Spanish literature, the body of literary works produced in Spain.
Such works fall into three major language divisions:
Castilian, Catalan, and Galician. This article
provides a brief historical account of each of these
three literatures and examines the emergence of
major genres.
Although literature in the vernacular was not
written until the medieval period, Spain had
previously made significant contributions to
literature. Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, and
Prudentius, as well as Seneca the Younger and Seneca
the Elder, are among writers in Latin who lived in,
or were born in, Spain before the modern Romance
languages emerged. Women were also writing in Spain
during the Roman period: Serena, believed to have
been a poet; Pola Argentaria, the wife of Lucan,
whom she is thought to have assisted in writing his
Pharsalia; and the poet and Stoic philosopher
Teofila. For works written in Latin during this
period, see Latin literature: Ancient Latin
literature. Later, the writings of Spanish Muslims
and Jews formed important branches of Arabic
literature and Hebrew literature. The literature of
the former Spanish colonies in the Americas is
treated separately under Latin American literature.
Castilian literature
Medieval period
The origins of vernacular writing
By 711, when the Muslim invasion of the Iberian
Peninsula began, Latin spoken there had begun its
transformation into Romance. Tenth-century glosses
to Latin texts in manuscripts belonging to the
monasteries of San Millán de la Cogolla and Silos,
in north-central Spain, contain traces of a
vernacular already substantially developed. The
earliest texts in Mozarabic (the Romance dialect of
Spaniards living under the Muslims) were recovered
from Hebrew and from Arabic muwashshaḥs (poems in
strophic form, with subjects such as panegyrics on
love). The last strophe of the muwashshaḥ was the
markaz, or theme stanza, popularly called the
kharjah and transcribed in Spanish as jarcha. These
jarchas provide evidence of a popular poetry begun
perhaps as early as the 10th century, and they are
related to traditional Spanish lyric types (e.g.,
the villancico, “carol”) of the later Middle Ages
and Renaissance. The jarcha was generally a woman’s
love song, and the motif, in Romance, was a cry of
passion on which the whole poem was based, providing
a clear thematic relationship to Galician-Portuguese
cantigas of the late 12th through mid-14th
centuries. Women poets in the region of Andalusia
writing in Arabic during the 11th and 12th centuries
include al-Abbadiyya and Ḥafṣa bint al-Hājj
al-Rukuniyya; the best known were Wallada la Omeya,
Butayna bint ʿAbbād, and Umm al-Kiram bint Sumadih,
all of royal blood.
The rise of heroic poetry

"The Lay of the
Cid"
The earliest surviving monument of Spanish
literature, and one of its most distinctive
masterpieces, is the Cantar de mío Cid (“Song of My
Cid”; also called Poema de mío Cid), an epic poem of
the mid-12th century (the existing manuscript is an
imperfect copy of 1307). It tells of the fall from
and restoration to royal favour of a Castilian
noble, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, known as the Cid
(derived from the Arabic title sidi, “lord”).
Because of the poem’s setting, personages,
topographical detail, and realistic tone and
treatment and because the poet wrote soon after the
Cid’s death, this poem has been accepted as
historically authentic, a conclusion extended to the
Castilian epic generally. The second and third
sections of Cantar de mío Cid, however, appear to be
imaginative, and the mere six lines accorded the
Cid’s conquest of Valencia, taking it from the
Muslims, show that the poet’s approach is
subjective. Nevertheless, the Cid’s adventures lived
on in epic, chronicle, ballad, and drama, reputedly
embodying Castilian character.
