to the equally orthodox defence of the code of honour, of the husband’s duty to avenge his wife’s dishonour. At this point Shakespeare reappears with Alicia and Edmundo, chides Walton for his deceit and laughingly waves aside Yorick’s hysterical accusations. The act ends with Yorick weeping inconsolably in Shakespeare’s arms, and Alicia and Edmundo vowing to flee the following day. First of all, however, comes the play-within-a-play of the vengeance of Count Octavio, the ‘wondrous comedy’ alluded to by Yorick standing as both metaphor and tragic resolution of ‘life’s reality’ as it affects the play’s main characters. Yorick’s success as the wounded count is the final straw for Walton who, piqued with envy, seizes the real letter Edmundo had written off-stage for Alicia plotting their escape and, as the devious confidant Landolfo, delivers it onstage to Yorick in the role of Octavio, leaving Shakespeare clutching the unwritten stage prop and spitting revenge: ‘The serpent has deceived the lion! Let the lion crush the serpent!’ (Tamayo 1979: 134). Octavio/Yorick reads the letter and slays the unfortunate Manfredo/Edmundo, and Beatriz/Alicia’s very real scream brings author, prompter, actors and stage hands scurrying on to the stage, together with Shakespeare, who is left to deliver the play’s ‘epilogue’: Ladies and gentlemen, there you have it! (Addressing the audience, breathless and deeply moved.) The play you are watching cannot be completed. Yorick, his reason blinded by enthusiasm, has wounded the actor playing Manfredo. Nor is this the only misfortune heaven has sent us. The famous actor Walton has also passed away. He has just been found in the street with a rapier-wound to the heart. In his right hand he was clutching a sword. He must have been slain by his adversary in a face-to-face quarrel. Pray for the dead. Ah, and pray for their killers too! (Tamayo 1979: 143–144)

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In its deliberate staginess, its blurring of the boundaries between art and fiction and, above all, its modernistic immersion of the author in a plot over which he has no control, Un drama nuevo, which was first performed at the upmarket Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid, with Tamayo’s brother Victorino as Yorick and Juan Casañer as Shakespeare, could be said to mark the end of Spanish drama’s engagement with Romanticism, while anticipating the radical self-exploratory work produced at the end of the century by writers like Valle-Inclán and Unamuno. At the same time, the ponderous moral tone that colours Shakespeare’s last words was typical of the devout Christian Tamayo who, as editor Alberto Sánchez has remarked (1979: 144, n. 82), would have been deeply opposed to these ‘affaires d’honneur, seeking prayers not just for the dead but for the “killers” too, the transgressors of both moral and canon law and henceforth victims of a tortured conscience’. It is difficult not to be reminded here of that other conscience-torn hero, Hamlet, guiltily subordinating the thirst for immediate revenge to respect for the praying Claudius.7 Tamayo’s Shakespeare goes one better than Shakespeare’s Hamlet in immediately obeying his impulse to revenge. The ‘lion’ crushes the ‘serpent’, but in so doing, is resituated within the play’s Christian coordinates as the ‘victim’ of a tortured conscience. It was in rather more Romantic and Schiller-inspired terms that Tamayo himself, in his address to the Real Academia given a little under a decade earlier, ‘La verdad considerada como fuente de belleza en la literatura dramática’ [‘Truth Conceived as the Source of Beauty in Dramatic Literature’], had rated the impact of Shakespeare’s work: Recall the world animated in the sphere of art by the presiding genius [numen] of Shakespeare. Therein we find the infinite variety of Nature, each character distinguished from the rest by a physiognomy of his own; therein the human being with neither mutilation nor amendment, prompting both pity and admiration; therein the innermost impulses of the will, the most impenetrable operations of consciousness, the deepest abysses of the mind and heart; therein Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Desdemona, Shylock, Richard III, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo, Hamlet, Lear, seemingly brought to life by an authentic soul; therein a portraiture of humanity itself in all its stages, at its most imposing and expressive; and this is why the name of Shakespeare extends to every corner of the globe. (Cited in Sánchez 1979: 39)

Barely five years before the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, which, it must be said, went largely unnoticed in Regency Spain, this was a stirring tribute to the ‘genius’ of an author whose foothold on national culture was still entirely unsound. The ‘numen’ or ‘soul’ which had ‘brought to life’ such characters – characters, it must be said, who were still largely familiar by hearsay or transformed by the hands of the adapters – was presented, virtually for the first time, as the ‘authentic’ originator of the works of Shakespeare. Although Un drama nuevo complicates that picture by showing ‘Shakespeare’s’ limited control over


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the actions of the protagonists and by restricting his role to that of director, rather than author, of the ‘new play’, it simultaneously succeeds in consolidating the figure of the playwright among the country’s elite as authority and a reference for the high moral dramas writers like Tamayo were trying to put in place.

‘Essential’ Shakespeare? Is Hamlet’s madness only apparent or real without him realising it? There’s a very easy answer to the question the audience is asking us. He does not wish to be mad except by calculated will, by design, to keep more of a proportion and a stronger right to thunder forth sentences, insults, epithets and epigrams against his uncle, his mother, against Polonius and against the courtiers who side with the usurper, things which may only be tolerated of a madman. It could well be too that a despair as great as his really has deranged his intellectual faculties, but not so much as to divert him from that path he has undertaken in order to carry out his revenge. We can thus classify Hamlet’s madness not as an aberration but as a derangement, for as the art of medicine instructs us, there is a notable difference between aberration and mental derangement: the former establishes a complete and utter divorce between matter and spirit, while the latter maintains a vivid correspondence between the two, so that one cannot be agitated without the other being agitated too; the two are bound to each other by an indissoluble tie. None would stoop to think that Hamlet might end his days in an asylum but that he might die either of an aneurysm of the heart or of an inflammation of the brain. [. . .] Hamlet is not unaware of what he is doing, because he knows everything and he wants to be right about everything. This knowledge, this rightness may well overstep the mark or tilt the balance of reason, but they both exist, and while they do, it cannot be said that he who owns them is insane; rather, let us call him by the name which best suits him and say that he is deranged by virtue of despair. (Rossi 1868: 79)

The passage is excerpted from a speech, given in his own language, by the Italian actor Ernesto Rossi to an awestruck audience at the Ateneo in Barcelona on the night of 3 August 1868. This was Rossi’s second visit to Spain, having marvelled audiences in both Madrid and Barcelona two years previously with his virtuoso productions of Hamlet and Othello. Both shows were to be repeated on this second, larger tour, which also included productions of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and, for the first time in any form, The Merchant of Venice, whose Italian title Shylock expresses the centrality of the character in Rossi’s production, in which of course he would cast himself as the Jew. The Hamlet speech is a perfect illustration of the deliberateness that went into each of Rossi’s performances: the concern with the underlying motivations behind the character’s every word and gesture, the carefully reconstructed ‘psychology’ that could be said to provide the ‘key’ to the effects on stage, even when this means going beyond

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the words of the text to plumb such ultimate unknowables as Hamlet’s unconscious need to retain control over events or the possible physical causes of his eventual death. Theatre critics constrained by the visible traits of Hamlet’s character naturally centred on the external symptoms of Rossi’s performance, on the ‘downcast appearance, the facial contractions, the dishevelled clothes, the clenched fingers’ (cited in Par 1936b: 86), without realizing that behind these carefully planned physical and sartorial mannerisms lurked a meticulously thought-out ‘interpretation’ of the character that explained his every move – including those he had not yet made: Hamlet would never have gone on to be a wise king. Hamlet had to die. It is a better tribute to shed a tear on his tomb than to cast a flower before the throne that needs purifying by another lineage. Cleverly, Shakespeare invented the arrival at Elsenore of Fortinbras, who gets the vote of the dying prince; and if this involves the idea that the throne of Denmark needs disinfecting by another hand, another mind and another set of values, it is no less the case [. . .] that the two thrones have nothing in common. This is how I have interpreted Shakespeare in his works, especially in Hamlet, and it is on the strength of these interpretations that I have sought to perform him on stage. (Rossi 1868: 111)

To this holistic explanation of Hamlet’s character is added the discovery of the necessity of Shakespeare’s plot, which, unlike the Ducis arrangement, had to end in the death of Hamlet and the salutary rise of Fortinbras. Forestalling possible criticisms, Rossi concludes by defending his performance as the logical and inevitable product of ‘these interpretations’: despite the scientific rigour of the analysis of Hamlet’s behaviour, there will always be objections to his unpicking of the play’s main issues; what is incontestable is the consistency of the performance with those underlying interpretative decisions. Despite being credited with an often histrionic approach to the author’s work, there can be no doubt that the Rossi repertoire, together with pioneering productions by compatriots such as Adelaide Ristori, Tommasso Salvini, Eleonora Duse and Ermete Novelli, did more than any previous set of productions to providing Spanish audiences with a sense of the unadulterated, ‘authentic’ Shakespeare. The fact that the plays were performed in Italian would not have been an obstacle to Castilian-speaking audiences from Madrid, and even less so to Catalan-speaking ones in Barcelona. More debatable is the extent to which the productions and their play texts actually followed the original.8 But this was – and is – by no means a custom confined to these companies, companies which in any case, and as Rossi’s intervention (cited above) was at pains to underline, strove hard to preserve both the plot and the ‘essence’ of the original characters. Given the distance between the latter and the neoclassical ‘adaptations’ of the early part of the century, or the preference for sentimentalized spin-offs characteristic of the Romantic phase, any production


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which respected the bare bones of the Shakespearean plot and disregarded the unities, or developed character in such a way that it did not obey preconceived notions of ‘verisimilitude’ or (often the same thing) bourgeois piety, came as a radical departure from the theatrical mainstream and, at the same time, would have been vaguely reminiscent of Spain’s neglected, though not forgotten, baroque dramatic tradition.9 Rossi’s main appeal was, according to Par (1936b: 21), his ability to combine the theatrically less objectionable aspects of Romanticism and a sensitivity to the newer although, as we have seen, already inaugurated recourses of realism. ‘Realist . . . when it came to technique; romantic when it came to spirit.’ The ‘spirit’ was very much in evidence in his interpretation of Romeo, which prompted one critic to remark: ‘We doubt that anyone could speak more gently and more amorously . . . the charming balcony scene . . . or the lines addressed to Juliet in the sepulchre, whose slab Romeo has just raised’ (cited in Par 1936b: 23). However, it is Rossi’s meticulous naturalism that stands out most in contemporary accounts of the actor’s performances. Thus, the archRomantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer noted the actor’s ‘regular build, fair complexion, kind and expressive features, prominent brow, lively mien’, before affirming: ‘A word, a movement, a gesture, the simplest attitude, the slightest incident is enough for him to complete the author’s thought’ (cited in Par 1936b: 20). An actor, that is, very much in the mould of Máiquez, Romea and Latorre, interpreters who had, more from instinct than from training, given a certain naturalism to parts that often seemed to resist it, but who rarely stepped beyond the limits of the written play text and who certainly never defended the interpretation of the author’s unwritten intentions as the key with which to unlock a character’s heart. Both Rossi and his great theatrical rival, Tomasso Salvini, whose production of Othello appeared at the Teatro Circo in Madrid in April that same year, had been preceded by their compatriot Adelaide Ristori in 1857. On the third leg of a European tour that had already taken her to Paris and London, Ristori had also been invited to perform before the Queen at the Zarzuela and, later that year, at the Teatro del Circo in Barcelona, where her production of Macbeth, and in particular her conception of the sleep-walking scene, had prompted an unusually enthusiastic response from critics whose previous experience of the tragedy had been the much-maligned Villalta version discussed in the previous chapter. ‘I was so engrossed in her performance of the part [of Lady Macbeth],’ confessed one reviewer in the Diario de Barcelona (26 November 1857), that for the duration of the scene my eyes remained immobile in their sockets, making me cry. It is to this enforced immobility that I must owe the onset of my weakened vision. From an analytical study of this devilish character the reader will form a proper judgement of the effect her interpretation had on me (especially

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Shakespeare in the Spanish Theatre in the climactic final scene), the fruit of her striking precisely the right tone, the appropriate expression on her face and in her gaze.

Such ‘strong’ and physically expressive performances had rarely been seen among Spanish actresses who were usually encouraged to play second fiddle to a succession of male virtuosi. Ristori, who would bequeath her name to the Teatro del Circo where these performances took place, would be especially remembered for the intensity and ‘energy’ of her performance as well as the ‘range’ of different timbres her voice was capable of achieving (now ‘gentle’, now ‘cavernous’) or the ‘passions’ it was capable of generating. For the critic in the Diario de Barcelona the most important of these was ‘one alone: the ambitious desire to occupy the throne of England [sic]’, something that did not detract from the sheer variety of ‘roles’ the character was made to play throughout the production: The speciality we observe in the performance of the role by Signora Ristori is the range of her expressions amid the monotony of the scenes, or at least of the passion which predominates therein. Her gentle voice and energetic accent, though repressed in the first and second acts, are a result of the place and the hour at which the crime has been plotted and dispatched. The animation, unease and silent double talk she uses alternately in the banquet scene, while addressing the guests and also Macbeth, who is being pursued by the phantom of Banquo, are also the result of the fear of imprudent public revelations of which remorse can be the cause.

‘Nowadays,’ wrote Juan Valera glumly in 1873, echoing Emerson, ‘all our philosophy and thought are Shakespeare. His spirit is the horizon beyond which nothing is visible’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 229). It was the Italians, and the ‘holy trinity’ of Ristori, Rossi and Salvini, who had undoubtedly laid the foundations of such belated bardolatry. Another no less important factor was the collapse of the political regime that had grown and prospered under Isabella. Later the same year that Rossi had been delivering his lecture on Hamlet at the Ateneo and Salvini interpreting Othello in Madrid, the traditional bastion of liberal resistance, Cadiz, was the site of a naval mutiny that would set the conditions for an unlikely coalition of Progressives and Liberal Unionists who vented their anger at the queen’s continual vacillations between liberals and conservatives, prompting the influential generals Prim and Serrano to denounce the government and eventually forcing Isabel herself into exile. The ‘Glorious Revolution’, as it was called, and the Constitution that followed, not only secured universal (male) suffrage and a reduction of the clerical control of the educational system but, through the failure of the new king Amadeus of Savoy to reunite the country, laid the foundations for the First Spanish Republic which came into being in 1873. The conditions thus seemed ripe for a redrawing of the cultural and theatrical


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map to which the ‘naturalist’ experiments of the Italian companies seemed to provide a key. As detractors of the Spanish stage like Rafael Montoro would argue (at the Ateneo in Madrid) in 1875, the realist ‘turn’ as evidenced in the theatre was the natural consequence of a situation of political convulsion, of the loss of moral and ideological direction and of that critical spirit which had been a spur to the bourgeoisie and the dominant materialism: The religious and philosophical crisis, the dangers and tendencies to be observed in the moral order and which are to be related to the organisation of societies, the instability of the institutions and the restlessness of the spirit, have without doubt given rise to a social medium in which the realist poet is born. (Cited in Rodríguez Sánchez de León 2003: 1884)

Not all of Spain’s cultural elite was convinced that the painstaking characterizations of Ristori or Rossi, or the robust acting style of Salvini, were the only ways forward for late nineteenth-century performance.10 The interpretative rigour and performative ‘naturalism’ on which their approach to writers like Shakespeare seemed predicated, as well as their respect for as much of the original text as it was possible to perform, was indeed regarded by many as an unwelcome advertisement of work which, by its very nature, was ill-adapted to the task of drama which, according to one critic, remained ‘the representation of native customs and . . . [of] moral values traditionally associated with the Spanish character’ (cited in Sánchez de León 2003: 1881). As Valera’s words seem to suggest, the location of Shakespeare at the centre of the cultural debate that ensued as a result of the 1868 revolution and on which the Italian companies were to capitalize, was greeted with dismay and scepticism by sectors of society for which the unmediated reception of plays which dwelt on the threat to legitimacy and shamelessly foregrounded violence and such ignoble desires as ambition was regarded as an unacceptable affront to those same values. As if to underline the fact, the period would also include the first more or less faithful rendering of Othello, a play which, according to its translator, Francisco Luis Retés, was still unknown to Spanish audiences. The qualifier ‘more or less’ is necessary, as Retés clearly loaded his text to suit contemporary tastes. This is evident not just in the choice of language, which bears scant resemblance to the original, but in the subtle rearrangement of the plot, which continues to carry the imprint of late eighteenth-century prejudices concerning propriety and decorum, the unity of action and also the hallowed principle of vraisemblance.11 These sanitary measures are complemented by the now familiar introduction of Romantic ambience, as in the spontaneous storm that breaks out as Othello bursts in to Desdemona’s bedroom to carry out his vengeance. The success of the play, which was performed on nine different occasions between 18 January and 14 February 1868 at the Teatro Principal in Barcelona, and which starred Pedro Delgado (the actor who would help convert José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio into one of the most popular of nineteenth-century plays), has been

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attributed to the fact that it constituted ‘big-time drama, in the decadent Spanish style, with imprecations, murders, willow song (atrociously rendered), sonorous phrases, rolled off for effect’ (Par 1936b: 91). ‘Authenticity’ and the Romantic love of spectacle were not incompatible, or so the production seemed to suggest, with a residual respect for the precepts. Another ‘authentic’ Shakespeare to be performed in the period was premiered at the Español in 1871 and enjoyed a remarkably long run in the capital and throughout the provinces. El príncipe Hamlet [Prince Hamlet] was a threeact version of the tragedy by Carlos Coello, who conflated the characters of Laertes and Horatio to generate a conflict between the latter and Hamlet, and who retained both the ghost and the poisoning of Hamlet and Claudius in a text that was a clear slap in the face of the generation of Ducis-inspired neoclassicists who had invariably despised such elements.12 One of the last surviving members of the ‘instinctive’ schools of Spanish actors, who is said to have based his ‘study’ of particular characters or situations on the ‘feeling’ they gave him during rehearsal or the performance itself (Calvo Revilla 1920: 199–200), actor Antonio Vico capitalized on Coello’s opportunist blend of irrational Romanticism and classical verisimilitude to produce one of his most powerful and best remembered performances.

The Death Throes of Classicism The brusque collapse of the First Republic and the restoration of the monarchy in 1875 ushered in a period of relative stability in Spanish politics – even though the calm of the closing years of the century was, according to most historians, achieved by means of stifling any creative dissidence through the imposition of a system of power-sharing by which the two main parties, the liberals of Práxides Mateo Sagasta and the conservatives of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, effectively took turns to rule the country. The ‘turno pacífico’ (or ‘peaceful alternation’), as it was euphemistically called, was guaranteed by wholesale electoral management overseen, especially in the predominant rural areas, by a depressing succession of ‘caciques’. These local political bosses made it their business to rig each new election so that any changes in the electorate’s opinion failed to affect the shade of government which, in any case, was decided from above, by the Ministry of the Interior, with the new Bourbon king Alfonso XII’s (mostly tacit) consent. The divisions and despondency among former Republicans, together with the economic prosperity of a period that saw a marked upturn in sectors such as industry and agriculture (particularly cotton) and a massive increase in foreign investment in mining, ensured that the system went largely unquestioned by the urban haute bourgeoisie and great landowners who, together with the Church, were easily the most influential forces in late nineteenthcentury Spain. When the bubble finally burst in the late 1880s, with the outbreak of phylloxera in the Spanish countryside and a slump in the metallurgical


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industry of the Basque Country, the hegemony of liberals and conservatives was undisturbed by the advances of both anarchism and socialism as they continued to govern the nation’s fortunes under the less than watchful eye of Alfonso XII’s widow and the country’s new regent, María Cristina. As far as the nation’s theatre was concerned, the model of peaceful alternation that dominated the political sphere was mirrored by a similar sense of predictability, with audiences being offered the choice of a limited spectrum of genres, ranging from the ‘red’ of high comedies by writers such as Ventura de la Vega or Tamayo y Baus, whose work was regularly revived, to the ‘violet’ of the light-hearted and naively optimistic sainetes and zarzuelas, which had become the virtual preserve of the growing petty bourgeoisie. Initially, Shakespeare himself could be said to have been subject to the same lack of originality, the plays that dominated the period of the late 1870s and 1880s being the now familiar Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Hamlet. However, with the neoclassical model of Ducis now a dusty remnant of a Frenchified past and the ‘paradigm’ of late nineteenth century shifting inexorably towards Italy, the hunt for ‘authentic’ Shakespeare entailed not just the reinterpretation of these tried and trusted classics but a gradual broadening of the repertoire. The process would soon be given a national editorial impetus with the publication of the first translations of Jaime Clark and Guillermo Macpherson, that included plays like Much Ado about Nothing and A Winter’s Tale that had never been rendered, let alone performed, in Spanish before (Pujante 2007: xxix).13 But it was the rush of fresh visits by Rossi (1875 and 1884), Ceresa (1880), Giovanni Emmanuel (1882, 1885 and 1893), Adelaide Tessero (1886), Eleonora Duse (1889) and Ermete Novelli (1894 and 1896) as well as the efforts of directors like actor-directors such as Emilio Thuillier and Fernando Díaz de Mendoza, which would finally succeed in extending the range of plays available for the stage. The Taming of the Shrew was first produced in Spain in 1894 by the Italian troupe of Ermete Novelli and Olga Giannini, as part of a tour that took in the theatres of the Comedia in Madrid and the Lírica in Barcelona, with a repertoire including Othello, The Merchant of Venice and a little-known comedy that was billed as La bisbetica domata. Novelli and Giannini were, as Alfonso Par noted (1936b: 50), working not from the original comedy but from an Italian version of a French adaptation ‘perpetrated’ by Paul Delair for the great French actor Coquelin. It was this Franco-Italian adaptation, not Shakespeare’s originary text, which seems to have been the source of a rendering by Manuel Matoses for the company of the Comedia led by Emilio Thuillier (Petruchio) and Carmen Cobeña (Katharina). Like the author of his source text, Matoses had no hesitation in cutting characters or scenes that detracted from what was perceived as the rollicking good spirits of the original, which was stubbornly billed as a version of the play by William Shakespeare. The most striking result of this was the virtual elimination of the Bianca subplot, Katharina’s non-conformist sister being presented as the mere butt of Kate’s shrewishness, which involved

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not just all-round insults and a presiding unmanageability but actual physical damage to persons and property. In the opposite corner to this Franco-Italian Katharina, Matoses would set a Petruchio whose credibility was, in Par’s opinion (1936b: 52–53), severely strained by adding to his patently mercenary interest in Katharina’s dowry a psychological curiosity in the domination of other people’s wills. For such a shallow yet domineering character, the taming of the ‘shrew’ was little more than an exercise in the imposition of an invincible ego. The other important addition to the existing Shakespeare repertoire at the close of the century was Antony and Cleopatra. Again it was an Italian troupe that first introduced the play into Spain: the company of Eleonora Duse, Rossi‘s former leading lady, whose production in 1890 at the Novedades theatre in Barcelona, impressively announced as a ‘spectacular tragic drama in five acts and eight scenes’, would inspire a Spanish version by Eugenio Sellés for the Teatro Español in Madrid, in 1898. ‘I have not reduced the English play,’ Sellés would claim, somewhat feebly, in the prologue to the published version of the play, called simply Cleopatra: I have neither made nor unmade the work: I have left it all to one side, removing from the whole the figure of Cleopatra and those who surround her. I have transmuted the scenes by adapting them to a straightforward plan and by endeavouring to allow the simple action to unfold clearly and without ramifications. Everything involving the figure of Cleopatra remains just as it is in the original. And I have even given her added scenes and lines which, though poor because they are my own invention, diminish neither the figure nor the dramatic force of the character. (1898: n.p.)

This major carve-up, which included limiting the action to a single room in Cleopatra’s Alexandrian palace and the mausoleum and which eliminated the whole of the Roman court, has a strikingly neoclassical air. All of the external business – principally the sea-battle – is narrated by messengers, while Antony’s dying speech in the arms of Cleopatra, played by the expressive María Guerrero, is inexplicably cut. Despite the fact that it played for ten nights in January 1898 at the normally exacting Español, the play was considered a flop, with Sellés actually withdrawing authorization for a continued run. For the normally conservative Juan Valera, the failure had less to do with the text than the ill-preparedness of the first-night audience to receive it: Eugenio Sellés, proceeding with the most sensible good taste and adhering to the demands of the theatre of his day, has removed all those characters whose presence is not indispensable to the carrying out of the action, to its fulfilment in the sight of the spectators and to its being understood by them; he has tried to follow the precept of the three unities and has almost achieved that of place, by eschewing the frequent changes of scene, the raising and lowering of the curtain and the somewhat tiring need to transport the audience from Egypt to Italy, from


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Italy to Greece, and from Greece back to Egypt. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 360; see also 352)

For the reader digesting the play in the comfort of his own home, such changes might appear superfluous and even ‘a desecration’, but ‘to see the work of Shakespeare in Spain and in the theatre, the arrangement was indispensable’ (361). Valera’s comments (and Sellés’s ‘arrangement’) would point to the apparent durability of a neoclassical aesthetic among an intellectual elite for whom Romanticism was an unfortunate blot upon the Spanish theatrical landscape. At the same time, however, they would seem to underestimate the change in audience tastes by which a play such as this – Sellés’s adaptation, not the Shakespeare original, which most of them would have never read – clearly failed to live up to the expectations raised by the Duse production, with its heightened sensuality and impressively visual naturalism. Valera superciliously dismisses the audience’s reaction to its ‘lack of attention’, to the fact that ‘here in Spain, people go to the theatre more to see and to be seen than to listen to the plays’ (361). But this fails to present the whole picture and does little justice to those other preoccupations, social and familial, that seemed to find a more cogent expression in the nascent realism of writers such as Àngel Guimerà in Catalonia, Jacinto Benavente, Benito Pérez Galdós and José de Echegaray in the country as a whole. María Guerrero, who had excelled in productions of their plays and would certainly have relished the limelight this new part afforded, may have been the wrong choice for Sellés’s carefully sanitized adaptation which, among other things, denied her the chance to feed dramatically off her lover’s last words. It may well be for this reason that, just a few months later, Guerrero would prevail on the same team of translators which had produced Cyrano de Bergerac in Barcelona that same spring to reshape Cleopatra, with her husband Fernando Díaz de Mendoza now cast as Antony. The translators are said to have used both the original text by Shakespeare, the French versions of Hugo and Laroche and the new prose rendering by Guillermo Macpherson, for a version that gave Antony a more decisive role but continued to project Cleopatra as the focal point while leaving most of the Roman business and the sea-battle to narrative accounts and the audience’s imagination. Whether the ‘improved phraseology’, as Par puts it (1936b: 150) would have stirred a more enthusiastic response is a matter of conjecture, as the threat of war over Cuba, where Spain would soon have its own naval battle to contend with, and the fear that the American fleet might launch an attack on the Spanish coast put an end to the production shortly before the first night, as it did to all theatrical activity in the province for the duration of the conflict.

Chapter 4

Disaster and Regeneration

1898 The explosion that sank the American battleship USS Maine in Havana bay in February 1898 precipitated a major diplomatic conflict between the United States and Spain, which quickly degenerated into war. Spanish defeat in the battle of Santiago de Cuba to a vastly superior American fleet no doubt brought memories of the Armada; more immediately and more painfully, however, it spelt the beginning of the end of Spain’s colonial rule in Cuba that, like Puerto Rico and the Philippines, would be yielded to America in the humiliating Treaty of Paris that was signed in December. ‘El Desastre’ [the ‘Disaster’], as the military debacle and subsequent rendition would be dubbed, not only drew attention to Spain’s losses abroad but also threw into relief the unassailable divisions and contradictions at the heart of the nation’s economic and social structure. Spain’s military inferiority to United States, which had been made painfully manifest in the brief and hopelessly one-sided engagement at Santiago, was interpreted at home by critics of the government as a symptom of the uncritical attachment to a series of outmoded traditions and of its general unpreparedness to face the challenges of an increasingly competitive world. Locked into an idealized vision of its own past, the Spain of the Restoration seemed, as Ramiro de Maetzu would put it just a year before the conflict, to ‘drag its despicable being along, its eyes closed to the march of time, its constant obsession being the evocation of ancient glories, imagining itself to be the homeland described in all the history books’ (cited in Granjel 1973: 78). The trouble with nostalgia is that it tends inevitably to turn the viewer’s attention from the reality that is all around her. ‘Oldness,’ noted José Martínez Ruiz (‘Azorín’) in his retrospective of 1913, ‘is that which has never had the consistency of the real, or that which, having once possessed it, has ceased to do so and become threadbare and worm-eaten.’ In the specific context of end-ofthe-century Spain, oldness was at the heart of the country’s ills which, in an uncontrolled outburst of spleen, the author lists as the vicious practices of its politics, the corruption of the administration, the incompetence, the rackets, the nepotism, the electioneering, the verbal incontinence,


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the ‘come-back-tomorrow’, the parliamentary fiddling, the rhetorical assaults, the ‘political conveniences’ which lead well-meaning spirits astray; the rigged elections, the boards and management of major companies placed in the hands of influential personages, the useless cogs of bureaucracy.( Ruiz 1969: 36)

It was largely against this useless, outmoded machinery of state, the extent of whose true incompetence the 1898 disaster made all too evident, that the generation ‘Azorín’ claimed to be speaking for, the ‘Generation of 98’, felt it their moral and patriotic duty to protest. However, if much of the protest was directed at the underlying reasons for the debacle, there was also a sense of outrage at the failure to react to it. To cite the title of an intervention by a prominent conservative politician that same year, it was as if the country had been left ‘with no pulse beat’, in a disabling state of disbelief at the scale of the disaster but equally paralysed by its incapacity to organize a response to it. It was thus largely to prick consciences and to goad into action both the ruling elite and intellectuals capable of engineering a solution, if only a ‘spiritual’ one, that the leading figures of the ‘Generation of 98’, Maetzu, Azorín and Pío Baroja,1 set out their ‘Manifesto’ of 1901. ‘Desirous as we are,’ they stated, ‘to cooperate, with our modest strength, in the generation of a new social state in Spain’, the signatories claimed to be speaking in the name of a ‘nascent ideal’ that they vowed to ‘translate into concrete facts’. Indebted in many ways to the imported philosophy of intellectual progress known as krausismo and the project of a fully lay education embodied in the Institución Libre de Enseñanza [Free Institute of Education], while anxious to distance themselves from the ‘utopian’ discourses of socialism and anarchism that were proliferating at the turn of the century, ‘the Three’, as they were known, placed their faith in science and in a wider tradition of European thought that they traced from the French ‘Encyclopedists’ to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, all of whom had sought to demonstrate the ‘relativity of absolute ideas’. As to the tangible results (the ‘concrete facts’) of the regeneration they proposed, they aspired to nothing less than [T]o lay bare the miseries of people in the country, the difficulties and sadness of the thousands of hungry, the horrors of prostitution and alcoholism; to show the necessity of compulsory education, the setting up of agricultural credit banks, the implementation of divorce, as a consequence of the law of civil matrimony. (Cited in Rull 1984: 34–35)

The emphasis on the real problems affecting the population and the apparent commitment to press for reforms in such sensitive areas as agriculture and matrimony were, as numerous critics and historians have shown, largely gestural. Like so much of the rhetoric of the ‘noventayochistas’ (or ‘98ers’), they rested on an imperfect knowledge of economic and social realities and on an agenda which, at heart, was more ‘spiritual’ and cultural than pragmatic or

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political. Miguel de Unamuno, the classical scholar, philosopher and novelist, who has often been associated with the group as its ‘elder statesman’, admitted as much when he declined to offer his services to the more politically minded ‘Three’. In this, the group’s social ideals, he owned in a letter to ‘Azorín’ dated March 1897, he could only help ‘indirectly’, because I know nothing about nomadic agricultural education or farm labouring leagues, nor do I have an interest…in reforesting the mountains, peasant workers’ cooperatives, agricultural credit banks…and reservoirs, nor believe this is what’s needed to alter the mentality of our people and, with it, their economic and moral situation. […] What the Spanish people need is a dose of selfconfidence, to learn to think and feel for themselves, not by delegation, and above all, to have their own feelings and ideals about life and about its value. (Cited in ‘Azorín’ 1969: 78–79)

Self-confidence – Spain’s faith in itself as a nation which, as the lapsed Catholic Unamuno seemed to be suggesting, was the necessary antidote to the ‘crisis of conscience’ claimed by his contemporary Ángel Ganivet to be affecting the country as a whole, and which the defeat to the United States, a year later, would set at a new ebb – could be regained not by revolutionary political intervention (a position none of the members of the generation espoused) but by spiritual regeneration, a kind of reconstruction of the soul based on something as nebulous as ‘the eternal truths of the eternal essence’ (Ganivet 1998: 184). Although this, as we shall see, resulted in a veritable renaissance of art and culture in the early part of the twentieth century and a much-needed renovation of the means of artistic production, the impact in social and political terms was negligible. The problems facing Spain after its defeat in 1898 were the very real problems of poverty, underdevelopment, social injustice, regional separatism, an inadequate education, lack of investment and urgent need to modify the political power structure. Yet faced with all these problems, ‘the Generation of 1898 gave the priority to spiritual reconstruction’ (Shaw 1982: 24)! The perception of the Generation of the Disaster, even by its own members, as a ‘spiritual’ and at the same time ‘literary’ or ‘bookish’ generation (Granjel 1973: 32, 36) is, in a way, borne out by the group’s articulation of the crisis in purely ‘literary’ terms. One of Maetzu’s major contributions to the group’s mental construction work was his study of three major archetypes of Spanish letters, Don Quijote, Don Juan y la Celestina (1929), a study based on the premise that literary myths give an image ‘not of history, but of something greater: the feelings that set it in motion’ (cited in Shaw 1982: 122). The case of Don Quixote is particularly illustrative, as the novel by Cervantes reflects the life of a character who set out ‘to conquer both the world of action and the world of the spirit’ as well as the life of a nation engaged in a triple struggle for imperial expansion, political supremacy in Europe and the defence of the Catholic faith. Don Quixote’s failure is therefore interpreted by Maetzu as the failure of a


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whole nation to assert itself at a moment in history where ‘the ideal proves superior to the means for carrying it out’ (1968: 19). As latter-day Quixotes – not quite in touch with reality but determined to carry their ideals through to their ultimate consequences – the group encountered enemies wherever they turned, enemies as abstract but as daunting as apathy, aboulia, paralysis, nostalgia, scepticism and what they also dubbed ‘hamletismo’, an enemy with all of the attributes of the rest, but equipped with one further trait: the tendency to ‘play to the gallery, to the histrionic’ (Granjel 1973: 34). Although not a medium the 98ers were overly concerned with, ‘Hamletism’ could also be witnessed in the theatre which, according to Andrés Peláez (2003: 2201), was a reflection of the wider social, political and ‘spiritual’ malaise affecting the country as a whole: The theatre in Spain remains, at the end of nineteenth century and beginnings of the twentieth, far removed from the major changes taking place in dramatic art in the rest of the European countries thanks to the work of directors and authors like Stanislavski, Gordon Craig, Appia, Chekhov and Pirandello. Dramatic art in Spain continues in the period to be a product consumed by a wealthy bourgeoisie which attends the theatre to see and to be seen. Hence all theatrical productions are directed at such a public. Companies comprising important actors and actresses go out of their way to please the audience with a repertoire and miseen-scène which are utterly conventional and conservative.

The ‘conventional’ in dramatic terms was, broadly, the French formula of the ‘pièce bien faite’ (or ‘well-made’ play), whose aim has been defined in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theatre and Performance as the wish to provide ‘a constantly entertaining, exciting narrative which satisfyingly resolved the many complications and intrigues that drove the story’ (2003: 1442). The high-comic grid was a powerful constraining force for writers writing for the stage at the close of the nineteenth century, and the truly successful versions of Shakespeare, such as the Matoses Taming of the Shrew, were carefully contained within its classical proscenium frame and reserved for bourgeois audiences that saw little need for political and cultural change. As for potentially ground-breaking work such as Antony and Cleopatra, a work that attracted the attention of such consummate naturalists as actors María Guerrero and Díaz de Mendoza (see Chapter 3), the stultifying residue of a neoclassical aesthetic, which restricted the action to a single location and precluded any elements which jarred with the dominant ‘mood’, impeded potential relevance at the same time as it anachronistically hampered any revolutionary artistic effects. The bias towards this form of the drama in the repertoires was, in the commercial theatres at least, matched by a prevalence of production techniques and acting styles that continued to bear a heavy debt to the heyday of the Restoration and to even earlier periods. The second half of the nineteenth century may have seen a veritable explosion in the design and construction of new

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playhouses in Madrid and virtually all of the provincial capitals, a result of the increased involvement of private investors, but this did not entail a modernization of their outmoded machinery or the adaptation of their traditional Italianate structure to the demands of new artists or of new kinds of audience. To complicate matters, where private investors in other European countries as well as in North and South America favoured the construction of playhouses equipped with luxurious stage areas capable of accommodating ever larger numbers of actors and extras and increasingly sophisticated machinery, Spanish impresarios committed what Peláez describes as a very ‘basic mistake’: given the limited returns of the theatre per se, they tended to optimize its possible conversion into the more popular space of the cinema, with the subsequent elimination of ‘useless’ spaces such as the salons, foyer, offices, etc. and a serious lack of attention to the stage itself (2003: 2204). Thus, although countries such as Germany, England or the United States had already incorporated the stage revolve as a basic element in production from as early as 1885, it would be another 55 years before the same mechanism was introduced into Spain – and then only in the show-case ‘national’ theatre, the Español, in the early stages of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (see Chapter 5). Likewise, electrical lighting, which was used to illumine theatre facades and the auditorium in 1888 and 1895, would not be employed on stage till 1900, although set designers and artists were, despite frequent complaints about the quality and safety of the medium, still toiling with paper decors well into the second decade of the twentieth century (Peláez 2003: 2205, 2207). The inappropriateness of commercial Spanish playhouses not only for the necessary illusionism of European naturalism but also for the no less sophisticated effects of modernism should by now be obvious. It was further compounded by the (generally) underdeveloped status of Spanish stage acting. Indeed, the halcyon days of Máiquez and his ‘natural’ successors Romea and Latorre had, by most accounts, been followed by a general vacuum in the field of interpretation, the lack of charismatic figures to fill the shoes of such illustrious artistic forefathers. The creation of a Conservatory of Dramatic Art and a Chair of Acting in 1830 had, it seems, failed to affect successive generations of students who continued to be subjected to an obsolete curriculum in which proper ‘declamation’ (enunciating the lines correctly) rather than ‘interpretation’ (‘understanding’ or ‘identifying’ with the character) was the prime concern. The rigidly hierarchical structure of most of the companies, still dominated by a leading actor who doubled up as director and even, in a few cases, as impresario charged with hiring and firing fellow actors and conditioning the repertoire, meant that many authors invented characters who bore a strong resemblance to the actors who were going to play them. ‘The mechanism,’ as César Oliva notes, ‘had been in operation for a long, long time, thanks to the extraordinary encoding of a profession based on the age-old system of declamation’. Given the nature of a profession where declamation was considered more important than interpretation, ‘the identification between actor and character


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was largely unnecessary’. This partly explains why full-blooded naturalism was so slow to catch on in Spain and why even the most accomplished of contemporary performers such as Guerrero or Díaz de Mendoza preferred the ‘outwardlooking, high-flown’ parts of authors such as Echegaray, Benavente or Linares Rivas to the intimate, more ‘low-key’ style of authentic naturalism. ‘The interpreters of the age,’ claims Oliva , ‘so vibrant in the recital of poetic theatre, of neo-Romantic drama and even in the harsh brands of rural drama, could not have made natural characters credible, since their grammar was based on an excessive theatricality’ (Oliva 2002: 24; see also Peláez 2003: 2235). If the ‘regenerationists’ who formed the vanguard of the Generation of 98 recognized anything it was that, culturally speaking, what Azorín called the country’s ‘Robinsonism’ could only be broken by ‘the fertilization of national thinking by foreign thinking’: Neither an artist nor a society of artists is capable of self-renovation – of being something – or of the renovation of art without some foreign influence. In art there is nothing primary, spontaneous or without cause; even the artists who seem most original (for instance, in painting a Velázquez or a Goya) owe all their strength, all their vigour, all their luminosity to suggestions which are alien to them. It is not a case of imitation or rhapsody; the influences we speak of are ethereal, almost indefinable and subtle suggestions, which awaken in the artist latent psychological states and cause the fanning of his sensibility which, otherwise, may not have been felt so intensely or, perhaps, may not have been felt in just this way. [. . .] The intellectual life of a people needs fertilizing by some outside source of stimulation. (1969: 37)

The importance of ‘outside sources’ which, as Azorín indicates elsewhere (1969: 55), was not seen as incompatible with the cultural patriotism the generation were endeavouring to promote, enabling a nation to see itself ‘in a new light’, is suggested by his ‘observation’ of numerous and identifiable influences on a range of authors connected, more or less arbitrarily, with the 1898 renaissance: Valle-Inclán, Unamuno, Benavente, Baroja, Maetzu and Rubén Darío. D’Annunzio, Barbey d’Aurevilly, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Amiel, Shakespeare, Musset, Dickens, Poe, Balzac, Gautier, Stendhal, Brandes, Ruskin, Nietzsche, Verlaine, Banville and Victor Hugo are all cited as the writers who have made them what they are, with Nietzsche, Verlaine and Gautier being singled out as the strongest influences of all (1969: 39).2 As far as the theatre was concerned, though the declarations of 98ers were typically vague and often contradictory (Berenguer 1992: 24), there was, as we shall see, a certain openness to new dramatic forms and modes of performance that would gradually challenge the hegemony of conventional Spanish dramaturgy. There was, at the turn of the century, no more ‘conventional’ a form than the zarzuela, or ‘género chico’ (literally, the ‘small genre’), as it was also affectionately known. An artistic offshoot of the Revolution of 1868 and also the product of

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the system of so-called teatro por horas, with its inevitably restricted range of comic ‘types’, the simple yet highly artificial zarzuela, which had dominated the stage in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and would extend its hegemony into the first decade of the twentieth, served as a ‘remedy for theatrical language and a cure for bad rhetoric, but also as a limitation on the reality and expressive means of drama’ (Ruiz Ramón 1984: 39–40). As a subgenre which, critics have argued, promoted a self-satisfied patriotic vision of the Spanish nation, the zarzuela was given special prominence in the 1890s by artists such as Carlos Arniches and the Álvarez Quintero brothers ( Joaquín and Serafín), with some 11 theatres in Madrid alone given over almost entirely to the genre.3 Feeding on the popular success of Manuel Matoses’ version of The Taming of the Shrew, the prolific composer Ruperto Chapí joined forces with librettists José López Silva and Carlos Fernández Shaw to produce Las bravías at the Madrid Apolo. As a self-styled ‘lyrical sainete’ the composition exploited the ‘localism’ that was a hallmark of the genre (Berenguer 1992: 44), promising, and indeed delivering, a light-hearted and distinctively Andalusian version of the French and Spanish stage adaptations. With the flamenco rhythms and southern scenarios written into both the score and the libretto, the zarzuela also seemed to link the explicit sexual politics of the play by Shakespeare, who is not mentioned, to the cock-sure behaviour of the ‘chulo’, or urban dandy, whose natural habitat was the capital Madrid. As Par (1936b: 56–57) would observe, One can understand the character of Patro [Katharina], if one bears in mind that before Lucio [Petruchio] can go any further in his lion-taming, having separated her from her dancing partner, the Shrew, knife in hand, tries to assault him and yet, after all the tamer’s ranting and raving, exclaims: ‘He is stronger than I am!’. Whence the whole meaning of the zarzuela: this is not Shakespeare’s play, where the gentlest affection is secretly born in the midst and in spite of endless rejections. This is the maja who admires her man, who takes delight in her punishment and subjection by the physically superior male. In keeping with this interpretation it should be noted that the authors of the zarzuela construct an entirely ‘cocky’ ambiance. Both the phraseology, the figures and, I suppose, the music suit admirably the scenes of chulos which were so fashionable at the time. In this respect, the piece has its unity and the radical discrepancy with the spirit of the Shakespearean Shrew goes hand in hand with the departure from the scenes which frame it. It is an awful adaptation of Shakespeare, but an excellent flamenco zarzuela – Matoses could not claim as much.

Like the low-life transmutations of Othello that followed the tragic adaptations of Ducis and Carnerero, Las bravías, half-zarzuela half-sainete, pulled the Shakespearean Shrew fully and, as it turned out, successfully, in the direction of medium- and low-brow Spanish culture. The Andalusian context and rhythms of the work, meanwhile, provided an entirely plausible interpretative framework that would, as we shall see, become a conventional way of naturalizing


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the ‘hot’ and ‘exotic’ content and setting of Shakespeare’s more ardent, Mediterranean dramas. To say the piece was popular would be an understatement, as there were nearly 200 performances (excluding matinees) in the first year alone, a figure which would swell in a period that would extend up to 1926. But it was hardly what the ‘98ers’ had in mind when they talked of stimulating the audience’s intellect.

Fortinbras That particular stimulus would come from Catalonia. ‘The Hamlet we wish to discuss is the Spanish people,’ announced the Catalan poet Joan Maragall in an article published in the Diario de Barcelona on 9 April 1899, exactly a year after the disastrous naval engagement off Cuba. If up to now Spain had not followed other countries such as Germany or the states of Eastern Europe in conferring a kind of national identity on Shakespearean characters like Hamlet, Maragall’s article makes a specific link between the post-war situation in Spain and the dramatic hero who, on hearing of his father’s murder, is crushed by the weight of the revelation and the responsibility of having to redress the crime committed. Hamlet’s recognition of his own impotence (‘O cursed spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!’) is, for Maragall, a perfect summary of the post-war climate in Spain: Today the Spanish are like one big Hamlet. They also have had tremendous iniquities revealed to them and, when faced with the duty of repairing them and of regenerating themselves, they have exclaimed: ‘That ever we were born!’, because the moment of revelation has been accompanied by a sense of their own weakness. That is why, like Hamlet, they dither and hallucinate. They claim the need to discover the truth of their ignominy before radically undertaking the redress but, deep down, what they really want is to defer it, because they do not feel strong enough to carry it through. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 362–363)

In this account, Hamlet was the prototype of the dubitative Spanish intellectual, appalled by the revelation of the ‘horrible’ truth – Spain’s failure to adapt to the times and manifest inferiority to a ‘New World’ power like the States, at whose hands it has suffered a calamitous defeat – yet too debilitated, too insecure to react positively to the crisis of values the debacle has brought to the surface.4 Despairing at the stagnation and immobility of a political system of ‘peaceful alternation’ which preferred to turn a blind eye to the real problems affecting the state and whose chief interest was in perpetuating its own existence,5 many members of the Generation of 98, or commentators connected with it, inclined towards anarchism or more authoritarian forms of government as a possible way out of the impasse (Shaw 1982: 28; Cacho 1997: 68).

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To Hamlet’s vacillations many in the group predictably favoured the more vital, ‘manly’ appeal of Fortinbras: This evolution and this law [the ‘natural’ ‘transfusion’ of energy from less to more ‘vital’ forms of life] are beginning to be accomplished in Spain, at least in those regions which make more of a living from modern life, and are accomplished not by any means in the form of armed invasion, or the reduction to slavery, or the annihilation of national identities, but, on the contrary, through the attraction of labour, the solidarity between men of action, the pacific and amorous mixing of blood, assimilation. The renovation has commenced: let us accept it, encourage it, and soon Hamlet will begin to feel the effects of the transfusion of life from Fortinbras. (Pujante & Campillo 2007: 364)

Maragall’s ‘evolutionary’ thesis is given added piquancy by its allusions to the situation in his native Catalonia, one of ‘those regions’ which seemed more in touch with the modern world. The demands for economic self-regulation were, both before and especially after the ‘Desastre’, matched by the call for a cultural autonomy, which intensified with the frequent visits to Paris by architects, writers and artists who saw at first hand the international implications of the crisis and whose aesthetic response to it – ‘modernism’ – was both more organized and more advanced than anything issuing out of Madrid. The bustling Barcelona cultural scene at the turn of the century, in which music and the visual arts featured prominently, also generated a literature which, in terms of brashness and inventive élan, seemed blithely indifferent to the paralysis and introspection predominating in the rest of the country. Among other things, the ‘Renaixença’ (‘Renaissance’), a linguistic and literary revival akin to the Irish ‘Celtic revival’, stressed the distinctive role of Catalonia in Iberian political, institutional and cultural history, though its most important objective was to bring Catalan culture into line with the most significant developments in the rest of Europe. In the theatre one of the most significant developments in the period immediately after the Disaster was the foundation of the ‘Teatre Íntim’ (or ‘Intimate Theatre’) company by the Catalan dramatist, poet and painter Adrià Gual. Challenging what it saw as the conventionality and predictability of the contemporary Spanish repertoire, the activities of ‘Teatre Íntim’ were predicated on the ‘autonomy’ of the mise-en-scène, which was differentiated from the work as dramatic literature, and on what Juan Antonio Hormigón (2004) calls ‘the necessary and inescapable presence of the director’. Working from repertoires which included his own predominantly naturalist work, plays by Benavente and Galdós, as well as a rich array of foreign material (both classical and modern, all of it translated into Catalan) by authors like Molière, Goethe, or Ibsen, Gual can be credited not just with expanding the existing ‘stock’ of stage-worthy dramatic material but, through his own Wagnerian approach to theatrical performance, which he regarded as a multi-medial event oriented to the


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‘perfect harmony’ of all the elements of performance,6 with practically inventing the figure of the stage director. His productions of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (Festa dels reis), from a translation by Carles Capdevila, at the Teatro Lírico (1904), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Somni d’una nit d’estiu), translated by Josep Carner and with a beautiful ‘symbolist’ backcloth painted by Salvador Alarma from Gual’s own sketches, at the Novedades (1908) – both plays practically unheralded on any Spanish stage – are a clear reflection of his aim to enhance the ‘immediacy’ of the theatrical experience. For Helena Buffery (2007: 31–32), the latter production was his most important contribution to Shakespeare production: Mediated by French symbolist readings of Shakespeare’s Dream, Carner’s version tuned in to the dream literature that was rife at the time, and coincided with the romantic, symbolist aesthetic favoured by Gual. Directed and produced by Gual, the Somni d’una nit d’estiu was the centrepiece of the Teatre Íntim’s 1908–1909 season, and undoubtedly the most significant Catalan-language spectacle of the year, with numerous references in the press to its exemplary value for Catalan theatre, poetry, diction, decorum and taste.

Later, as director of the Catalan School of Dramatic Art, which was founded in 1913, Gual would also direct a version of Romeo and Juliet by Morera i Galicia (1920). Gual’s import and reinterpretation of foreign classics would have rapid repercussions in Madrid. ‘From Barcelona,’ Azorín would affirm, ‘Nietzsche, Ibsen, Maeterlinck have come to Madrid’. As the first Spanish city in which Ibsen’s plays were published, the Catalan capital would become a veritable Mecca for dramatists and actors in search of models with which to dynamize their own art. A fundamental aspect of that search was a concern with the ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ basis of those models, unspoilt by adaptation, an originary text to treat with reverence and respect. ‘Poor people,’ proclaimed the mainstream dramatist Jacinto Benavente from the pages of the progressive review Revista nueva on 5 August 1899. In a scathing article, called ‘The popular Theatre’, which singled out melodrama as the chief scourge of the contemporary theatre and which sought to reassess a popular audience’s capacity to perceive and appreciate artistic greatness, Benavente declared: Give me a popular audience and present them with Shakespeare, with Schiller and the Greek classics, and you would soon see how, where their understanding lets them down, respect will fill its shoes; how the sublime and the grotesque will display all their greatness – Othello and Georges Dandin, Segismundo and Sganarelle.

Like another Catalan, Eugeni d’Ors, who would clamour for a Shakespeare uncut, ‘just as he is’, in the belief that he would ‘thrill . . . an innocent audience,

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capable of shedding lively tears before the bitter mishaps of King Lear’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 391), Benavente would defend the English bard less as a dramatist than as ‘a man of the theatre, whose . . . great qualities, like his great defects, are always those of a dramatic author who knows his way around the theatre and [who understands] the audience’. The idea that an author like Shakespeare, if regarded with the appropriate ‘respect’ could (once again) serve as paradigm for a genuinely ‘popular’ theatre, was one the generation of the Disaster returned to again and again. It may, as José M. González (1998: 58) has suggested, stem from the attempts of different members of the generation to ‘de-mythify’ the English bard, to present a ‘less flattering and acquiescent vision of the Shakespearean’ than had been hitherto possible or, in the spirit of Tamayo y Baus in his uniquely original Un drama nuevo, to readdress him as a human and, therefore, a fallible writer. But the perception of a ‘popular’ basis to Shakespeare’s drama – a view that also contained the idea that the ‘essential’ Shakespeare is the Shakespeare of the comedies, rather than the tragedies – may also be seen simply as an attempt to captivate and redirect what d’Ors also refers to as the ‘innocent’ tastes of post-Disaster audiences. Benavente himself was involved in one such attempt in the 1899 production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Teatro Delicias in the working-class Madrid district of Carabanchel. As co-director, with Valle-Inclán, of the short-lived ‘Teatro Artístico’ [Artistic Theatre] company, a Spanish version of the ‘Théâtre Libre’ founded by André Antoine a few years earlier in Paris, Benavente himself played Petruchio in what was possibly an adaptation of the Matoses version discussed in the previous chapter,7 although no text has survived, and there is no indication of how many nights the production ran for. What is certain is that same year he would produce his own three-act version of Twelfth Night, with the enticingly simple title Cuento de amor [Love Story] and subtitle ‘Una comedia fantástica’ [A Fantastic Comedy]. Par (1936b: 63) hesitates to call the play an adaptation and highlights the quite un-Shakespearean seriousness of a piece which, he rightly suggests, has a ‘seriously sentimental’ air quite out of keeping with the frivolousness and tomfoolery of the original. It is true that Benavente slashes elements – such as Malvolio’s cross garters – and characters – there is no equivalent for Sir Andrew Aguecheek – which might detract from the amorous tension established in the main plot; the tension, it is made clear from the outset, is not same-sex, as the author, despite his homosexuality, refrains from exploiting the erotic possibilities of the Olivia-Florisel (Viola) liaison. At the same time, Benavente would introduce situations, such as Florisel’s condemnation to death, which add a much darker hue to the play’s overall atmosphere than is present in Shakespeare, where Olivia’s rigid mourning rites and the disproportionate shaming of Malvolio are the only negative notes. These variations aside, a glance at the plot shows that Benavente may have had the Shakespearean text, or a translation of it, close to hand because he rarely wanders very far from the original narrative.


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In his ‘revaluation’ of Shakespeare’s credentials in his starkly honest Juventud y egolatría [Youth and Egomania] of 1935, Pío Baroja comments on his discovery of the comic in Shakespeare: For a long time I had the impression that, as a writer, Shakespeare was unique and different from the rest. I felt that the difference between him and others was not one of quantity but of quality. I thought that Shakespeare the man was made of different stuff, but now I do not believe it. Just as Shakespeare is not the quintessence of world literature, so Plato and Kant are not the quintessence of world philosophy. Once I admired the thoughts and types of the author of Hamlet; now what astounds me most when I read him is his rhetoric and above all his joy. (1935: 75–76)

Teatre Íntim’s productions of Twelfth Night and the Dream, Teatro del Arte’s staging of the Shrew and Benavente’s own adaptation of Twelfth Night for the Teatro de la Comedia are all incursions into the relatively uncharted terrain of Shakespearean comedy. The Shrew would reappear regularly in both the Matoses version, which would be revived till as late as 1929, and in a fresh version, Domando la tarasca, written and directed by theatrical innovator Gregorio Martínez Sierra, and performed by his own Antoine-inspired Teatro del Arte company at the Teatro Eslava in Madrid in 1917. Working from his own adaptation of the play, which was published the same year, and with a stylized set (by painter and designer Fernando Mignoni) and seventeenth-century French courtly costumes, Martínez Sierra offered a production which, as well as concealing none of the ‘faults’ of the play’s two protagonists, played here by Catalina Bárcena and Paco Hernández, innovatively retained the figure of Christopher Sly, who had tended to be omitted from earlier productions. The beautifully decorated scenery and slick scene changes – a lesson Martínez Sierra is alleged to have learnt on his visits to England and Germany8 – were keenly noted by a generally appreciative theatre press. An example of Martínez Sierra’s determination to dignify and enrich the Spanish stage with productions that exploited the theatrical – not just the textual – possibilities of the plays on which they were based, Domando la tarasca was described by the reviewer in the newspaper ABC (13 April 1917) as a credit to the Teatro Eslava where ‘such a worthy and effective campaign [was] being waged in favour of art, of culture and of good taste’. Despite the comic turn in the work of directors such as Gual and Martínez Sierra, the opening decades of the twentieth century would be dominated by the familiar form of tragedy, with Hamlet and Othello at the top of most companies’ lists. With Sarah Bernhardt’s cross-dressed performance of Hamlet at the Teatro Princesa in Madrid in 1899 fresh in the audiences’ memories, the play would return with a certain monotony throughout the period of both María Cristina’s regency, the reign of Alfonso XIII and the dictatorship of Miguel

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Primo de Rivera in productions which, despite the rising importance of the figure of the director and the introduction of electrical lighting and efficient stage-machinery in most of the country’s playhouses, would continue to vaunt the figure of the star actor as the play’s most marketable asset.9 Actors like Frederic Fuentes (1901), Ricardo Calvo (1912, 1923, 1928, 1929), José Tallaví (1913), Francisco Morano (1915) and Juan Santacana (1927) would offer virtuoso performances of what, for the bulk of Spain’s cultivated audiences, as well as the critical establishment of the early part of the century, was Shakespeare’s most emblematic character. With Spain refusing to take part in the Great War of 1914–1918, Hamlet emerged particularly strongly as a symbol of the nation’s paralysis, bringing back painful memories of a similar stasis following the defeat to America and the loss of the colonies. As Salvador de Madariaga would put it in his ‘El monólogo de Hamlet’ [Hamlet’s Monologue], published in 1916, the year of the tercentenary celebrations of both Shakespeare and Cervantes: Hamlet. We are like Hamlet, he of the paralysed will, and like him we carry around with us in a world of activities our secret desire for action and our secret incapacity to do anything. Words, words, words. Our superb public speakers. Castelar, who put a stop to the revolution in mid-flight, recalls the scruples of Hamlet before the kneeling King Claudius. Excuses for covering up our apathy. Nothing but excuses. (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 422)

The reference to Emilio Castelar, the Republican politician and ringleader in the 1868 uprising, known for his oratorical skills, is an indication of how tightly the character was linked to political developments – in this case, Spain’s neutrality and ‘inaction’ in the face of war echoing Castelar’s failure to realize the full ‘revolutionary’ potential of his reforms – as well as how closely the theatre, and Hamlet as its maximum representative, tended, up to 1916 at least, to be identified with the purely declamatory skills of the main actor. Calvo, who had graduated up from the Guerrero-Díaz de Mendoza company, and the versatile Morano, who would also direct himself in the Shrew and a version of The Merchant of Venice by Augusto Abril and Ramón de Ollerena, both in 1915, seem to have brought more subtlety to the role, revelling in the set speeches but also exploring other facets of the Prince’s ‘personality’, such as his cruelty to Ophelia or his love of make-believe. As for the Santacana Hamlet, which was to launch the first modern-dress production of a Shakespearean play on an unsuspecting Spanish public at the Teatro Pavón in Madrid, many of the set speeches were dropped altogether, whereas the ‘translation’, by Fernando de la Villa, seemed bent on filling in the gaps of Shakespeare’s text with an explanation of motives by which, for example, Hamlet ‘justifies’ his murder of Polonius on the grounds that his own father died unlawfully (Portillo and Salvador 2003: 185).


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A Theatre for the People? By the time Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power, with the King’s compliance, in 1923, the already varied stock of dramatic entertainments had been added to by a new range of spectacles, ranging from the proletarian form of the music hall and the ‘cuplé ’to the high-class, high-art genre of verse drama, or revivals of at least part of the newly rediscovered Golden Age corpus (1992). Dougherty and Vilches (1990: 15) have traced the theatrical vibrancy and enormous fecundity of a period (1918–1926) in which, to take the 18 playhouses operative in Madrid, there could be as many as 1000 different performances per month. Nor did the up-and-coming medium of the cinema which, as I indicated above, occupied some of the venues initially ear-marked for the theatre, pose a serious threat to the hegemony of the latter which, despite the historic resistance of the church, continued to be the chief source of entertainment for the country’s main urban classes. Admittedly, the apparent vitality of the theatre in this period can be deceptive, the quantity of works often obscuring the fact that they were written by a limited number of hands: the Álvarez Quintero brothers, Carlos Arniches, Benavente, or Pedro Muñoz Seca, the author of an immensely popular comedy called Las hijas del rey Lear [The Daughters of King Lear]. The virtual monopoly these authors enjoyed was complemented by a star-system of actors, whose pre-eminence, which would lead to inevitable rivalries and charges of ‘divismo’ in the profession, often obscured the lack of training and talent of some of the country’s better-known actors or consigned some truly vocational interpreters to the status of bit-part player or understudy to their more high-profile colleagues. The more traditional forms of popular entertainment, such as the sainete or the zarzuela, which despite (or arguably because of) the political and economic crisis of 1898, would enjoy a veritable boom at the beginning of the twentieth century, tended to voice the same stale clichés and to display the same hackneyed tableaux of idealized castanet-clicking gypsies or downtrodden but normally unprotesting factory workers. Their capacity to please, which tended to be in direct proportion to their distance from reality, was precisely a function of the expectedness of those themes and images. In their demand for the same, impresarios and their mainly middle-class audiences continued to be subject to the logic of the ‘turno pacifico’ or peaceful alternation which had governed political life for decades. As Serge Salaun puts it (1987: 31), ‘the bourgeoisie, which was liberal at the start of the Restoration, [had] turned conservative, and the commercial theatre [had] moved in the same direction’. This was not the same for all aspects of the profession, however; although producers, authors, actors and audiences appeared reluctant to have anything to do with all but the tried and tested formulae of dramatic production, there were important developments in the fields of set design and lighting which, paradoxically perhaps, paved the way for the technical advances of the early

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Franco period. With the abdication of Alfonso XIII in 1930 and the instatement of the Second Spanish Republic, the random efforts of directors such as Adrià Gual and Gregorio Martínez Sierra were boosted by government in its determination to foster and disseminate culture (whatever its manifestation) among the country’s less-privileged communities, particularly the backward rural areas. A government decree of 1931 declared: It is the feeling of the Republic that the time has come for the Spanish people to have a share in the assets which the State possesses and which should be accessible to each and everyone. [. . .] It is a case of bringing people, especially those who live in rural locations, the breath of progress and the means of participating therein, in its moral stimuli and in the examples of universal advances, so that all the towns of Spain, even the remotest ones, may reap the benefits and noble pleasures currently restricted to the urban capitals.

The Misiones Pedagógicas [Pedagogical Missions], an institute dependent on the Ministry of Public Instruction, whose inception the declaration announced, was entrusted with the not inconsiderable task of setting up libraries, showing films, organizing lectures, recitals, concerts and so on in parts of the country where illiteracy was still rampant. Among its branches was the Coro y el Teatro del Pueblo [Choir and Theatre of the People] directed by Eduardo Torner and Alejandro Casona. These troupes, which comprised mainly students belonging to the extremely active university theatre companies and the Teatro Escuela de Arte, toured the towns and villages on Sundays and public holidays, offering a selection of plays chosen from the impressive body of Golden Age Spanish work (Huertas Vázquez 1988: 130).10 The Mission’s aim in this respect was paternalistic and, in its assumption that the nation’s cultural revival could only be centred on the rural areas, possibly misguided.11 However, as Eduardo Huertas Vázquez, glossing the Missions’ achievements, has argued (1988: 134), this should not be allowed to detract from the overall aim of the venture which, he states, was nothing less than the administration of social justice: Justice which, in the words of its founder Manuel B. Cossío, was as follows: ‘All we are doing is returning to the people what belongs to the people’. A people which was highly cultivated, but left to slumber by interests of government and the governing classes, stripped of its consciousness of itself as a people and of its legitimate role in history. For this was the ultimate aim, the most important task the Misiones Pedagógicas set out to achieve and which was only prevented from coming to complete fruition by domestic events with which we are all familiar.

A product of the civilizing agenda of the Misiones Pedagógicas was the popular ‘La Barraca’ theatre company. The company, whose roots lay in the university and was the initiative of an exceptionally talented group of Madrid-based


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students led by the young Andalusian poet Federico García Lorca, soon gained the support of the Minister of Public Instruction, Fernando de los Ríos, who secured a healthy subsidy from the Republican government. The aim of the ‘La Barraca’ was to create a permanent university theatre in Madrid, together with a touring outfit that would travel throughout Spain during the festive periods and vacations. The founding principle of the group was nothing less than the renovation (‘in artistic terms’) of the Spanish stage. To that end it availed itself of mainly Spanish classics as the best ‘educators of popular taste’, with the noble purpose of bringing theatre to ‘the masses of peasants who, from time immemorial, have been deprived of the theatrical spectacle’. With their repertoire of Golden Age masterpieces, the company toured the provinces of Albacete, Alicante, Asturias, Ávila, Barcelona, Burgos, Ciudad Real, Granada, Huesca, León, Murcia, Navarra, Palencia, Salamanca, Santander, Sevilla, Toledo, Valencia, Valladolid and so on. The butt of constant attacks, many of them politically motivated, which accused it of ‘corrupt practices, worthy of foreign countries’, ‘shameful promiscuity’, ‘squandering public funds’ or ‘answering the dictates of Jewish Marxism’, ‘La Barraca’ can be credited with re-presenting Spanish theatre in a way that recalled the simple, unadorned mode of performance of the original plays. By giving theatre ‘back to the people, in the terms in which they used to know it, a theatre with the plays they used to love’, Lorca himself declared his allegiance to a popular tradition dating back to the autos sacramentales; at the same time, by offering both simplified and stylized versions of these plays, so that the audience might choose between them, the company also hoped to reinvent the means of theatrical production, allowing ‘the drama of the past [to] inform the audience of the present, and the present audience, directors, and performers [to] reinterpret the past’ (Holguin 2002: 98–99). Although Shakespeare did not feature directly in the repertoires of either the Misiones or La Barraca, it would not be overstating the case to say that his work had a formative influence on their vision of the nature and role of performance. Lorca himself seems to have been extremely well-versed in his plays. Bearing in mind that his knowledge of English was fairly limited, it seems reasonable to suppose that the ‘well-thumbed’ edition of Shakespeare’s complete works Margarita Pomès found on Lorca’s desk in 1931 was either not English or possibly an ‘iconic’ memento of his brief visit to London and Oxford in the summer of 1929. More likely, his source would have been one of the complete editions then in vogue – either Rafael Martínez Lafuente’s rendering of French versions of the plays or, as it has also been suggested, Luis Astrana Marín’s all-prose translations that had the merit of being the first rendering of the entire corpus from the original English, the first volumes of which had begun to appear in 1921. Given that there were very few productions in Madrid or elsewhere that escaped his notice, Lorca may also have retained an image of the Italian actor Ermete Zacconi’s highly acclaimed performances at the Teatro Cervantes and the Princesa or more recent productions by Ricardo Calvo and Emiliano

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Latorre. In either case, whether Lorca was working from actual texts, memories of the texts or live performances, an impression of what Shakespeare was doing in them seems to have spilled over into some of Lorca’s own work in the period. Among Lorca’s chief preoccupations was that of developing a theatre that challenged the conventions of the dominant bourgeois ideology and foregrounded desire – its fulfilment and also its frustration – as the motor of the action. In both cases, the work of Shakespeare, particularly Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, appears to have provided possible ‘intertexts’. It was at Lorca’s former Students’ Residence in Madrid that one of the few noteworthy Shakespeare productions of the Republican period took place. Staged and interpreted by members of the Anglo-Hispanic Committee in Madrid, the January 1936 production of Twelfth Night was – uniquely for the period – offered in English by a company made up entirely of British actors from a text which, although cut to the by now habitual three-act format demanded by Spanish audiences, retained enough of the original to justify its presentation as the play’s Spanish ‘premiere’. Although identified by one of the few reviews of the production as one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays of ‘farce and diversion’, comparable in theme and tone to The Comedy of Errors, the choice of play was deeply congenial to Lorca’s concerns with sexual identity and unsettling juxtapositions of slap-dash comedy and delicate nuances of feeling. The deliberate ‘staginess’ of the production was highlighted by the presence of a dancer, small orchestra and piano – reflecting Lorca’s and many of his contemporaries’ fascination with ‘total’ theatre – and by an innovative set, designed by Luis Arizmendi and Ramón de la Riva, which combined lavish costumes and decor with simple sets of curtains that served as backdrop to the secondary scenes. The Spanish translation and accompanying study of the play by Astrana Marín may have primed part of the audience for some of the text’s complexities, although it is hard not to see the production, already made opaque by its performance in English, as complicating some of its received notions of comedy and as pointing ahead to certain of Lorca’s own so-called unperformable plays, El público [The audience] and Comedia sin título [Play with no title], where the question of desire is the only fixed point in an impenetrable and ceaselessly changing landscape of gender-reversal and cross-dressing.12 Meanwhile, back in the mainstream theatres, the authorities struggled to combat the tide of bourgeois drama with sporadic injections of cash and theatrical expertise. Several figures, among them the Valencian Max Aub, campaigned stridently for the nationalization of the country’s main stages, the creation of a National Theatre on French, German and British lines being accompanied by that of a National Dance School, Conservatory, National Experimental Theatre and University Theatre groups. What Aub envisaged was nothing less than the complete overhaul of the theatre, with the building of new playhouses, the upgrading of the role of the director as well as the construction of a ‘national’ repertoire, based principally on classical Spanish drama. The outbreak of Civil War meant that most of these projects would be


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curtailed, although in 1934 the government of the Second Republic did offer the director Cipriano Rivas Cherif (1891–1967) a free concession to use the Teatro María Guerrero (the former Princesa) in Madrid as the headquarters of a new drama school, el Estudio de Arte Dramático, as what it hoped would be the launch-pad for young actors, directors and technicians. Predictably, the response of much of Spain’s theatrical establishment was one of scepticism and incredulity at the necessity of these measures. When Margarita Xirgu, a former leading light in Lorca’s group ‘La Barraca’ who, in exile in Argentina, became the first Spanish actress to play Hamlet, used her position as director of the Teatro Español to contract Rivas Cherif as the company’s ‘literary and artistic adviser’, the significance of the gesture was lost on many of her contemporaries: People did not see the necessity of a director or there was simply no adequate idea of why the new company should be making this one of their priorities. […] Why was anyone thinking of taking on a director when there was nothing but reticence when it came to bettering the conditions of the performance by improving and modernizing the stages? (Rubio 2004: 183)13

A measure of that resistance can be seen in the nearby Teatro Victoria. Romeo and Juliet has, as we have seen, had a long performance history in Spain. From the earliest adaptation by Dionisio Solís, which failed to respect even the order of the protagonists in the title, the play quickly blossomed into the most popular of pieces, a popularity which grew with the impassioned interpretations of the ‘authentic’ Italian productions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although clearly feeding off such popularity, José María Pemán’s adaptation of 1936, Julieta y Romeo, kept the plot and characterization within safely Spanish bounds. Josefina (‘Pepita’) Díaz de Artigas played the part of a young widow whose unloved state – the marriage, it is suggested, was never consummated – breeds a desire for the real thing. Hearing of her predicament, a resourceful and unabashed cousin, played by Manuel Collado, whom she does not know because of conflicting interests within the same family (another departure from the original), decides to put her desire to the test and assumes the identity of an impecunious stranger called Julián Romeo – an allusion to the nineteenth-century actor, Julián Romea. Under this assumed identity, Romeo gradually gains the confidence of Julieta till his plan reaches its culmination when Julieta must choose between the wealthy man he is and the poor man he appears to be, at which point Pemán is said to have shown his true Shakespearean colours by allowing ‘Queen Mab’ to win the day. Despite this minor Shakespearean allusion, the production seems to have offered very little in the way of dramaturgical insight or novel presentation. In a gesture that was undoubtedly intended to evoke the ever-popular zarzuela, Pemán sets the play in a kind of timeless Andalusia, a close-knit although essentially alien community for the ‘chulesco’ Romeo who, naturally enough, hails from the capital

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Madrid. Pemán reworks the Montague-Capulet feud as an ongoing legal wrangle between Romeo’s branch of the family and the gossipy ugly sisters to Julieta’s Cinderella, who, as typical Andalusians, are dressed in mourning. The Civil War of 1936–1939 would not only close the theatres but put an end to the renovation of the stage initiated by directors such as Gual and Martínez Sierra and developed by artists such as Lorca. When the playhouses re-opened after the capitulation of the Republican forces, many of the writers, artists and performers who had contributed to the cultural regeneration of Spain were either dead or in exile. For those who remained, artistic survival meant adapting to the aesthetic and ethical postulates of the new regime or, increasingly, from the late 1950s on, finding ways round the ever-vigilant eye of the Francoist censor. The consequences for Shakespeare production will be the topic of the next chapter.

Chapter 5

The Franco Years

The Cultural Premises The end of the Civil War, which had raged for three bloody years between July 1936 and April 1939, did not mean a cessation of the hostilities in Spain; on the contrary, it would inaugurate a spirit of revenge which would persist until the very end of the regime and even after the death of its leader, Francisco Franco, in 1975. ‘The war is not yet over!’ became a stock phrase of the regime till it was eventually replaced by a constitutional monarchy headed by King Juan Carlos I in 1978. For many commentators, Francoism’s most durable feature was the terror it instilled in its opponents – a terror reflected in the persecution and execution of dissidents till as late as September 1975. The bombing of the civilian population by the German and Italian air force at the height of the conflict and the summary roadside killings that were a regular practice throughout the war were followed by more discreet, if no less effective, forms of repression in the years to come. As in so many other aspects of government, the regime that was installed in 1939 was guided initially in cultural matters by the ideologues of the Falange, a movement whose ‘legitimacy’ was felt to be underpinned not only by the rise of Fascism in other European countries, particularly Italy and Germany, but also by its claim to be fulfilling Spain’s Catholic destiny. The determination of the Falange to become the political and cultural arbiter of the new State was reflected in its presence in the universities, the press, the censorship committees as well as in the media of cinema, theatre and radio. In a pamphlet called the ‘Political Meaning of Culture at the Present Time’, the Falangist Minister for National Education José Ibáñez Martín called for ‘a noble and Christian revolution of the spirit’ involving ‘the re-education of the present generations and the pure formation of those today who are putty in our hands’. The idea of re-educating the populace, of expunging from their minds the misguided philosophies of Republicanism and refilling them with more healthy, spiritually uplifting ideas became an obsession of the early part of the regime – albeit expressed in less cynically manipulative terms than those used by the Minister. According to the latter, culture was at the head of the ‘hierarchy of the State’s concerns’, with intellectuals under an obligation to restore Hispanic culture

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and learning and to transmit them to the people as basic requisites of what it meant to be a Spaniard, namely, ‘the knowledge and love of God and Fatherland’ (1942: 13). For Pedro Laín Entralgo, who was one of the stalwarts of the cultural and propagandistic activities of the Falange, Culture should conform to four ‘hard and fast criteria, two of them substantial: Spanishness and Catholicism; another modal or configurative: up-to-dateness, and the last one tactical: efficiency’ (1943: 105).1 The cultural apparatus that Franco and his ideologues were anxious to put in place was thus underwritten by a national narrative in which the ‘permanent’ values of religious and racial purity, familial and societal stability, imaginatively enshrined in an idealist notion of Spanish peasantry, converged in a ‘time space’ that was to be located in Spain’s imperial past. Like the authoritarian regimes in contemporary Germany, Italy and also Portugal with which it begged comparison, the regime pursued a ‘policy of memory reconstruction’, surrounding itself with the symbolic trappings – the monumentality, the marches, the ‘rituals’ of fascism – appropriate to the ‘desired synthesis between “tradition” and the “avant-garde”, between the “national” and the “modern”’ (Loff 1999: 45). In virtually all spheres of cultural activity, Francoism sought to roll back the interventions of the Republican period by constructing material of its own that was ‘politically docile’, at the same time as it ‘fulfilled . . . the role, social and diplomatic, of furnishing symbolic capital to underscore the legitimacy of the regime’ (Heymann 1998: 137). Despite, or rather because of, its unfortunate mass-cultural associations, the cinema was ideally suited to those ends, and Franco himself, under a pseudonym, contributed to the screenplay of one the more notorious instances of ‘memory reconstruction’ – the 1942 film Raza [Race], with its exaltation of the triad of values (God, Country and Family), which the regime enshrined as the bedrock of its legitimacy. But the theatre also had a role to play, and the nationalization of the stage was, as we shall see, the first step in the search for the kind of ‘symbolic capital’ that the new regime so desperately required. An immediate problem it faced, however, was the sheer dearth of theatrical talent capable of, or disposed towards, making such an initiative viable. ‘When on 1 April 1939 a new and decisive era in our history commenced,’ one proFranco commentator would later observe, ‘the Spanish theatre, as a living organism, had to begin practically from scratch’ (Calvo Sotelo 1973: n.p.). The post-war ‘diaspora’ (as it was euphemistically called) of authors, directors and actors had left a major void, a void the regime nonetheless hoped to turn to its advantage by cluttering the repertoires with plays which, in Phyllis Zatlin’s words, were aimed at ‘exalting the grandeur of Spain’s past and [providing] an essentialist notion of the nation’s Castilian and Catholic identity’ (Zatlin 1999: 223). Much of this work was as bad as it was predictable: either new work that openly celebrated the rise of nationalism, the restaging of plays considered ideologically ‘germane’, or Golden Age comedias carefully chosen and ‘adapted’ to suggest improbable parallels with the present. As in Nazi Germany, the first

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kind of play was quick to disappear from the repertoires. By contrast, old plays and comedias, where characters are driven by a sense of honour or hail from ‘glorious’ moments of Spain’s imperial past, were generously subsidized and generally earned extended runs. Answering the question, ‘What should the theatre of the Falange be like?’ in the Revista Nacional de Educación, Tomás Borrás talked of a ‘theatre of the protagonist’, which purportedly reflected all men as tiny ‘particles of an entity called the Fatherland’ and which was diametrically opposed to what he called a ‘theatre of the anti-protagonist . . . brilliant, intellectual and full of art’, but whose ‘object is not Spain but the rest of the world’ (1943: 82–83). The Fascist dream which, in many respects, followed the Republican ideal of culture, of a theatre that would impart these values to the widest possible clientele, ran up against the practical realities of a post-war economic situation where all but a limited portion of the strictly urban population could afford to attend the theatre. This, as Oliva has noted (2002: 26), would have an inevitable impact on the kind of plays that were produced because ‘[t]he potential spectator for the theatre belonged predominantly to the service sector and, to a lesser extent, to the industrial one’. The steady raising of the prices and the unequal competition coming from the cinema meant that ‘never as then could one talk so clearly of a theatre of or for the Right’. The ‘complicity’ between a reactionary repertoire and an undemanding, economically advantaged audience is the substance of José Monleón’s critique of the period, which also includes an appreciation of the role of the censor in the construction of a ‘national’ culture: The Spanish Civil War established a set of victors and of victims, and in consequence a political, economic and social order which was in the service of the former. In general terms, the audiences belonged to the side which won the war. The theatre – and again we are talking in very general terms – became an expression of their need for escapism, for the consolation of sentimentality, for mechanical humour, for a superficial knowledge of the ‘great international hits’, etc., etc. Censorship did little more than oversee, through the privileged reading and prior approval of the texts, the fulfilment of the desired harmony between the Spanish theatre and its public. (1977: 244–245)

The tendency to self-censorship, the exercise of self-restraint by original writers and translators even before their work was submitted for approval, saw to it that this role was reduced still further.