Folk epics, known as cantares de gesta (“songs of
deeds”) and recited by jongleurs, celebrated heroic
exploits such as the Cid’s. Medieval
historiographers often incorporated prose versions
of these cantares in their chronicles, Latin and
vernacular; it was by this process that the fanciful
Cantar de Rodrigo (“Song of Rodrigo”), chronicling
the Cid’s early manhood with elements of the later
legend, was preserved. Fragments of the Cantar de
Roncesvalles (“Song of Roncesvalles”) and Poema de
Fernán González (“Poem of Fernán González”) rework
earlier epics. Vernacular chroniclers mention many
other heroic minstrel narratives, now lost, but, as
a result of the incorporation of these narratives
into chronicles, themes and textual passages can be
reconstructed. Heroic narratives partially recovered
include Los siete infantes de Lara (“The Seven
Princes of Lara”), El cerco de Zamora (“The Siege of
Zamora”), Bernardo del Carpio, and other themes from
Castile’s feudal history, subject matter that echoes
remote Visigothic origins rather than French epics.
The beginnings of prose
A major influence on prose was exercised by Arabic.
Oriental learning entered Christian Spain with the
capture (1085) of Toledo from the Muslims, and the
city became a centre of translation from Oriental
languages. An anonymous translation from Arabic
(1251) of the beast fable Kalīlah wa Dimnah
exemplifies early storytelling in Spanish. A romance
of the Seven Sages, the Sendebar, was translated
likewise through Arabic, with other collections of
Eastern stories.
By the mid-12th century, the Christians had
recovered Córdoba, Valencia, and Sevilla. A
propitious intellectual atmosphere fomented the
founding of universities, and under Alfonso X of
Castile and Leon (reigned 1252–84) vernacular
literature achieved prestige. Alfonso, in whose
chancery Castilian replaced Latin, mandated
translations and compilations aimed at fusing all
knowledge—Classical, Oriental, Hebrew, and
Christian—in the vernacular. These works, some under
his personal editorship, include the great legal
code Las Siete Partidas (“The Seven Divisions”),
containing invaluable information on daily life, and
compilations from Arabic sources on astronomy, on
the magical properties of gems, and on games,
especially chess. The Crónica general, a history of
Spain, and the General estoria, an attempted
universal history from the Creation onward, were
foundational works of Spanish historiography. The
Crónica general, overseen by Alfonso to ad 711 and
completed by his son Sancho IV, was Spain’s most
influential medieval work. Alfonso, sometimes called
the father of Castilian prose, was also a major
poet, and he compiled early Spain’s greatest
collection of medieval poetry and music, the
Cantigas de Santa María (“Songs to St. Mary”), in
Galician.
Learned narrative poetry
The mester de clerecía (“craft of the clergy”) was a
new poetic mode, indebted to France and the
monasteries and presupposing literate readers. It
adapted the French alexandrine in the “fourfold
way”—i.e., 14-syllable lines used in four-line
monorhyme stanzas—and treated religious, didactic,
or pseudohistorical matter. During the 13th century,
Gonzalo de Berceo, Spain’s earliest poet known by
name, wrote rhymed vernacular chronicles of saints’
lives, the miracles of the Virgin, and other
devotional themes with ingenuous candour,
accumulating picturesque and affectionately observed
popular detail.
Gonzalo de Berceo

Gonzalo de Berceo, (b. c. 1198,
Berceo, Spain—d. c. 1264), the first
author of verse in Castilian Spanish
whose name is known.
Berceo was a secular priest
associated with the Monastery of San
Millán de Cogolla in the Rioja, where he
served as an administrator and notary.
His works combined classical rhetorical
style, popular poetic form, and the
exhortative style of the sermon.
Berceo’s subjects were religious
topics—the lives of the saints, the
Mass, and the miracles of the saints and
the Virgin. He wrote in Castilian, a
dialect which was then considered
inferior to Galician-Portuguese, in
order to bring religious learning to the
common people. He used both Latin and
folk sources and adhered consistently to
the cuaderna vía, a verse form of
four-line stanzas, 14 syllables to the
line, with each line broken by a
caesura. In Vida de San Millán (c. 1234;
“Life of Saint Millán”), Berceo promoted
a local saint in order to encourage
contributions to the monastery. Among
his other works were Vida de Santa Oria
(c. 1265; “Life of Saint Oria”),
Milagros de Nuestra Señora (c. 1245–60;
“Miracles of Our Lady”), and Sacrificio
de la misa (c. 1237; “Sacrifice of the
Mass”).