Theatre and Nationhood An early instance of the determination to administer ‘national’ culture to a theoretically hungry populace was the foundation of the National Theatre of the Falange in 1938, a year before the end of the war. Directed by Luis Escobar,

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the company could be regarded as a Fascist version of Lorca’s La Barraca, with a repertoire of homely Golden Age classics that it played in lively, ‘unadulterated’ form in the towns and villages absorbed by the ‘nationalist’ reconquest. After the war, the Ayuntamiento of Madrid, which still owned the Teatro Español, invited applications for new management of the nation’s flagship playhouse. In a clear allusion to an application made by the Falangist Sindicato del Espectáculo [Syndicate of Spectacles], the nationalist newspaper Arriba (18 August) ran an article stating that the concession should indeed be granted to ‘such a competent group of persons’, thereby lending the Syndicate the ‘status and ranking it deserves’, while preventing the theatre from falling into the hands of speculators and ‘theatrical fortune-hunters’, or becoming the scene for a ‘motley succession of spectacles and artistes whose performance for purely business purposes may [nevertheless] come in handy at the rest of Madrid’s theatres’. Significantly, then, direct state intervention was confined to the Español and to its sister theatre, the María Guerrero, although a policy of laissez-faire applied to the remaining theatres in the capital and, indeed, the rest of the country. While it would be wrong to suggest that these other venues, or the cinema with which they tended to be in unequal competition, were exempt from any form of state or ecclesiastical supervision, their chief criterion was the market and catering to as wide a constituency as possible, which meant a strong emphasis on such mass-cultural products as music hall, the revue and so on. In the case of the Español, the concession to the Syndicate was a foregone conclusion, a move that was intended to enhance the theatre’s reputation as a sanctity of theatrical excellence and, perhaps more significantly, help secure its status as an ‘official’ theatre of state. As the same newspaper would put it on 31 December 1940: We should be . . . proud that in the year 1940 theatres of the ilk of the Español and the María Guerrero [which was also ‘nationalized’] are given over to a new sense of the dramatic art which is both respectful of the past and animated with the best spirit of renovation for the staging and presentation of the plays performed there. Madrid needs to be in a position to say that two of its leading playhouses are devoted to a mission we so devoutly desired when, in its theatres, the plays being performed were the stuff of a city under the tyranny of Marxism, agitated by mediocrity.2

Among the aesthetic missions of the new ‘national’ theatres was the ennobling and dignifying of the Spanish stage. A product of the Falange’s dream of a National Theatre organized along German lines,3 the Español was soon seen not just as a beacon of probity and artistic excellence in a sea of theatrical mediocrity but, as director José Tamayo would put it, as [A] focal point for the urge to renew, a symbol of hope to those who, dissatisfied with the general state of affairs, aimed to make the theatre a modern-day reality

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which, by using the best possible means at its disposal, might once again instil an enthusiasm for the performance in the public at large. (1953: 37)

In contrast to the María Guerrero, with its repertoire of mainly new (both national and foreign) plays, at the Español, which from 1941 came under the management of Augusto García Viñolas, who had succeeded Felipe Lluch, and the artistic direction of Cayetano Luca de Tena, the ‘urge to renew’ meant the recovery of some of the ‘classics’ of Spanish drama, a substantial number of them from the ‘Golden Age’ (late sixteenth/early seventeenth century), and also annually, from the first season after the conflict (1940–1941), at least one ‘Shakespeare’. Shakespeare’s importance not just for the Español but for the cultural politics the playhouse put into action can be gauged from a remark ‘overheard’ by the theatre critic of the Madrid weekly Hoja del Lunes during the interval of the first-night production of Macbeth in 1942: ‘This is something to make even the coldest-hearted of us proud to proclaim themselves Spanish’ (16 February). After the inauspicious production of Hans Rothe’s Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor, subtitled ‘Variations on works by William Shakespeare’ and, despite the identity of its adapter, the gifted poet Dámaso Alonso, almost universally decried as a travesty of the ‘real’ Shakespeare, Luca de Tena’s production of Macbeth was hailed as the theatrical event of the season (1941–1942) and the herald of a new dawn in Spain’s theatrical history. ‘Both the management and the artists of the Español have been working on the performance of Macbeth with the utmost care,’ ran the report in Informaciones on 21 January 1942 – some three weeks before the play’s premiere on 11 February! ‘The spectacle will be impressive in its scope and serve as an instance of what, theatrically, the new Spain is capable of achieving’. The same idea was echoed, almost word for word, in a number of reports leading up to the premiere and was confirmed, one day after the event, in a full-page review in the sports magazine Gol (12 February 1942) where, amid the barrage of stories and statistics relating to the current soccer season, an explicit link was made between the theatrical success of Luca de Tena’s production and the credibility of the new regime. ‘Let there be no more talk,’ stormed the reviewer, ‘of the decadence of our theatre or of our period of transition, because both ideas will be forgotten once all our impresarios, actors and authors commit themselves to the iron purpose of producing good theatre’. The ‘dignified’ production of Shakespearean drama, such that could compete with the very best of foreign productions of his work, was a possible vehicle for the recognition the regime so anxiously sought. Central to this appropriation of Shakespeare was a conventional perception of his work as embodying the timeless values considered to be both the hallmark of the classic and the legacy it left for future generations. ‘Shakespeare without Shakespeare’ – the freedom to retain an aura of recognizable Shakespeareanism, while carefully reshaping the text to suit the prevailing mood – was the fundamental tenet of these early Francoist performances, with the artistic director now assuming full control of both casting, rehearsals and

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final performance (Oliva 1989: 95).4 In practice, the director’s urge to innovate tended to be subordinated to a scrupulous respect for the elements – set, costumes, music and lighting – which were regarded as contributing to the play’s general ‘ambiance’, coupled with a concern for their appropriateness to the age or place evoked in the original. The limited financial and technical resources of the Español, but above all the lack of a continuous tradition in performing the classics, let alone Shakespeare, were perhaps decisive here. On the other hand, the play text, which was generally commissioned to prestigious and, in the main, ‘politically docile’ authors, such as Nicolás González Ruiz or, in the case of Hamlet, José María Pemán, was rendered from authoritative editions but generally compressed into fewer acts, re-organized to respect narrative ‘logic’, spatial unity and also the interval; very often it was ‘unburdened’ of episodes, such as the Porter’s Scene in Macbeth, which were deemed too offensive or ‘controversial’ to be presented before a discriminating public. For his production of Macbeth, Luca de Tena could draw on the considerable talents of set designer Siegfried Burmann, a disciple of Max Reinhardt who had also worked with Gregorio Martínez Sierra. Together they crafted a spare, naked set that was nonetheless characterized by its depth and monumentality. The elevated stage was dominated by a vast portal which, as one critic remarked, served not just as the entrance to Macbeth’s castle but as ‘another curtain for the double drama of the characters’ souls’. The solid medieval trappings of the performance, enhanced by rough-hewn doors, tables and other furnishings – the three-dimensional, ‘corporeal’ décor that would become a trademark of Burmann’s work for the stage – was complemented by the militaristic black and white ‘period’ costume, designed by Fernando Chausa, which suggested both Norman chain-mail and Scottish kilt, with most of the uniforms bearing insignias that mingled pseudo-Celtic iconography with the symbolism of Fascism. The powerful visual impact of the production – the smallness of the characters trapped within the ‘epic’ proportions of the stage; the eerie appearance of spectres and of the three witches who were shown ‘in bas-relief, statuesque, oracular, with neither stick nor broom’ – was enhanced by the use of projectors and complemented by Manuel Prada’s evocative musical score. At the same time, it seems to have more than made up for González Ruiz’s efficient but halfhearted translation which, although dispensing with the Porter’s scene, with its obscenities and close-to-the-bone allusions to Catholic ‘equivocators’, chose to suppress what one critic called the ‘dangerous and horrifying’ scene in which Macduff bears aloft the tyrant’s severed head.5 This visually and aurally impressive, spruced-up Shakespeare was defended as in no way inferior to foreign productions of his work and was presented with the full backing of the all-powerful Falange which, as we saw, was entrusted with overseeing the nation’s moral hygiene in the early years of the regime. Romeo y Julieta, the second Shakespeare in the Luca de Tena-González Ruiz series, was eagerly anticipated by a press anxious to make the inevitable connection between artistic excellence and the ‘healthiness’ of the new regime. Romeo y

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Figure 5.1 Lady Macbeth (Mercedes Prendes) greets Duncan in the Español’s 1942 production of Macbeth, directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena. (Photo by Ortíz, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Teatral, Madrid.)

Julieta was ‘the play of the Falange,’ the local daily Madrid announced unequivocally on 1 December 1943. ‘In the shadow of the continual vigilance with which the Vicesecretariat of Popular Education oversees it,’ it went on, the theatre of the Falange shone ‘like a limpid truth in the dirty milieu of the Spanish stage’. To ensure that ‘truth’ was visible to all, González Ruiz adapted Shakespeare’s tragedy to emphasize the ‘moral atmosphere’ of a play which he interpreted as, first and foremost, a study of innocent, if misguided, passion. Presented in the hand programme as ‘an accommodation to the present times’, Romeo y Julieta would be a cleaned-up, bawdy-free version of the play, which mingled prose with a substantial amount of verse to capture some of the ‘lyricism’ of the original. Emilio Burgos’s spectacular ‘Renaissance’ set, complete with running fountain for the piazza scenes and a giant chandelier that dropped into position for the ball, were again attempts to give solid ‘reality’ to a production which tactfully insisted on the ‘poetic’ nature of the lovers’ relationship. Macbeth, which was revived in 1943, and Romeo y Julieta were followed at regular yearly intervals by productions of Othello (1944), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1945; revived in 1964), Richard III (1946), The Merchant of Venice (1947) and Hamlet (1949), all directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena. What all of these productions have in common is a play text which, though deriving from an authentic and authoritative source,6 is cut and, if necessary, re-arranged to suit the exigencies of ‘taste’ and swift scene changes. The mise-en-scène and costuming are generally spectacular and ‘cinematic’, carefully designed to re-create

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the ‘context’, both geographical and historic, in which the action is supposed to unfold. Notwithstanding this concern with topographic and historical accuracy, a certain artistic lip-service is paid to contemporary schools of scenography, particularly constructivism and expressionism, with a preference for so-called corporeal sets that stress the density and physicality of the objects and settings presented. The object is as much fidelity to the original as is possible or desirable, without losing sight of the demands of a modern audience and without minimizing the importance of modern set design as a source of symbolic capital. Years later, Luca de Tena would spell out his recommendations for the ‘proper’ performance of the classics, including Shakespeare: ‘The secret for performing these authors . . . lies in the speed and logic of the changes of scene’. While continuing to insist that adaptations were an absolute must (‘however much the scholars might carp’ [1952b: 46]), he would also acknowledge that the ‘authentic’ Shakespeare was the ‘crude and popular’ one he had witnessed in Germany in years immediately after the Second World War. Like the revolving stage he had seen and so admired at the Schiller Theater, however, a Shakespeare at once more vital and more popular was precisely what he had not been unable to deliver at the Español. The realist sets of Burmann and Burgos and the sumptuous period costumes of Chausa and Vicente Viudes, which were the most striking features of these performances, meant increased production costs that inevitably translated into a prohibitive ticket prices. Meanwhile the self-censored texts of González Ruiz, who translated all of the plays but the last, and José María Pemán who translated Hamlet, were careful to erase all smut and, if necessary, the character(s) who produced it, in favour of more manageable, morally sanitized and ‘poetic’ renderings of familiar plays for predominantly middle-class audiences hungry for such quality ‘aesthetic’ events. An indifferent performance of Othello, with actors José María Seoane and Prendes conspicuously failing to live up to Emilio Burgos’s sumptuously designed set, brought the first signs of dissent from a press exasperated by the prominence given to Shakespeare. The Misión (21 December 1946) would bring the issue into the open in its otherwise favourable review of Richard III: ‘We are quite content to see Shakespeare continuing his reign at our official playhouse, but we would be even happier to see [Cervantes] putting in an appearance with any one of his plays at this the nation’s leading theatre’. The qualified response to Pemán’s all-verse rendering of Hamlet – Burgos’s impressive gothic cathedral set and Chausa’s typically elaborate costumes failing to compensate for the ‘coldness’ and ‘rigidity’ of a production that Guillermo Marín’s reputedly jocular Hamlet did little to alleviate – was a confirmation that, with Luca de Tena’s departure from the Español and his replacement by Luis Fernando de Igoa,7 Shakespeare’s reign at the Español had, like the taste for large-scale productions his work seemed designed to satisfy, momentarily come to an end. When José Tamayo, director of the ‘Lope de Vega’ theatre company that had been founded in 1946, was handed control of the Español in 1954, there was

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every indication that that dominion might be resumed. Tamayo had, after all, directed Pemán’s version of Romeo and Juliet at the Teatro Eslava in Valencia as the inaugural work of the ‘Lope de Vega’. The company’s aim had been ‘to perform the great works of universal theatre, but in a style which, at heart, was a sign of dissatisfaction with what, at the time, was being produced in Spain’ (cited in Bernal 1992: 96). But although this did give room in the repertoires for a considerable number of foreign plays, most of these were by contemporary or near-contemporary authors (Goldoni, Pirandello, Arthur Miller, etc.) rather than ‘classical’ ones such as Shakespeare.8

New Openings ‘Apertura’ (literally, ‘opening’) is the term frequently applied to the latter half of the Franco regime, to differentiate it from the ‘dark years’ of the first decade or so. Indeed, the conditions that made the transition to democracy that started in 1975 the conflict-free process it is often presented as were, to a large extent, already in place in the 1960s. For it was then that a new generation of technocrats, many of them educated abroad and with close affiliations to the Catholic movement Opus Dei , took control of the government and began to press for an opening up of the economy to foreign investment and pan-national institutions such as the Common Market. From as early as February 1962 the Spanish government had requested the opening of negotiations with the EEC with a view to its eventual incorporation in the Market, an incorporation which however rested, in the terms of the so-called Birkelbach report, on the democratization of the applicant (Monleón 1995: 13). Meanwhile, the massive urbanization of the Spanish coast attracted not only hordes of sun-starved Northern Europeans and the money they brought with them but important doses of popular European, especially British, culture which inevitably left its mark on the native consciousness which, much to the chagrin and also alarm of the authorities who continued to regard Europe as ‘the source of every perversion’ and Spain as the ‘spiritual reserve of the West’ (Monleón 1977: 250), began to neglect the official imaginary of bull-fighting and flamenco (which continued to be served up as kitsch souvenirs to the tourists) in favour of the more invigorating impulses of English-speaking cinema and pop. The revamping of the old Ministry of Information and Tourism, which was placed in the hands of the ‘moderate’ Manuel Fraga (a selfdeclared Anglophile and future father of the 1978 Constitution), was a reflection of the vital importance the regime attached to the latter sector, but also, insofar as the ministry was responsible for official censorship, a recognition of the way culture was linked, now irremediably, to wider international developments. It is Fraga who has been credited with initiating a certain softening of the restrictions placed on cultural agents, notably the abolition of ‘prior censorship’, by which all texts were vetted in manuscript prior to publication and which had been a virtual death-knell for all but the most orthodox, or

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subtly indirect, of cultural products. ‘Freedom of expression and the transmission of information . . . will have no other limitations than those imposed by law’, decreed the revised Press and Printing Act of 1966, in a salutary reminder to authors and editors to carefully screen their products before putting them in print.9 Self-censorship was thus the aim, a policy which put the onus on the producers themselves to abide by the law and not to incur the wrath of the censor. In the theatre, where the screening of the play-text could still be accompanied by often unexpected visits by functionaries to the playhouses to see rehearsals and performances,10 it was taken as read that certain themes (anything which questioned the family or the institution of matrimony) could not be handled, while in a law of 1964 governing both theatre and cinema, there was an open prohibition of ‘the disrespectful representation of religious practices and beliefs’, images and scenes that ‘might stir unseemly passions in the average spectator’, ‘allusions made in such a way that the may prove more suggestive than the thing itself’, ‘colloquial expressions’ and ‘scenes or close-up shots of character which transgress the most basic standards of good taste’ (Boletín Oficial de Estado, 8 March 1963).However, even these exacting standards could be relaxed when it came to certain forms of performance, especially those of ‘theatrical works from the cultural legacy of the past, bearing in mind the special character they have because of their historical remoteness and the special predisposition on the part of the spectator, as well as particular features of their language and situations’ (Boletín Oficial de Estado, 25 February 1964) – a condition which would have a particular bearing on new productions of Shakespeare. These restrictions did not impede the proliferation of independent theatre companies and the premiere of plays by authors such as Valle-Inclán or Bertold Brecht. As Monleón observes (1995: 240), the censor, that anonymous figure, till then acknowledged as a kind of ‘inevitable functionary’, bereft of sensibility, began to express his ‘bad conscience’ by alternating the usual prohibitions with a number of surprising authorizations, frequently turning a blind eye to productions which, until recently, would have been added to a virtually interminable blacklist. Monleón cites the production of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the ‘official’ Teatro María Guerrero and its subsequent prohibition by Admiral Carrero Blanco, who is claimed to have turned up ‘unexpectedly’ to see it one night, as ‘another chapter in the struggle between ‘inmovilistas’ and ‘aperturistas’ which marked the latter years of the Franco regime and which was given tragic expression in the executions approved by the Dictator shortly before his demise’ (1995: 240; see also Monleón 1977: 253–254). Neither side seems to have fully asserted itself in the years leading up to the illness and death of Franco. Although the return of work by outlawed figures such as Valle-Inclán and García Lorca, or the new critical realism of authors such as Antonio Buero Vallejo, did seem to re-establish a connection with the nation’s repressed theatrical vanguard, mainstream repertoires continued to be dominated by the kind of bland, conventional comedy secretly approved of

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by the regime. Buero’s work in particular has been viewed as belonging to a wing of theatrical resistance to the dictates of the regime, a wing comprising authors who had developed their own ‘cryptograph of meaning’, producing at least two levels of reading: an explicit one for censors and unsuspecting spectators, and another for like-minded audiences. The other wing, as Monleón discerns it (1977: 257–258), was that of certain professional companies, such as those of Nuria Espert or Adolfo Marsillach, which through productions of off-beat work like Peter Weiss’s Marat-Sade or Jean Genet’s The Maids, ‘defied the terrible demands of Spanish theatrical life – the need to “succeed” meant keeping within the limits of what made success possible – to formulate spectacles which were both new, imaginative and dramaturgically respectable’. Theatre in Catalonia provides plenty of early examples of how apparently problem-free this process could be. If the choice of Julius Caesar by the Alpha-63 company in 1967 was itself contentious, no less significant was its premiere in Hospitalet de Llobregat, a predominantly working-class satellite of Barcelona, that is, outside the national theatre circuit of the capital Madrid, as venue. Its use of Josep María de Sagarra’s well-known Catalan version of the play as text and ‘modern-dress’ reading heavily inspired by Orson Welles’s anti-‘Fascist’ Caesar of 1938 were further challenges to cultural and ideological orthodoxy. Amidst increasingly strident calls for a ‘national’ theatre that reflected genuinely popular interests, the anonymous critic in the influential review Yorick (1968: 68–69) had warmed to the Hospitalet experience as a sign of the town hall’s ‘palpable concern to bring to its area [in a square outside the ayuntamiento building itself] a positive and stimulating sociocultural reality’, although in a familiarly elitist gesture, lamenting that the play had probably gone over the heads of the ‘social stratum to which it was chiefly addressed’. The Sagarra text, written in a language that was still struggling for official recognition, was itself a declaration of intentions by a production which, again, was considered so ‘excessively intellectualized and politically confused’ as to have completely washed over a bewildered and, by all accounts, restless Hospitalet audience (69). This was certainly not the intention of a production whose implications, as another critic of the period was to write, ‘have absolutely nothing to do with the past or with archaeology’ (Serra d’Or, August 1968: 74–75). In his own appraisal of the production, written five years after the play’s fist night, director Josep Codina somewhat tentatively concluded ‘perhaps it is because we are living such unsettled times – a bit like 16th-century England – that Shakespeare feels so up-to-date, so modern’ (1973: 86). Even the bemused first-night audience at Hospitalet would, one feels, have spotted the relevance of dressing the Roman crowd controllers as jackbooted storm-troopers, the plebeians in blue zip-up Spanish workmen’s uniforms or, in Codina’s most un-Wellsean touch, the senators in capes with sashes over white ‘banana-republic’ uniforms. The metallic ‘meccano-style’ set with split-level platforms, evoking the construction of empire but also the building-boom in 1960s Spain, the presence of electoral slogans

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and posters, the cluster of microphones surrounding Antony and Brutus and, finally, the representation of Octavius, Antony and Lepidus as ‘three typical dictators of our times’ (77) were audacious attempts to relate Shakespeare’s play to late Francoist Spain as well as (by contemporary Spanish standards) a truly innovative treatment of a classic text. Back in the capital, a pair of Hamlets from the early 1960s give some idea not only of the freeing-up but also of the residual reservations, of the contemporary Spanish stage. Fresh from her triumph in the role of Medea, the young Catalan-born actress Nuria Espert and her husband Armando Moreno decided to capitalize on the success and to stage their own production of Shakespeare’s tragedy at the open-air Teatre Grec, Barcelona’s own ‘Greek Theatre’. The self-consciously ‘figurative’ set that included battlements, platforms and a spectacular throne room paled into insignificance behind the centre point of the performance: Espert’s decision to cast herself as the Danish prince. Several years later she would defend her decision to emulate actresses such as the great Sarah Bernhardt and Margarita Xirgu not, she recalls (1993: 415), as an attempt to make the audience believe she was a boy: she kept her hair long (‘half way down my back’), because what she was proposing was ‘to highlight the homosexual dimension of [Hamlet’s] relationships’, and more precisely, an inability to come to terms with his own sexuality, which is what she saw as underpinning his relation with Horatio and, more calamitously, with Gertrude and with Ophelia. If the part helped her to ‘mature’ as an actress (417), however, part of the 1960 audience was a long way from attaining such a state. The ‘Espert Hamlet’, as it became known, quickly gained a notoriety that may have helped it gain some unexpected credit at the box office. Such a provocative and, for many, unwarranted projection of the play’s potential homosexuality produced scenes in the theatre that had not been witnessed since the early 1900s. For Tony Howard (2007: 208), the deliberate citations of the Republican Xirgu’s production laid bare Espert’s ‘provocative sense of history’. Her autobiographical De fuego y aire [On Fire and Air] of 2002 recalls a first-night audience which evokes images of the ‘two Spains’ that had gone to war 24 years earlier: on the one hand, the ‘dissenters’ who booed and stamped their feet; on the other, the fans who roared their approval and engaged in ‘frenzied applause’ (44–55). The controversy tended to overshadow the importance of a production that helped revive a work which, since the travesty of the National Theatre version of 1949, had been largely absent from the repertoires, while bringing into relief the role played by Catalan, the language of the play, and private theatres such as the Grec, in suggesting provocative alternatives, both aesthetically and politically, to the theatrical mainstream (Delgado 2003: 136). If the Espert show was nourished by the enterprising and highly acclaimed Catalan translation of Josep Maria de Sagarra, whose name would become a by-word for the Catalan resistance to the hegemony of Castilian, the play text for the Madrid production at the Español was commissioned by director José

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Tamayo to the equally provocative figure of Buero Vallejo. Given that, as we have seen, ‘classical’ literature did not ordinarily trouble the censor, the Buero version was performed virtually in its entirety. Recalling his interpretation of the Prince, whom he chose to play in a ‘less dubitative and spiritualized than visceral, Elizabethan, rough and rather savage’ fashion, leading actor Adolfo Marsillach, who had already performed the role as an under-study to Alejandro Ulloa in 1951, would again relate the difficulties of overcoming the audience’s expectations. The aftertaste left by the Espert Hamlet was just one of the factors the actor had to contend with; another was the imposing presence of Laurence Olivier, whose 1948 film version of the play, which was released a year later in Spain, had given iconic force to a certain image of the Prince. Dashing, sensitive but ultimately irresolute – ‘the man who could not make up his mind’, as the film’s credits put it – Olivier’s characterization had insinuated itself into the minds of Spanish spectators, many of whom were appalled by this Hamlet’s lack of spirituality. Although Marsillach would also invoke other reasons for their indignation,11 the reception of the production was undoubtedly marked by what critics perceived as this departure from preconceived notions of character. The purely figurative set, designed by Vicente Viudes, and Cristóbal Halffter’s atmospheric sound-music were seen as further disruptions to received Spanish ideas of the play’s performability, which did not include the possibility of the actual physical presence of the Ghost and which tended to dismiss as ‘irrelevant’ the metatheatrical speculations on play-acting (Portillo and Salvador 2003: 189). The fourth centenary of Shakespeare’s birth sparked a series of commemorative events which, if lacking the sparkle of celebrations in the United Kingdom, were significant insofar as they at last gave a Spanish public a view of how the Bard was being interpreted in his own country – and by some of the actors with whom some of them may have been familiar. Coming just two years after the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lope de Vega, it is in a way natural that such a signal date should not raise as many expectations as it did in the United Kingdom and the rest of Europe. ‘The 4th Centenary of Shakespeare has gone by practically unnoticed,’ complained one critic in 1964 (cited in Muñoz 1992: 250). This did not mean that no tributes were paid,12 but that ‘the status of the world’s premier dramatist – still unsurpassed – and his universality required a universal apotheosis.’ In terms of sheer number of performances, however, 1963–1964 and 1964–1965 comfortably outscored seasons both immediately previous and subsequent to the centenary.13 At the same time, as with the Lope tribute, together with the more familiar work from the Shakespeare ‘canon’, there were openings for a number of lesser known plays, many of them never before performed on a Spanish stage.14 The visit to the Español, which was one again under the direction of Luca de Tena, by the Shakespeare Festival Company to offer productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Wendi Toye, and The Merchant of Venice, directed by David Williams, served to kick-start Spain’s engagement with the Bard, prompting enthusiastic responses to the

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arrival of ‘authentic’ Shakespeare and, above all, to the all-British cast’s unique approach to the plays’ characters. As José Monleón would write excitedly in the review Triunfo (16 May 1964): What definitely was a success, and predictably so, was the work of the actors. The English school of theatre is probably the best in the West, for some the best in the world. It is half-way between solemnity and playfulness. The English actor masters the art of saying something important or beautiful without being bombastic about it. I do not know whether this is a strength which comes from the great English clowns and music-hall stars. The fact is that the English actor has lost the rigidity, the fatuousness, which is the hallmark of the greater part of modern world actors. There is a sense of irony, a cultural density, which allows them to be light, without being frivolous. Or to address the audience directly, without the performance falling apart as a result.

Here the critic draws upon his own reminiscences of English theatres, where: The entrance to the theatre is the fourth wall [i.e. the auditorium], not the stage. The performance is projected on to the spectators, in the manner of the music hall, and yet the relations between the characters as demanded by the drama is faithfully and rigorously observed. Nobody ‘goes over’ to the audience, yet the actor – and this is the secret of the English school – is wondrously close.

Characteristically, the English style of performance is used as a stick with which to beat the (by implication) inferior Spanish school, with its conspicuous failure to break the illusionist spell or to step out of role in order to construct a relationship with the audience. Monleón himself alludes critically to the visually spectacular production of the Dream that same year by the regular Español company, a revival of the play produced by Luca de Tena and Burmann in the 1940s, which once again relied upon a ‘version’ of the play by González Ruiz. The critique is probably unfair, as Spanish producers, even those blessed with the directorship of a top-flight venue such as the Español, were inevitably hamstrung by the obligation of organizing two performances on a single day as well as by the financial restrictions on virtually all post-war theatrical activity. Seen in this light, there is surely some credit in Burmann’s design which, with its distinctly Mediterranean vegetated forest, sought to make a virtue of necessity and to lighten up and idealize the flora while clinging to the spell cast by a wood which, in Luca de Tena’s words (1993: 330), was ‘closer to fantasy than to reality’, an effect which was reinforced by the incorporation of music by Mendelssohn. The director reveals the ‘little trick’ he played to adapt the wood to the magical dictates of the new interpretation: the cardboard trunks were painted longitudinally in three distinct colours. By rotating the trees and accompanying the movement,

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which was done in full view of the public, with subtle changes of light, the scene changed from green, for the daytime, to blue for night and pink for dawn. The set thus achieved much of the desired magic and, according to the director, when the curtain was raised the reaction was one of murmured surprise, followed by a huge ovation. Sélica Torcal’s Puck was hailed with similar plaudits and, despite the critic’s strictures, the production seems to have been a success at the box office. The other productions at the Español that stand out in the latter part of the Franco regime are The Tempest, translated by the poet José Hierro and directed by Luca de Tena; King Lear, from the version by Jacinto Benavente and directed by the promising young Miguel Narros; the virtually unknown Measure for Measure, also directed by Narros, from a version by Enrique Llovet, and an impressive staging of Othello by Alberto González Vergel. For the first of these, poet Hierro produced a script combining both prose and verse, while condensing the five acts of the original into two, at the expense of certain scenes like the opening storm, which the Español was ill-equipped to reproduce. These limitations were made up for by an abundance of orchestral pieces and songs, composed by Gerardo Gombau, and the now characteristic explosion of rhythm and colour that tended to accompany the later work of Luca de Tena. Despite the rigidity of much of the cast, critical praise was heaped on Carmen Bernardos, who played the part of Ariel as a winged cherub ‘full of grace and sympathy’. Jacinto Benavente was a striking choice as translator of King Lear, and there is certain logic to the idea of the old man of the Spanish stage providing the text to be consumed by some of the literary pelicans vying to take his place as the leading light of the ‘new’ Spanish drama. In contrast to his later production of the play, which would cast Goneril as a junky, her death the result of an overdose of heroin rather than of her sister’s poison, Narros claims to have been constrained by his status as newcomer to the Spanish stage and also to Shakespeare, since this was his first crack at the Englishman’s work (1993: 424). A large cast, made up of some of the future stars of the Spanish stage and cinema such as Agustín González, Juan Luis Galiardo, Ana Belén, Julieta Serrano and comedian Raúl Sender, was the main draw of a production that combined innovative bare-set scenery with absolute fidelity to Benavente’s prose translation of the original. A rather more familiar play was Othello, although the González Vergel production seems to have opened new vistas which, though hardly a novelty to audiences outside Spain, approximated a more or less ‘straight’ version of a tragedy which, as we have seen, had been subject to constant adaptation and repositioning. ‘For the first time in Madrid, the full text of this startling tragedy by Shakespeare,’ declared a headline in El Alcázar (19 November 1971), an unorthodox lure intended for spectators who, contrary to the norm, expected nothing less than a faithful rendition of the ‘true’ play. If this was the case, some of them may have disappointed: although the three-and-a-half hour production contained all of the episodes of the original drama, and even added some ‘light

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interludes’ of ballet and music by the in-house conductor Cristóbal Halffter and the Manuel de Falla Symphonic Orchestra, the tendency of the translators, Ángel Fernández Santos and Miguel Rubio was to modernize the language as much as possible, introducing the occasional verbal outburst that was felt to be ‘out of keeping’ with the general mood. The odd passage was cut: for instance, Othello’s inner reflections following the failed attempt to murder Cassio. However, this did not detract from the psychological insights of a production which, as one critic observed, kept all of the gripping lyricism of the Shakespeare original and, by retaining all of the Venetian scenes, helped clarify Othello’s status as outsider in Venice and so the virulence of his reaction to the suspicion that Desdemona has been deceiving him. The production was bolstered by an impressive set designed by Emilio Burgos, which evoked all of the monumental beauty of Venice while employing a bare red-illuminated stage for the Cyprus scenes. Critics stressed the use of moveable elements – ladders dropping into place or being swiftly raised, emblems and an enormous red-gold portal on stage, hatches that are opened and closed, platforms that move forward and back, tulles, curtains and simple furnishings – and the wide uncluttered stage that gave ample room for the imaginative unfolding of the tragedy as well as abetting some swift and unobtrusive scene changes. The stage effects and lighting were simple and sober, whereas the stage revolve was accompanied by some highly personal and at the same time agile performances that gave a ballet effect to the whole. The tone and timbre of the interventions, the composition, ‘choral’ disposition and movement of the figures, the use of one of the boxes for Brabantio’s first intervention and the general erasure of the boundary between stage and auditorium, were innovations that bespoke an unprecedented respect for the ‘original’ stage conditions. The sumptuous period dress, particularly striking in the case of Othello and Desdemona, may have obeyed the same archaeological impulse.15 As for the characterization, Carlos Ballesteros’ Othello, lightly tanned in the spirit of Máiquez (one critic described him as ‘a bit short on boot polish’), displayed the toughness, vacillations and depth required, although he was also upbraided for speaking his lines too quickly and flatly and not providing the necessary nuances. Lola Cardona’s Desdemona was simply ‘admirable’: gentle, troubling, bitter, dramatic – the only drawback being her tendency to move on stage ‘with all of the easy self-assurance of a young lady on [Madrid’s up-market street] Calle Serrano’. José Prada’s Iago, although a little too ‘baroque’ for some critics’ tastes, with a tendency to roll his eyes shiftily to underline his crafty vengefulness, was nonetheless a resentful, deceitfully obsessive figure. Javier Loyola’s Rodrigo was simply clownish – a ‘burlesque’ travesty of the original who was sucked in to what was universally decried as the least successful scene: the Venetian masked carnival enacted in 5.1. A theatrically more impressive and, at the same time, authentically ‘Shakespearean’ production in the period is hard to find. The willingness of director, set-designer and musician to emulate companies such as the Royal

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Shakespeare Company, although within the carefully encompassed boundaries of the contemporary Spanish stage, and with the limitations of the existing troupes, marked an important change of attitude to Shakespeare among the Spanish theatrical fraternity. The English Bard was still solid cultural capital – a high-cultural gambit requiring the very best and most expensive of the (scanty) resources available to the enterprising producer. But the much-flaunted reverence for the text as well as for the conditions of performance that were assumed to have obtained in Jacobean England could not conceal a desire to break the barriers of the Spanish stage and, as much as the Italianate structure of the country’s main playhouses would allow, to resituate the public in relation to the plays performed. González Vergel’s Othello was, in other words, as much a commentary on contemporary cultural conditions as it was a reflection on the long history of a play which, with very few exceptions, had hardly ever been allowed to resemble itself. The use of music and dance, of costume and mask and so on was, in the spirit of Gual and Martínez Sierra, pitched towards a redefinition of theatre as ‘total’ theatre, with Shakespeare once again as pretext for a redrawing of the boundaries between the different media as well as between the actors and a traditionally aloof, cosily indifferent public. That such a radical process was only feasible (technically) in a high-profile ‘national’ theatre such as the Español may show the disposition of the regime to countenance such a project; the downside was the impracticality of total Shakespeare in the more precarious and seriously under-funded private venues. ‘Neruda met Shakespeare in the Spanish civil war and they became friends.’ José María Morera’s choice of the left-wing Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s version of Romeo and Juliet for his production of the play at the Teatro Fígaro in Madrid was, as his programme notes make clear, already provocative. An implacable critic of America’s invasion of Vietnam, Neruda claimed to have discovered his political identity in a play that was a denunciation of ‘the desire to assassinate love, to pierce hearts with knives and flood the world with napalm’. From his strongly anti-militaristic perspective, Shakespeare was, he claimed, punishing the promoters of this senseless hatred and spilling of blood ‘with a rose and for all eternity’. Aside from one allusion to the ‘pacifist’ perspective adopted in the production – the ‘classical’ notion of love being replaced by a the triumph of love’s emergence from the slime – critics tended to underplay the importance of Neruda’s role: on the contrary, the strange mix of the translation’s 11-syllable blank verse and the attempt to emulate Shakespeare’s own unsettling blend of elaborate love rhetoric one moment, and street-wise banter the next, was said to be add to the ‘inconsistency’ of a production which, notwithstanding Neruda’s high-profile position as a distinguished spokesman for the peace movement, was regarded as ‘unexceptional’. Far more critical space was given to Gerardo Vera’s and Andrea D’Odorico’s contentious set: a curtainless space framed by three black walls and featuring a three-floor metal scaffold, which compressed the divided dukedom into a single edifice, a spiral staircase communicating the different levels or being

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pressed into service in the balcony scene. The frantic movement, with characters running up and down, or across, the different gantries, again failed to impress the critics, whose attitude to productions that challenged the archaeological take on Shakespeare was generally conservative.16 Morera himself appreciated how the staging of such a traditional and ‘untouchable’ play represented a special challenge: the effect of the atmosphere, the colour of the period, together with the rhythm and behaviour of the protagonists were something so fixed in the minds of the spectators that any innovations had to be tactfully introduced and carefully justified. Miguel Narros’s costume designs blended in with the ‘industrial’ setting by favouring faded and uniform dress, with an abundance of ‘cold’ grey or ochre tones that were seen as ‘running counter to the words’ of the text. The press reported some whistling and shouting from ‘professional colleagues’ intent, for reasons unspecified, on wrecking the opening night. Despite their efforts to do so, the production was to last another six nights, and even its detractors would acknowledge that ‘the audience’s applause was both inevitable, justified and necessary’. If the Neruda-Morera ‘pacifist’ Romeo and Juliet divided spectators and professional critics, the ‘new’ Taming of the Shrew (La nueva fierecilla domada) staged in March 1975 at the Teatro Español sparked a furore not witnessed since Nuria Espert’s cross-dressed Hamlet. Set in a bustling Mediterranean market square, full of traders and an assorted crowd of shoppers and commedia dell’arte-style street entertainers, the Christopher Sly framing ‘narrative’ is rewritten as a playwithin-a-play scenario where The Taming of the Shrew is presented as an impromptu performance by a troupe of wandering actors and musicians. As director Juan Guerrero Zamora would put it in the ABC on 3 April 1975: The New Taming of the Shrew is an extremely free re-structuring. It retains the main characters and the plot, but the form is new. The play is staged in a public market-place. As far as the content is concerned, I take the liberty of contradicting the famous and universal author. According to Shakespeare, women must be subject to men in everything. My century and I prefer to talk of evolution. Men and women are equal quantities.

Picked to coincide with International Women’s Year, Shakespeare’s Shrew was turned into a plea for women’s rights, the numerous rewritings designed to undermine the play’s explicit sexual politics which had arguably made this one of the most congenial texts of the early Franco period and one of the most popular comedies since the Matoses version of the end of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 3). Especially daring, given the historical context and also the venue (the ‘national’ Teatro Español) was the final speech, in which Kate (‘Caterina’, as she is called in this production) stepped forward in denims to defend, not the necessary subjugation of women to their husbands but the absolute equality of the sexes. The favourable response of the first-night audience that was said to have given the production a ‘long ovation’, contrasted

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Figure 5.2 Kate (Nuria Torray) harangues the market-place in the 1975 production of La nueva fierecilla domada [The New Taming of the Shrew], directed by Juan Guerrero Zamora. (Photo by Manuel Martínez Muñoz, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Teatral, Madrid.)

sharply with that of critics who, predictably, saw it as a travesty of the original work and, more outspokenly, a ‘wringing of the neck’ of Shakespeare’s wellknown and much-loved ‘shrew’ (cited in Bandín 2008: 130). This survey of Shakespeare productions in the later Franco years would be incomplete without a consideration of the part played by television in popularising Shakespeare in the 1960s and 1970s. Although Shakespeare did not appear to attract the attention of Spanish movie directors,17 the drama series ‘Estudio 1’, broadcast from 1965 by the state-controlled television station Radio-Televisión Española (RTVE), did offer studio productions of a number of his plays: Julius Caesar (1965), Romeo and Juliet (1966 and 1972), Macbeth (1966), The Merchant of Venice (1967), Hamlet (1970), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1971) and Othello (1972).18 Many of these productions were spin-offs of contemporary stage performances, featuring the same actors and directors such as Luca de Tena or González Vergel. Given that RTVE was the only channel available to viewers until the end of the Franco regime, the ‘peak-time’ ‘Estudio 1’ would make a vital contribution to the dissemination of work familiar only to a minority of Spaniards.

Chapter 6

The Transition and Beyond

Remembering Caesar The death of Franco in 1975 marked the beginning of a process in which the country was metamorphosed from Western Europe’s last remaining dictatorship to a modern democratic state. The ‘Transition’, as many commentators have pointed out, spelt not just the widely accepted implantation of a legal and political apparatus but a whole process of economic and social ‘normalization’. Crucial to this process was a deliberate forgetting of the circumstances – the Civil War and its aftermath – which brought General Franco to power and initiated a period of repressive, autocratic rule. The ‘pathological amnesia’ which, among other ‘symptoms’, involved the gradual elimination in the pro-Constitution media of allusions to the key dates of the war, of the Falange as a movement and of post-transitional upheavals such as the killing of three lawyers and two members of their staff at a communist law firm in Madrid in 1977, may have helped ensure a smooth transition to political ‘normality’; at the same time, it appeared to repress and leave unresolved fundamental doubts and anxieties as to the durability and actual extent of the newly restored democracy (Aguilar Fernández 1996: 20). As one historian of the period has put it, The transition was, unconsciously, written as a state of passage to which us Spaniards, unwittingly addicted to the dictatorial regime, had arrived all of a sudden and which had remained suspended between modernity and postmodernity, between mourning and celebration, between production and destruction, between hope and disenchantment. (Vilarós 1998: 21)

Hope would be translated in 1978 into a massive endorsement of the Spanish Constitution and so the opening of the road to multi-party elections and a semblance of political ‘normality’. Francoist die-hards continued to disrupt the scene, markedly in the frustrated coup attempt of 23 February 1981, although their presence was more and more diffuse, their ‘bitter voices’ increasingly muffled by both the ruling elite and a compliant press. Following a transitional period of government by the ‘centrist’ Union of the Democratic Centre (UCD), Felipe González’s Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) swept to


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victory in the 1982 elections, instituting a period of Socialist dominance of the Spanish political scene that would last till the second half of the 1990s. Having finally broken free of the economic and cultural isolationism of the Franco years, Spain now plunged headlong into membership of international institutions such as the EEC and, more controversially, NATO. For cultural production in general, and the theatre in particular, the sheer scale of the changes ushered in following the plebiscite that massively endorsed a brand-new Constitution in 1978 was heady in the extreme. José Monleón (1995: 246–247; see also Oliva 2002: 256) has attempted to register the developments that saw the recovery of numerous theatres built at the start of the century from their inevitable conversion into cinemas, architectural decay or purchase by banks. In the same period, some of Spain’s autonomous governments set aside funding for the creation of Drama Centres and Schools of Drama, with the dual aim of generating their own products and, as we shall see in the next chapter, of challenging the traditional dependence on the theatre produced in Madrid. In Madrid itself, the State converted the old national Teatro María Guerrero into the Centro Dramático Nacional (National Drama Centre, or CDN for short), entrusting its direction to artists distinguished by their talent, their independence and their ‘progressive’ approaches to production at the head of non-nationalized companies.1 At the same time, it created the Centro Nacional de Nuevas Tendencias Escénicas [National Centre for New Stage Tendencies], the Teatro Lírico Nacional [National Lyrical Theatre] and the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico [National Company of Classical Theatre]. The so-called Consejo del Teatro [Theatre Council], which gave advice on questions of funding and sponsorship, was made up of members drawn from all sectors of the trade: actors, authors, directors, technicians and so on. A theatre archive, the Centro Nacional de Documentación [National Documentation Centre] was set up, with its own review, El Público [The Public]. The creation of a National Institute for the Performing Arts and Music (INAEM) to channel the activities of these different organisms may have seemed like an attempt to ‘nationalize’ culture on Francoist lines, although in reality there was no coherent or unified policy on what kind of product was suitable, merely a concern with making available as much quality entertainment as was possible in the economically unstable post-dictatorial period. The early years of the Transition would thus witness an increase in state subsidization of the major festivals such as the Almagro Classical Theatre Festival which, initially at least, was given over to the Spanish Golden Age comedia; Mérida, to the classics of ancient Greece and Rome; Cádiz, to Latin American theatre, and Madrid, which every autumn would host productions by some of the major western companies. In Granada, a festival devoted to plays by the theatrical vanguard was also inaugurated. A series of covenants were signed between the various sectors that effectively put an end to the former supremacy of impresarios; legislation affecting education raised the academic status of the

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Real Escuela Superior de Arte Dramático [Royal School of Dramatic Art], which would eventually gain university status; the travelling expenses of Spanish companies invited to the major international festivals were met in full, as were the costs of innumerable specialists attending a range of academic events; there was a regulation of the support offered to private and so-called grant-maintained companies which, if given a favourable hearing from the Consejo del Teatro concerning the artistic merits of the project on offer, were elevated to the status of semi-national outfits. In brief, there was an unprecedented state investment in the performing arts that went some way to remedying the dearth of original or specialist productions in the Franco era. On the other hand, the changes could also be said to have failed to address what, for Monleón, remained the intractable problem of ‘the relation between theatre and society or, to put it differently, the role the latter assigns to the former’ (1995: 247). This discrepancy is evident in some of the major Shakespeare productions of the decade or so following the death of the dictator. Although the real revolution in Shakespeare production would occur after the Transition was complete, the plays performed before and immediately after Franco’s life-support system was switched off are a useful litmus test of the wider changes taking place. Of these the Roman plays, particularly Julius Caesar, acquired a special significance. A play that pivots around the ‘demise’ of an ageing, autocratic ruler and the ‘transfer’ of power to a tightly knit oligarchy who claim opportunistically to be acting in the best interests of Rome, Julius Caesar also shows what happens when the principles of that transfer are forgotten: the breakdown of order and the psychological collapse of the leader of the conspirators, Brutus, who, like Macbeth, is duly haunted by the spectral presence of his noble victim. Julius’s material re-embodiment as Octavius in turn announces the coming of a ‘new’ Caesar, one who, in Alexander Leggatt’s words, ‘is colder, lower, but deadly effective’ (1988: 158). Such a ‘return of the repressed’ was, during the Spanish Transition, effectively blocked by a ‘tacit agreement amongst the most prominent sectors of society to silence the bitter voices of the past which were causing much disquiet’ (Aguilar Fernández 1996: 21). Government and the maintenance of order by the new ruling elite – headed by former Falangist Adolfo Suárez – became, together with the legalization of formerly outlawed parties like the Spanish Communist Party, tantamount to the ‘institutionalization of consensus’, whose ultimate aim was to drive from the national consciousness ‘an age-old tradition of civil confrontation which was generally attributed to the existence of an almost racial predisposition to violence and intransigence’ (286–287). The breakdown of consensus was, it was feared, an inevitable prelude to the fragmentation of power and to the creation of a political vacuum to be filled by a figure more sinister and despotic than the one that had been so gleefully laid to rest – a scenario that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar appeared to provide with a potent, uncomfortably familiar antecedent.2


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The failure of the Alpha-63 production of the play, discussed in the previous chapter, to have the seismic effect that might have been expected on either the regime or even the specialized press is largely, one suspects, a consequence of the still pervasive assumption that Shakespeare’s greatness put him above or beyond politics, and that to politicize him was to run an aesthetic, rather than a political, risk. Certainly this seems to have been the dominant critical position with regard to Juan Antonio Hormigón’s self-styled ‘Brechtian’ adaptation of Shakespeare’s text for the 1975–1976 production by the Compañía Nacional de Teatro in the provinces, and at the ‘national’ Teatro María Guerrero in Madrid. In a version of the play, directed by José María Morera, which condensed into a few short scenes the fall of Caesar and the ‘long struggle for power’ leading up to the genesis of the Augustan empire, Hormigón left no doubts as to the position he expected the spectators to adopt towards the events unfolding before them. ’ In the official handbook that accompanied the performance he stated: Like the burghers and craftsmen of Elizabethan London, we too can find in that process the lights to illuminate our own contemporary history; to rationalize the contradictions and the aftermaths of arbitrary and absolute power; to make sense of the political vacuums which are permitted by certain hegemonies, etc. (1976: 33).

Whether these class affinities were felt by audiences at the María Guerrero, the ‘contemporaneity’ of the events depicted and the familiarity of the emerging power bloc made up of ‘the plutocracy of knights and metropolitan bourgeoisie, together with the remnants of the former nobility’, would not have been lost on them. The production’s subtitle, ‘La ambición del poder’ [The Ambition for Power], the articulation of the action into quickly succeeding tableaux, with such arresting, if heavy-handed, titles as ‘Ethics and Economics’, ‘Killing Can Be Big Business’, ‘Demagogy as a Political Instrument’ or ‘Reason in Interests’, were a further nexus to the contemporary situation which, with the death of Franco just a few months earlier and the prospect of continuity in the shape of Franco’s appointed successor, Juan Carlos de Borbón, seemed destined to be capitalized upon by the plutocrats who had flourished under the old regime. As well as developing characters who make cursory appearances in the original but whose opinions are reflected as keys to the tenor of the action – chiefly Cicero – Hormigón’s major innovation with respect to Shakespeare was the individuation and naming of various plebeians. In both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, it has been claimed, Shakespeare ‘rewrites individuality as a characteristic of the elite and denigrates collective action by associating it with a rabble that by definition holds no interest in the social order’ (Spottiswood 2000: 62). In contrast to the patricians, who are sketched in vivid and socially

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determinate detail, the unnamed plebeians are treated as undefined lumpen, fickle and, as the murder of Cinna reveals, prone to outbreaks of irrational violence. If Shakespeare includes commoners at all it is, it is argued, to make them ‘stand “in the shadow” of the great individual’ and so underscore his greatness (73). Not only does Hormigón identify some of the commoners who appear in his text but he allows them to comment, chorus-like, on the action unfolding before them, including such ingenuous yet insightful observations as the following – significantly the last speech in the play before the final blackout3 – by a character called Félix: We keep to ourselves and get drunk whenever we can, and we get wine on charity. The places we met at were shut down and we were silent. Later our votes were bought and we sold them. First for cash, eventually for a bowl of soup. Now they’ve cancelled the elections. What the hell!

Such moments of political candour owe much to Brecht’s The Affairs of Mr Julius Caesar that Hormigón cites approvingly in the handbook as exposing ‘actual tendencies in Roman society of the period’ (1976: 32). Brecht it is who is behind many of the scenes in Hormigón’s adaptation, particularly Tableau IX, titled ‘Patricians and Plebeians’, which adds to the (already familiar) trades of cobbler and carpenter those of former soldier, bricklayer and ‘parado’ (or ‘unemployed person’). The culmination of the scene is a tribute not only to Brecht but also, and not unparadoxically, to Beckett, whose history’s end scenario, powerfully theorized by Jan Kott, Hormigón was clearly anxious to evoke.4 Reviewing some of the criticism of the period, it seems likely that a production which, according to Francisco Álvaro in El espectador y la crítica (1977: 179), drew complaints from both the British Embassy and the heirs of Bertolt Brecht left audiences who went to see it either outraged by, or worse, simply indifferent to such naked politicizations. ‘William Shakespeare, Devastated’, thundered the headline of the review in the solidly pro-constitutional daily Diario 16 (10 November 1976), a now familiar smirch on twentieth-century productions of the play which, in John Ripley’s revealing phrase, ‘treat its action as a workaday account of sordid politics’ and thus ‘rob it of tragic power’ (1980: 276). The prominence of the plebeians,5 the role of Cicero as critic of the (ab)uses of rhetoric, the incorporation of such facile business as Octavius’s Nazi-style salutes, were dismissed out of hand by the Diario 16 critic, Ángel FernándezSantos, as ‘dialectical incrustations’ which, ‘in a vain attempt to make everything politically transparent, destroy the tremendous formal coherence’ of the Shakespearean original. Even Enrique Llovet, who had translated the refractory Measure for Measure for a production at the Español (directed by Miguel Narros) in 1969, and who hailed the Hormigón–Morera production as a ‘splendid proposition’ and an ‘intelligent rereading pitched towards a modern-day audience’, was forced to admit in El País (14 November 1976) that


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the streamlining of certain roles, specially Portia’s, and the episodic structure of the different tableaux, which in performance was accentuated by the use of a revolving stage, diverted attention from the subtleties and clarifications of Shakespeare’s text, converting the whole into a ‘brief tapestry of vulgar adventures’. Llovet’s conclusion is bleak indeed: ‘To stage Shakespeare in the political version befitting the curiosity and theatrical know-how of the modern playgoer is a task well beyond the capabilities of the Spanish theatre community’. By foregrounding and even intensifying what the Arden editor of the play David Daniell calls ‘the politics of the school playground’ (1998: 38) which, for many, is the intellectual ‘hub’ of Shakespeare’s text, Hormigón appeared to be playing into the hands of conservative critics such as Francisco Álvaro, for whom the deployment of ‘every imaginable platitude to spring from such rampant historical materialism’ simply served to detract from the clarity of the original (El espectador y la crítica, 1977: 177). On the other hand, and despite the selfdeclaredly ‘dialectical’ approach to the text that unashamedly lent a voice and identity to the shapeless ‘rabblement’ that inhabits the margins of the original work, the failure of the plebeians to gain a position of strength or to suggest any other course of action than the cynical and often liquor-affected observation of events from the sidelines hardly endeared the adaptation to spectators seeking a more forthright definition of the role of the proletariat in political upheavals of the kind enacted in the play. Hormigón’s attempt to redeem the figure of Caesar, representing him as what the critic in Informaciones (3 November 1976) describes as ‘more modern than his killers, the representatives of the old oligarchy’, may also have alienated audiences assuming an easily decodable ‘equation’ with contemporary events. Ultimately and ironically, however, the failure of a production that had taxed to the limits the shaky finances of Spain’s last remaining ‘national’ theatre seemed to hinge less on the charges of excessive or insufficient ‘relevance’ than it did on the play text’s irreverent handling of an established icon of the international dramatic tradition. What was plainly not acceptable to the theatrically literate audiences of the first uncertain months of the Transition was a version that toyed so wilfully with a ‘classic’ text, which put personal or collective agendas before a ‘proper’ respect for the original. As Fernández-Santos, in the Diario 16 review, would put, ‘it is not a case of Hormigón having upstaged Shakespeare, but of his forcing us to choose between Shakespeare and himself. The choice is obvious.’

The Grand ‘Nationals’ A further barometer of the political changes ushered in and, notwithstanding the attempted coup, then normalized by the Transition, can be found in Miguel Narros’ 1983 production of King Lear for the revived Teatro del Arte company. The production came just three years after his Macbeth for the Teatro Español, a play that had always fascinated him because of its implacable analysis of

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ambition and particularly the dehumanizing effects it has on relations between human beings. In Macbeth, Narros would identify (1993: 430) one of the play’s appeals as the peculiar ‘union’ between the Macbeths and the identification between them: ‘She was the ambitious side, but also the weaker side, the side which leads her into sanity’. In contrast, Macbeth, man in his primal condition, suddenly ‘awakens to an ambition which brings a change in him: he has to continue devouring himself, to continue committing crimes’, as part of what Narros describes as his insatiable ‘hunger for evil’. Recognizing what he describes as an excess of respect for Shakespeare’s text in his production of King Lear for the 1960s (see Chapter 5), a natural consequence of his inexperience and as yet inferior position in the Spanish theatrical hierarchy, his revival of the piece a decade-and-half later in collaboration with the Valencia-based Instituto Shakespeare was, despite its absolute fidelity to the full Shakespearean original and the heavily versified nature of the text, very much a product of the ‘new’ Spain which emerged after the passing of the 1978 Constitution. With this second production of Lear, what chiefly attracted him was [T]hat all-devouring madness which is so close to the reality we were faced with. Look at Lear’s daughters, with that ambition which reached unsuspected degrees. Goneril in the production does not die from poisoning but from an overdose of heroin. Her moral and physical degradation leads her to try and destroy her own body. This production was in the 80s; I was interested in the problems facing the young and this is how Goneril appears, with a syringe. (424)

The rejuvenation of the daughters, including the decision to re-cast Goneril as a heroin addict, obeyed Narros’ impulse to intensify what he had merely been suggested in his earlier production: the struggle between different generations and what one reviewer called the ‘logic of despair’ that has its material embodiment in the breakdown of order, filial affection and the precarious balancing act of ambition. Narros’s declared commitment to Kott’s vision of Shakespeare as ‘our’ contemporary and Beckett’s Endgame was materialized in an empty stage that thrust out into the auditorium and was occupied by a few sparse objects, symbolizing the remnants of the old regime, or a rubbish tip that slowly grew around the regal ‘throne’, graphically reinvented as a geriatric’s wheelchair. For designer Andrea D’Odorico talking to El País (20 January 1983), the intention was to create a space suggestive of the fact that power corrupts and everything that surrounds it turns to mire; however, the echoes of the dictatorship and the harrowing images of the decrepit Franco clinging to a power base crumbling beneath his feet were equally plausible referents for the predominantly youthful audience which attended the play’s premiere at the Teatro Olimpia in Madrid. The Lear Narros directed in the sixties may, in the director’s own words, have been more ‘emotional and direct but . . . it lacked the political commitment which is acquired with life’; although somewhat inexplicably set in


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the 1930s, the frame of reference for this later production was undoubtedly the immediate context of reception that was the turn of the decade of the seventies and the uncertainties surrounding the still fragile democracy. Those uncertainties, which had arguably still not lifted by 1986, the year of Narros’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which eschewed the ecofriendly, green-world resonances of some contemporary productions of the play by re-presenting the wood in neo-Beckettian terms as ‘a huge black, neutral environment that was changed by lighting effects and mechanical devices’ (Portillo and Gómez-Lara 1994: 216), hang inevitably over the few noteworthy productions of Shakespeare in the transitional period. The obvious case in point is the all-powerful Centro Dramático Nacional (CDN), whose creation in 1978 as the theatrical flagship for the newly reinstated democracy bespoke a confidence in the new political structure that has ironic parallels with the ‘national’ Theatres Español and María Guerrero at the start of the Franco period (see Chapter 5). What Portillo and Salvador (2003: 191) in their survey of Spanish Hamlets in 1999 refer to as ‘the most luxurious, expensive, and ambitious production to date’ was staged by José Carlos Plaza, who had just been appointed artistic director of the CDN. Operating with what seemed an inexhaustible budget, certainly one which exceeded anything available so far

Figure 6.1 Hamlet (José Luis Gómez) upbraids Ophelia (Ana Belén) in the CDN’s 1989 production of Hamlet, directed by José Carlos Plaza. (Photo by Chicho, courtesy of the Centro de Documentación Teatral.)

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(at least as far as the public-sector theatre was concerned), Plaza was able to employ the very best in acting talent, with the high-profile presence of actors such as José Luis Gómez (Hamlet), Alberto Closas (Claudius), Berta Riaza (Gertrude) and Ana Belén (Ophelia). The set, designed by Gerardo Vera, incorporated an enormous stone waterfall that poured real water at crucial moments of the plot, such as Hamlet’s dialogue with his father’s ghost. Writer, and self-declared Anglophile Vicente Molina Foix had been entrusted with the free-verse translation of the text and, despite the inevitable shortening of speeches and cutting of ‘secondary’ parts such as Cornelius, Voltimand and the English ambassadors, the production still ran for a testing four hours. Despite the commercial success of a production which would enjoy an extended run,6 it failed to excite critics who were, in the main, rightly incensed by its failure to deliver on the pre-performance hype. Portillo and Salvador, for instance, are scathing of the amount of money squandered on the full set of armour prepared for the ghost who, in an obvious last-minute change of heart,7 then failed to materialize on stage. ‘According to the published text,’ they write (2003: 192): The Ghost’s voice [which is heard off-stage, while water flows down the water-fall and red lights flash on and off] should be that of the actor playing Hamlet, but the audience missed that detail as they were [too] busy looking at the special effects.

The presence of the latter was also questioned as, for many, they not only proved a pointless and costly distraction but seemed to add very little to the action they were designed to shadow. Another problem was the play’s numerous set speeches, particularly Hamlet’s. Plaza claimed to have researched into when and how the monologues were delivered in the play’s original context, reaching the conclusion that such speeches appeared in critical situations, when there was a need for the author to have his characters express their innermost thoughts. Hence, ‘to give them greater theatrical significance, what I did was to stop time, with all the other characters remaining still. Time stops, because it is a process of thought’ (Portillo and Salvador 1993: 438). This, by his own admission, led to somewhat uncomfortable situations that threatened to bog down what was already a turgid production. Although Plaza might argue that as all the monologues are really internal conflicts within the character herself, these moments slipped ‘fluidly and gently’ within the play’s dramatic structure, it was hard not to see this device as a somewhat heavy-handed attempt to underline the essential ‘poetry’ of the text at the expense of its unlimited performance potential – a gesture of reverence not uncommon in mainstream or ‘public’ productions of Shakespeare in Spain, as we have seen. This is not to say that the production did not uncover aspects of the play, and particularly of character, which have not been sufficiently stressed in the


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Spanish reception of Hamlet. ‘The thing is,’ Plaza would state (1993: 439), ‘when I come across really goodly characters, I try to find out what it is that they do wrong, and when they are really bad, I look for some justification’. The latter was the case with Claudius (Alberto Closas) to whom Plaza attributes solid political reasons for acting in the way he does. ‘He is a man of the Renaissance, far more consistent than Hamlet’s father, whose political conduct is deplorable, very much that of a feudal king.’ The victim of his own murderous impulses, Claudius has no alternative but to act as he does if he wants to oppose the existing feudal regime. ‘He is not guilty in principle’ but will become so when he attempts to put the world right by means of a criminal action – and this is what marks him forever. Hamlet, by contrast, is the paragon of goodness, goodness ‘in the sense of harmony, because he wanted to be harmonious, however much he is caught up in the disharmony which surrounds him’. This, Plaza contends, is the play’s true nexus with the present: You find this in our society today, as there are lots of people, lots of us, who try, do our best, to be good, by standing back and judging others on how badly they do things. This for me would be ‘not to be’, not to be involved in your society, while ‘to be’. . .would be to get stuck in and get your hands dirty. (1993: 436)8

Anticipating Lluís Pasqual’s production of Julius Caesar discussed below, uppermost in Plaza’s mind for this production was the importance of a sociopolitical context, in which the new ruling class are felt to have abrogated the principles that had ushered in and accompanied the return to democracy. ‘It is clear,’ he would declare ‘that the decision I took in choosing ethics, corruption and harmony as the focus of dramatic attention was a consequence of the curtailment of the essential values of the human being which we are presently experiencing in Spain’ (1993: 439). ‘Ethics’ and the current political and social situation in Spain would also provide the subtext for the CDN’s production of Julius Caesar in 1988 by the Catalan director Lluís Pasqual, whose As You Like It had been hailed as one of the most entertaining and insightful productions of recent years and earned him the National Dance and Theatre Prize of 1984.9 If the Hormigón–Morera version had flopped in 1976, when its possible ‘relevance’ was beyond question, what hope had the play of appealing to audiences 12 years later, when the Transition seemed virtually complete? What ‘message’ could it impart to audiences more attuned to the harmless antics of Bottom and Puck than to the political in-fighting of Republican Rome? The answer, according to Pasqual, in an interview given four years after the play’s first night at the María Guerrero, lay deep in the collective unconscious not just of the Spanish people but of the European continent as a whole. In Caesar he had attempted to explain ‘a certain European reality in which, all of a sudden, our father, the ancien régime, has died and all that’s left is a series of children scattered around, each more brutish and more power-hungry than the next’; the production, he declared, was therefore

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‘a political reflexion on the contemporary West’ (Pasqual 1993: 454). Given Pasqual’s Oedipal slant on Shakespeare, Hamlet may be expected to have been a more rewarding choice of play. If Julius Caesar was the play selected, it was precisely because the absence of such a figurehead had led not to revenge but to an unhealthy fixation on the behaviours of the new emerging political class. Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy worked for a modern audience, he had claimed, ‘because it engaged with the political nature of the individual, with “homo politicus”’. According to the reviewer in El público (55, 1988: 11), politicians are the people ‘society most wants to watch at present – their declarations and intrigues, their jealousies, their dramatic gestures’. The early death of the play’s eponymous hero was a dramatic pre-text for Shakespeare’s real concern: the description of a political new order which bore an uncanny resemblance to the present. To underscore the fact, the actors’ togas (successively white, black and red) revealed generous swaths of double-breasted suits and ties. Modern-dress versions of the play are, of course, not new to the Anglo-American circuit and, to judge from recent productions, continue to have their attractions for directors anxious to make links to contemporary configurations of power.10 In Pasqual’s production for the CDN the suits and ties were designed to evoke a self-enclosed clique, a distinctive ‘caste’ of governors who seemed closer to each other than to the commoners in whose name they claimed to be acting. Caesar’s bow tie and stick differentiated him in age and rank from the conspirators – an old-style patrician politician or ‘benign dictator’ ringed by dour and doggedly ambitious pretenders – whereas Antony’s crooked tie and loosened shirt collar, together with the actor’s athletic physique, suggested a proximity to the people, which was in fact a more accomplished version of the populism essayed by Brutus. Generous doses of hair gel, especially in the cases of Casca and, later, Octavius, may have been intended to generate stereotyped images of Falangist henchmen; however, if the production were memorable for anything it was for the unrelenting mediocrity of the protagonists whose ideals extended no further than their own installation and, if possible, perpetuation in positions of absolute power. The ‘classical’ setting – the huge open portals, the black marble steps where Caesar is butchered, the impressive stone table in the second half of the performance – came across as petrified backdrop to the grim and undistinguished behaviour of the conspirators and their successors. As the critic in El público put it: ‘There remains the odd exciting moment, the odd trace of fleeting optimism, leading to an even profounder scepticism,’ for ‘hope is a chimera which ends in deceit’ (1988: 10) – a bitter indictment of contemporary realpolitik made long before the national press was, for the first time in decades, to blow the lid off real cases of political corruption. However, the ‘people’ hardly came off any better in Pasqual’s uniformly disenchanted (and disenchanting) production. The individuation they may have been granted in Hormigón’s appropriation was replaced by their reduction


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to a shadowy presence, the Soothsayer included, among the audience itself where they were alternately rebuked by the tribunes Flavius and Murellus or whipped into an irrational frenzy in the oration scene. It is, of course, after Antony’s oration that Cinna the Poet is attacked by the plebeians. A prominent figure in productions of the play since Orson Welles made so much of his killing, Cinna has become a symbol of culture hounded and stamped upon by an irrational mob.11 In Pasqual’s heavily cut production the character, who pops up in the auditorium, is unceremoniously lynched by a ‘mob’ of four or five actors planted nearby, providing a jarring and quite sinister close to the first half of the play, an impression that was hardly alleviated by the bloody battle sequences of the second. This relegation of the plebeians to either passive spectator of, or instrument in, the struggle for power between opposing groups of cynical, self-reflecting politicians remains a testimony both to the political infighting of Shakespeare’s Rome and – from a contemporary Spanish perspective – to the progressive distancing of the electorate from the mechanisms of social and political transformation. For if the transition had bequeathed anything to the generation for which Pasqual appeared to be speaking, it was not just a model of non-violent, negotiated change but a democratic system which, as Josep Colomer has observed: As a consequence of those same precautions against instability and the same propensity for preserving special interests that had inspired the transition, restricted the number of relevant actors and distanced the citizens from the places where the real decisions were being made. (1998: 180–181)

The ethics of modern times were equally to the fore in Plaza’s next collaboration with Molina Foix for the CDN, The Merchant of Venice (1992). Plaza claimed: [The play] has a close relation to the preoccupations, obsessions and extremisms of a society like ours in which money has become a fundamental value for distinguishing between one social class and another. Other problems don’t seem to be of so much interest or, at least, there is a certain insensitivity towards them, as with what is happening now with the problems of North Africans who are trying to escape their poverty and who are drowning in order to reach the promised land. In the Merchant of Venice I take sides and join the band of the pariahs – in this case, the Jews. (1993: 443)

Side-taking meant, not for the first time, substantially upgrading the figure of Shylock (José Pedro Carrión) whose chief mistake in the play, according to Plaza, is that he became as xenophobic as the Venetians, a lose–lose situation because it is the strongest who always win. Drawing a comparison with the situations of the blacks in cities such as London, Plaza claimed his aim was to denounce a situation, familiar to modern Spaniards, in which people with other

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beliefs, other values and another colour are always marginalized as ‘the other’. At the same time, the productions was, like his Hamlet, intended as a forthright engagement with Spanish socio-political reality: It is a play with important social repercussions, as the society we are living in is a decadent one, where there is a huge banking business and where ‘the others’ have to play the role of villains. It is a pity that a play with that kind of content and with those ingredients has not been performed more often. (1993: 443–444)

Carrión’s Shylock, played with all the dignity, wounded pride and hatred contained in Shakespeare’s text, but none of the well-worn clichés that accompany performances of the role, was a powerfully eloquent if carefully constrained critic of the changes. Attractive stars such as the singer-actress Ana Belén (Portia) and Toni Cantó (Bassanio) helped to enhance the appeal of the performance, Cantó’s overtly gay relationship with the other ‘victim’ in the production, Antonio (Chema Muñoz), whose isolation at the end of the play is made all the more explicit by the spotlighting of the ‘heroes’, Bassanio and Portia, and his obvious discomfort with the other guests in Belmont, causing ripples of confusion and even indignation among some members of the audience and also critics. Plaza’s words and also the press releases that preceded the production insisted on the ‘discrimination’ angle, with Ana Belén even intervening to affirm that ‘events have got ahead of us’ (cited in Portillo and Gómez-Lara 1994: 219). The lavish period costumes, impressive stage effects (especially in the casket scene) and uneven acting often detracted from this vigorous politicisation of the play, although the fact that the play had been revived at all after a 30-year absence from the Spanish stage, together with Carrión’s powerful impersonation of Shylock, were surely more significant than all the glitz and glamour of the production.

Internationalism If Shakespeare had, for well over a century, been the best known of foreign authors in Spain, it was only in the decade of the 1990s that acknowledgment of his literary greatness was matched by a genuine recognition of his work’s performance potential. Among the reasons for this proliferation of performances, signalling what the newspaper El País in 1993 hyperbolically referred to as an outbreak of ‘Shakespearemanía’ (see Introduction), were what Portillo and Gómez-Lara (1994) described as the country’s changing social and political circumstances. The transition to democracy following the death of Franco enabled Spain’s emergence from its self-imposed historic isolation, with the revival of the monarchy, the legalization of previously outlawed political parties, and the cession of a high degree of autonomy to regions such as Catalonia and


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the Basque Country. The return to democracy, and the successful organization of high-profile international events such as the Olympic Games in Barcelona or the World Exhibition in Seville brought wider international recognition as well as economic prosperity to a nation that now saw its future as increasingly linked to the rest of Europe. In the case of the theatre, Spain turned with appreciation towards dramatic authors whose discourse seemed best to reflect the fears and aspirations of the modern European democratic state. The recent transition to political ‘normality’ would greatly enhance Shakespeare’s reputation, attracting generous sums of public money and fostering new, culturally specific interpretations of his work for the stage. Translations into Spain’s other languages (Catalan, Basque and Galician) would even help make his plays the standardbearers of nationalist causes in the country’s most fiercely independent regions (see Chapter 7). The result was an identification through Shakespeare with some of the issues (both aesthetic and moral) affecting other citizens of the European Community. Shakespeare’s international aura was complemented by a more practical reason for his appeal to Spanish companies: the plays’ unique performability. Spanish classical drama is predominantly rhyme-based and, as Portillo and Gómez-Lara suggest, the post–Civil War period in Spain – both the years of dictatorship, 1939–1975, and the transitional phase – had witnessed a dearth of actors capable of reciting the texts of writers such as Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Tirso de Molina. Shakespearean blank verse, successfully translated, seemed less taxing on actors as well as giving a contemporary feel to plays with which the modern theatre-going public could plainly identify.12 So it was that Shakespeare had not only become the best known and most successful of foreign dramatists, but he had even supplanted native authors (both modern and classical) as one of the most performable playwrights. As Portillo suggests elsewhere (2000: 89), Rather than lament how little Shakespeare is perfomed [sic] in Spain, I reckon we should boast the opposite. Not only is he the most performed of foreign playwrights, but after Lorca and Valle-Inclán, he is also the most popular. Nowadays it’s easier to see a performance of Shakespeare than it is of [Antonio] Buero [Vallejo], [Antonio] Gala or [Francisco] Nieva; and in 1993 there have been more premieres of Shakespeare than of Calderón, Lope and Tirso put together.

A further factor not to be underestimated was the spread of English as a second language because until the late 1970s the teaching of English hardly existed in school and college curricula or, at any rate, ran a distant second to French. A knowledge of English – by the 1990s, a must in practically all of the liberal professions – had led inevitably to a first-hand acquaintance with AngloAmerican culture and hence with its most hallowed icon. No university study of English is now complete without some experience of the Bard’s work, a trend that seems to be extending to the secondary-school system, where the plays are

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often included (in the form of narrativized ‘graded readers’) in the normal English-language courses (Gregor 2006). A product of the widespread study of English is a burgeoning academic Shakespeare industry that is now an established part of the broad-based Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (AEDEAN) and the more specialist forum, the Spanish Society of English Renaissance Studies (SEDERI), both of which hold annual conferences and publish their proceedings. Though the impact of academic research on theatrical productions is still weak, scholars such as Ángel Luis Pujante and the team at the Instituto Shakespeare in the University of Valencia have, until recently, continued to produce translations of Shakespeare’s plays which have finally gained acceptance among different companies and directors. The internationalization of Shakespeare and its impact on transitional Spain can be gauged by the visits of a plethora of foreign companies under foreign directors, producing plays in their original language(s) either in the main theatrical capitals, on tour or, increasingly, at the numerous festivals which would emerge in the decades of the 80s and 90s. Visiting troupes were not something new to Spain, though the cultural autarchy of the early Franco years had to all intents and purposes sealed the country off from all but the most innocuous of non-Spanish spectacles. As we saw in the previous chapter, the fourth centenary ‘celebrations’ of Shakespeare’s birth did bring a momentary end to the country’s theatrical isolationism with the visit of the Shakespeare Festival Company though, with the exception of the Young Vic’s production of The Taming of the Shrew in 1971 under Frank Dunlop, there would be no further invitations to foreign companies until well after the death of Franco, when Lindsay Kemp and David Haughton brought their open-air dance version of the Dream to the Teatre Grec (Barcelona) in August 1982 and the Dutch company ‘Sheer Madness’, their English-language version of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits (with star turns from, among other plays, Macbeth, Hamlet, Richard III and Antony and Cleopatra) to the Teatro Martín in Madrid in April 1983. From then on, and under the auspices of specialist festivals in Barcelona, Madrid, Almagro, Merida, etc. there was to be a steady trickle of visits by non-native troupes, many of them highly acclaimed such as Cheek by Jowl, Footsbarn or the Royal Shakespeare.13 As well as these productions by specialist British Shakespeare or classical theatre companies, the capital also played host to foreign-language Shakespeare productions by companies from the former Yugoslavia (ITD’s production of Hamlet in 1984), Brazil (Macunaima Company’s production of Romeo and Juliet in 1985), USSR (Rustavelli Theatre’s Georgian production of Richard III in 1989), India (the Kathakali-King Lear by the Kalamandalam group, also in 1989), Poland (Stary Theatre’s production of Hamlet IV in 1990), Italy (Teatro Stabile di Genova’s staging of Titus Andronicus, directed by Peter Stein, in 1990), Iran (Hamlet, by Teheran’s Nassr Theatre in 1991) and Sweden (Backa Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night, directed by Eva Bergman, in 1992). Foreign productions in Barcelona in the same period include a Swedish King Lear (directed by Ingmar Bergman for the Stockholm


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Dramaten in 1985), a French Hamlet (the Yves Bonnefoy version, directed by Patrice Chéreau for Théâtre de Nanterre-Amandiers in 1989), a German version of the same play (written by Erich Fried and directed by George Tabori for the Austrian Der Kreis company) and a puppet version of Macbeth by the Dutch Stuffed Puppet company. Such productions would provide a further stimulus to directors seeking to revitalize the Spanish stage or simply to adopt new ‘takes’ on familiar material. In this, travelling companies like the Footsbarn would once again provide illuminating, if not always fully comprehended or appreciated, examples. It was indeed the Footsbarn’s multicultural Romeo and Juliet, performed in a circus tent next to the Egyptian Temple of Debod, which took the Madrid scene by storm in November 1993. ‘Does anything justify the shattering of a finely balanced dramatic structure or the replacing of immortal lines with a play which, in contrast with the original, will always be found wanting?’. The question, rhetorically posed, raises the possible objections of traditionalists for whom the text remained sacrosanct and which Footsbarn, with actors representing nine different nationalists, had wilfully mangled for the sake of clarity and as dramatic counterpoint to their circus-like acrobatics. No less importantly, ‘Does Shakespeare fit within the narrow confines of a stage ringed by tiers of planks and squeezed beneath an overbearing canvass which scarcely leaves any room for a jerry-made set?’, asked J. López Mozo in his review for Teatro (244, 1993: 35). The critic’s response to both questions was clearly that they do, and it is no coincidence that the Footsbarn production followed hard upon a year (1992) when the great events which had helped put Spain on the international map and had directly or indirectly led to the pumping of public money into cultural enterprises such as the Expo in Seville should also abet the development of a counter-culture, which is characterized precisely by the flaunting of its own poverty and exultation of its marginality. Footsbarn’s own self-imposed pariah status, complemented by a perfectly ordered internal ensemble structure where no one stands out, the actors direct themselves and the previously sanctified Author is nothing but a prop for the action, undoubtedly appealed to the legion of smaller independent companies which, in Madrid’s healthy ‘off’ scene and festivals like the Autumn festival would find a forum for their work. The 1990s saw a number of Shakespearean productions undertaken in the counter-cultural spirit of Footsbarn, taking liberties with the text and staged in more or less alternative venues in the capital where the ‘otherness’ and bareness of the mise-en-scène are paramount. Following hard on Footsbarn’s circusmarquee demolition-job on Romeo and Juliet, Marina Warner directed her own take on the play Érase una vez . . . Romeo y Julieta [Once upon a Time . . . Romeo and Juliet] at the fringe Teatro Estudio, where the original plot is re-presented from the viewpoint of Juliet, her mother and the Nurse, who interchange roles and even chorally speak the part of Juliet, or interpret the roles of characters who are in fact absent from the stage – including Romeo. The Pablo Neruda

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version of the text, which was first employed in a Spanish production at the start of the 1970s (see Chapter 5) is thus used as mere pre-text for a production which turns an economy of means to expressive effect – in this case, exposing and imaginatively dismantling residual Spanish machismo. The gender counterpoint came exactly two years later with Teatro Meridional’s all-male and decidedly tongue-in-cheek Romeo, pointedly subtitled Versión montesca de la tragedia de Verona [A/The Montague Version of the Tragedy of Verona]. Translated and adapted by Julio Salvatierra, the production featured just three actors on a bare stage who play the roles of Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, Friar John and Friar Laurence. The remaining parts were either written out or replaced by means of a chorus and other ‘distancing’ techniques, all of which, as Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla would write in Reseña (271, 1996: 26), entailed the spectator’s complicity in the acceptance of certain forms of metatheatricality – something which seemed quite feasible with the kind of young, educated middle-class audience attending a venue such as the Teatro Galileo. That same year (1996), the same theatre would host a rare performance of Much Ado about Nothing, directed by Rosa Briones. As with the previous performances, a simplicity of means and the intensity of the nine young actors’ efforts would be the keynotes of a mise-en-scène which employed a mesh of ropes suspended vertically from the ceiling, reminding the same critic in Reseña (272, 1996: 24) of ‘some of the English companies visiting Spain in previous years’, a device which proved most effective the scene in which Benedick eavesdrops behind the washing to hear his friends discuss Beatrice’s ‘infatuation’. The lack of financial means and the relative immaturity of the actors, he claims, ‘were more than made up for by the imagination and a painstaking performance’ (25). Two other of Madrid’s alternative theatres are worth mentioning as the sites of some typically irreverential productions of Shakespeare in the mid to late nineties. The Teatro Pradillo first hosted a version of Macbeth by adapter, dramaturge and director Vicente León for the Teatro de la Esquirla company. A few months before Steve Berkoff would offer his one-man show based on Shakespeare’s ‘villains’ at the slightly more up-market Teatro de la Abadía, the Pradillo was the venue for a pared-down production of the Scottish tragedy which had the same two characters (Macbeth and Lady Macbeth) played by three different pairs of actors. The connexions with Marina Warner’s Romeo and Juliet were clear, not just in the deliberate ‘splitting’ of the protagonists’ identities but in the scant but effective materials used for the set – here, different sets of curtains and plain sheets of semi-transparent, corrugated plastic which allowed imperfect glimpses and shadows of ‘other’ characters, flexible pull-down screens which offered images of witches’ masks, brass bowls for washing bloody hands, logs half-cut by blunted axes (‘A tribute,’ according to López Mozo in Reseña [293, 1998: 27], ‘to simple, primitive and old objects’, as well as a token of the adapter/director’s true fixation: the human capacity for evil and the effort employed for committing it).