Berceo’s verse rarely reaches poetic
heights but has simplicity and homely
charm. Its clear and amusing rustic
images contrast with the chivalric epics
of the period and the author’s own
devout mysticism. It also sheds light on
medieval thought and its development.
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The 14th century
Following the period of translation and compilation
came brilliant original creations, represented in
prose by Alfonso’s nephew Juan Manuel and in poetry
by Juan Ruiz (also called Archpriest of Hita). Juan
Manuel’s eclectic Libro de los enxiemplos del conde
Lucanor et de Patronio (Eng. trans. The Book of
Count Lucanor and Patronio)—which consists of 51
moral tales variously didactic, amusing, and
practical—drew partly on Arabic, Oriental, and
popular Spanish sources. It was Spain’s first
collection of prose fiction rendered in the
vernacular. Juan Manuel’s seven surviving books
treat such subjects as hunting, chivalry, heraldry,
genealogy, education, and Christianity. The frame
story that links Count Lucanor’s tales anticipates
novelistic structure: the young count repeatedly
seeks advice from his tutor Patronio, who responds
with exemplary tales.
Chivalric romances of the Arthurian or Breton
cycle, which had been circulating in translation,
partially inspired Spain’s first romance of chivalry
and first novel, El caballero Cifar (c. 1305; “The
Knight Cifar”), based on St. Eustace, the Roman
general miraculously converted to Christianity.
Amadís de Gaula—the oldest known version of which,
dating from 1508, was written in Spanish by Garci
Rodríguez (or Ordóñez) de Montalvo, although it may
have begun circulation in the early 14th century—is
another chivalric romance related to Arthurian
sources. It enthralled the popular imagination
through the 16th century with its sentimental
idealism, lyrical atmosphere, and supernatural
adventure.
Juan Ruiz, an intensely alert, individual early
poet, composed the Libro de buen amor (1330,
expanded 1343; “Book of Good Love”), which combined
disparate elements—Ovid, Aesop, the Roman Catholic
liturgy, and the 12th-century Latin Pamphilus de
amore, an anonymous elegiac comedy. The result
mingled eroticism with devotion and invited readers
to interpret often-equivocal teachings. Ruiz’s
Trotaconventos became Spanish literature’s first
great fictional character. Ruiz handled alexandrine
metre with new vigour and plasticity, interspersing
religious, pastoral-farcical, amorous, and satirical
lyrics of great metrical variety.
More-exotic elements appeared in the Proverbios
morales (c. 1355) of Santob de Carrión de los Condes
and in an Aragonese version of the biblical story of
Joseph, which was based on the Qurʾān and written in
Arabic characters. Drawing on the Old Testament, the
Talmud, and the Hebrew poet and philosopher Ibn
Gabirol, Santob’s Proverbios introduced Hebrew
poetry’s grave sententiousness and aphoristic
concision.
Pedro López de Ayala dominated poetry and prose
during the later 1300s with his Rimado de palacio
(“Poem of Palace Life”), the last major relic of the
“fourfold-way” verse form, and with family
chronicles of 14th-century Castilian monarchs Peter,
Henry II, John I, and Henry III, which stimulated
production of personal, contemporary history. An
early humanist, Ayala translated and imitated Livy,
Boccaccio, Boethius, St. Gregory, and St. Isidore.
A subgenre vigorously cultivated was the
misogynistic treatise warning against women’s wiles.
Rooted in works that condemned Eve for the Fall of
Man, they include such works as Disciplina
clericalis (The Scholar’s Guide), written in the
late 11th or early 12th century by Pedro Alfonso
(Petrus Alfonsi); El Corbacho, also known as El
Arcipreste de Talavera (c. 1438; Eng. trans. Little
Sermons on Sin), by Alfonso Martínez de Toledo; and
Repetición de amores (c. 1497; “Repetitious Loves”;
Eng. trans. An Anti-feminist Treatise of Fifteenth
Century Spain) by Luis Ramírez de Lucena. Numerous
examples from medieval Spanish literature and
folklore echoed the same themes (e.g., Juan Manuel’s
Count Lucanor and Juan Ruiz’s Book of Good Love).