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The Sala Ensayo 100 would host two powerful Shakespeares during the decade of the 1990s: Adrián Daumas’s production of Twelfth Night and Blanca Portillo and Jorge Muñoz’s rather more light-hearted Shakespeare a pedazos [Shakespeare in Pieces]. Like Gerardo Vera, whose own production of the play for the Teatro de la Abadía was billed for the same Autumn Festival, Daumas was drawn to the erotic potential of Twelfth Night. His debt to New Historicist and Cultural Materialist perceptions of Shakespeare was evident in his own programme notes, where he observed that the work ‘exploits erotic resistance in order to generate dramatic conflict, pursues a plurality of possible pleasures, before the inevitable capitulation to the ideologies of heterosexual closure and ritualised matrimony’. What the production had certainly generated, prior to its premiere, was a great deal of publicity, the result of an absurd scandal surrounding the poster – a full-frontal nude shot of María Icaza, who played Viola, posing as Botticelli’s Venus – which was initially banned from the Madrid metro (Gregor 1998). Members of the audience enticed by the scandal may have been disappointed to discover that there was no actual nudity in the production, although there was no shortage of what Daumas considered the morbid fascination with desire. In Vera’s production, the latter had merely been hinted at or, more often, overshadowed by the comic capers of Maria, Sir Toby and company; here, on the contrary, it would flourish in all its various guises: straight, same-sex or even a simmering mixture of the two, as in the tense, aggressive sexual sparring between Valentine and Viola for the Duke’s affections. The play’s eroticism was powerfully evoked by the predominantly red lighting and box-like set (an open door at the rear of the stage furnishing a safety-valve vista of a street or the Illyrian shoreline) and by the intense, eerie music. Lorca’s intense Andalusian tragedy Bodas de sangre [Blood Wedding], which Daumas had also directed for the American Repertoire Theater where he trained under Ron Daniels, was an irresistible reference as each of the main protagonists, clad mainly in red and black 1930s-style costumes, battled desperately to repress their feelings. Shakespeare a pedazos [Shakespeare in Pieces] was, as its titles suggests, constructed from fragments of plays, all of them ‘canonical’ and all of them tragedies: Macbeth, Richard III and Hamlet. The treatment of the plays was mainly parodic, the performances increasing or intensifying particular traits for comic ends: thus, Lady Macbeth is worked up into a veritable femme fatale, a vamp whose power of seduction and perversity goads her husband into attempting to kill the king and, when he fails, does the job herself; Richard into a New York gangster, in a caricature familiar to followers of Calixto Bieito’s rewriting of the play for the 2000s (see Chapter 8); Hamlet into a man-child who must mature rapidly to overcome his attachment to his mother. These different transformations presented a collage that intersected, metatheatrically, with the arguments and conflicts between the actors involved in the production. Particular credit was given to the actors’ performances and to the effectively simple set that was based on the imaginative use of wings to delimit and suggest different spaces.

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In the opinion of Eduardo Pérez-Rasilla (Reseña 305, 1999: 34), the use of these resources abetted ‘the nimbleness of a story which is presented as a metatheatrical game and which seeks – and finds – an ingenuous complicity with the spectator’. Not all of Spain’s producers would view the modernization of Shakespeare in such a positive light. Actor and director Eusebio Lázaro, for instance, described the ‘paradoxical situation’ whereby ‘productions of Shakespeare which aim at the greatest “modernity”, approximating them to present epochs or situations, seem all the more out-of-date and anachronistic the greater the presentness or the stronger the parallels’ which the director has tried to bring out. This procedure which, as we have seen, was such a feature of late-Francoist and transitional Shakespeares and which directors such as Adolfo Marsillach tried to bring to his productions of Spanish classics at the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico bespoke what Lázaro calls an ‘inability to explore and understand the “insides” of the play’; consequently, productions tended to be oriented towards ‘the trivial and the external’ (1993: 318). It is precisely Shakespeare’s artistry in creating scenes out of nothing, in appealing to the audience’s imagination for want of the comforting trappings of illusion and so constantly bordering on the ‘metatheatrical’, which directors such as Lázaro have, often, one suspects, through economic necessity, attempted to apply to their own understanding of the texts. ‘To show what’s essential about his plays,’ Lázaro has contended, ‘the major scenery is out of place’. Working below the surface, as it were, he has, like Peter Brook, endeavoured to mine an ‘essential’ or ‘authentic’ Shakespeare, much closer to the actual conditions of Elizabethan staging and far from the spectacle and phoney contemporaneity which characterized so many productions of the eighties and nineties. Lázaro’s invitation to ‘think small’, while remaining true to what he saw as the ‘essential’ Shakespeare, may itself have a ring of phoniness about it. What is, after all, ‘essential’ to Shakespeare? Why should small-scale productions be any ‘truer’ to the original than the big and visually impressive performances of the national companies of the 1980s? If the Transition meant anything in terms of the reception of Shakespeare, it was the enabling of a plurality of approaches to the playwright’s work – a plurality evident not just in the work of companies and theatres operating mainly in the capital Madrid but in the traditionally under-privileged provinces belonging to what, for want of a better term, has been designated the Spanish ‘periphery’. It is to work produced in a few of these peripheral regions that I should like to turn now.

Chapter 7

Shakespeare on the ‘Periphery’

Redrawing the Map Like the majority of productions I have mentioned, the focus of this book has so far been the capital of Spain, Madrid. There is, as I suggest in the Introduction, a certain inevitability to this: for centuries – at least since the reign of Philip II (1556–1598) – Madrid has been not just the capital of Spain but the centre of an Empire, the metropolis to which subjects and émigrés have cast an anxious eye, the seat of national government and, at various stages in Spanish history, the birthplace of a projected ‘national’ culture. Up to the second half of the nineteenth century, neither individual artists nor artistic movements set on achieving national and international fame could afford to ignore Madrid. Like London or Paris, cities whose gravitational pull was the envy of generations of political governors and cultural producers alike, Madrid was the source and provider of both mainstream and eccentric artistic talent. Home to the Real Academia de la Lengua, the guardian of the national language (‘castellano’, the Spanish of Castile), to the National Library, to various national museums, galleries and theatres, for centuries it was the reference point for what it meant to be ‘Spanish’. In later years, it would also be the site of some of the most explosive, if transient, of latter-day ‘counter-cultural’ phenomena such as the ‘movida madrileña’ [the ‘Madrid scene’], which would have such a decisive impact on contemporary pop, fashion and cinema. Needless to say, despite its privileged position at the geographical hub of the Iberian Peninsula, the election of Madrid as national capital was not to everyone’s liking. The heavy Castilian influence in the court of Philip had, from the start, caused serious resentment among the king’s non-Castilian subjects – not least among the states of the Crown of Aragon in north-eastern Spain, which feared that their traditional laws and liberties would gradually be eroded by the activities of officious or malign servants of an absentee king. The association of successive royal courts in Madrid with corruption in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries may have helped generate some of the finest literature the country has produced. However, coming as it did on the back of the decline of the Spanish empire, it also aggravated latent tensions between the capital with its legions of parasites, social climbers and threadbare hidalgos,

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and the dirt-poor rural provinces that scraped a living as virtual fiefdoms of overlords appointed directly from Madrid. Simultaneous revolts in Portugal and Catalonia were prompted by Castile’s costly policy of confrontation with the Dutch in the Thirty Years War, while similar, if unsuccessful uprisings, in Spanish Sicily and Naples revealed the measure of discontent with a metropolis whose chief claim to power – the presence of the monarchy and the dwindling flux of goods which reached it through the country’s different ports – was increasingly in doubt. If Madrid enjoyed a long, if disputed, history as the nation’s legitimate capital, siphoning the profits of the country’s considerable resources only to fail to redistribute the wealth provided, it was partly owing to the failure of the provinces to orchestrate any organized resistance to its domination. All this began to change in the period of Isabella II (1833–1868) with the demand of Basque and Catalan industries for stiffer tariff protection from Madrid. It was this demand that gave a new sense of separate interest to the ‘differential factor’ of Catalonia, for instance, with both the urban middle class and proletariat clamouring for greater independence from Madrid. The loss of Cuba by ‘bungling’ Madrid politicians, which had deprived Catalonia of a useful market, was a further stimulus to the separatist cause, giving the Catalanists the possibility of a popular following. The dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923–1930) alienated the ‘periphery’ still further. Having initially supported the coup d’état, alarmed by the growing strength of the anarchists, Catalan conservatives and regionalists recoiled from Primo’s own brand of Spanish nationalism and rigid centralism which, they felt, constituted an irremovable obstacle to the hopes of Catalan autonomy. A possible solution to the problem during the Second Republic1 was immediately cast aside when General Franco came to power. ‘España una, grande y libre’ [‘Spain (is) one, great and free’] would be the rallying call of a regime that hoped to promote the image of a country united around a common cause, a common identity, and in which different regional initiatives were either ignored or brutally repressed. Not only were the (admittedly limited) powers of the Generalitat abolished, but Castilian Spanish was enforced as the official language of state in an attempt to nip in the bud the florescence of linguistic self-differentiation in Catalonia. In the Basque Country, the loss of rights obtained under the Republic merely galvanized support for separatist movements which, tiring of what it saw as the ineffectiveness of the mainstream nationalist parties, would lead eventually to the formation of the terrorist outfit ETA. In the latter years of the dictatorship, the so-called period of the ‘apertura’, this oppressive centralism was slightly eased – mainly as a result of foreign vigilance and the government’s ambition to take an active role in the wider, international community. With the death of Franco and the restoration of democracy, regionalism returned with renewed vigour. The Constitution of 1978, which was drawn up with the help of representatives from different regional parties, satisfied many of these longings by inscribing into its own


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statutes the creation of a number of quasi-independent regions with their own powers and assemblies, together with the provision of more powers in the years to come. The ban on the use of different languages was lifted and children were encouraged to learn Castilian in conjunction with – not instead of – their own regional tongues. In so doing, the Constitution effectively redrew the map of Spain, by dividing it into 17 Autonomous Communities. Thereafter, a series of laws regulated the norms by which Spaniards were governed in the political phase of the new democracy. Little by little, the dependency on a single administration was reduced, as in each of the regions or ‘countries’ – depending on its historical weight – there was a proliferation of organs of government and a transferral of powers (in health, education, taxation, etc.) that had previously been the reserve of State. As far as the theatre was concerned, the decade of the 1980s saw what César Oliva (2002: 257) has called the drawing of a ‘new map’ of Spain, with more and more attention (and money) being channelled towards different regional stages. Not all of these developed to the same extent, however, and even today there are substantial differences in the degree to which the autonomies have invested in the performing arts. Once again, it is the Communities with the deepest historical roots that would take the early strides in crafting their own cultural agendas and, as in the case of the Generalitat de Catalunya, in giving an important impetus to drama written and produced in the autonomous tongue. The Basque Country would also be among the first to seek to organize its own theatres, as would Galicia and, to a lesser extent, Andalusia. In a few cases, the outcome of this process was the creation of different ‘national’ theatre companies to match the National Drama Centre founded in Madrid.2 Not all of the regions were to embrace the same model, however, and for many theatre has remained a minority activity, poorly subsidized and, in marketing terms, given a lower profile than other more ‘popular’ forms of cultural production. Both for the affluent ‘national’ companies and the legion of smaller, private outfits, independence from Madrid meant the opportunity to develop alternative repertoires, in which revivals of the ‘classics’ of the Spanish canon were coupled with the work of new and ‘local’ dramatic talent. In Communities with their own languages, like Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, the choice of plays would also be conditioned by a wider linguistic policy based on promoting and giving an outlet to the work of local writers or, in the case of classical drama, the replacement of ‘Castilian’ plays with work by foreign authors duly rendered into the local tongue. Shakespeare, as we shall see, would play a prominent part in this latter process, his work being used to fill gaps in the ‘national’ literature of Communities for which, as Portillo and Gómez-Lara suggest, ‘the use of their own native language is more important than any specific messages that may be drawn from the plays’ (1994: 219). In the discussion that follows, I would like to examine this statement in light of selected productions from the later transitional period in four of the country’s most distinctive regions: Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia.

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Catalonia As a Community that enjoyed its own cultural resurgence long before the other regions of Spain and that, for a time, could rival the capital in both the quantity and the quality of the spectacles produced there (see especially Chapter 4), Catalonia was particularly well placed to reap the benefits of the transfer of cultural capital in the transition to democracy. A product of the transitional years, but with one eye on its own extraordinary theatrical tradition, the Catalan company Teatre Lliure (literally, ‘Free Theatre’) quickly distinguished itself as a broker of text-based theatre, with a powerful and uncompromisingly appropriational re-reading of the classics and a commitment to contemporary creations, opening its doors to programmes that alternated theatre with dance and music. Directed in successive stages by Fabià Puigserver, Lluís Pasqual, Lluís Homar, Guillem-Jordi Graells y Josep Montanyès, its integration into the Catalan world of culture and its contribution to a normalization of the theatre in Catalan society were soon rewarded with a faithful following among the educated elite. A member of the European Union of Theatres, the group would tour extensively throughout Europe and Latin America and be involved in international co-productions with established companies such as the Hebbel Theater in Berlin and the Salzburg Festival in Austria. At the same time, following the company’s move from the Mercat de les Flors in the heart of Barcelona to its new site on the outskirts, the former Palau de l’Agricultura in Montjuïc, Teatre Lliure would also host the work of international directors such as Kristian Lupa, Carlo Cecchi, Philip Glass, Declan Donellan, Philippe Decouflé, Thomas Ostermeier, Jan Lauwers, Bob Wilson and Peter Sellars. As far as the reception of Shakespeare is concerned, Lliure would revolutionize the production of his work in the provinces, consolidating its status as a forum for the discussion of issues affecting both Catalonia and a wider ‘global’ community. A robust production of Titus Andronicus directed by Fabià Puigserver in 1977–1978 with an extremely young cast including Carlota Soldevila, Inma Colomer, Anna Lizarán, Lluís Homar and Domenech Reixach was Lliure’s Shakespearean debut. Given the scant attention the play had received prior to this performance, barely two years after Franco’s death, and amid all the uncertainty surrounding the newly born democracy, the choice of play may, like the Hormigón–Morera Julius Caesar discussed in Chapter 5, be seen as a statement of aesthetic and political intentions. A mosaic-patterned stage, resembling an enormous chess-board, where the actors moved like ‘pawns’ in a game whose rules defied them, and above all the shocking mixture of Roman ‘period’ costume and modern street-culture garb were telling reminders of the fragility of the young democracy and the continued risk of further (and larger) bloodbaths. The group’s determination to re-present and problematize even seemingly benign material may also be illustrated by an early production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Al vostre gust) by one of the Lliure’s founders, Lluís Pasqual.


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Figure 7.1 The chess-board set in Teatre Lliure’s 1979 production of Titus Andronic (Titus Andronicus), directed by Fabià Puigserver. (Photo by Luis Cristóbal courtesy of Teatre Lliure and the Centro de Documentación Teatral.)

Pasqual’s approach to Shakespeare’s drama has always, by his own account, been guided by a mixture of reverence – this side ‘bardolatry’ – and absolute humility. ‘For an actor, playing Shakespeare,’ he would declare in El País (13 March 1988), ‘is like playing Mozart for a musician: a utopia, an impossibility and, at the same time, an act of ennobling and daring. For a director, it is a constant sensation of impotence and gratitude.’ Built into his early stagings of the playwright’s work, then, was a surprisingly mature sense of the limitations imposed, not just by the financial restrictions on a provincial company like the Lliure but by the impossibility of ever exhausting the meanings of Shakespearean drama – of doing the text full justice either as an actor or as a director. This may explain why, to date, Pasqual has tended to eschew the ‘big’, spectacular productions of the work which, as we saw, were the hallmark of the mainstream public-company performances in the capital during the 1980s. In doing so, he claims to have been making his own, necessarily modest, contribution to a theatre that approximates to the ‘sources’ of Shakespeare’s own theatrical energy. His 1983–1984 As You Like It was to be the first step in this process. As Pasqual would put it in El País (17 August 1983), With Al vostre gust I believe that Lliure has started, or I have started, on a path which may not be that visible from outside and which, at the end of the day, may

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only be a small, small step along the way. That path could be defined as a kind of return to Shakespeare’s sources. Whenever I see a big production of Shakespeare, I feel a kind of repulsion, because it is in contradiction with Shakespeare himself. Shakespeare was a very pragmatic person, who knew exactly what he had to go on when he wrote, a particular set of actors and audience, a playhouse with very modest means. Shakespeare was much more a battler than those big Shakespeares you see nowadays. The big stages, the big scenery . . . make me ill-at-ease.

As if to emphasize the point, the production Pasqual was to direct, in conjunction with designer Fabià Puigserver, for the cramped stage of the Lliure’s emblematic playhouse at the Mercat de les Flors not only restricted the number of actors to 11, with some bold doublings-up such as the use of an actress (Carlota Soldevila) to play Duke Senior and Adam, but reduced the set to a minimum: no longer the rich palatial settings or the thick Virgilian forests invoked in the original but a series of intimate shadowy spaces bathed in very dim light and resonating with Xabier Clot’s suggestive musical score. The only display of stage-architectural extravagance was a huge reflecting mirror which hung above the stage and which, as M. A. Conejero would note (1984: 470), invited the spectator ‘to see “the other side” of the story, and at the same time to recognize himself as part of the scenery’. In this bare Brookian space, the emphasis fell on the (uncut) text, translated into Catalan by Josep Maria de Sagarra, and on the energy (both verbal and physical) exuded by the actors, with Lluís Homar in the role of Orlando and Anna Lizarán as a feisty Rosalind. Al vostre gust might be regarded as Lliure’s and Pasqual’s first major national and international success, both earning Pasqual the coveted National Theatre and Dance Prize in 1984 and also being revived by Pasqual himself in French for the Comédie Française in 1989. Notwithstanding Al vostre gust and Pasqual’s later The Tempest, a co-production with the Centro Dramático Nacional for Bilbao’s Arriaga theatre in 2001 (see Chapter 8), the bulk of Lliure’s work on Shakespeare would be with the tragedies – the ‘great’ tragedies such as King Lear, Hamlet and Othello and the always popular ‘Roman’ plays, with stunning productions of Titus Andronicus and Julius Caesar. Of the four so-called great tragedies, Lear is probably the least performed in Spain. There are objective reasons for this – the length of the text, the frequent changes of scene, the presence of four strong female characters and so on – which clearly override considerations of the play’s possible ‘relevance’, however loosely defined. In their 1996 production, Lliure not only took these problems on board but could be credited with making a virtue of economic necessity. Directed by Ariel García Valdés, their Lear, o el somni de una actriu [Lear, or the Dream of an Actress] employed a handful of actors and a bare circus ring set as the scaffolding for a series of ‘variations’ on the play’s key scenes – the trial of love, the relationship between Lear and the Fool, the storm scenes and so on – which owed much to Samuel Beckett’s end-game scenario, dutifully transmitted by Jan Kott, and especially to Luigi Pirandello’s bewildering tale of (here) five characters in search of an author.


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Pirandello it is who is said to have ‘shone through the largely improvised plot line which puts us at the level of a company “interpreting”’ a play; the presence of Beckett was felt in the ‘absurdist-realist tone’ with which the Pirandello ‘argument’ was used to counterpoint the original text, which had been translated into Catalan by Salvador Oliva. The weight of the acting was evenly spread among the five actors, although special mention was reserved for Anna Lizarán, the ‘actress’ in the title who dreams she is playing Lear and for the clownish Fool played by Jordi Bosch, whose relationship to Lear was seen as a kind of ‘tragico-philosophical “variation” on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic’ which, unlike Beckett’s Godot, for instance, was satisfactorily resolved in a ‘quasi-familiar rapport in which Lear . . . once again succumbed to the absurd and feverish “chaos of the night”’. Although the circus-ring antics of the performers did occasionally over-bake the Beckettian interrogation of the possibility of salvation, the production was adjudged to have done enough to suggest what Ferrán Corbella, writing in the theatre review Reseña (1996: 20), called the ‘grotesque prudishness of the decaying moral universe’ the play presents. One of the most exciting – as well as controversial – talents to emerge from the Lliure ‘stable’ of directors during the 1980s and 1990s was, without doubt, Calixto Bieito. Although not a Catalan by birth, Bieito moved to Catalonia with his family at age 14 and has been based there ever since. Perhaps for this reason, his work for both the theatre and, his first love, the opera, has been enormously alive to the resonances of Catalan culture and its language while retaining an appreciation of the place and role of the ‘other’, whether Castilian-speaking or simply non-Catalan, in the ‘host’ society. In many ways, his work has followed a pattern now familiar to Catalan producers, with work that is produced in Catalan in Catalonia invariably rendered into Castilian when it is taken elsewhere. It has also, recently, been the product of several fruitful collaborations between the Teatre Romea company Bieito currently runs and companies and institutions both inside and outside Spain. More strikingly, perhaps, he has followed compatriots such as Puigserver and Pasqual (to whom he was assistant director at the Lliure) in guest directing for foreign companies and in foreign languages such as German and English. This is the logical consequence of a rich international education which has enabled him to work with such seminal directors as Peter Brook in France, Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Jerzy Grotowski in Poland and Giorgio Strehler in Italy. As Bieito would remark in an interview with Michael Coveney for The Guardian on 7 August 2004, on the eve of a double-headed participation in the Edinburgh Festival with Verdi’s Il Trovatore and an English version of La Celestina, the future of culture lies in forging links between countries, not, as has been the case in Spain for so long, closing them off. ‘The concept of Europe is very important because Europe is not so big. We should have strong identities but also strong links.’ The Sagarra text and carefully illumined ‘bare’ set were once again in use in Bieito’s production of El somni d’una nit d’estiu [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] (1991, at the Teatre Grec), one of the key notes of which was, together with an

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insistence on the desires and limitations of the body, the ‘intrusion’ of what some critics have frowned upon as ‘incongruous’ tokens of global pop culture. Hence the striking resemblance of Anna Güell’s Puck to the cartoon character Bart Simpson, or the seemingly gratuitous incorporation of different musical backing styles, from salsa and bolero to rock and rap. Rather than jarring additions to a text, which are often abused by current Spanish directors in the hunt for a younger constituency, the use of such elements has been interpreted as revealing Bieito’s ‘fascination with counterpointing the musicality of [Sagarra’s] language with a soundtrack that never simply illustrates what is being said but rather comments on or undermines it’ (Delgado 2006: 112). If the production achieved anything, it was to expose the uncritical fashion in which classical, in this case Shakespearean, drama had been absorbed into Spanish culture as well as to show how the boundaries between different cultural ‘realities’ were becoming increasingly blurred and banalized. After a departure from Sagarra in his starkly anti-nationalistic King John (1995) and his two versions of The Tempest (1997; one in Catalan, with Trinculo, Stephano and Ariel pointedly depicted as speakers of Castilian or faulty Catalan; the other, in Castilian, for the Autumn Festival in Madrid), Bieito once again turned to the author of what Helena Buffery (1998) has suggested has become ‘the most accepted Catalan Shakespeare’ – significantly for the ‘national’ Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) – for his 1999 production of Measure for Measure (Mesura per mesura). Although a bold production of a little performed play, Mesura per mesura sat uneasily in the framework of the TNC’s lavish auditorium and in its repertoire of largely heritage productions. On the other hand, and from the viewpoint of Bieito’s subsequent development as an artist, it announced what Maria Delgado (2006: 116) has called a certain ‘look’ for his work: ‘a Felliniesque costume aesthetic [the work of Mercè Paloma] [and] a ferocious pace where scenes tumble into one another as narrative is conveyed across and through the body’.3 Employing a set that was half-way between a Roman amphitheatre and a modern football stadium, the production charted the sleazy meanderings of the Duke (an ‘impish’ Mingo Ràfols) who appeared to ‘revel in the delight of a disguise’ that allowed him to occupy a space between the secular authority represented by Angelo and the religious position embodied by Isabella. As well as an obvious ‘aesthetic’ debt to Spanish cinéastes such as Buñuel or Almodóvar, the production carried a series of potent allusions to contemporary Spanish gender politics, none more so than in the production’s final scene where, on hearing Angelo’s declaration of love, Isabella ‘froze in horror, shaking her head furiously as he dragged her off like an unruly dog to the deafening pomp of [a] military band’ (Delgado 2006: 117). With more than 100 different productions between 1975 and 2000,4 whose high points were, without doubt, the work of Lliure and of theatrical ‘mavericks’ such as Bieito for the Grec, the reception of Shakespeare in Catalonia was more intense than in any of the other Spanish provinces, with the possible exception of Madrid. There is no space here to do full justice to the many


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original and insightful Catalan performances during the Transition or indeed to the translations they were based on. As well as helping to convert Shakespeare into the most widely staged and read dramatist of the post-dictatorial period, the latter have, as Helena Buffery has recently shown (2007), been instrumental in underlining the political significance of Shakespeare as an acceptable alternative to ‘imperialist’ Castilian culture.

The Basque Country In the Basque Country this picture of uncomplicated acculturation has been complicated by the fact that so little of the drama produced there is actually written in Basque, or ‘euskera’, as it is more commonly known. As recently as 23 March 2007, Josu Montero, writing in the stridently separatist newspaper Gara, could ask whether it was possible even to talk of the existence of Basque playwrights as a significant collective, when the programmes for the theatres were regularly inundated with Spanish plays, or foreign classics in Spanish; if the presence of work by living playwrights on such repertoires was small, the presence of work by living Basque ones was risible. The historical preponderance of Spanish is such that Basque literature as a whole barely predates 1879, the year in which the floral games – a mixture of sporting and literary events and competitions, which is usually taken to mark the starting point of modern Basque poetry and literature as a whole – were organized by Antoine d’Abbadie. Up to then, the cultural ambit of expression in euskera had, as Xabier Mendiguren has observed (1993: 286), been extremely narrow, barely transcending the geographical boundaries in which it was spoken and with little or no outlet to the main international currents of literary and aesthetic production. Thanks to the efforts of the instigators of the Basque cultural resurgence, who endeavoured to open the language up to those currents, some headway was made, although it would not be until 1926 that the first Basque translation of Shakespeare, Toribio Alzaga’s Irritza [Ambition], a rather free translation of Macbeth, became available in print. It is easy to underestimate the impact of the publication, when only a year before, the central government in Madrid had banned the publication of books in euskera and issued directives to school inspectors of schools to withdraw all books which, according to a Royal Decree of 1925, ‘were not written in Spanish or contained doctrines or tendencies contrary to the unity of the homeland or against the very bases of society’. Irritza, a Basque play about the dangers of tyranny, would appear to have contravened both principles, and it is a wonder the play was ever staged, let alone put it print. Written in the Guipuzcoan branch of euskera, which quickly became the bastion of the new Basque theatre, Alzaga’s version of Macbeth incorporated lexical items from other local dialects as well as the odd neologism and the new Aranist spelling. Among the qualities of the text singled out by Mendiguren (1993: 287), which distinguish it from later versions, are its

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‘tempo [which is] suitable for performance and its increased communicability’, both of which he attributes to Alzaga’s direct knowledge of, and involvement with, the stage. From Alzaga’s version of Macbeth it would be another 30 years or so before another ‘Shakespeare’ was published in Basque: Bingen Ametzaga’s Hamlet, soon to be followed by the first and, to date, the only systematic rendering of Shakespeare’s plays in Basque by the cleric Bedita Larrakoetxea, who had been exiled to England as a result of the Civil War. With their philological rigour and ‘moderately formalistic’ respect for the original style, Larrakoetxea’s translations did at least come close to providing a readerly Basque equivalent to Shakespeare’s English. Unfortunately, like the Ametzaga Hamlet, Larrakoetxea’s 37 translations failed to inspire any noteworthy productions, their concern for semantic fidelity at the expense of stylistic and pragmatic proximity to a potential audience, ‘however small’ (Mendiguren 1993: 291), rendering them virtually unplayable. For performance-worthy scripts one must thus look forward to the translation and subsequent dubbing of most of the complete Shakespeare series produced for the BBC, whose rights were bought by the new Basque autonomous TV channel ETB, following the return to democracy. Studying the handful of scripts that were eventually published, Mendiguren has highlighted two distinguishing features: the concern to produce a communicative text and the awareness that the material being used needed careful adapting for the sake of dubbing, which meant that the version that finally emerged kept as tightly as possible, both structurally and rhythmically, to the original texts. Another more important result of this was the performances, which were dubbed in Basque but subtitled in Spanish, did at least give some idea of what Shakespeare might sound like in the target culture. ‘For the rest’, he concludes wistfully, There is no record of any Basque theatre company having staged a single work of Shakespeare’s up to the present [1993], which is why it is possible to aver that [Shakespeare] is a modest latecomer to the Basque cultural scene and that our awareness of Basque versions of his plays must be limited to the few readers who have been able to read the renderings by Larrakoetxea and a slightly larger circle of TV spectators who have sampled the BBC versions which have been dubbed for Basque television (1993: 298).

Despite an aggressive linguistic policy and manoeuvres by successive Basque governments to ‘nationalize’ the production of Basque theatre,5 the fact remains that the majority of Basque theatregoers do not attend performances in euskera, since the majority language, particularly in the urban areas where theatre is produced, happens to be Spanish. This is why for the best productions of Shakespeare in the Basque Country during the Transition one must turn to Spanish-language productions by Basque troupes. Of these the most prominent and widely travelled is


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undoubtedly Ur Teatro, the group founded in 1987 by Helena Pimenta. A graduate of English Studies at Salamanca University, Pimenta has brought to her direction of Shakespeare and other classics not just an understanding of the original texts, some of which she has translated herself, but a patent desire to experiment with and, where possible, expand the accepted ‘canon’ of Shakespearean texts. Her early work with Shakespeare includes a trilogy of productions from the 1990s, commencing with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1992), which won the National Theatre Prize, and continuing with Romeo and Juliet (1995) and the previously unperformed Love’s Labours Lost (1998). As a play which proved extremely popular in Spain in the 1980s and 90s, and for a variety of reasons, not all of them aesthetic,6 A Midsummer Night’s Dream was, on the face of it, an unadventurous choice of play with which to initiate one’s engagement with Shakespeare. First performed at the Sala Niessen in Rentería, where Pimenta used to run her own private theatre workshop in conjunction with her first troupe Atelier, the production involved just six actors (three men and three women). On a bare stage and in colourful modern dress, the play’s 23 different roles were performed in an extraordinarily supple and sensuous way, the actors’ bodies – their contortions and, in the case of Bottom, their transformations, being the focal point of the production.

Figure 7.2 Female bonding in Ur Teatro’s 1992 production of Sueño de una noche de verano (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), directed by Helena Pimenta for Ur Teatro. (Photo by Daniel Alonso, courtesy of the Centro Documentación Teatral.)

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Another feature of Ur’s work on the play was the characterization of the ‘mechanicals’, each belonging to a particular region of the peninsula, each projecting a particular stereotype: the Andalusian, the Galician, the Catalan and, by way of contrast, a Pole, whose presence served to problematize the question of ‘foreignness’, the play within the play of Pyramus and Thisbe becoming a kind of vehicle through which to address the emerging question of immigration as well as contradictory contemporary Spanish attitudes to it. Ur’s production of Love’s Labours Lost in 1998 may have failed to generate the same kind of enthusiasm at the box office but would nonetheless be regarded as one of the high points of a glittering engagement with the Bard that has been distinguished by a refusal to countenance the trite solutions usually adopted in the treatment of ‘classical’ works and by an, at times, controversial take on very familiar material. ‘Shakespeare will always be around,’ Pimenta would state in a pre-production interview for Revista 51, as ‘there is so much there to discover’. For her production of Love’s Labours Lost she once again opted for the boundary-blurring box-like set, placing the emphasis on the text, which she regards as sacrosanct, the actors’ ability to define the space they inhabit and, in one of her most ostensibly postmodernist touches, the introduction of cinema to supplant the play within the play.7 Pimenta would admit to taking risks with this production. Prior to the performance at the Almagro Classical Theatre festival, she would state that she had considered it an obligation to present a ‘brand-new and committed version’, something she acknowledged would be ‘risky, from a commercial point of view’ (El Mundo, 6 July 1998). This, as it turned out, resulted in very few departures from the text, save for the odd contemporary allusion, although it did involve a highly visual interpretation of the play, the set and use of lighting suggesting a ‘fantastic’ landscape reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. The dreamworld effect was enhanced by the musical score composed by Fernando Auzmendi and Javier Olaizola, performed on a traditional Basque percussion instrument, the txalaparta. Not so much an attempt to ‘naturalize’ this rarely performed play for Basque audiences, the use of such devices was a subtle reminder of Ur’s regional provenance as well as part of a trend in communities like the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia in the post-transitional phase to stamp their own ‘denomination of origin’ on the production of foreign work.

Galicia Though less hampered by abysmal differences between the local tongue and Castilian,8 the engagement of Galicia, in the north-western corner of Spain, with Shakespeare has been dated as late as the 1950s, with Álvaro Cunqueiro’s rewrite of Hamlet as O incerto Señor Don Hamlet, príncipe de Dinamarca [The Uncertain (or Hesitant) Mister Hamlet, Prince of Denmark] (1959). Strictly speaking,


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this was not the first ‘Shakespearean’ drama to be written and staged in Galician, an honour which would go to a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor by the Escola Dramática Galega (the Galician School of Drama) some 30 years before. Nor was Cunqueiro’s work initially intended as a stage play but rather as a piece of closet drama, a literary variation on a theme addressed to a reading, rather than to a viewing, public. Cunqueiro’s aim seems to have been to supplement Shakespeare’s tragedy with a rationale explaining the underlying motives of the characters: thus, Halmar (Cunqueiro’s Claudius) is the Prince’s real father; the death of the father, the wedding with the mother, the son’s revenge, ‘saving’ Queen Gerda from herself by stabbing her to death and Hamlet’s suicide are products of the author’s conception of the play as ‘an Oedipal narrative, as one of the mythic legends on man, who, in order to become one, murders his father and marries his mother’ (Alonso and González 1993: 384). That the play was never intended for performance is evident from the opening ‘stage directions’, in which Cunqueiro takes six pages to describe the setting, or from the presence of a chorus in the first act, more concerned about Hamlet’s lack of appetite than with filling in the essential information gap – unbeknownst to Hamlet, his father is the present king, the man he killed, his uncle. Hamlet’s baffling ignorance, like his mother’s unwitting pregnancy or Halmar’s dying words (‘What long blades these swords from Italy have’), has been presented as an ‘absurdist’ departure from Shakespeare by an author whose intention is not to restage Hamlet from the perspective of twentiethcentury Galician reality, but simply to ‘disarm the Hamlet myth, [to] demythify it and convert it into parody’. The conscious ambiguity, hinted at in the very title of the play; the constant haze of mist that envelops the setting and the characters as one of many allusions to the author’s native Galicia; the lack of action, glut of implications, of dialogues which are almost monologues, ‘in which each character does little more than listen to herself’ have all been identified as elements of the play which preclude the possibility of performance (Guevara 2007). Undeterred by these and other difficulties, the Asociación Cultural Iberoamericana premiered the play the very year of its publication (at the Teatro Colón in A Coruña), a one-off performance followed 10 years later by a production by the Agrupación Teatral Valle-Inclán and again, in 1979, by the Escola Dramática Galega, a company that began life at the Teatro Circo, as an institute for study and experimentation in the performing arts. In 1991 the Teatro Principal in Santiago de Compostela was the venue for a new production of the play by the Centro Dramático Galego (CDG). As Galicia’s premier theatre company, the CDG has been a reference as well as source of envy for many smaller independent looking to produce work in Galician. As well as Cunqueiro’s Don Hamlet, the company would go on to stage a number of Shakespeare ‘originals’ – all of them in Galician: The Merry Wives of Windsor (As alegres casadas, 1989), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Un soño de verán,

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1992), Richard III (Ricardo III, 2005) and, most recently, Twelfth Night (Noite de Reis, 2007). The first of these, from a free adaptation by Manuel Guede, who also directed it, in conjunction with Eduardo Alonso, incorporated elements from both Romeo and Juliet – a way of giving further shape to the relationship between Anne Page and Fenton – The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado about Nothing – with Beatrice and Benedick mysteriously transported to Windsor – as well as ‘fleshing out’ the character of Falstaff, with allusions to the two Henry IV plays and, especially, the libretto of Verdi’s opera of the same name. Fernando de Rojas’s great character La Celestina (the model for ‘Señora Depresa’ [i.e. Mistress Quickly]) was also drafted in for a bare-stage production which prided itself on the work of the actors and the use of language, together with its intertextual, deliberately ‘operatic’ script. A similar desire to expand on the bare givens of the Shakespeare corpus was visible in Guede and Alonso’s next venture, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If As alegres casadas had gaily cited other Shakespearean pieces as well as opera and sixteenth-century comedia, Un soño de verán drew heavily on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass as well as on Galicia’s own extremely rich folk tradition.9 The production’s most defamiliarizing touch was, without doubt, the introduction of a character called ‘Alicia’ (Alice), who bursts into the production as a late spectator and insists on climbing onto a (still empty) stage, where she promptly falls asleep and, like Christopher Sly in Shakespeare’s Shrew, effectively dreams the production that followed. Unlike the framing narratordreamer of the Shrew, however, Alicia becomes the protagonist of her own dream, not only as a witness to the scenic transformations enacted by the production (e.g. the magical apparition of the court of Athens or the conversion of a twisted knot of ‘trees’ into Noitebra and her three attendants) but as the object of desire of Romeo, who is a more familiar version of the character of Philostrate, and also a potential mate for Egeus (‘Toribio’ in this version), the widower whom Theseus hopes to console with a wife. She is also transformed by the witches into a variety of shapes, including a toad, an ostrich and finally a handsome young squire, who – and there are clear echoes of Twelfth Night here – immediately captivates Titania. The production thus downgraded the role of the mechanicals while giving special prominence to the role of Puck-Xas who, in Act 2 Scene 1, was shown spying on the fairies who accompany Titania, before being ordered by Oberon to prepare the love-juice (which he mixes with a hair from a witch’s beard) with a view to kidnapping Alicia. The plan, unfortunately, fails and some of the love-juice falls on Noitebra, forcing her to fall hopelessly in love with Toribio and, in another magical transformation, be converted into a ravishing young girl. The magic concludes in Theseus’ palace with Romeo covering Alicia with his cloak, only to find that she has disappeared, before reappearing drowsing in the stalls of the auditorium. She is awoken by an usher and, frustrated by the vividness of the dream, decides to close her eyes and try to bring it all back to life again. This was a cue for the lights to go up and for all the


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characters to appear before the audience once again, before taking their final bow. Rather than being a free version of Shakespeare’s original, the adaptation, according to Eduardo Alonso (2002: 354), was little more than ‘a play inspired by it’: From the beginning, the aim was not to perform Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but to express theatrically everything that this interesting text has provoked in the creative imagination of the adapters who, while admitting that it is not loyal to Shakespeare, insist that it is true to themselves.

In their hunt for the truth, however, the authors seemed to have stumbled upon a number of situations and devices which, from a theatrical point of view, were all too Shakespearean. These ranged from the overly ‘theatrical’ treatment of the Athenian court and the disposition of the mechanicals to please their masters to the ‘post-modern’ interrogation of the theatrical illusion by the introduction of the Alice-in-Wonderland scenario and the introduction of a spectator (Alicia) into the plot against her will. Guede and Alonso’s ‘Alicia’ was not quite Carroll’s ‘Alice’ – the steamy love scenes she has Romeo puts paid to that particular illusion; she does, however, owe her the name and, to a certain extent, the connotations she may have for a modern spectator: ‘a being lost in her own fantasy, in her own dreams, someone capable of going through the evoking glass and getting lost in the “illogical” and “intangible” world of a new “reality”’ (Alonso 2002: 354). If such a ‘reality’ includes fairies, goblins and especially witches, it is not just by way of deferential allusion to the Galician identity of the adapters and the troupe as a whole: if Shakespeare had written his play in the present, claims Alonso, ‘he would not have forgotten to include witches, who, besides fulfilling the role of evil-good characters, complete the imaginary condition of the wood’, as well as ‘punishing Alicia for meddling with the magical world of theatre’ (2002: 355–356). As for Puck-Xas, he completes the metatheatrical dimension of both the original and the adaptation insofar as he is ‘the goblin of the theatre, of the theatre as a building, of the theatre as a concept, and of the theatre as the world’ (357) and so enjoys special prominence in a production which, although updating and problematizing Shakespeare, never ceases to do ‘homage’ to him ‘and to the people of the theatre who wrote and performed’ the comedy (358). Although in terms of finance and artistic excellence the CDG has come to dominate the Galician scene since its inception, it is by no means the only Galician company to have performed Shakespeare. Since its formation in 1987 Teatro do Noroeste, the Santiago-based company led by Luma Gómez and former director of the CDG Eduardo Alonso, has produced four of his works: King Lear (O rei Lear, 1990), Macbeth (1994), Twelfth Night (Noite de Reis, 1996) and Romeo and Juliet (Romeo e Xulieta, 2007). Although operating with a much smaller budget, the Noroeste’s work has been distinguished by its

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inventiveness and its imbrication in various ‘campaigns’ thought up to promote drama for pedagogical ends, such as ‘Theatre in Education’ and ‘Directions [Apuntamentos] for the Understanding of Tragedy’. Although one of its stated aims has been to help recover some of Galicia’s lost theatrical heritage and also to stimulate new work, the group has devoted a substantial segment of its repertoire to plays (Medea, The Marriage of Figaro, La Celestina, etc.) and playwrights (Euripides, Seneca, Anouilh, Brecht, Beaumarchais, Shakespeare) who are neither contemporary nor Galician. As with contemporary Basque productions, the tendency has thus been to balance the desire to provide a platform for new and unsung theatrical talent with the reliance on a trusty and (commercially) more dependable range of ‘classics’, among whom Shakespeare, rather than Spain’s own legion of Golden Age authors, has had pride of place. O rei Lear, which was translated by Cándido Pazó and directed by Eduardo Alonso, featured a plain, bare stage, shrouded for most of the time in almost complete darkness, the minimal lighting being focused entirely on the actors, who were dressed in suitably sober costumes of ochre and light pastels. The plainness of the setting, broken only by the presence of the odd prop, such as the enormous map that Lear (Ernesto Chao) unfurled in the opening scene, helped to foreground the work of the actors, whose carefully choreographed movements gave an almost ritualistic feel to the production as well as Pazó’s text, which reflected his own dedication to the theatre and to the tradition, newly revived, of oral narrative in Galician. The austerity of Alonso’s production was such that practically all of the minor characters (and a few of the major ones) were dropped – the action revolving around the ‘essential’ eight: Lear, Regan (‘Regania’), Goneril (‘Gonerila’), Cordelia, Kent, who doubled up as the Fool, Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund. The figure of a narrator was introduced to provide information about events not staged before the audience. The reasons for the cuts were, as Alonso would acknowledge later (Alonso and González 1993: 346), more economic than artistic: full-scale productions of plays such as King Lear, with its host of messengers, soldiers, courtiers and other ancillaries, not to mention its frequent changes of scene, have proven beyond the possibilities of all but the big, publicly funded national and regional companies. However, this did not deter the Noroeste from producing what he also considers to be, post-Kott, a play that addresses late twentieth-century audiences in a starkly purposeful, but satisfyingly open-ended way: It is extremely difficult to go for a single reading of the piece, but it is not so much a question of finding the truth concealed behind its shattering words, as of drawing from it some of the truths which may be of interest to our time, and which make King Lear such an astoundingly contemporary creation.

For his Macbeth, which was played out against an all-red set, Alonso would again cut the cast and the action to the bare essentials, while Noite de reis, one in


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a string of Twelfth Nights which would dominate the 1996–1997 season throughout the country (see Chapter 6), ‘deals gently’ (Alonso 2002: 358) with the erotic ambiguity of the Viola–Cesario relationship and what director Alonso calls ‘the savage force of the juvenile attraction’ that overcomes both Orsino and Olivia. The sobriety of the costumes was matched by the simplicity of the scenery, in which a few basic objects were used to define the different spaces. Perhaps the production’s most elaborate device was the lighting which, according to Alonso, was designed to create ‘an atmosphere of abstraction and irreality [sic]’ because the dramatic action of Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria, one of those ‘semi-mythical regions with a remote and evocative name’ where Shakespeare had a habit of setting his comedies.

Andalusia To conclude this short survey of Shakespeare on the ‘periphery’, I would like to consider his reception and performance in Spain’s southernmost region, Andalusia. Despite its traditional status as a centre for the performing arts and, during the years of Cadiz constitution, a site of resistance to ‘official’ Napoleonic culture (see Chapter 2), Andalusia suffered perhaps more than any other region the myopic rigours of the Franco dictatorship, bringing what one scholar has called a long theatrical ‘ebb tide’ (Martínez Velasco 1993: 349), barely relieved by the odd visit of touring companies from Madrid or elsewhere. Although there had already been a steady trickle of classical Spanish plays from well before the dictatorship, the first ‘Shakespearean’ drama to make any impact during the Franco years was, curiously enough, the 1970 production of Brecht’s Coriolanus by the Seville-based Tabanque company, under the direction of Joaquín Arbide. The Alpha-63 Catalan version of Julius Caesar could be said to have been a far more contentious and radical choice of spectacle, given the social, historical and geographical context in which it was initially staged (see Chapter 5). But Tabanque’s selection of this unfamiliar and unperformed Roman play, following its own version of Caesar in the mid-sixties, could not have failed to register with audiences eager for signs of the regime’s decay as well as an end to the unequal distribution of land and wealth that had been a constant in the region’s troubled social history. The production of Coriolanus, which followed on Arbide’s engagement since his days as a member of the TEU with other authors considered inimical to the regime, including Arrabal, Brecht, Camus, Buero Vallejo, Shaw, Unamuno, Ionesco, Cocteau, Valle Inclán, Lorca, Wesker, Pirandello and Bergamín, remained true to Brecht’s ideal of endistancing by dispensing with the fourth wall and engaging the audience directly in the action of the play. The transition to democracy strengthened theatrical activity in the region and, as in Spain’s other Autonomous Communities, encouraged the production of foreign classics such as Shakespeare as a way of completing and

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complementing the traditional repertoires that were the legacy of the Franco years. Teatro del Mediodía initiated that era in 1979 with an unremarkable version of The Tempest which, according to Julio Martínez Velasco, ‘respected the essence [of Shakespeare’s text]’ while ‘revelling in the set speeches’ of characters such as Caliban, renamed as ‘Canibal’, whereas Miguel Narros chose the Seville Teatro del Arte for the national premiere of his full-length production of King Lear, from a translation by the Instituto Shakespeare at Valencia (see Chapter 6). The four-and-a-half hour production exploited the possibilities of the thrust stage that stretched well into the auditorium, producing a playing space which was not entirely circular but enjoyed all of the advantages of this kind of stage, as the actors and audience were brought close together in a production which was as close as it was possible to get to Shakespeare’s Globe. (Martínez Velasco 1993: 362)

If the years 1987–1992 witnessed what Martínez Velasco calls the ‘consolidation of Shakespeare’s importance’ in Andalusia, much of this ‘importance’ derived from his popularity with university drama groups and also a couple of the country’s most inventive puppet-theatre companies. The Seville University production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1987, enterprisingly set in modernday Seville, may be seen as an attempt to revive the spirit of former university troupes such as the Teatro Universitario de Cámara of Granada, whose 1956 production of Hamlet was, if nothing else, one of the most ambitious of nonprofessional stagings of Shakespeare in Francoist Spain. The Granada troupe, now known as the Teatro Estable de la Universidad de Granada, would respond the same year with their version of The Tempest, directed by the Argentinian Roberto Villanueva, which according to Andrés Molinari in the daily Ideal (19 October 1987), successfully combined ‘the atmosphere of novelistic farce, of tragedy purified by the hurricane’, with the Dante of the Purgatory. Equally noteworthy productions were the La Pupa and Atiza company puppet versions of Macbeth and Otelo y Desdemona (a reduced version of Othello), respectively. Taking the Lamb siblings’ bowdlerized narrative version of the text as the most appropriate for an audience of all ages, Atiza’s production reduced the action of the play to a bare hour. With puppets controlled from the rear, rather than on strings, it was as if the characters were ‘floating’ in an undefined space between the audience and a ‘set,’ painted by Javier Álvarez, containing stunningly vivid scenes from Venice and Cyprus. In contrast, La Pupa, would target a purely adult audience in a recreation of Macbeth, which featured beautiful period costume, an oppressively dark and gloomy set – ‘Scotland in mourning’, as María Victoria Oliva would put it El Público (March 1988: 33) – and grim masked puppets. With some 15 different ‘characters’ including a horse, a cat and a figure representing the wind as well as the ‘shadows’ of Banquo and Fleance, the aim, in the words of adapter Gema López (in El Correo de Andalucía,


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15 December 1987), was to produce a Macbeth that did not ‘betray the style and traditional scenography of the play’ while accentuating the ‘dark and dramatic’ side of the tragedy. Stage productions in Andalusia would intensify and also become more professionalized with the creation of the Centro Andaluz de Teatro (CAT). Like its publicly funded counterparts in other regions, the CAT’s activities have been diverse: not only co-producing shows with different companies but also staging its own heterogeneous artistic material, with the general aim of promoting modern home-grown (and often local) talent in addition to offering a smattering of ‘classic’ works, both national and foreign. The ‘institutional’ approach to the classics is evident in one of the CAT’s early involvements with Shakespeare, the 1996 production of Julius Caesar that premiered at the Classical Theatre Festival in Mérida, Extremadura, before moving on to the Classical Festival of Almagro. ‘If on top of the fact that Shakespeare is not performed every day we start doing adaptations,’ director Daniel Suárez would declare in El Mundo (5 July 1996) prior to the play’s premiere, ‘we have got it all wrong. To get to the stage of doing adaptations, you first need to have a very broad Shakespearean culture’ – an aim he suggested should be a priority for Spanish theatre as a whole. Using his own translation of the text, which extended its ‘fidelity’ to the original to rendering Shakespeare’s iambics in 10-syllable lines and respecting the verse–prose variations, Suárez kept the scenery to a minimum to foreground the ‘theme’, which is (unremarkably) identified in the programme as the ‘corruption of power’. The language, which was modernized to avoid what Suárez called the pitfalls and ‘petulance’ of Spanish Golden Age rhetoric, stood in stark contrast to use of ‘period’ costumes (the work of Oscar-winning costume designer Franca Squarciapino), another gesture in the direction of ‘authentic’ Shakespeare. Apart from the gratuitous decision to allow some of the 40-strong cast to interchange roles for different productions, what the El Mundo critic interpreted as Suárez’s uniquely ‘Andalusian vision’ of the play seems to have added very little to the José Tamayo-Lope de Vega company production at the very same theatre in 1955. John D. Sanderson (2002: 69) recounts a meeting of Andalusian writers organized by the CAT, in which it was suggested that Spanish directors and companies tended to avoid financial risk-taking, choosing spectacles from a rather limited repertoire of so-called classic authors, notably Valle-Inclán, Lorca and Shakespeare: The general identification of the work of Shakespeare with a high-cultural product might explain . . . the institutional tendency to favour its expansion and the tendency of the public to attend its performance, even though a formally archaic target text is being used.

By contrast, the financial agents of private theatres, who not only receive public subsidies but also have to make their own economic contributions are

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less willing to invest in productions employing codes that are so utterly removed from the present-day target context – ‘whatever literary prestige the original text may have’. The distance, they assume, precludes the possibility of ‘identification’ and fear that ‘the archaeological interest in seeing the performance of ancestral customs which do not involve the spectator emotionally in the development of the plot will reach a very small number of people’, an interest which fails to justify the substantial economic risks taken. The debate throws into relief the problem of the availability of ‘classics’ such as Shakespeare in the traditionally high culture-starved Spanish provinces in the period of the Transition and beyond. With the exception of Catalonia, the latter’s only access to ‘big-time’ Shakespeare – a Shakespeare anywhere near as lavish and spectacular as the ‘grand nationals’ discussed in Chapter 6 – was through the occasional visits of these generously subsidized national companies or the marginally lower-cost, although no less spectacular, productions of their own local-government-funded dramatic ‘centres’. When the Socialists left power in 1996 and a new right-wing government was voted in, the cut-back in spending on the arts forced all of the major national companies to revise their policies of production, stimulating a genuine and, for some, long-awaited concern with the very possibility of ‘identification’ that would worry their ‘private’ counterparts. A consequence of this would, as I hope to show in my final chapter, be a levelling of theatrical ambition between the two sectors, with Shakespeare once again providing an important site of resistance and opportunity.

Chapter 8

New Horizons

The Festival Circuit Despite the restrictions on public spending on the arts in the latter years of the Aznar administration and following the return to power of the Socialists under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the period has seen a veritable flurry of Shakespeares up and down the country. To take the year 2000 alone,1 Helena Pimenta’s production of The Comedy of Errors for the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya would be accompanied by the following spectacles: an As You Like It by Adrián Daumas at the Festival de Teatro Clásico in Cáceres; A Winter’s Tale by the Catalan Ca l’Ubú company (directed by Marc Hervàs); Pepa Plana’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, called simply Giulietta, at Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona); Teatrofias’s Macbeth! (directed by Jorge Ojeda Gómez) in Seville; the Teatro Universitario de Alicante’s Much Ado about Nothing (directed by Juan Luis Mira); La Fura dels Baus’s adaptation of Hamlet, called OBS, in Granollers (Catalonia); the José Luis Gómez version of The Tempest, called Prospero: Scena, a monologue accompanied by song, at the Almagro festival; Marta Baró’s production of King John for the El Soto theatre workshop in Móstoles (Madrid); the Sala Beckett company’s version of Richard III, called Ricard G (directed by Magda Puyo and Ramon Simòn) in Barcelona; the Alarifes and Fila 7 production of Romeo and Juliet (directed by Francisco Suárez, also from the Neruda translation) in Santander; Teatre Educatiu’s production of the same play (directed by Gonzalo Baz) in Palma de Mallorca; Conde Gatón company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (directed by Ovidio Lucio Blanco) in León; Alquibla Teatro’s production of the same play (directed by Antonio Saura) in Murcia; Tierra Roja’s The Tempest (directed by José Manuel Martí) in Seville; Kronos Teatro’s Titus Andronicus (directed by Àlex Rigola) at the Teatre Lliure in Barcelona. The list could probably be expanded. However, even as it stands, it is an eloquent testimony to the fact that by the turn of the century, Shakespeare was firmly established as one, if not the, most widely performed of playwrights (contemporary or classical; national or foreign); that there was very little consensus as to which of the plays were worth staging or to what their likely impact was to be; and that in all of the country, not just in the traditional cultural

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centres, Madrid and Barcelona, there were avid consumers of his work – work which, as we shall see, in the case of the regions, has been used not just to express the identity of different ‘national’ formations but also to address wider issues affecting a global community. This expansion of the presence and significance of Shakespeare’s dramas has coincided with a centrifugal movement, already initiated in the early 1990s, away from the association of Shakespeare performance with particular companies based in particular communities and whose sphere of theatrical activity rarely extended beyond the linguistic and geographical boundaries of the Community that subsidized their work, to a dissemination of the plays and productions to other parts of the country, thanks mainly to Spain’s vibrant festival circuit. Thus, together with the now established festivals of Almagro, Mérida and so on, the new millennium would see the inauguration of a specialized Shakespeare Festival at the Catalan town of Santa Susana. The festival organizers favour what they call a ‘thematic’ approach to the plays, by which they mean a preference for productions which, however diverse their presentation of the plays, raise issues that can be said to matter to a modern-day audience. More modestly, they have sought to bring the figure of Shakespeare closer to a Spanish public while offering a ‘global’ vision of his work.2 The festival is broad based and seeks to cover the panoply of genres to which Shakespeare’s work has been adapted: dance, opera, large- and small-scale theatre, music, circus and shows for children. Up to 2008, when the festival moved to Mataró, most of these shows were staged in the grounds of the Masía de Can Ratés, a beautiful sixteenth-century palace with two distinct open-air performance areas: one in front of the walls of the palace (with a capacity for 600 spectators) and another in the gardens (250 spectators). As well as attracting some noteworthy nonSpanish companies and productions, such as the Michael Dyer directed Comedy of Errors, Antonio Latella’s La dodicesima notte (Twelfth Night) or Carme Portaceli’s version of Heiner Müller’s Hamletsmachine (4+Shakespeare=Hamlet-màquina) for the festival’s first edition; the Vilnius City Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet in 2005 or Hélène Cinque’s staging of Peines d’amour perdues (Love’s Labours Lost) for the L’Instant d’une Résonance troupe and the Portuguese Joâo Garcia Miguel’s two-man Burgher King Lear in 2008, the Santa Susana festival has been an important showcase for Shakespeares from Spain’s different regions. Both Ur Teatro’s The Tempest and the Centro Dramático Galego’s Richard III have been staged here (in 2004 and 2005) as part of larger national and international tours. Other productions include (in chronological order) the Centro Andaluz de Teatro’s Romeo x Julieta (2003), the Calixto Bieito/Teatre Romea Catalan King Lear (2004), and the Rigola/Teatre Lliure Julius Caesar (2005). Smaller, less prestigious productions by independent companies have also found a niche at the festival – among them, the Parracs Company festive version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Ángel Llàcer (2003); La Mirada’s As You Like It, directed by Xicu Masó (2005); the Alquimistes Company’s Romeo and Juliet, subtitled ‘A love affair without barriers’, featuring a group of mentally impaired actors, and, most recently, building on the success of the Bieito

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version, Laperla 29’s King Lear, staged by Oriol Broggi (2008). As well as confirming the festival’s intentions to provide as large a sample as possible of current productions of Shakespeare, the repertoires attest to the currency of Shakespeare as a major source of creative energy and token of cultural capital in Spain’s different regions, in this case Catalonia.

Catalonia’s ‘Global’ Bard The extent of Catalonia’s investment in Shakespeare in the 2000s is evident in a string of productions from the beginning of the century that probe the very edges of Shakespeare’s work to discover and release some hitherto unexplored meanings – meanings that have, in turn, been enabled by recent ‘global’ events. The 2001–2002 staging of Coriolanus at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, was part of the TNC’s policy of providing a forum for the work of high-profile international artists in a Catalan context. Like the Lliure, the TNC has also featured productions of the relatively unexplored subgenre of the Shakespearean ‘Roman’ tragedy, specifically a 2001–2002 staging of Coriolanus (Coriolà) by guest director Georges Lauvadant and dramaturge Daniel Loyaza, from a Catalan rendering by Joan Sellent, with Lluís Homar in the role of the renegade general. The production could be said to mark a return to the expensive, big-set ventures of the 1980s, with no fewer than 21 different actors rushing frantically this way and that, doubling up roles in a fast-moving performance that was nonetheless regarded as ‘monotonous’ by many of the reviews consulted. Rigorously modern-dress – with besuited corporate-class senators and tribunes, soldiers resembling riot police, plastic bag-wielding plebeians – and re-located from ancient Rome to a modern freeway flyover (classical columns replaced by the concrete pillars of a murky, sinister underpass), with New York skyline in the background, the production seemed (somewhat opportunistically?) bent on re-activating all of the signifieds a contemporary, 9/11-haunted audience might expect from a play of this kind: the threat to the ‘metropolis’ from an unspecified ‘other’, the concern with surveillance in all its different forms, the de-humanization of the city and commodification of the lives of its inhabitants and so on. The overall effect, according to one critic, was the de-politicization of Shakespeare’s play, or rather, as Pablo Ley would put it in El País (2 February 2002): A negation of any virtue attributable to politics, either leftist or rightist, invariably constructed upon ambition and self-interest. A veritable disenchantment with man in society. The certainty of the impossibility [sic] of lasting peace, always constructed on the fragile foundations of betrayal.

In this grey, value-free universe Homar’s Coriolanus, recast as a kind of corporate ‘Patton, who fails to adapt when the bugles no longer sound’ – an effect abetted by a production that summarily dismisses practically all of the battle

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scenes, leaving the hero bereft of purpose, while magnifying Coriolanus’ mother Volumnia, powerfully interpreted by Rosa Novell as what Juan Carlos Olivares in ABC (4 February 2002) called a ‘she-wolf among warriors and politicians’. The approach to Julius Caesar by the new artistic director of Teatre Lliure, Àlex Rigola, from a Catalan rendering by Salvador Oliva, was similar to the Pasqual production in both costume and set but went much further down the modernizing path by dispensing altogether with the togas which, it will be recalled, in an uneasy anachronism had allowed glimpses of business suits underneath, and by paring the action down to a robust two-part tragedy, titled, respectively, ‘Word’ and ‘War’ (in Catalan for the play’s Barcelona debut and, interestingly, in English for the play’s performances elsewhere) which, like the word ROMA, flicker luminously on the black walls of the set. The first part is an analysis of how the rhetoric of speeches – Portia’s stirring lament at her abandonment, the funeral orations over the corpse of Caesar, which is left on stage for a full hour before the interval – serves the most primary instincts and interests; the second part, beginning with the conspirators’ council, with Brutus and Cassius and the rest resembling what Jordi Llavina calls ‘a confab of Mafiosi’ (La Vanguardia, 27 November 2002), a study of how the monumentality and brutality of war can be condensed in a series of simple actions which, according to Juan Carlos Olivares in Avui (23 November 2002), are also ‘perfect both in meaning and aesthetic, like a haiku’. Characteristically, Rigola was alive to all the resources on which modern productions are able to draw: the liberal use of microphones – the power of the ‘word’ – evoked the Welles and Alpha-63 versions (see Chapter 5), whereas the black-and-white modern costumes, musical mélange of rock and classic (from The Doors’ ‘This Is the End’ to Wagner’s ‘Dance of the Walkyries’ – both irresistible references to Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘apocalyptic’ adaptation of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – and Swan Lake), and pistol-toting protagonists helped provoke the ‘cold passion’, which Eduardo Haro Tecglen writing in El País (21 November 2003) took to be the production’s key note. The success of the Rigola production, which started life in Catalan and in the metropolis Barcelona before working its way, in Spanish, around the rest of Spain’s provinces gave it an unexpected afterlife, no longer as a touchstone of the transition, to which many in the audience would be indifferent, but as an allusion to much larger and more insidious global developments where mass communication and armed conflict have entered into frightening and hitherto unexplored relations. For some of the most exuberant, and controversial, recent Spanish productions of Shakespeare, one only has to turn (once again) to the work of Calixto Bieito who, as director of Barcelona’s Teatre Romea, has turned his attentions to classics of both opera and theatre. Following what many critics regarded as an aesthetic hatchet job on A Masked Ball and Don Giovanni, he devoted part of the period 2002–2004 to ‘re-interpreting’ three of Shakespeare’s best known

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plays, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear – the third of them receiving its Catalan-language premiere. Bieito’s attitude to Shakespeare has, as we saw in Chapter 7, been unhampered by the reverence characterizing mainstream productions of his work in the period of the Transition. Explaining Macbeth to an audience of aficionados in Stratford-upon-Avon, he would aver that [Every production] has to be a new piece by a new writer. We changed the text all the time. The fifth act is my favourite. It is like the last days in the bunker. We gave Lady Macduff five children. Macbeth did not die at the end. He stays with all his ghosts. Death, we know, is for heroes. Always with Shakespeare you can do whatever you want. All you must do is surprise the audience. The text is not the limit. This is theatre. There is no limit. (The Guardian, 7 August 2004)

In actual practice, Bieito’s no-limits approach impinges not so much on the structure of the productions, which tends to maintain a certain fidelity to the text and, in general, the scene-order of the originals, as on his conception of the characters and on the spaces they inhabit, or on his resolution of different aspects of the action. For his Macbeth, which was rendered into Catalan by Miquel Desclot, Bieito relocated the action in an unspecifiedly modern epoch, most of it unfolding at the Macbeths’ kitschly Almodovaresque abode, with all of the main characters, including the hallowed Duncan, being re-imagined (not, it might be added, very originally) as a clique of trigger-happy, hardened mafiosi. In this valueless and also aesthetically ugly ambit, Lady Macbeth (Bieito’s wife, Roser Cami) was little more than a sensual and light-headed moll to a Macbeth (Mingo Rafòls), whom Michael Billington describes as ‘a muscular, shavenheaded, leather-jacketed gangster with more than a touch of Bruce Willis’. As well as Almodóvar (the interior décor), Fellini and Coppola, there were indeed shades of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction or Spanish director Alex de la Iglesia’s Perdita Durango in a production in which killing was as brutal as it was amusing – as in Banquo’s assassination with a polythene bag by a figure, the ubiquitous Ross, whose ‘autistic’ brother Seyton (Chantal Aimée) would be the play’s three witches, dressed as Coco the clown. But there was also certain poignancy in what Billington describes as the production’s main theme: the ‘central couple’s obsession with fertility’, an obsession that mingled yearning – the three (not five) children paddling in the Macbeths’ paddling-pool were not theirs but the Macduffs – with the instinct for ‘revenge’ on the toddlers and on their mother. The appearance of all the main characters, including the ‘ghost’ of Macbeth, at the end of the play singing Nick Cave’s ‘Death Is not the End’ was, as Marcos Ordóñez would observe in the cultural supplement of El País (9 March 2002), partly a disturbing epitaph and a familiar hymn to the ‘peculiar mixture of emotion and madness’ which is the keynote of the spectacle. Quite plausibly, it was also an anticipatory reference to the second production in the trilogy, Bieito’s English-language Hamlet with the Birmingham Repertory Theatre for the Edinburgh Festival in 2003. ‘Operation Macbeth

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Part 2’, critic Ordóñez would observe in El País, when the production moved back to the Romea two months later, an allusion to the fact that much of the play’s ‘aesthetic’ – the garish dress, the imitation leather upholstery, the party ambiance, with the scene now shifting to a sleazy cocktail bar called ‘The Palace’ where Horatio is reborn as an ivory-tickling chorus to the rest of the play – was all too familiar. Likewise the violence – brutal and gratuitous as in Ophelia’s rape by a shaven-headed Hamlet, or half-comic as in Polonius’s suffocation by a rolled up copy of Hello! magazine – was once again very close to the surface. Less respectful with the text of Hamlet than with Macbeth,3 Bieito and his dramaturge, Xavier Zuber, arguably took no more liberties than are customary in a modernizing tradition which, as Charles Spencer correctly observed in The Telegraph (22 August 2003), dates back to Marowitz. What Ordóñez identified as the production’s main themes, the corruption and disintegration of the family and, from Bieito’s own programme notes, ‘man’s anguish before death’, were, similarly, hardly likely to shock audiences. More scandalous were the, by now, familiar and even expected Bieito mannerisms: making explicit while appearing to revel in, what, in the original, is at best only merely implicit – the ‘abuse’ of Ophelia, the incestuous snogging with Gertrude (Diane Fletcher), a flighty reincarnation of Bieito’s Lady Macbeth – or importing material, mainly from film or popular music, intended to ‘clarify’, while problematizing, the meaning of the ‘object’ text, Claudius’ version of the Hollies hit ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He Was My Brother’ being a pointed, if crude, example. Similar ‘excesses’ would be wrought on King Lear (2004) which is the latest of Bieito’s Shakespeares. From a trimmed-down Catalan rendering of the First Folio version of the play by Joan Sellent, who was also responsible for the Castilian version performed later in Madrid, the production stood, in Maria Delgado’s words, ‘as a potent symbol of a theatrical culture unafraid to tackle works long perceived as untranslatable and unstageable’ (2006: 128). Bieito seemed to cite his own 1999 Grec production of Measure for Measure (see Chapter 7) by situating the action in a stark, floodlit stadium with 1980s ‘Eastern European’-costumed characters strutting the stage or occupying the plastic seats that were set in rows at the rear. The Tarantino-style violence was still very much on display – Goneril, for instance, would suffocate Regan with a plastic shopping bag before blowing her brains out with a revolver, whereas Edgar and Edmund would fight it out with chain-saws in the final act – although oddly the play’s potentially most gory moment, the blinding of Gloucester, was executed with the actors’ backs to the audience. Also evident were Bieito’s habitual pop-cultural references, as with Oswald’s ‘choral’ role as a track-suited DJ ‘accompanying’ the action with the appropriate tracks, a role that recalled that of Horatio in his earlier Hamlet. Equally to the fore, however, was Bieito’s peculiar ‘revision’ of the Shakespearean family romance, with hints of an incestuous relationship between José María Pou’s randy old Lear and an acquiescent Cordelia (Anna

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Ycobalzeta). Cordelia it is, however, who is the only character redeemed in a production that depicted Lear as a decrepit, lecherous and ‘sardonic’ old fool who gets his comeuppance by being made a destitute and the two elder sisters as fashion-conscious vamps, tormented by their own fading beauty and their over-charged attraction to versatile and irresistible Edmund, which would extend to their desperate attempts to sexually ‘arouse’ his mutilated dead body. A striking commentary on the breakdown of the family and also, as the grandstand seating arrangement at the back of the stage suggested, the ‘public’ flaunting of ‘private’ desires – the real significance of Polonius choking on Hello! thus hove into view – the production could also be said to enact what Delgado calls the ‘specularization of violence’ which, as the body bag containing the dead Cordelia recalled, carried an obvious reference to the current war in Iraq.

The New Austerity The visit of Peter Brook’s ‘multiracial’ La tragédie d’Hamlet to Barcelona in June 2002 was undoubtedly an inspiration for many Spanish companies lacking the budgets of the Lliure and the Romea but which discovered a kind of aesthetic rationale to the (already) economic necessity of sifting the text to extract the bare ‘essentials’ of the play. Although there have been voices who have balked at what one newspaper critic called ‘the obsession with putting Shakespeare on a diet’,4 or producers such as Miguel Narros who, from the very start, have insisted on the need to perform the whole text, however modishly different or ‘unfamiliar’ the mise-en-scène,5 the recent trend among modern Spanish producers around the country has been to reduce the plays as far as possible: focusing either on particular characters or on representative situations and in any case dispensing with elements that are seen as ‘decorative’ and so ‘superfluous’, or that impede the desired ‘tempo’ of the performance, the explicitness of its ‘relevance’ to contemporary reality. A few examples from contemporary production should suffice to show what, for want of a better phrase, I have called the ‘new austerity’. For a measure of how even ‘institutional’ performances eventually succumb not only to the pressures of the market but also to the no less powerful forces of emotional ‘relevance’ and socio-political reality,6 it is worth considering the recent productions by the Centro Andaluz de Teatro of Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Both these productions would be directed by Emilio Hernández, a former assistant director at the Centro Dramático Nacional to José Luis Gómez and Nuria Espert, whose theatrical roots lay in openly politicized work of underground companies during the latter period of the Franco regime. Despite his origins, Hernández has had no illusions as to the public’s threshold of tolerance and understanding of work outside the dramatic mainstream. ‘The public does not ask for what it does not know,’ he would declare bluntly in an interview for the Asturian theatre review La Ratonera (13 January 2005) – which

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does not mean that productions should be limited in their creative freedom or that the directors’ work is in any way banalized or should aim for ‘easy’ dramaturgical solutions. ’Theatre which ends at the proscenium,’ he would also state, ‘is a falsification of the very idea of the theatre’. As if to emphasize this ‘street-wise’ concept of the theatre, Hernández drew his inspiration for his staging of Othello from a piece of racist graffiti he claims to have seen in Seville, where the slogan ‘Menos muros’ [‘No more walls’] had been altered to read ‘Menos moros’ [‘No more Arabs’]. This knee-jerk reaction to the influx of immigrants from northern Africa, which has been a major source of social tension in Spain and other parts of Europe in the last decadeand-a-half, is especially galling in a country, and indeed a region (Andalusia), which owes much of its present identity to the presence of the Moors. Racism, the fear of the other, together with domestic violence (another blight that is still very much at the centre of social debates and legislative initiatives) as the product of jealousy and a misguided sense of personal ownership, were the inspiration for a production which, from its inception, set out quite deliberately to explore what could be interpreted as a present-day malaise. ‘Othello is a play which can be useful as a way of analysing the present,’ claimed the translator, the Granada-based author Luis García Montero, in the Andalusia edition of El País (16 January 2001). ‘When all we get are problems like impoverished uranium, mad cows or the nuclear submarine and the politicians do not do a thing, it seems to me that the people of the theatre should get involved in politics.’ García Montero it was who provided the script for a production that was set at some indeterminate time in the twentieth century and which, to highlight the indeterminacy, dispensed with all references to either Venice or Cyprus. The marginalization of the outsider, the abuse of women and the domination of the system by a handful of potentates who overlook the services of someone such as Othello as soon as he steps out of line, were themes conveyed by a mise-en-scène where the ‘exotic’, Eastern dimension was suggested both by the Arabic song sung by Othello at a party, the sound of the sea as a reminder of the perilous voyage undertaken by thousands of African immigrants and by the Persian carpets that festooned the stage and were gradually removed as Othello becomes more and more isolated. The use of revolvers to replace the daggers of Shakespeare’s play, Othello’s impressive modern military attire, Desdemona’s wedding gown and the portrayal of Gratiano, Ludovico and the Duke as champagne-swilling gangsters were the most memorable elements of a performance that Hernández had made as ‘contemporary’ as possible in what he would describe in El Mundo (2 May 2001) as a ‘Brechtian’ appeal to both scholars of Shakespeare and people (the vast majority) ‘who had not read a single one of his plays’. Hernández’s second Shakespeare for CAT, Antonio Onetti’s version of Romeo and Juliet, promised to build on elements already explored in Othello. ‘The confrontation between the two families,’ he would claim in El País

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(17 January 2003), ‘is simply a metaphor for a world divided in twain – something which, unfortunately, is more the case than ever’. What appealed to him was precisely the play’s capacity to transcend its immediate context to address the big, ‘universal’ questions (in this case, the division of the world into opposing blocs). Baz Luhrmann’s film Romeo + Juliet, which was cited throughout the production, was also complicated by the transformation of Luhrmann’s teenage graffiti-style ‘plus’ sign into a cross (Romeo x Julieta – Romeo ‘plus’/ ’times’/’for’ – i.e. ‘crazy about’ – Juliet?). The production sought to keep the essence of Shakespeare’s tragedy of forbidden love, while doing so in a language that was radically new, deliberately, perhaps modishly, designed to attract more youthful audiences, which are notoriously uninterested in stuffy, incomprehensible classics such as Shakespeare. Thus Hernández’s Romeo was depicted as a pleasure-seeking young man (actor Antonio Navarro was only 22 when he played the part) obsessed with rap, night-life and popping pills, whereas Juliet (Celia Vioque, then only 20) was portrayed as a ‘niña bien’ (upperset young woman, from a comfortable middle-class background), who nonetheless combined innocence, rebelliousness and a certain feminist streak. The ‘families’ were in reality a mélange of different urban tribes, whose hostility is explained by the fact that they resemble each other. Meanwhile, the fleshing out of ‘secondary’ characters like the ‘Tata’ – Shakespeare’s Nurse, who is given the production’s final speech in the tomb – and ‘Mercucho’ (Mercutio), who returns from the dead to offer a bitter commentary on the events that precipitate the tragedy, is one the adapters’ main departures in a text that strives to reproduce the vocabulary and cadences which might appeal to audiences unversed in the intricacies of Shakespeare’s plots and language. The other major departure from Shakespeare’s text is the decision to set the production not in Verona – or even Luhrmann’s ‘Verona Beach’ – but in modern-day Andalusia, with the adoption of unmistakeably southern Spanish accents and ambiences, from Mercucho’s heavily sibilant speech to the ‘chorus’, comprising four flamenco singer-dancers and the guitar score, composed by the living flamenco legend ‘Tomatito’, who had worked with Hernández and Onetti before on Madre Caballo [Mother Horse], Onetti’s adaptation of Brecht’s Mother Courage. The music and stylized violence made even more explicit the debt to Lorca’s Bodas de sangre [Blood Wedding] and to the haunting finality of the ‘Aquí hay dos bandos’ [‘Here there are two sides’] speech of the Mother in this most Andalusian, and yet hauntingly universal, of dramas. The play’s 14 actors, many of them novices, had been selected from more than 500 applicants, all of them from Andalusia. ‘The essence of the play,’ Hernández would state, ‘is living together, fusion. Especially now, when people want us to believe the world is divided into the axis of good and the axis of evil’. Flamenco, itself a highly complex and multi-faceted genre, and its ‘fusion’ with other styles such as hip-hop, rap, grunge and punk, was the production’s comment on Andalusia’s ambiguous status at the heart of ‘deep’ Spain and yet, historically, ever alert to other styles and other cultures.