Pedro López de Ayala

Detail from Castilian manuscript of
Saint Gregory's Morales (Commentary on
Job).
López de Ayala kneels before Saint
Gregory.
Pedro López de Ayala, (b. 1332, Vitoria,
Castile—d. 1407, Calahorra, Navarre),
Spanish poet and court chronicler who
observed firsthand the happenings of his
time and, unlike earlier chroniclers,
recorded them objectively. His Crónicas
(standard ed., 1779–80) are marked by
this personal observation and vivid
expression, making them among the first
great Spanish histories.
Ayala had a long and distinguished
civil career under four Castilian
monarchs, Peter I, Henry II, John I, and
Henry III. Holding such posts as captain
of the Castilian fleet (1359),
ambassador to France (1379–80 and
1395–96), and royal chancellor of
Castile (1398 until his death), he spent
his lifetime in close association with
leading men and events. As a poet, he is
chiefly remembered for his Rimado de
palacio (c. 1400), one of the last works
in cuaderna vía (Spanish narrative verse
form consisting of 4-line stanzas, each
line having 14 syllables and identical
rhyme), an autobiographical satire on
contemporary society. Ayala’s
translations from Livy, Boccaccio, and
others gave him a reputation as the
first Castilian humanist.
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The 15th century
The early 15th century witnessed a renewal of poetry
under Italian influence. During the reign of King
John II, the anarchy of feudalism’s death throes
contrasted with the cultivation of polite letters,
which signified good birth and breeding. The
Cancionero de Baena (“Songbook of Baena”), compiled
for the king by the poet Juan Alfonso de Baena,
anthologized 583 poems (mostly courtly lyrics) by 55
poets from the highest nobles to the humblest
versifiers. The collection showed not merely the
decadence of Galician-Portuguese troubadours but
also the stirrings of more-intellectual poetry
incorporating symbol, allegory, and Classical
allusions in the treatment of moral, philosophical,
and political themes. Other significant verse
collections include the Cancionero de Estúñiga (c.
1460–63) and the important Cancionero general (1511)
of Hernando del Castillo; among the latter’s 128
named poets is Florencia Pinar, one of the first
women poets in Castilian to be identified by name.
Francisco Imperial, a Genoese who settled in Sevilla
and a leader among new poets, drew on Dante,
attempting to transplant the Italian hendecasyllable
(11-syllable line) to Spanish poetry.
The marqués de Santillana—a poet, scholar,
soldier, and statesman—collected masterpieces of
foreign literatures and stimulated translation. His
Proemio e carta al condestable de Portugal (1449;
“Preface and Letter to the Constable of Portugal”),
which initiated literary history and criticism in
Spanish, reflected his readings in contemporary
foreign languages and translated classics.
Santillana’s sonnets in the “Italian style” launched
the formal enrichment of Spanish poetry. He is still
acknowledged as a precursor of the Renaissance,
though his sonnets and long poems, which reflect his
Italian-influenced training, are often neglected in
favour of his charming rustic songs of native
inspiration. Juan de Mena’s vast allegorical poem
dramatizing history past, present, and future (El laberinto de fortuna, 1444; “The Labyrinth of
Fortune”), a more conscious attempt to rival
Dante,
suffers from pedantry and over-Latinization of
syntax and vocabulary.
An outstanding anonymous 15th-century poem, the
Danza de la muerte (“Dance of Death”), exemplifies a
theme then popular with poets, painters, and
composers across western Europe. Written with
greater satiric force than other works that treated
the dance of death theme, it introduced characters
(e.g., a rabbi) not found in its predecessors and
presented a cross section of society via
conversations between Death and his protesting
victims. Although not intended for dramatic
presentation, it formed the basis for later dramas.
Juan de Mena

Juan de Mena, (b. 1411, Córdoba—d.
1456, Torrelaguna, Castile), poet who
was a forerunner of the Renaissance in
Spain.