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Among the plethora of different Shakespeares performed in modern Spain, Romeo and Juliet has proved particularly popular. The Buhrmann ‘pop’ version and also, plausibly, the CAT Romeo x Julieta may have been the inspiration for the Galician company Teatro de Noroeste’s recent production of the play. Two bare workmen’s scaffolds and a group of modern-dress, predominantly teenage actors served to re-present Renaissance Verona and the opposing clans of Montagues and Capulets. As the programme would put it: As the youth-cult goes from strength to strength, [and] when being young becomes a kind of value in itself, Teatro de Noroeste presents Romeo and Juliet, where it casts an inquisitive eye on that age-old phenomenon: being young.

The ‘youth cult’, which involved a group of white, casually dressed teenagers, whose athleticism on the scaffolding belied their immersion in the designerdrug, beer-from-a-bottle subculture that has characterized the so-called democracy generation of children born after the dictatorship, also entailed the suppression of virtually all of the play’s elder characters. In this updated Westside Story version, director Eduardo Alonso’s only concession to adulthood, significantly in the play’s ‘final and fatal denouement’, is the supermarket trolley-pushing beggar woman (Luma Gómez) who performs the role of the Chorus. For the rest, the production was dominated by the frenetic action of the adolescent actors in a hard-hitting version of the tragedy that the director has summarized as follows: ‘Violent pleasure [the strongly physical attraction between the protagonists] is followed by a violent end, with death coming at the height of ecstasy, like gunpowder and fire, which are extinguished by a kiss’. Romeo’s final gunshot to the head was a fitting end to a production which, by restricting the wider, familial context to mere allusion, and by erasing the figure of the elder counsellor, whether it be the Nurse or Friar Lawrence, placed the emphasis on hedonistic pleasure-seeking and sacrificed over-determination for a celebration of the here and now. The ‘here and now’ would be the quarry of another Galician production from the 2000s, the Centro Dramático Galego’s 2004 Richard III. If the stakes of producing one of the most widely performed of Shakespeare’s historical tragedies were already high, director Manuel Guede decided to up the ante by making the production a question of regional pride. ‘To accept the challenge here and now,’ he would write in the programme notes for the production, after a check-list of all the major Richards to have graced the page and screen, ‘means to believe, without the slightest rashness, in the energy of the Galician theatre trade, to be confident of carrying it through and to be convinced that all who are part of the spectacle will dishonour neither Shakespeare nor our own theatre’. Guede’s confidence in the company’s ‘energy’ was such that, as well as cutting the cast down to a mere 15 actors, with many of them doubling up to perform more than one role,7 he brashly pushed the play’s time-frame forward

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Figure 8.1 Xosé Manuel Oliveira as ‘Führer’ in the CDG’s 2004 production of Ricardo III (Richard III), directed by Manuel Guede for the Centro Dramático Galego. (Photo courtesy of the Centro Dramático Galego-Axencia Galega das Industrias Culturais.)

to the late 1930s and the rise of fascism. Like the Ian McKellen film adaptation, which served as possible (if unacknowledged) inspiration,8 Guede thus assumed that certain scenes and behaviours could only be explained ‘from the point of view of the present’. In order to alert the audience to the possible status of the text as an indictment of totalitarianism as well as portraying Richard (Xosé Manuel Oliveira) as a great-coated Hitler, the production employed a set, designed by Francisco Oti, which as Guede would clarify in El Mundo (28 June 2005), was meant to resemble a ‘sewer’, which is the natural shelter and base for Richard’s rise to supremacy. The historical allusions to Nazism were not allowed to obscure the production’s rootedness in a specifically Spanish linguistic context. Unlike the Bieito King Lear, for example, the text was not translated ‘back’ into Spanish when the production was taken on tour to different parts of the country, including the metropolis Madrid. ‘If we had translated it,’ claimed Guede, ‘it would have jarred on the ear. Neither the silences nor the expressions would be the same’. Fidelity to the group’s working language, which is Galician, did not preclude the use of supertitles where technically feasible – a graphic reminder, as if it were needed, of the ‘politics’ of language use in which Shakespeare has become inevitably enmeshed.

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Groups such as Noroeste and the Centro Dramático Galego have, as we saw in the last chapter, helped give Shakespeare a currency and an urgency in Galicia that has been lacking in other communities with their own language, such as the Basque Country. This may be what has attracted non-Galician producers such as Helena Pimenta to produce Galician versions of the play for local companies, such as her 2006 staging of Macbeth for the Ourense-based Sarabela company, a small independent theatre company that turned professional in 1990. Sarabela’s artistic director, Ánxeles Cuña, has described the company’s aims as those of ‘making good theatre, a theatre which is alive, risky and contemporary, coherent, rigorous, self-critical, full of responsibility, resistant’ (www.sarabelateatro.com). Contemporary coherence was clearly a desideratum in their production of Macbeth. As well as the inevitable allure of a play involving witches and witchcraft for a Galician audience, the production stressed what, for Camilo Franco in La Voz de Galicia (23 July 2006), is a permanent feature of Galician politics, by bringing into a play ‘the emotional imbalance . . . and multifaceted personality of someone who ends up confusing the exercise of power with something that actually belongs to them’. One day before, in the same newspaper, Xosé Carlos Caneiro had credited Pimenta’s reading of the play with an ‘epic touch’, which eschewed the ‘modernistic pseudo-originality which has been the death-knell to the classics’. Typically of her work on the classics, the production was also hyperbolically hailed as ‘exuberant in its forms, both effective and full of effect’, the strength and vitality of the production being abetted by ‘a superb text, which highly emotional and electrifyingly invigorating for our poor, worn-out hearts’. Fernando Dacosta was also saluted as producing a magnificent interpretation of the leading character, described as ‘the best of recent Macbeths’. The bulk of Pimenta’s work has, as we have seen, been in Spanish, at the head of the Basque Ur Teatro troupe. After her The Tempest (2004) which, once again, Pimenta chose to premiere outside the capital Madrid,9 Ur has recently celebrated its twentieth anniversary with the cinematic production of another heavily under-performed and little known comedy, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (2007). Set in the 1920s, the production drew on all of the stereotypes of the period – Charleston, music-hall, Al Jolson look-alikes – to underscore the vacuously escapist nature of the plot, as well as the cynicism of its central characters. The ‘frivolous’ context of the play, which presents a comfortably-off social set ‘whose only occupation is courtship’ and whose dedication to all manner of hedonistic pastime is a way of ‘escaping their responsibilities’ was, Pimenta would argue in El País (28 October 2007), ideally conveyed by its relocation in a time-zone and a social clique which, in its determination to evade the suffering of the First World War, experiences ‘the same fears we are feeling today’, fears that prompt us to ‘consume with gay abandon and which bring us face to face with the nature of modern man’. The set, designed by company actor José Tomé together with Pedro Galván blended ‘conventional’ court and forest scenographies with post-modern reflecting mirrors and

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a discotheque floor which changed colour under foot. This, as Gordon Craig would note in Whispers (1 March 2008), gave a kind of fantastic quality to a production, which was also distinguished by its frenetic tempo and slick and unobtrusive scene-changes: Helena Pimenta seems to have taken [Harold] Bloom’s advice and staged the play as a parodic farce by stressing the laughable elements of the heroes’ behaviour and also by making them the butt of the jokes, invectives and reproaches of the other characters. [. . .] That said, there is still a space for introspection, for the deep analysis of feelings and states of mind, for violent antitheses and for the game of rhetoric, for poetry, in short, all of which gives the actors splendid opportunities for proving their worth, opportunities they never fail to take, at times to excellent effect. [. . .] The outcome is a show which is highly entertaining, fresh, lacking in any kind of solemnity and where the action gallops along to its conclusion, leaving the spectator quite out of breath, an astonished witness to the trials and tribulations of the characters.

Pimenta’s incursions into early Shakespearean comedy aside, it is the ‘mature’ plays that have continued to spark the greatest interest among contemporary playgoers. One of the most eagerly anticipated productions of the 2000s, comparable to the Bieito King Lear, was without doubt Lluís Pasqual’s much-trumpeted return to Shakespeare in 2006 with his double bill of Hamlet and The Tempest for the Arriaga Theatre in Bilbao. Although inevitable comparisons were drawn with Ariane Mnouchkine’s yoking of Twelfth Night, Richard II and I Henry IV for the Théâtre du Soleil in the 1980s, it was clear from the beginning that Pasqual’s aims were both more modest and yet more focused. Despite appearances, the two plays could, he would suggest in La Vanguardia (3 July 2006), be seen as ‘two sides of the same coin’: Hamlet or the inevitability of revenge, The Tempest or the gratuitousness of forgiving. Anxious as ever to relate the plays to the present, Pasqual went even further, discovering what he calls ‘two huge complementary metaphors on the extent of armed violence contained under the umbrella term, terrorism’ – a bold assertion in such a troubled milieu as the Basque Country. Although this militaristic reading, which was reinforced in the case of Hamlet by the presence of guards armed with submachine guns and bullet-proof jackets or a ghost in military fatigues who hands Hamlet the revolver to carry out his revenge, may be a superficial reaction to the proposal, Pasqual studiously avoided any topicality by setting his scene in a bare space whose sole reference point was a long diagonal staircase with a gangway linking it to the pit against a wide backdrop of black gauze and taffeta. If the set designed by Paco Azorín suppressed all symbols of power and place, the absence of rhetoric in both gesture and speech focused the audience’s attention on what Joan-Anton Benach in La Vanguardia (3 July 2006) would highlight as the production’s chief merit: the essential ‘facts’ of the play and of each of the main characters. In the case of Hamlet (Eduardo Fernández),

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Pasqual’s object was to de-Romanticize the figure of the Prince who, faced with the sobriety of Helio Pedregal’s Claudius and the weak conformity of Gertrude, played by the great cinema actress Marisa Paredes, for whom the production marked a long-awaited return to the stage, but who in Benach’s words, was more ‘angry than grief-stricken’. Full of ‘method’-like tics, a man who stammers, as well as hesitates, grows when he acts the fool or sinks into a torpid languor when he sends Ophelia to the nunnery or speaks the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy cigarette in hand, Hamlet was portrayed as a modern-day ‘angry young man’, who was yet bereft of the ‘inner’ man critics have come to expect and agonize about. The links with The Tempest, mentioned above, were reinforced by the presence of the same set, with the slight modification of several wooden pallets being scattered randomly around and the replacement of the black backdrop with a moveable curtain that constantly changed colour or was illuminated by sudden flashes of lighting, as in the spectacular opening storm scene. The narrow confines of the set reinforced what one critic saw as the ‘island-laboratory’ effect of a stage, where Prospero (Francesc Orella) as director explored the nature of his own desires, Miranda’s (Rebeca Valls) discovery of love, the magical manoeuvres of Ariel (Anna Lizarán) and the disorientation and conversion of the usurpers. A ‘storm in a teacup’ another reviewer dubbed this constricted view of the play while the appearance of an armed commando – forcing the militaristic reading cited above – and Prospero’s occasional ‘retreat’ from the stage to the front rows of the stalls to observe the action were viewed as typical directorial touches, which reflected the experimental and visionary nature of what Francesc Massip, writing in Avui (3 July 2006), wrongly identified as Shakespeare’s last play. Unexpectedly for many, the comedy in the play shifted from the usual source (a surprisingly subdued Trinculo, Stephano and their capers with Caliban) to the Prospero-Ariel pairing. The initial ‘disagreeable’ surprise of seeing an Ariel presented as what María José Ragué (El Mundo, 4 July 2006) would call ‘a flying, leaping dwarf who, being air, speaks as if the air were being filtered through her teeth’, turned to raptures at this ‘little angel . . . who gives a prodigious turn to each of the situations in which she intervenes, thanks to her versatility, richness of nuances and the actor’s comic quality’. The recent production of King Lear by the Centro Dramático Nacional, directed by Gerardo Vera from a translation by Juan Mayorga, confirmed the enduring appeal of the ‘classics’ of Shakespeare’s repertoire [see front cover image]. As a designer as well as a director, Vera had often been distinguished by a certain ‘operatic’ mannerism, which sees the production as a kind of ‘total’ fusion of different media (costume, scenery, lighting, etc.) – often at the expense of the meaning of the plays he has produced. His Lear, in this respect, was unusually austere; leaving aside the trappings that had blighted previous productions of the CDN, the action developed on a stage as ‘dark as a wolves den’, according to the critic in La Razón (14 March 2008), with a minimum of suggestive props (such as Lear’s padded leather armchair) and synecdochic

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stage effects, such as the neon arch in the court scenes, or the fallen telegraph post and blizzard which evoke Lear’s bewilderment and disorientation on the heath. Although the production did involve some 23 actors – all modern-dressed, mainly clad in suits or blue dresses to convey the political context of the family tragedy – these were merely backdrop to the struggles between Lear, powerfully performed by the Argentinian actor Alfredo Alcón, Goneril (Carme Elias) and Regan (Cristina Marcos), the Fool (Luis Bermejo) and Edmond (Jesús Noguero). Such was Vera’s concern with narrative economy that the battle scenes were presented on video while the running time was cut to an endurable two-and-a-half hours to maintain the rhythm and awful inevitability of a production described in the programme as ‘synthetic and essential, . . . fiercely present-day’. How ‘present-day’ Spanish productions of Shakespeare will continue to be is obviously a matter of conjecture.10 The ‘presentist’ stance that has dominated recent productions will naturally be conditioned not only by the urgency and ‘universality’ of the issues they address but also, and less glamorously, by the material necessity of tailoring productions to the prevailing economic conditions. Until Spain is able to extract itself from one of its worst economic crises since the turn of the nineteenth century, it is unlikely that we will see a repetition of the big-time Shakespeare of the early transitional years. One of the fascinating and also encouraging signs is how even ‘national’ productions such as the Vera King Lear seem to be taking their cue from the subsidy-starved, yet continuously inventive private and/or provincial companies which, as I hope to have shown, have done so much to reinvent Shakespeare for modern times.

Notes

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Among the other productions on tour were María Ruiz’s Macbeth, Eduardo Vasco’s Hamlet, Emilio Hernández’s Los tarantos (based on Romeo and Juliet), Denis Rafter’s Twelfth Night and two distinct versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Juan Pastor and the Extremadura-based Guirigay theatre company. See my comparison of Shakespeare’s fortunes in Spain and Lope de Vega’s fortunes in the United Kingdom in Gregor (2005). El País (19 March 1993). For a discussion of this earlier ‘outbreak’, see Portillo (2000). See, for instance, J. M. González (2002: 7) who regards Spain’s hermeticism as having preserved Shakespeare from being used as a ‘commodity’ in the Spanish cultural market. For Shakespeare’s early reception in Germany, see Williams (2004). Jusserand (1899) remains a solid source of reference for the spread of Shakespeare in France. See also Pemble (2005) for a more upbeat, modernized account. For an account of the Spanish Shakespeare ‘canon’ and its relation to the kind of plays performed in other European countries up to 1916, see Pujante (2008c). Asking what, outside of art, Spain had done to ‘enlarge the mind and pull mankind a few steps up the hill’ towards civilization, Kenneth Clark would famously answer: ‘Don Quixote, the Great Saints, the Jesuits in South America? Otherwise she has simply remained Spain. . . . ’ (1999: 10).

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La república de las mujeres [The Republic of Women], one of the 300 or so of these one-act farces that he is purported to have written. The three different manuscripts of the translation as well as the published version of 1900 indicate that this is a rendering from a French translation of an ‘English tragedy’, without naming the author. The first published version of Ducis’s Hamlet, which differs slightly from the text of the play first performed in September 1769, would undergo still more revisions as Ducis sought to adapt it to changing aesthetic and political circumstances. The so-called definitive version of 1809 is actually a composite of the modifications made in the period between the play’s first publication in 1770, the brief revival in 1787 (with the actor Lerive in the main role) and the more lasting

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version of 1803 (with the great Talma as Hamlet). Nor would the latter be the absolutely ‘definitive’ text, as Ducis would continue to tinker with the play for successive editions published up to, and even after, his death in 1816. On the history of these editions see Golder (1992: 61–64). Similarly, although the box-office receipts recorded for Hamleto were a long way from the 7450 reales estimated as the maximum for so-called comedias de teatro (or serious drama) at the Corral del Príncipe in the period and fell off sharply after the play’s premiere (from 5347 reales on the first night and 3711 on the second to 2397 on the fifth and a paltry 1076 on the second night of the play’s revival), they were by no means inferior to those of most other productions in the same season and, on average, even surpassed those of theoretically better-known work such as Calderón’s El tetrarca de Jerusalén [The Tetrarch of Jerusalem] or Beaumarchais’ Eugénie (Andioc and Coulon 1996: 17, 312–313). The next country was Italy in 1774, after which the play seems to have been performed in Russia, the Netherlands and Poland. Only a few passages from Hamlet, ‘sagaciously adapted by Ducis, and others reworked and amended by Voltaire’, are considered appropriate. A so-called Life of Shakespeare written under the pseudonym ‘Inarco Celenio’ and heavily indebted to Nicholas Rowe. In fact, Moratín’s rendering of Hamlet would not be performed until 2004 at the Almagro Classical Theatre Festival. On use of the text for performance, see Pujante (2008a). This does not necessarily imply that the genre pleased everyone, and the last two decades of the century saw a succession of attempts by the government to regulate things such as the behaviour of spectators (a constant headache for the authorities), the formation of the companies, the role of the censor and, most crucially of all, the kind of plays that were considered fit for performance. A particular concern of the legislators in the period was the need to encourage home-grown talent to produce the more orthodoxly classical drama Luzán had been defending – a tall order given the enduring popularity of Golden Age dramatists, especially Calderón, and the failure of a truly ‘classical’ tradition in Spain. In 1799 the government of Charles IV approved the ‘idea for the reform of the public theatres of Madrid’ presented by the professor of poetics and theatre censor Santos Díez González, which among other things contemplated the publication of the new plays produced in the capital ‘to the greater glory of [their] authors and the honour of Spanish dramatic poetry’ (Lafarga 1989: 24). A 6-volume collection of these plays was printed during 1800–1801 under the title Teatro Nuevo Español [New Spanish Theatre]. In terms of genre there was a preponderance of comedies (16), followed at some distance by tragedies (4), ‘dramas’ (3), pastoral drama (1), comic opera (1), melodrama (1) as well as two unspecified pieces. Although the translation is normally attributed to one ‘Teodoro de la Calle’ (or ‘Teodoro de Lacalle’), and indeed this is the name that appears on most editions of the play, it now seems clear that Carnerero, who happened to have been Isidoro Máiquez’s guide in Paris, often used it as a pseudonym; see Cano 1992: 17–24 and the debate on De la Calle/Carnerero’s skills as a translator in the Diario de Madrid between 19 November and 6 December 1802. (I am grateful to Jesús Tronch for bringing this debate to my attention.)

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Ducis’ other Shakespeares, all of them written in the two decades after Hamlet, were Roméo et Juliette (1772), Le roi Lear (1783), Macbeth (1784) and Jeans sans Terre (1791). Here another outsider, this time of Jewish origin, the Tetrarch of Jerusalem is obsessed with the (totally unfounded) idea of his wife’s infidelity and ends up killing her in the sight of her (non-existent) lover, the Roman emperor Octavian. The play possesses its own Iago-figure, or agent provocateur, in the shape of the Tetrarch’s apparently loyal soldier Ptolomeo. The chief difference is that the Tetrarch’s suspicions are, in a sense, already in place, and Ptolomeo’s role restricted to that of leading Octavian to the room where the Tetrarch has his wife incarcerated – not, it must be said, to spite his general, but to secure the release of his own sweetheart Libia. The Tetrarch is jealous because . . . he is jealous, and the play serves as a warning against what its title announces to be the world’s greatest monster – as well as delighting in the machinations of tragic destiny by which the oracle’s words to Mariene (her own death at the hands of the ‘monster’ and the Tetrarch’s murder of that which he prizes most dearly) are, by somewhat roundabout means, confirmed. Carnerero obviously felt differently and, in one of his rare deviations from the object text, actually dared to append a scene to the end of Act II in which ‘Pésaro’ reveals all in a soliloquy: he is in love with ‘Edelmira’. All other motives (envy, demotion, suspected cuckoldry) are discarded. For an extended discussion of the tragedy and its translation, see Gregor (2002). Hedging his bets perhaps, Ducis also appended an alternative happy ending to the 1793 edition of the play, in which Othello’s hand is halted by the entrance of the other characters, although there is no evidence to suggest that it was ever performed in France or that Carnerero rendered it into Spanish. The durable nature of such prejudices, kept up by such influential English Shakespeareans as Dr Johnson and Coleridge, is evidenced in the work of a more ‘enlightened’ modern critic, A.C. Bradley: ‘If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a fellowcountryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner with somewhat less certainty.’ (1981: 157, n. 2). Carnerero thus uses ‘Libia’ [‘Lybia’] to ‘translate’ Ducis’ typically wordy and purposefully vague ‘ce climat . . . que vous me reprochez’ [‘the land you reproach me with’] or ‘les bords africains’ [‘the African shores’].

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For a discussion of the broader cultural implications of a play which appropriates ‘Shakespeare the icon, not simply Shakespeare the body of dramatic works’, see Calvo (2008: 109-–110). By contrast, the Teatro de la Cruz, which clung on to its traditional end-piece of ‘tonadilla, sainete y bolero’ (or fandango) and the theatres in the rest of Spain not occupied by the Bonapartian forces, showed that popular ‘taste’, already embittered by the horrors of the war and the purge which that followed, was perhaps

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more anxious than before for the established repertoire of Spanish plays, including those belonging to the much-maligned ‘baroque’ or ‘Golden’ age. Böhl von Faber’s ‘translation’ of Schlegel, entitled ‘Reflexiones de Schlegel sobre el teatro, traducidas del Alemán’ [Schlegel’s Reflections on Drama, Translated from the German], would later be published in his Vindicaciones de Calderón (1820). It is to the earlier, unpaginated newspaper article that I will be referring here. As early as 1802, responding to the recent run of performances of Otelo in Madrid, the anonymous reviewer of the normally pro-Enlightenment Memorial Literario had complained that, ‘according to our inviolable custom, this tragedy has not come straight from its native soil, but through the custom-house of the Pyrenees’ (Pujante & and Campillo 2007: 54). Such a view rested, as Guillermo Carnero has shown (1997: 237-–238), on a whole string of postulates, both political and aesthetic, which were radically opposed to the Enlightenment: the assumption of a peculiar national character, epitomized by a seigniorial concept of honour, fanatical religiousness, extreme patriotism, and hatred of anything foreign; the notion of a ‘true’ enlightenment, embodied in the ideals of the old regime, as opposed to the ‘false’ enlightenment, exported by France and the Napoleonic government; the revelation of the national character in the ‘popular’ uprising against Napoleon; the need to reproduce the forms of political organization of the seventeenth century as the highpoint of Spain’s splendour; the essentially conservative nature of Spanish politics, religion, customs and literature versus the inappropriateness of ‘modern’, foreign-inspired experiments such as those tried out at Cadiz; the natural opposition to the ‘evil empire’ and centre of libertinage, France; the insidious nature of the French influence; the identification of liberalism with ‘afrancesamiento’ and necessary collusion with the enemy; the designation of the defence of neoclassical precepts as a political crime. According to critic and dramatist Juan Eugenio Hartzenbusch, in the seasons 1829-–1830 and 1830–-1831, right at the end of Ferdinand’s rule, a paltry seven original plays were performed in Madrid’s two theatres, the Príncipe and the Cruz: ‘three loas, a tragedy, a comedy, a harrowing drama [drama patibulario] and a rollicking farce [comedión] about Moors and Christians’ (cited in Peers, Edgar Allison (1954), Historia del movimiento romántico español, José M. Gimeno (trans.), Madrid: Gredos: 346). The play begins after the death of Teobaldo (Tybalt) and Romeo’s banishment, and simply relates all previous incidents, such as the lovers’ first encounter, the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, and so on. But not until the 1826 revival of the play, with Carlos Latorre in the main role and Shakespeare now a familiar quantity among cultivated circles. I shall be quoting from the second of these versions. Titles like Otelo, o il moro di Valencia (1874), ¡Otello, o il moro de Magnesia! (1877) or Otel-lo, o il moro di Sarrià (1883), all of them ‘inspired’ by popular contemporary productions of Othello by visiting Italian companies. The fact that the 1830 production of El Caliche de Malacena for the Teatro Santa Cruz in Barcelona starred Nicanor Puchol, who had played the ‘straight’ Otelo a few months before at the same venue, surely reinforced the effect of the parody as a kind of complement to the original.

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Many of Romea’s ideas on acting are contained in Idea general del arte de teatro [General ideas on the art of the theatre] (1858), one of a number of such tracts published in the mid-nineteenth century. See Rubio (1988). ‘Being encouraged to follow the path of truth, I devoted myself to study with all the confidence and ardour of he who, like myself, worships the art he practises. The fruit of that study are my present convictions that “art is truth”, and so deeply are they rooted in me that I not only put them into practice but disseminate and teach them.’ (Cited in Rubio 1988: 274–275)

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For a consideration of the differences between Shakespeare’s ‘historical drama’, Ducis’s ‘sentimental tragedy’ and Díaz’s ‘Romantic melodrama’, see Gies (2007). See Jones and Wahrman (2002), on the broader cultural context of these ideals. There is an obvious difference from the way the Shakespeare ‘myth’ was being exploited in contemporary England, where a flurry of plays starring Shakespeare, including the English translation of Duval’s Shakespeare Amoureux, sated a need to know the man ‘behind’ works which were taken as read. As James W. Nichols puts it: All of them indicate clearly the unique position [Shakespeare] had come to occupy among English dramatists, and the familiarity with which both his characters and plots are treated indicates that dramatists expected them to be quite familiar to their audiences – a familiarity they could have presumed with no other body of work save the Bible. (1963: 32)

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Such a familiarity could not be assumed in Spain, where ‘Shakespeare’ was not so much a body of works as a memorable character who also happened to be an author. On the history of the author as character in Western literature, see the essays in Franssen and Hoenselaars (1999). Needless to say, no sexual impropriety is suggested in the relationship. His father, José, was a celebrated actor and also director, whereas his brothers, Andrés and Victorino were also connected to the stage; Manuel himself would marry a niece of Isidoro Máiquez. As Jonathan Bate has argued (1997: 257), there is a distinctly ‘Elizabethan’ residue to the word ‘conscience’ that denotes consciousness or self-awareness. It is the latter, rather than simply Hamlet’s conscience, which distinguishes him from the traditional avenger: When alone on stage, reflecting on his own situation, he seems to embody the very nature of human being; it is consciousness that forms his sense of self, his ‘character’, and in so doing makes it agonizingly difficult for him to perform the action that is demanded of him.

8

There was, as Par observes (1936b: 9), a tendency to oversimplify the texts, cut unwieldy scenes or shift them from one part of the play to another – not something which would surprise even a modern audience.

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As well as Shakespeare, the repertoires of both Ristori and Rossi included many classical pieces from Greek and Roman tragedy, as well as a version of Calderón’s classic La vida es sueño [Life is a Dream], which Rossi produced in a gala performance for Queen Isabella, shortly before her death, at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid in 1868. For an account of the impact of the Italian companies in late 19th-century Barcelona, see Puigdomènech (1998). Compare the response to ‘immigrant’ performances with their shattering of ‘the moral decorum and emotional gentility of late nineteenth-century Shakespeare’ in Victorian England, as described by Jane Moody (in Marshall and Poole 2003: 99–118). Thus, Cassio’s drunken spree and all of the events surrounding the landing in Cyprus, including Desdemona’s lewd exchange with Iago, are omitted. The same fate befalls the character of Bianca; however, to provide as much ocular proof as possible, Retés has Othello witness the death of Cassio skulking in some nearby bushes (a hiding place which, inexplicably, does not allow him to see the death of Rodrigo and therefore to rumble Iago). In a touch that is reminiscent of Ducis’s version, Retés suggests Desdemona’s regret at having married the Moor, although the latter is reconverted into a devout Christian. Coello also expunges several of Ducis’s additions such as the false attribution of Hamlet’s ‘madness’ to his supposed rejection by Ophelia and the latter’s joy when Claudius and Gertrude consent to their relationship. These wholly source-oriented, prose renderings of the plays were never intended for performance, although it is probably accurate to say that, by expanding readers’ knowledge of Shakespeare’s texts, they also encouraged producers and dramaturges to at least give a ‘sense’ of the original.

Chapter 4 1

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Significantly, all three were novelists; none of them was a professional politician or had been actively involved in the conflict in Cuba. Luis Granjel (1973: 94–95) has linked the influx of foreign thought and literary practices to the general experience of ‘transit’, both social and cultural, throughout Europe. French was the medium in which the Generation of the Disaster seem first to have encountered both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whereas the French and Russian novel and Scandinavian drama provided the texts which ‘proclaimed whole new ideologies of political and social redemption’. The ‘teatro por horas’ system had been adopted at the Apolo, the Zarzuela, the Eslava, the Novedades, the Moderno, the Cómico, the Recoletos, the Felipe, the Romea, the Maravillas and the Eldorado. As Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto (Marquis of Valmar) would put it a year later, if drama ‘lives off passion and action, and requires of its characters nothing so much as strength, clarity, determination of impulse and mettle’, these qualities are ‘found wanting’ in Hamlet (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 368). Significantly, Sagasta’s Liberal-Fusionist party would return to power just two years after the conflict. For a more detailed analysis of Gual’s approach to production, see Salvat (1980) as well as Gual’s own memoirs (1960).

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A possibility suggested by Hormigón (2004) who nonetheless views the production of the Shrew and project of the ‘artistic theatre’ as a whole as crippled by what he calls its deliberately ‘minority’ status and the elitism of its agenda. According to Enrique Gómez in Época (cited in Reyero 1980: 30). The ruling star system, by which productions were reduced to mere vehicles for the talents of the leading actor or actress, would be the catalyst for Ortega y Gasset’s attack on the Ermete Novelli interpretation of Shylock in 1910 at the Teatro Lara: ‘If Antonio, Portia, Bassanio and Jessica do not enter the realm of our perception, the moneylender will become for us no more than a shaggy old dog that barks at passers-by from his kennel.’ (Pujante and Campillo 2007: 405; for a discussion of Ortega’s critique, published in El Imparcial, 14 July 1910, see Pujante 2008b). Although not included in the initial decree, the staging of theatre was added in December 1931, where together with the foundation of a self-consciously popular ‘People’s Theatre’, there was also a provision for a puppet theatre or retablo de fantoches, as it was also known. As the writer Ramón J. Sender would put it in 1932: The country and the factories will eventually prove triumphant and end up educating the students and the teachers, the literary societies and the newspapers. It is absurd to swim against the tide, sending decadent little theatres to the villages which can do theatre as well as Castilblanco [the town in Extremadura where a working-class peasant protest against the militarised police force, the Civil Guard, would end in the lynching of 4 guards]. Against the hesitant, half-hearted and degraded culture of bourgeois spiritualism, the new facts of life are gaining more and more ground. (Cited in Huertas Vázquez 1988: 133)

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It is perhaps significant that the play that provides the reference point for Lorca’s most radical venture in ‘unperformability’, El público, was being staged around the same time at another theatre in Madrid, the commercial Teatro Victoria. Compare Luis Araquistain’s lament in La batalla teatral [The Battle of the Theatres] (1930) to the effect that ‘that being, the stage director, who in all the world is the life and soul of any company, is virtually unknown in Spain’. (Cited in Rubio 2004: 83)

Chapter 5 1

Despite Entralgo’s strictures, there were no hard and fast criteria for establishing which works were suitable, although authors and directors were either canny or ambitious enough to know what was likely to be considered acceptable for either publication or performance, or, even better, both. César Oliva (1989: 83) has summarized what these unwritten criteria involved: 1. Implicit or explicit criteria in the Roman Index. 2. Criticism of the ideology or practice of the regime. 3. Public morality.

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4. 5. 6. 7.

Clashes with the assumptions of nationalist historiography. Criticism of the civil order. Apologies for non-authoritarian or Marxist ideologies. The prohibition on principle of any work opposed or hostile to the regime. To these unwritten rules should be added the guidelines of the Church with regard to censorable subject-matter:

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2. 3.

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Sexual morals, interpreted as the prohibition of the freedom of expression which in some way involved an offence against decency and good behaviour in everything related to the sixth commandment and, closely connected with such morals, the omission of references to abortion, homosexuality and divorce. Political opinions in the sense described above. Use of language considered indecent, provocative or inappropriate to the good manners which should preside over the conduct of persons who consider themselves decent. Finally, religion as an institution or hierarchy, the repository of all the godly, human values which inspire ideal human conduct. (Oliva 2002: 143)

Although censorship would evolve during the Franco regime and, as we shall see, gravitate towards a greater tolerance of the work submitted, it was constantly marked by its somewhat arbitrary nature. That arbitrariness was, as Abellán has remarked (1980: 52), its greatest weapon insofar as ‘its effectiveness was a function of its being so piecemeal, that is, its being a discretional and at the same time vindictive instrument in the hands of a political power machine’. The association of Marxism with mediocrity was a common ploy by which theatre commentators and practitioners in the 1940s and 1950s distanced themselves from what they considered the ‘dirty’ realism of the first half of the century while implying the artistic (as well as ideological) superiority of the new repertoires. On the Nazi appropriation of the theatre, and especially Shakespeare, see Hortmann (1998: 112–118) and Symington (2005). As Luca de Tena was to put it a decade or so after the premiere of his 1942 Macbeth: The general acceptance [of the director] is a sign of the maturity of theatre as a form. It is a conquest of the times, a social improvement, one rung further up the cultural ladder. [. . .] Free from the sacred authority of the author, the directors have felt in Shakespeare, in Aeschylus or in Calderón the full force of their desire to renovate. And very often they have been able to bring them closer to the tastes of a modern-day public . . . who are thus given a full view of [drama’s] most permanent models, which had been virtually relegated to their literary dimension or to serve as illustration in the classroom, without fulfilling their true educational potential, their full capacity to stand as the norm or to suggest things. (1952a: 39)

5

The play text also omitted the play’s final speech, presumably on the grounds that Malcolm’s plans to recall ‘our exiled friends abroad/That fled the snares of watchful tyranny’ could be construed as a reference to Franco’s own persecutions.

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González Ruiz drew regularly on Cambridge editions of the plays. The change of artistic direction coincided with the shift of responsibility for the ‘national’ theatres from the Ministry of Education to the Ministry of Information and Tourism. Tamayo’s chief Shakespearean success in the decade of 1950, Julius Caesar (1955), was staged away from the Español and the capital, at the spectacular Roman theatre in Mérida (Extremadura) as part of the town’s annual classical theatre festival. The vagueness of the limitations imposed (‘respect for the truth and morality; obedience to the Principles of the National Movement Act and other fundamental laws; the demands of national defence, security of State and the rule of domestic public order and foreign peace; the respect which is due to the institutions and persons in the critique of political and administrative action; the independence of the courts and the safeguard of intimacy, personal and family honour’) did nothing to reduce the arbitrariness of the interventions of the censor. See Adolfo Marsillach’s wry memoirs of how, on the night of the dress rehearsal, two functionaries would appear and, after the reverential salutations of the manager and stage director, would occupy their privileged stalls next to the stage. [. . .] The functionaries would immediately engage their different tasks: one looked closely at what was happening on stage, while the other did not remove his eyes from the page while the actors interpreted their parts. The aim was very clear: one of the censors kept a close eye on the details of the performance which could prove offensive – a supposedly subversive gesture, a significant glance at the crowd and, of course, the depth of an actress’s décolletage or the length of her skirt – while the other checked that nothing had been changed in the duly authorized text. (1998: 277)

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Already hoarse from the still conventional practice of offering two daily productions of the same show, Marsillach had had to abandon the stage half-way through Act III to remind the ‘player king’ that he still had one scene left to perform, his improvised re-entry speech (‘Sir, the players are always late’) apparently doing little to appease their anger. The Palacio de las Naciones in Montjuich (Barcelona) would in fact organize the ‘Commemorative Festival of Shakespeare’s 4th Centenary’ in December 1964–January 1965 with productions of Macbeth, León Felipe’s adaptation of Twelfth Night, suggestively called No es cordero . . . que es cordera [It is not a He-lamb, but a She-lamb] and Julius Caesar, all directed by Esteban Polls and with a company of actors headed by Alejandro Ulloa. Thus, according to figures given by Manuel Muñoz, there were four productions of Shakespeare in 1955–56, seven in 1956–57, four in 1957–58, four more in 1958–59, three in 1959–60, none at all in 1960–61, two in 1961–62, two in 1962–63, seven in 1963–64, eight in 1964–65, two in 1965–66, three in 1966–67, three in 1967–68, another three in 1968–69 and only two in 1969–70. In the 1963–64 season, the following plays were performed: Hamlet (by the Alejandro Ulloa company), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (by the Teatro Español company, under the direction of Luca de Tena, a revival of his 1945 production),

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the same play in English (by the British Shakespeare Festival company, directed by Wendy Toye), The Merchant of Venice (also in English, by the same company, this time directed by David Williams), Othello (again in English, in a performance organized by the British Institute in Barcelona), Much Ado about Nothing (from an adaptation by Enrique Ortenbach and directed by Ramiro Bascompte), together with a revival of Julius Caesar by Pemán and José Tamayo, first performed in 1955 and re-staged by the ‘Lope de Vega’ Company. Barcelona and to a lesser extent Madrid (with only three productions) were the only two cities to stage these performances. The situation in the following season was very similar: a show prepared by the Barcelona group FESTA comprising scenes from different plays, the revival of Ulloa’s Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice (in a Catalan version by Josep María Sagarra and staged by the EADAG), the Esteban Polls Macbeth, the Felipe adaptation of Twelfth Night, an adaptation of Henry VIII by Piedad Salas and presented under the title Catalina de Aragón [Katharine of Aragon], the Polls Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew (performed by the pupils of the Madrid School of Drama, the RESAD) and a new version of Othello by the extremely active Alejandro Ulloa. With the exception of Catalina de Aragón and The Taming of the Shrew, all of these productions were premiered initially in Barcelona, which became the veritable capital of the quarter-centenary events in Spain. Not so the ‘trovos’ (short metrical compositions) and flamenco-style clapping and stomping which, as one critic notes, were clearly aimed at ‘a present-day Spanish public’. ‘Where are the skies of Italy,’ wailed one reviewer, ‘the garden, the balcony with flowers, and Verona with its pomp and palaces?’ There are two notable exceptions, both from the early period: a film version of Tamayo y Baus’s play Un drama nuevo, starring Jesús Tordesillas, directed by Juan de Orduña in 1946, and a kitschly ‘Andalusian’ adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, La fierecilla domada (1955), directed by Antonio Román, designed by Siegfried Burmann and with Carmen Sevilla in the role of Kate. ‘Estudio 1’, which would outlive the Franco regime by a decade, would go on to screen productions of The Taming of the Shrew (1979) and a new Merchant of Venice (1981) as well as a TV version of the successful stage-play and film Un drama nuevo (1979).