Mena belonged to the literary court
of King John II of Castile, where he was
renowned for the Latin erudition he had
acquired at the University of Salamanca
and in Italy. He is best known for his
poem El laberinto de Fortuna (1444; “The
Labyrinth of Fortune”), also called Las
trescientas (“The Three Hundreds”) for
its length; it is a complex work that
owes much to Lucan, Virgil, and Dante.
Writing in arte mayor, lines of 12
syllables that lend themselves to
stately recitation, Mena sought to make
the Spanish language a literary vehicle
adequate to his epic vision of Spain and
her mission. His themes are medieval,
but his use of Latinisms and rhetorical
devices and his references to classical
personages suggest an affinity to the
new manner of expression that came to be
associated with the Renaissance.
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The era of the Renaissance
The beginning of the
Siglo de Oro
The unification of Spain in 1479 and the
establishment of its overseas empire, which began
with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the New
World (1492–93), contributed to the emergence of the
Renaissance in Spain, as did the introduction of
printing to the country (1474) and the cultural
influence of Italy. The early Spanish humanists
included the first grammarians and lexicographers of
any Romance tongue. Juan Luis Vives, the brothers
Juan and Alfonso de Valdés, and others were
followers of Erasmus, whose writings circulated in
translation from 1536 onward and whose influence
appears in the Counter-Reformation figure of St.
Ignatius of Loyola, who founded the Society of Jesus
(Jesuits), and in the later religious writer and
poet Luis de León. Nor did Spain lack women
humanists; some exceptional women renowned for their
erudition taught in universities, including
Francisca de Nebrija and Lucía Medrano. Beatriz
Galindo (“La Latina”) taught Latin to Queen Isabella
I; Luisa Sigea de Velasco—a humanist, scholar, and
writer of poetry, dialogues, and letters in Spanish
and in Latin—taught at the Portuguese court.
Connecting the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is
the masterful Comedia de Calixto y Melibea (1499), a
novel of 16 “acts” in dialogue form published
anonymously but attributed to Fernando de Rojas. The
dominant character, the procuress Celestina, is
depicted with unsurpassed realism and gives the work
the title by which it is commonly known, La
Celestina. The analysis of passion and the dramatic
conflict that lust unleashes attain great
psychological intensity in this early masterpiece of
Spanish prose, sometimes considered Spain’s first
realistic novel.
These figures and works of the early Renaissance
prepared the way for the Siglo de Oro (“Golden
Age”), a period often dated from the publication in
1554 of Lazarillo de Tormes, the first picaresque
novel, to the death in 1681 of dramatist and poet
Pedro Calderón. Comparable to the Elizabethan era in
England, albeit longer, Spain’s Siglo de Oro spanned
both the Renaissance and Baroque periods and
produced not only drama and poetry that match
Shakespeare’s in stature but also
Miguel de
Cervantes’s celebrated novel Don Quixote.
Luis de León

Luis de León, (b. 1527, Belmonte,
Cuenca Province, Spain—d. Aug. 23, 1591,
Madrigal de las Altas), mystic and poet
who contributed greatly to Spanish
Renaissance literature.
León was a monk educated chiefly at
Salamanca, where he obtained his first
chair in 1561. Academic rivalry between
the Dominicans and the Augustinians,
whom he had joined in 1544, led to his
denunciation to the Inquisition for
criticizing the text of the Vulgate,
imprudent at that period in Spain,
particularly because one of his
great-grandmothers had been Jewish.
After almost five years’ imprisonment
(1572–76), he was exonerated and
restored to his chair, which, however,
he resigned in favour of the man who had
replaced him. But he subsequently gained
a new one, also at Salamanca; a second
denunciation, in 1582, did not succeed.
His prose masterpiece, De los nombres de
Cristo (1583–85), a treatise in the
dialogue form popularized by the
followers of Erasmus on the various
names given to Christ in Scripture, is
the supreme exemplar of Spanish
classical prose style: clear, lofty,
and, though studied, entirely devoid of
affectation. His translations from
Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian
include the Song of Solomon (modern
edition by J. Guillén, 1936) and the
Book of Job, both with commentary.
León’s poems, containing many of the
motifs of De los nombres de Cristo, were
posthumously published by Francisco
Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas in 1631
because their sincerity of expression
and emphasis on content rather than form
were useful in the struggle against the
attempts of the Gongorists to
re-Latinize the language. The Spanish
classicists of the 18th century used his
lyrics as models. Among his more
familiar poems are “Vida retirada”
(1557; “Withdrawn Life”) and “Noche
Serena” (1571; “Serene Night”). His
poetic works reflect the tension between
his Horatian ideals of moderation and
the turbulent life of a man of an honest
and naturally pugnacious temperament
inhabiting a world of ecclesiastical
intrigue and rancorous academic
politics. His other works include
theological treatises and commentaries
in Latin on various psalms and books of
the Bible and La perfecta casada (1583;
“The Perfect Married Woman”), a
commentary in Spanish on Proverbs 31,
incorporating elements of the medieval
ascetic tradition of misogyny
interspersed with picturesque glimpses
of feminine customs of the day.
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Poetry
Surviving for centuries in the oral tradition,
Spanish ballads (romances) link medieval heroic epic
to modern poetry and drama. The earliest datable
romances—from the mid-15th century, although the
romance form itself has been traced to the 11th
century—treated frontier incidents or lyrical
themes. Anonymous romances on medieval heroic
themes, commemorating history as it happened, formed
everyman’s sourcebook on national history and
character; they were anthologized in the Antwerp
Cancionero de romances (“Ballad Songbook”) and the
Silva de varios romances (“Miscellany of Various
Ballads”), both published about 1550 and repeatedly
thereafter. The romance form (octosyllabic,
alternate lines having a single assonance
throughout) was quickly adopted by cultured poets
and also became the medium of choice for popular
narrative verse.
The Catalan Juan Boscán Almogáver revived
attempts to Italianize Spanish poetry by
reintroducing Italian metres; he preceded Garcilaso
de la Vega, with whom the cultured lyric was reborn.
Garcilaso added intense personal notes and
characteristic Renaissance themes to a masterful
poetic technique derived from medieval and Classical
poets. His short poems, elegies, and sonnets shaped
the development of Spain’s lyric poetry throughout
the Siglo de Oro.
Fray Luis de León, adopting some of Garcilaso’s
verse techniques, typified the “Salamanca school,”
which emphasized content rather than form. Poet and
critic Fernando de Herrera headed a contrasting
school in Sevilla, which was derived equally from
Garcilaso but was concerned with subtly refined
sentiment; Herrera’s remarkable verse vibrantly
expressed topical heroic themes. The popularity of
the short native metres was reinforced by
traditional ballad collections (romanceros) and by
the evolving drama.
Models for epic poetry were the works of Italian
poets
Ludovico
Ariosto and
Torquato Tasso, but the
themes and heroes of Spanish epics celebrated
overseas conquest or defense of the empire and the
faith. Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga achieved epic
distinction with Araucana (published 1569–90),
chronicling native resistance to Spain’s conquest of
Chile. A similar attempt at epic,
Lope de Vega’s Dragontea (1598), retells Sir Francis Drake’s last
voyage and death.
Juan Boscán Almogáver

Juan Boscán, original name Joan Boscà
I Almogàver (b. c. 1490, Barcelona,
Aragon [Spain]—d. Sept. 21, 1542,
Barcelona), Catalan poet who wrote
exclusively in Castilian and adapted the
Italian hendecasyllable to that
language.
Though a minor poet, Boscán is of
major historical importance because of
his naturalizing of Italian metres and
verse forms, an experiment that induced
one of the greatest of all Spanish
poets, Boscán’s younger friend Garcilaso
de la Vega, to follow his example. Their
works appeared together posthumously in
1543, and the tide of Petrarchianism
dominated over Spanish poetry for the
next century and a half.