Chapter 6 1

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Directors of the CDN during the period of the Transition (1975–1990) would include Adolfo Marsillach, Nuria Espert, José Luis Gómez, José Luis Alonso and Lluís Pasqual. Compare the production by the Catalan company Teatre Lliure of Titus Andronicus (directed by Fabià Puigserver) in 1977–1978, mentioned in Chapter 7. In a handwritten addition to the (unpaginated) prompt book, which ends, as in Shakespeare, with an intervention by Octavius. I am grateful to the Centro de Documentación Teatral in Madrid for allowing me to consult and photocopy parts of the text.

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Notes COBBLER: More wine, Holconio. The world is crumbling under our feet. CARPENTER (To the Unemployed Man) Go on, have a drink. Let the storm blow itself out. COBBLER I’m always telling you. There’s nothing to be done!

In an interview for El País (9 November 1976) Hormigón would clarify his position, stating that his aim was to show ‘a people which is not heroic . . . but alienated, a people with an ounce of civil awareness left’. It would remain for a further two years in repertory, although with certain changes to the cast. Plaza would admit that as he did not know how to give a body to the spectre, he preferred to let the audiences use its imagination (1993: 442). The concern with identifying Hamlet with the present moment, which recalls the identification with Hamlet and crisis in the wake of the ‘Disaster’ of 1898 (see Chapter 4), explains why, nearly a century later, the production opts for a more ‘ethical’ reading than is possible in the ‘metaphysics of the unconscious’. José Luis Gómez, who played the part of the Prince, underlined this ethical principle in facing the multiple challenges of the role. Steadfastly refusing to watch acclaimed performances by actors like Schofield, Jacobi, Burton or Gielgud (‘Only Bruno Ganz in the theatre and Olivier in the cinema’), he preferred what he described in El País (20 October 1989) as a mixture of ‘text, body and inwardness’, affirming that his approach to the character was ‘that of a man involved in the adventure of living’. For a discussion of the production, see Chapter 7. On the impact of modern-dress productions of Shakespeare in general, see Kennedy (2001: 110–113). In the particular case of Julius Caesar the bestknown modernizations of the play in the Anglo-American theatrical tradition were, of course, Orson Welles’s 1937 ‘Death of a Dictator’ and, a year later, Henry Cass’s military-uniformed production. Eclectically costumed performances ensued throughout the 1970s and 1980s (see Spevack 1988: 40–41) and up to the present where, early in 2003, Karin Coonrod directed a modern-dress production in New York which, in one reviewer’s words, was intended to ‘evoke the contemporary American nexus of conservative political power among the government, the military and the corporate elite’ (New York Times 22 January 2003: 5). For Alan Sinfield (1992: 25), the whole play might creatively be rethought from Cinna’s perspective as ‘the anxious fantasy of the Shakespearean intellectual, despised by the military-industrial complex and scapegoated by the people’. See also Pujante (1999) on this point. Under Declan Donellan, Cheek by Jowl staged both the rarely performed Pericles (1984) and As You Like It (1992). Footsbarn also proved regular visitors, with collectively directed productions of Macbeth (1987), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1991 and 1992), while the RSC caused a stir with their productions of Much Ado about Nothing (1984, directed by Terry Hands), Titus Andronicus (1989, directed by Deborah Warner) and The Comedy of Errors (1992, directed by Ian Judge). With the exception of Much Ado, which was performed at the Tivoli Theatre in Barcelona, all of these productions were part of the Madrid Theatre Festival.

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Chapter 7 1

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The ‘Catalan Statute’ of 1932 gave the Generalitat de Catalunya control of its internal affairs, ensuring, among other things, that Catalonia became a bastion of republicanism in the Civil War of 1936–1939. See the discussion in Chapter 6. To date, the four communities with their own fully ‘national’ companies are Catalonia, Galicia, Andalusia and Aragón. It is not by chance that Bieito has declared his allegiance to a host of film makers – Fellini, Kurosawa, Antonioni, Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Baz Luhrmann, whose Moulin Rouge he claims to have admired for its ‘fast editing and bravura technique’ (The Guardian, 7 August 2004). According to figures provided by the Institut de Teatre in Barcelona. These commenced with the creation of ‘Antzerti’ or the Servicio de Arte Dramático de Euskadi [Basque Service of Dramatic Art] in the early 1980s. Intended, on the one hand, as a school of dramatic art and, on the other, as a centre of theatrical production, the institution soon foundered through lack of public funding. See Portillo and Gómez-Lara (1994: 216–217) who, among other reasons for the play’s success, adduce its audience-friendly all-round gaiety, the predominance of female parts (women actors being considered generally more proficient than men) and a lack of psychological insight which, they claim, favours the participation of younger, less experienced actors. Commenting on the device in an interview for the El Mundo cultural supplement, ‘El Cultural’ (14 February 1999), she explains that it was partly motivated by that old bugbear of ‘alternative Spanish theatre’, lack of funding and so limited casts and partly by her own conception of the play as an analogue to the highly aestheticized world of golden-age Hollywood cinema: Let us just say that the aesthetics of the whole play has a little bit in common with the world of cinema. In the play, the actors are insulted directly by the audience; to me it seemed paradoxical that it was through a screen because it is precisely cinema actors who cannot be insulted. It was a kind of homage to the cinema but also a defence of the specificity of the theatre, where the actors are more vulnerable because they come face to face with the audience.

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Unlike Basque, the proximity of Galician to Castilian Spanish and, it needs to be said, the higher proportion of bilingual spectators, has guaranteed Galician’s status as a natural and viable medium for the transmission of the texts. The latter is evident in the re-presentation of Puck as ‘Xas’ (an old name for a Galician goblin), the translation of the names of the mechanicals and also of the trains of Oberon and Titania, and most innovatively in the introduction of three witches, ‘Zugota’, ‘Antaruxa’ and ‘Chamorra’, who are all ruled over by ‘Noitebra’.

Chapter 8 1

According to information provided by the Centro de Documentación Teatral in Madrid. The same source gives 36 different productions for the following year (2001) and 34 for 2002.

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See the festival website on www.festivalshakespeare.com The TNC website is on www.tnc.cat Thus although Fortinbras was omitted, and Laertes’ role drastically reduced, scene order was shifted to achieve greater ‘coherence’, enabling Hamlet (George Anton) to deliver ‘To be or not to be’ over (literally) the corpse of Polonius. Marcos Ordóñez, in the culture supplement of El País (20 July 2002, 21), in response to Brook’s Hamlet and the Teatre Lliure Troilus and Cressida. Narros’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Centro Cultural de la Villa, which was set, for no obvious reason, on an ice-bound ocean liner with the characters roller-skating around deck, lasted a full three hours, with very few modifications to the original text. See the discussion at the end of Chapter 7. Memorably so, Muriel Sánchez, who played both Lady Anne and Prince Edward. Compare the RTA company’s 2006 production of Hamlet (directed and adapted by Lino Braxe) that set the play in the Denmark of 1940, just prior to the Nazi invasion. (I am grateful to Jorge Luis Bueno for drawing this production to my attention.) As the inaugural production of the Santa Susana Shakespeare Theatre Festival. The CDN’s current Shakespeare is another ‘classic’, Hamlet, directed and starring Juan Diego Botto, though using the oldest known Spanish translation of the play: Leandro Fernández de Moratín’s rendering of 1798.

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Index

Abellán, M. L. 171 Abril, Augusto 78 Aguilar Fernández, Paloma 171 Aguilar Piñal, F. 171 Aimée, Chantal 147 Alarife (theatre company) 143 Alarma, Salvador 75 Albert, M. 171 Alcalá Galiano, Antonio 37, 38, 171 Alcón, Alfredo 157 Àlex Rigola 1, 143, 144, 146 Alfieri, Vittorio 46 Alfonso XII, King of Spain (1875–85) 62, 63 Alfonso XIII, King of Spain (1886–1931) 77, 79, 80 Almodóvar, Pedro 130, 147 Alonso, Dámaso 89 Alonso, Eduardo 136, 137, 138, 139, 152, 171 Alpha-63 (theatre company) 95, 107, 139, 146 Alquibla Teatro, (theatre company) 143 Alquimistas (theatre company) 144 Álvarez Barrientos, Joaquín 171 Álvarez Quintero, Joaquín 72, 79 Álvarez Quintero, Serafín 72, 79 Álvarez, Javier 140 Álvaro, Francisco 108, 109 Alzaga, Toribio 131–2 Amadeus of Savoy, King of Spain (1870–3) 60 American Repertoire Theater 121 Ametzaga, Bingen 132 Amiel, Denys 71 Andioc, René 27, 171 Andrés, Juan 15 Anouilh, Jean 138 Antoine, André 76

Appia, Adolphe 69 Arbide, Joaquín 139 Aristotle 29, 37 Arizmendi, Luis 82 Arniches, Carlos 72, 79 Arrabal, Fernando 139 Arteaga, Esteban de 14 Astrana Marín, Luis 81, 82 Atiza (puppet theatre company) 140 Aub, Max 82 Auzmendi, Fernando 134 Azorín, Paco 155 Backa Theatre (Swedish theatre company) 118 Ballesteros, Carlos 100 Balzac, Honoré de 71 Bandín, Elena 171 Banville, Théodore de 71 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée 71 Baró, Marta 143 Baroja, Pío 67, 71, 77, 171 Basili, Basilio 42 Bate, Jonathan 171 Baz, Gonzalo 143 Beaumarchais, Pierre 9, 138 Beckett, Samuel 108, 110, 128, 129 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo 59 Belén, Ana 111, 112, 116 Benach, Joan-Anton 155, 156 Benavente, Jacinto 65, 71, 74, 75–7, 79, 99 Cuento de amor [Love Story] 76 Berenguer, Ángel 171 Bergamín, José 139 Bergman, Ingmar 118, 129 Bermejo, Luis 157 Bernal, Elisenda 176 Bernal, Francisca 171

180

Bernardos, Carmen 99 Bernhardt, Sarah 77, 96 Bieito, Calixto 1, 2, 121, 129–30, 144, 146–9, 153, 155 Billington, Michael 147 Birmingham Repertory Theatre 147 Blanco White, José 22, 38, 41 Blanco, Carrero 94 Blanco, Ovidio Lucio 143 Bloom, Harold 155 Böhl von Faber, Johann Nikolaus 28–31 Bonaparte, Joseph 27, 28 Bonaparte, Napoleon 26, 34 Bonnefoy, Yves 119 Borrás, Tomás 87, 171 Bosch, Jordi 129 Bradley, A. C. 171 Brandes, Georg 71 Brecht, Bertold 94, 108, 138, 139, 151 Briones, Rosa 120 Broggi, Oriol 145 Brook, Peter 122, 129, 149 Buero Vallejo, Antonio 94–5, 97, 117, 139 Buffery, Helena 75, 130, 131, 171 Buñuel, Luis 130 Burbage, Richard 52 Burgos, Emilio 91, 92, 100 Burmann, Siegfried 90, 92, 98 Busquets, Loreto 16, 172 Byron, George 38 Ca l’Ubú (theatre company) 143 Cacho, Vicente 172 Cadalso, José 12, 42 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 1, 18, 22, 29, 30, 31, 32, 37, 43, 46, 117 Calvo Revilla, Luis 39, 172 Calvo Sotelo, Joaquín 172 Calvo, Clara 36, 172 Calvo, Ricardo 78, 81 Cami, Roser 147 Campillo, Laura 177 Camus, Albert 139 Canavaggio, Jean 172 Caneiro, Xosé Carlos 154 Cano, José Luis 172

Index Cánovas del Castillo, Antonio 62 Cantó, Toni 116 Capdevila, Carles 75 Cardona, Lola 100 Carner, Joseph 75 Carnerero, José María de (‘Teodoro de la Calle’) Caliche, la parodia de Otelo [Caliche, the Parody of Othello] 34–7, 172 Hamlet 36 Macbeth 42 Otelo, ó el moro de Venecia [Othello, or the Moor of Venice] 3, 17–25, 32, 34, 41, 53, 172 Carnero, Guillermo 16–17, 172 Carrión, José Pedro 115–16 Carroll, Lewis 136 Casañer, Juan 56 Casona, Alejandro 80 Castelar, Emilio 78 Castellet, J. M. 172 CAT see Centro Andaluz de Teatro Cave, Nick 147 CDG see Centro Dramático Galego CDN see Centro Dramático Nacional Cecchi, Carlo 126 Centro Andaluz de Teatro [Andalusian Theatre Centre] 141–2, 144, 149–51, 152 Centro Dramático Galego [Galician Drama Centre] 135–7, 144, 152–3, 154 Centro Dramático Nacional [National Drama Centre] 5, 105, 111–12, 113, 114, 115, 125, 128, 149, 156–7 Centro Nacional de Nuevas Tendencias Escénicas [National Centre for New Stage Tendencies] 105 Ceresa, Giovanni 63 Cermák, J. 176 Cervantes, Miguel de 68, 78, 92 Chamosa, J. L. 177 Chao, Ernesto 138 Chapí, Ruperto Las bravías (zarzuela) 72–3, 138 Charles III, King of Spain (1759–88) 9, 26

Index Charles IV, King of Spain (1788–1808) 23, 26 Chaudhuri, Sukanta 172 Chausa, Fernando 90, 92 Cheek by Jowl (theatre company) 3, 118 Chekhov, Anton 69 Chéreau, Patrice 119 Cinque, Hélène 144 Clark, Jaime 63 Clark, Kenneth 172 Closas, Alberto 112, 113 Clot, Xabier 128 Cobeña, Carmen 63 Cocteau, Jean 139 Codina, Josep 95, 172 Coello, Carlos El príncipe Hamlet [Prince Hamlet] 62 Collado, Manuel 83 Colomer, Inma 127 Colomer, Josep 172 Comédie Française (French theatre company) 128 Comellas, Luciano Francisco 34 Compañía Lope de Vega (theatre company) 92, 141 Compañía Nacional de Teatro [National Theatre Company] 107 Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico [National Classical Theatre Company] 1, 105, 122 Conde Gatón (theatre company) 143 Conejero, M. A. 128, 172 Consejo del Teatro [Theatre Council] 105, 106 Coppola, Francis Ford 146, 147 Corbella, Ferrán 129 Coro y Teatro del Pueblo [Choir and Theatre of the People] 80 Coulon, Mireille 171 Coveney, Michael 129 Craig, Gordon (director) 69 Craig, Gordon (theatre critic) 155 Cruz, Ramón de la Hamleto, rey de Dinamarca [Hamleto, King of Denmark] 3, 5, 7, 8–12 Cuña, Ánxeles 154 Cunqueiro, Álvaro

181

O incerto Don Señor Hamlet [The Uncertain Mr Hamlet] 134–5 D’Abbadie, Antoine 131 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 71 D’Odorico, Andrea 101, 110 D’Ors, Eugeni 75, 76 Dacosta, Fernando 154 Daniell, David 109, 172 Daniels, Ron 121 Darío, Rubén 71 Daumas, Adrián 121, 143 Dávidházi, Péter 172 DeCesaris, Janet 176 Decouflé, Philippe 126 Delabastita, Dirk 172, 173 Delair, Paul 63 Delavigne, Casimir 39, 46 Les enfants d’Edouard [The Children of Edward] 39, 41, 49, 51 Delgado, Maria 130, 148, 149, 172 Delgado, Pedro 61 Dente, Carla 172 Der Kreis (Austrian theatre company) 119 Desclot, Miquel 147 De Vos, Josef 173 Dhulst, Lieven 172 Díaz de Artigas, Josefina 83 Díaz de Mendoza, Fernando 63, 69, 71, 78 Díaz, José María 49, 50 Dickens, Charles 71 Diderot, Denis 10, 23, 33, 40, 47, 172 Díez González, Santos 26 Díez, Matilde 39, 41, 44, 50 Donellan, Declan 126 Dougherty, Dru 79, 172, 178 Draudt, Manfred 34, 172 Ducis, Jean-François 3, 7, 30, 38, 173 Hamlet 7–8, 11, 173 Jean sans Terre [Landless John] 49 Macbeth 42, 43 Othello, ou le More de Venise [Othello, or the Moor of Venice] 3, 17–19, 20, 21–2, 26, 28, 31, 34, 53, 173 Roméo et Juliette 32, 33 Dumas, Alexandre 38, 42, 46 Dunlop, Frank 118

182

Index

Feijóo, Benito Jerónimo 9, 173 Fellini, Federico 147 Ferdinand VII, King of Spain (1808, 1813–33) 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 37, 38, 41, 46 Fernández de Moratín, Leandro 15–16, 22, 27, 42, 44, 46, 48, 175 Fernández de Moratín, Nicolás 27 Fernández Santos, Ángel 100, 108, 109 Fernández Shaw, Carlos 72 Fernández, Eduardo 155 Fila 7 (theatre company) 143 Fletcher, Diane 148 Flitter, Derek 173 Footsbarn (theatre company) 4, 118, 119 Fraga, Manuel 93–4 Franco, Camilo 154 Franco, Francisco 3, 4, 70, 85, 86, 93, 94, 99, 104, 106, 107, 110, 117, 124, 127, 139, 140, 149 Franssen, Paul 173 Freire, Ana 28, 173 Fried, Erich 119 Fuentes, Frederic 78

García Gutiérrez 48 García Lorca, Federico 81–2, 84, 88, 94, 117, 121, 139, 141, 151 Garcia Miguel, Joâo 144 García Montero, Luis 150 García Suelto, Manuel 32, 43 García Valdés, Ariel 128 García Viñolas, Augusto 89 Gautier, Téophile 71 Genet, Jean 95 Giannini, Olga 63 Gies, David T. 173 Gil y Carrasco, Enrique 43, 44, 45, 173 Glass, Philip 126 Godoy, Manuel 23, 26 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 74 Golder, John 173 Goldoni, Carlo 93 Gombau, Gerardo 99 Gómez Hermosilla, José 31 Gómez, José Luis 111, 112, 143, 149 Gómez, Luma 137, 152 Gómez-Lara, Manuel 116, 117, 125, 176 González Ruiz, Nicolás 90, 91, 92, 98 González Vergel, Alberto 99, 103 González, Felipe 104 González, José Manuel 76, 173 González, Mercedes 171 Graells, Guillem-Jordi 126 Granjel, Luis S. 173 Gregor, Keith 173, 174, 177 Grimaldi, Jean-Marie (‘Juan’) 31, 33 Grotowski, Jerzy 129 Gual, Adrià 5, 74–5, 77, 80, 84, 101, 174 Guede, Manuel 136, 137, 152–3 Güell, Anna 130 Guerrero Zamora, Juan 102, 103 Guerrero, María 64, 65, 69, 71, 78 Guevara, Álvaro 174 Guimerà, Àngel 65 Guzmán, T. 177

Gala, Antonio 117 Galván, Pedro 154 Ganivet, Ángel 68, 173 García de Villalta, José 5, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, 59

Hálffter, Cristóbal 97, 100 Haro Tecglen, Eduardo 146 Hartzenbusch, Juan Eugenio 40, 46 Hattaway, Mick 174 Haughton, David 118

Durán, Agustín 30 Duse, Eleonora 58, 63, 64, 65 Duval, Alexandre Shakespeare amoureux [Shakespeare in Love] 27–8, 52–3 Dyer, Michael 144 Echegaray, José de 65, 71 Elias, Carme 157 El Soto (theatre workshop) 143 Emmanuel, Giovanni 63 Escobar, Luis 87 Espert, Nuria 95, 96, 97, 102, 149, 173 Espinosa Carbonell, Joaquín 173 Espronceda, José de 46 Euripides 138

Index Hebbel Theatre (German theatre company) 126 Hernández, Emilio 149–51 Herreros, Manuel Bretón de los 39 Los hijos de Eduardo [The Children of Edward] 39–41, 49, 51 Hervàs, Marc 143 Heylen, Romy 8, 174 Heymann, Mochen 174 Hierro, José 99 Hoenselaars, Ton 173, 174, 177 Holguin, Sandie 174 Homar, Lluís 126, 127, 128, 145 Hormigón, Juan Antonio 74, 107–8, 113, 114, 127, 174 Hortmann, Wilhelm 174 Howard, Tony 96, 174 Huerta Calvo, J. 174 Huertas Vázquez, Eduardo 80, 174 Hugo, Victor 37, 38, 42, 46, 53, 71 Ibáñez Martín, José 85–6, 174 Ibsen, Henrik 71, 74, 75 Icaza, María 121 Iglesia, Alex de la 147 Igoa, Luis Fernando de 92 Instituto Shakespeare [Shakespeare Institute] 110, 117, 140 Ionesco, Eugène 139 Isabella II, Queen of Spain (1833–68) 37, 46, 48, 60, 124 ITD (Yugoslav theatre company) 118 Jolson, Al 154 Jones, Colin 174 Jovellanos, Gaspar de Melchor 10, 13–14, 16, 26, 27, 174 Juan Carlos I, King of Spain (1975– ) 85, 107 Jusserand, J. J. 174 Kalamandalam (Indian theatre company) 118 Kemble, John 24–5 Kemp, Lindsay 118 Kennedy, Dennis 174 Klein, Holger 173

183

Kott, Jan 108, 110, 128, 138 Kronos Teatro (theatre company) 143 La Barraca (theatre company) 80–1, 83, 88 Lafarga, Francisco 9, 174 La Fura dels Baus (theatre company) 143 Laín Entralgo, Pedro 86, 174 Lamadrid, Teodora 39 Lamarca, Luis 49–50, 175 Lambert, José 175 La Mirada (theatre company) 144 Laperla 29 (theatre company) 145 La Pupa (puppet theatre company) 140 Larra, Mariano José de 33, 37, 38 Larrakoetxea, Bedita 132 Latella, Antonio 144 Latorre, Carlos 33, 40, 47, 53, 59, 70, 174 Latorre, Emiliano 81 Lauvadant, Georges 145 Lauwers, Jan 126 Lázaro, Eusebio 122, 175 Leggatt, Alexander 106, 175 León, Vicente 120 Letourneur, Pierre 7, 32 Ley, Pablo 145 L’Instant d’une Résonance (French theatre company) 144 Lissorgues, Yvan 175 Lizarán, Anna 127, 128, 129, 156 Llàcer, Ángel 144 Llavina, Jordi 146 Llopis, Agustín 33 Llorens, Vicente 38, 175 Llovet, Enrique 99, 108, 109 Lluch, Felipe 89 Loff, Manuel 175 López Mozo, Jerónimo 119, 120 López Silva, José 72 López, François 171, 175 López, Gema 140–1 Louis XVIII, King of France (1814–24) 27 Loyaza, Daniel 145 Loyola, Javier 100

184

Index

Luca de Tena, Cayetano 3, 4, 89, 90–2, 97, 98, 99, 103, 175 Lucini, Francesco 42 Luhrmann, Baz 151, 152 Luna, Rita 32 Lupa, Kristian 126 Luzán, Ignacio de 10, 13, 14, 26, 27, 175 Macpherson, Guillermo 63, 65 Macunaima (Brazilian theatre company) 118 Madariaga, Salvador de 78 Maeterlinck, Maurice 75 Maetzu, Ramiro de 66, 67, 68–9, 71, 175 Máiquez, Isidoro 20, 23–5, 26, 31, 32, 33, 40, 41, 43, 44, 47, 59, 70, 100 Manningham, John 52 Maragall, Joan 73–4 Marcos, Cristina 157 María Cristina, Queen Regent of Spain (1833–40) 37, 63, 77 Marín, Guillermo 92 Marivaux, Pierre de 9 Marowitz, Charles 148 Marshall, Gail 175 Marsillach, Adolfo 95, 97, 122, 175 Martí, José Manuel 143 Martínez de la Rosa, Francisco 41, 46, 48 Martínez Lafuente, Rafael 81 Martínez Ruiz, José (‘Azorín’) 66–7, 68, 71, 75, 171 Martínez Sierra, Gregorio 5, 77, 80, 84, 90, 101 Martínez Velasco, Julio 140, 175 Masó, Xicu 144 Massip, Francesc 156 Matoses, Manuel 63–4, 69, 72, 73, 77, 102 Mayorga, Juan 156 McKellen, Ian 153 Mendelssohn, Felix 98 Mendiguren, Xabier 131, 175 Mendoza, Antonio 50 Merimée, Prosper 36 Merino, Vicente 7 Miller, Arthur 93 Mira, Juan Luis 143 Mnouchkine, Ariane 155

Molière 9, 74 Molina Foix, Vicente 112, 115 Molina, Tirso de 1, 117 Molinari, Andrés 140 Monleón, José 87, 94, 95, 98, 105, 106, 175 Montanyès, Jordi 126 Montero, Josu 131 Montoro, Rafael 61 Moody, Jane 175 Mora, José Joaquín de 30 Morano, Francisco 78 Moreno, Armando 96 Morera, José María 101, 102, 107, 108, 113, 127 Morera i Galicia, Jaime 75 Müller, Heiner 144 Muñoz, Chema 116 Muñoz, Jorge 121 Muñoz, Manuel 175 Muñoz Seca, Pedro 79 Musset, Alfred de 47, 71 Narros, Miguel 99, 102, 109–11, 140, 149, 176 Nassr Theatre (Iranian theatre company) 118 Navarro, Antonio 151 Neruda, Pablo 101, 102, 119, 143 Nichols, James W. 176 Nietzsche, Friedrich 67, 71, 75 Nieva, Francisco 117 Noguero, Jesús 157 Novell, Rosa 146 Novelli, Ermete 58, 63 Ochoa, Eugenio de 37–8 Ojeda Gómez, Jorge 143 Ojeda, Pedro 48, 178 Olaizola, Javier 134 Oliva, César 70, 87, 125, 176 Oliva, María Victoria 140 Oliva, Salvador 129, 146 Olivares, Juan Carlos 146 Oliveira, Xosé Manuel 153 Olivier, Laurence 97 Ollerena, Ramón de 78 Onetti, Antonio 150, 151 Ordóñez, Marcos 147, 148, 173

Index Orella, Francesc 156 Orgaz, José 34 Ostermeier, Thomas 126 Oti, Francisco 153 Paloma, Mercè 130 Pancheva, Eugenia 178 Par, Alfonso 12, 24, 25, 31, 32, 34, 41, 44, 63, 65, 76, 176 Paredes, Marisa 156 Parracs (theatre company) 144 Pasqual, Lluís 113–15, 126, 126–8, 129, 146, 155–6, 176 Pazó, Cándido 138 Pedregal, Helio 156 Pegenaute, Luis 176 Peláez, Andrés 69, 70, 176 Pemán, José María 83, 90, 92 Pemble, John 176 Pérez Galdós, Benito 25, 65, 74 Pérez Guerra, Javier 176 Pérez Magallón, Jesús 176 Pérez-Rasilla, Eduardo 120, 122 Philip II, King of Spain (1556–98) 29, 123 Philip V, King of Spain (1700–24) 8 Picoche, Jean-Louis 176 Picoche, Jean-Louis 46, 47 Pimenta, Helena 1, 2, 133–4, 143, 154–5 Pirandello, Luigi 69, 93, 128–9, 139 Place, Pierre-Antoine de la 7, 8 Plana, Pepa 143 Plaza, José Carlos 111–12, 113, 115–16, 176 Poe, Edgar Allan 71 Pomès, Margarita 81 Poole, Adrian 175 Pope, Alexander 30 Portaceli, Carme 144 Portillo, Blanca 121 Portillo, Rafael 112, 116, 117, 125, 176 Pou, José María 148 Prada, José 100 Prada, Manuel 90 Prado, Antonia de 25, 44 Prendes, Mercedes 91, 92 Prieto, Andrés 33 Primo de Rivera, Miguel 77–8, 79, 124

185

Procházka, M. 176 Puchol, Nicanor 33 Puigdomènech, Helena 176 Puigserver, Fabià 126, 127, 128, 129 Pujante, A. Luis 117, 176, 177 Puyo, Magda 143 Rabadán, R. 177 Racine, Jean 9, 46 Ràfols, Mingo 130, 147 Ragué, María José 156 Reinhardt, Max 90 Reixach, Doménech 127 Retés, Francisco Luis de 5, 61–2 Reyero, Carlos 177 Riaza, Berta 112 Riccoboni, François 50 Ríos, Fernando de los 81 Ríos, Juan Antonio 177 Ripley, John 108, 177 Ristori, Adelaida 58, 59–60, 61 Riva, Ramón de la 82 Rivas Cherif, Cipriano 83 Rivas, Linares 71 Rodríguez, Concepción 33–4, 39 Rodríguez Cánovas, José 177 Rodríguez Cuadros, Evangelina 177 Rodríguez Sánchez de León, María José 177 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis 143 Rojas, Fernando de 136 Rokiski Lázaro, Gloria 177 Romea, Julián 39–41, 44, 47, 50, 51, 53, 59, 70, 83, 177 Romero, Antonio 51 Roper, Derek 174 Rossi, Ernesto 57–9, 60, 61, 63, 64, 177 Rothe, Hans 89 Royal Shakespeare Company 1, 3, 100–1, 118 RSC see Royal Shakespeare Company Rubio, Jesús 40, 47–8, 177 Rubio, Miguel 100 Ruiz Ramón, Francisco 177 Rull, Enrique 177 Ruskin, John 71 Rustavelli (Russian theatre company) 118 Rymer, Thomas 21

186

Index

Sagarra, Josep María de 95, 96, 128, 129, 130 Sagasta, Práxides Mateo 62 Sala Beckett, theatre company 143 Sala Valldaura, J. M. 177 Salaun, Serge 79, 177 Salvador, Mercedes 112, 176 Salvat, Ricard 177 Salvatierra, Julio 120 Salvini, Tommasso 58, 59, 60, 61 San Miguel, Evaristo 44 Sánchez, Alberto 56 Sanderson, John D. 141–2, 177 Santacana, Juan 78 Santoyo, J. C. 177 Sarabela (theatre company) 154 Saura, Antonio 143 Schlegel, A. W. 28, 29, 30, 31 Schopenhauer, Arthur 67 Scott, Walter 38 Scribe, Eugène 46 Séjour, Victor 50 Sellars, Peter 126 Sellent, Joan 145, 148 Sellés, Eugenio Cleopatra 64–5, 177 Seneca 138 Seoane, José María 92 Shakespeare, William ‘life’ 6, 52–7 works Antony and Cleopatra 4, 64, 69, 118 As You Like It 113, 121, 126–8, 143, 144 The Comedy of Errors 5, 82, 143, 144 Coriolanus 107, 139, 145–6 Cymbeline 5 Hamlet 4, 15–16, 52, 56, 57–8, 60, 63, 69, 73–4, 77–8, 83, 90, 91, 96–7, 102, 103, 111–13, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121, 128, 132, 135, 140, 143, 147–8, 155–6 Henry IV 5, 136, 155 Henry V 5 Julius Caesar 1, 4, 95–6, 103, 106–9, 113–15, 127, 128, 139, 141, 144, 146 King John 4, 49, 130, 143

King Lear 1, 5, 99, 109–11, 118, 128–9, 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 147, 148–9, 153, 155, 156–7 Love’s Labours Lost 5, 133, 134, 144 Macbeth 4, 41–5, 52, 57, 59–60, 89–90, 103, 109–10, 118, 119, 120, 121, 131–2, 137, 138, 140–1, 143, 147, 148, 154 Measure for Measure 5, 99, 108, 148 The Merchant of Venice 4, 57, 63, 78, 91, 97, 103, 115–16 The Merry Wives of Windsor 4, 89, 135 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 4, 75, 77, 82, 91, 97, 98–9, 103, 111, 118, 129–30, 133–4, 135, 136–7, 140, 143, 144 Much Ado about Nothing 63, 120, 136, 143 Othello 4, 18–19, 21, 25, 53, 57, 60, 61, 63, 77, 91, 92, 99–101, 103, 128, 140, 149, 150 Richard II 5, 155 Richard III 5, 39, 41, 50–1, 91, 118, 121, 136, 143, 144, 152–3 Romeo and Juliet 4, 32, 51, 53, 57, 59, 63, 75, 82, 83–4, 90–1, 93, 101–2, 103, 118, 119–20, 133, 136, 137, 143, 144, 149, 150–1, 152 The Taming of the Shrew 4, 63–4, 69, 72–3, 76, 77, 78, 102–3, 117, 136 The Tempest 1, 5, 53, 99, 128, 130, 140, 143, 144, 154, 155, 156 Titus Andronicus 118, 126, 127, 128, 143 Troilus and Cressida 5 Twelfth Night 75, 76, 77, 82, 118, 121, 136, 137, 138–9, 144, 155 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 154–5 A Winter’s Tale 5, 63, 143 Shakespeare Festival Company 3, 4, 97–8, 117 Shaw, Donald 48, 177, 178 Shaw, George Bernard 139 Sheer Madness (Dutch theatre company) 118 Sim, Chee Leng 172

Index Simòn, Ramon 143 Sinfield, Alan 178 Smith, Paul Julian 6, 178 Sokolova, Boika 174, 178 Soldevila, Carlota 127, 128 Solís, Dionisio 32–3, 83 Soncini, Sara 172 Spencer, Charles 148 Spevack, Marvin 178 Spottiswood, Gerald W. 178 Squarciapino, Franca 141 Stanislavski, Constantin 69 Stary Theatre (Polish theatre company) 118 Stendhal 71 Stockholm Dramaten (Swedish theatre company) 118–19 Strehler, Giorgio 129 Stuffed Puppet (Dutch puppet theatre company) 119 Suárez, Adolfo 106 Suárez, Daniel 141 Suárez, Francisco 143 Symington, Rodney 178 Tabanque (theatre company) 139 Tabori, George 119 Tallaví, José 78 Talma, François-Joseph 19, 20, 23, 24, 40 Tamayo, José 88, 92–3, 96–7, 141, 178 Tamayo y Baus, Manuel 54, 56, 63 Un drama nuevo [A New Play] 54–7, 76, 178 Tamayo y Baus, Victorino 56 Tarantino, Quentin 147, 148 Taylor, Gary 178 Teatre Educatiu (theatre company) 143 Teatre Íntim (theatre company) 74–5, 77 Teatre Lliure (theatre company) 126–9, 130, 144, 145, 146, 149 Teatre Nacional de Catalunya [National Theatre of Catalonia] 130, 143, 145 Teatre Romea (theatre company) 129, 144, 149 Teatro del Arte (theatre company) 77, 109

187

Teatro Artístico (theatre company) 76, 77 Teatro de la Esquirla (theatre company) 120 Teatro Lírico Nacional [National Lyrical Theatre] 105 Teatro del Mediodía (theatre company) 140 Teatro Meridional (theatre company) 120 Teatro do Noroeste (theatre company) 137–9, 152, 154 Teatro Stabile di Genova (Italian theatre company) 118 Teatrofias (theatre company) 143 Tessero, Adelaide 63 Théâtre de Nanterre-Amandiers (French theatre company) 119 Théâtre du Soleil (French theatre company) 155 Thuillier, Emilio 63 Tierra Roja (theatre company) 143 TNC see Teatre Nacional de Catalunya Tolstoy, Leo 71 ‘Tomatito’ 151 Tomé, José 154 Tonson, Jacob 54 Torcal, Sélica 99 Tordesillas, Catalina 7 Torner, Eduardo 80 Torray, Nuria 103 Toye, Wendi 97 Tricás, Mercè 176 Ulloa, Alejandro 97 Unamuno, Miguel de 56, 68, 71, 139 Ur Teatro (theatre company) 133–4, 144, 154–5 Urzainqui, Inmaculada 171 Valera, Juan 40, 60, 61, 64–5 Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 56, 71, 94, 117, 139, 141 Vallejo, Irene 48, 178 Valls, Rebeca 156 Vega, Lope de 1, 97, 117 Vega, Ventura de la 28, 53, 63 Vellón, Javier 23, 178

188

Vera, Gerardo 101, 112, 121, 156–7 Verdi, Giuseppe 129, 136 Verlaine, Paul 71 Vico, Antonio 24, 62 Vilarós, Teresa M. 178 Vilches, Francisca 79, 178 Villa, Fernando de la 78 Villanueva, Roberto 140 Vilnius City Theatre (theatre company) 144 Vioque, Celia 151 Viudes, Vicente 92, 97 Voltaire 9, 16, 19, 37, 46, 178 Wahrman, Dror 174 Warner, Marina 119–20 Weiss, Peter 95

Index Welles, Orson 95, 115, 146 Wesker, Arnold 139 Williams, David 97 Williams, Simon 178 Wilson, Bob 126 Xirgu, Margarita 83, 96 Ycobalzeta, Anna 149 Young Vic (theatre company) 118 Zacconi, Ermete 81 Zatlin, Phyllis 86, 178 Zorrilla, José 61 Zuber, Xavier 148 Zumel, Enrique Guillermo Shakespeare [William Shakespeare] 53–4

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Shakespeare and Moral Agency (Continuum Shakespeare Studies)

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Shakespeare and Modern Theatre

Shakespeare and the Institution of Theatre: The Best in this Kind (Palgrave Shakespeare Studies)

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The Tempest (Shakespeare Explained)

Macbeth (The Annotated Shakespeare)

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