Boscán had published in 1534 a
translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s
Il cortegiano (The Courtier). His prose
was greatly superior to his verse, and
El Cortesano is not only one of the
influential books of the Spanish
Renaissance but a work of art in its own
right.
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Early drama
Spanish drama originated in the church. The Auto de
los reyes magos (“Play of the Three Wise Kings”),
dated from the second half of the 12th century, is
an incomplete play of the Epiphany cycle. It is
medieval Spanish drama’s only extant text. The
play’s realistic characterization of the Magi and of
Herod and his advisers and its polymetric form
foreshadowed aspects of later dramatic development
in Spain.
A reference in King Alfonso X’s legal code
suggested the existence of some popular secular
drama in the 13th century, but no texts have
survived. These juegos (short satiric entertainments
given by traveling players) antedated the plays that
constitute one of Spain’s main contributions to
dramatic genres: the pasos, entremeses, and
sainetes, all short, typically humorous works
originally used as interludes.
Juan del Encina helped emancipate the drama from
ecclesiastical ties by giving performances for noble
patrons. His Cancionero (1496; “Songbook”) contains
pastoral-religious dramatic dialogues in rustic
dialect, but he soon turned to secular themes and
vivid farce. His conception of drama evolved during
his long stay in Italy, with native medievalism
transforming into Renaissance experimentation. The
work of Encina’s Portuguese disciple Gil Vicente, a
court poet at Lisbon who wrote in both Castilian and
Portuguese, showed a significantly improved
naturalness of dialogue, acuteness of observation,
and sense of situation.
Drama’s transition from court to marketplace and
the creation of a broader public were largely
accomplished by Lope de Rueda, who toured Spain with
his modest troupe performing a repertoire of his own
composition. His four prose comedies have been
called clumsy, but his 10 pasos showed his dramatic
merits. He fathered Spain’s one-act play, perhaps
the country’s most vital and popular dramatic form.
The first dramatist to realize the ballads’
theatrical possibilities was Juan de la Cueva. His
comedies and tragedies derived largely from
Classical antiquity, but in Los siete infantes de
Lara (“The Seven Princes of Lara”), El reto de
Zamora (“The Challenge of Zamora”), and La libertad
de España por Bernardo del Carpio (“The Liberation
of Spain by Bernardo del Carpio”), all published in
1588, he revived heroic legends familiar in romances
and helped to found a national drama.
PICARESQUE
The adjective
picaresque comes from the Spanish picaro,
a rogue, and is applied to a story in
which the roguish hero undergoes a
series of loosely-linked adventures,
often encountered on a journey, as in
the English novels of Fielding or
Smollett. Usually cited as the first picaresque novel is the anonymous
Lazarillo de Tormes (1533).
Cervantes's famous story of Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza is the greatest
example of the genre, but it is much
more than that, and is now often
regarded as the first 'modern' novel.
Moreover, many would argue it is the
greatest novel ever written, which
influenced not only the early English
novelists but also writers of many
cultures over the centuries.
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Prose
Historical writing
Prose before the Counter-Reformation produced some
notable dialogues, especially Alfonso de Valdés’s
Diálogo de Mercurio y Carón (1528; “Dialogue Between
Mercury and Charon”). His brother Juan de Valdés’s
Diálogo de la lengua (“Dialogue About the Language”)
attained great critical prestige. The themes of
history and patriotism flourished as Spain’s power
increased; among the finest achievements from this
epoch was Juan de Mariana’s own translation into
Spanish (1601) of his Latin history of Spain, which
marked the vernacular’s triumph for all literary
purposes.
Major landmarks in historical writing emanated
from the New World, transmuting vital experience
into literature with unaccustomed vividness.
Christopher Columbus’s letters and accounts of his
voyages, the letters and accounts to King Charles V
by Hernán Cortés, and similar narratives by more
humble conquistadores opened new horizons to
readers. Attempting to capture exotic landscapes in
words, they enlarged the language’s resources. The
most engaging of such writings was the Historia
verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632;
True History of the Conquest of New Spain) by the
explorer Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Friar Bartolomé
de Las Casas, sometimes called the “Apostle of the
Indies,” wrote Brevísima relación de la destrucción
de las Indias (A Short Account of the Destruction of
the Indies, or The Tears of the Indians) in 1542,
criticizing Spanish colonial policy and abuse of the
native population. His work helped to give rise
among Spain’s enemies to the infamous Leyenda Negra
(“Black Legend”).
The novel

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Popular taste in the novel was dominated for a
century by progeny of the medieval courtly romance
Amadís de Gaula. These chivalric romances
perpetuated certain medieval ideals, but they also
represented pure escapism, eventually provoking such
literary reactions as the pastoral novel and the
picaresque novel. The former, imported from Italy,
oozed nostalgia for an Arcadian golden age; its
shepherds were courtiers and poets who, like the
knights-errant of chivalric romance, turned their
backs on reality. Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana
(1559?) initiated Spain’s pastoral vogue, which was
later cultivated by such major writers as
Cervantes
(La Galatea, 1585) and
Lope de Vega (La Arcadia,
1598).
Another reaction appeared in the picaresque
novel, a genre initiated with the anonymous
Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). This native Spanish
genre, widely imitated elsewhere, featured as its
protagonist a pícaro (“rogue”), essentially an
antihero, living by his wits and concerned only with
staying alive. Passing from master to master, he
depicted life from underneath. Significant for
guiding fiction to direct observation of life, the
picaresque formula has long been imitated, up to
such 20th-century writers as Pío Baroja, Juan
Antonio de Zunzunegui, and Camilo José Cela.
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Miguel de Cervantes, the preeminent figure in
Spanish literature, produced in
Don Quixote (part 1,
1605; part 2, 1615) the prototype of the modern
novel. Nominally satirizing the moribund chivalric
romance,
Cervantes presented “reality” on two
levels: the “poetic truth” of Don Quixote and the
“historic truth” of his squire, Sancho Panza. Where
Don Quixote saw and attacked an advancing army,
Sancho saw only a herd of sheep; what Sancho
perceived as windmills were menacing giants to the
questing knight-errant. The constant interaction of
these rarely compatible attitudes revealed the
novel’s potential for philosophical commentary on
existence; the dynamic interplay and evolution of
the two characters established psychological realism
and abandoned prior fiction’s static
characterizations. In the Novelas ejemplares (1613;
“Exemplary Tales”),
Cervantes claimed to be the
first to write novelas (short stories in the Italian
manner) in Spanish, differentiating between
narratives that interest for their action and those
whose merit lies in the mode of telling.
María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Spain’s first woman
novelist, was among the few women writers of the
period who did not belong to a religious order. She
too published Italian-inspired short stories, in the
collections Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637;
Eng. trans. The Enchantments of Love: Amorous and
Exemplary Novels) and Desengaños amorosos (1647;
“Disillusion in Love”). Both employ framing
structures in which, like Giovanni
Boccaccio’s
Decameron, men and women gather to tell stories;
many characters from the first collection appear in
the second, including the protagonist, Lisis. The
stories of Novelas amorosas are told during the
nights, those of Desengaños during the days; most
concern the “battle of the sexes,” featuring
innocent victims and evildoers of both sexes, but
plots turn upon men’s seduction, treachery, abuse,
and even torture of defenseless women.
CERVANTES

Cervantes
Miguel de
Cervantes Saavedra (1547—1616) was a
slightly younger contemporary - and rival — of Lope
de Vega. He had an adventurous career as a soldier
for Philip II of Spain and in 1571 fought in the
great sea battle of Lepanto, where he lost the use
of his left hand. He was captured by Barbary pirates
in 1575 and spent nearly five years as a slave,
making several unsuccessful attempts to escape
before he was ransomed. Back in Spain, he became a
lowly, underpaid official in the government while
writing rather unsuccessful plays, a pastoral
romance, and a lament in verse for the defeat of the
Armada (1588). He was several times imprisoned for
debt, and began writing The History of the Valorous
and Witty Knight Errant Don Quixote while in prison.
It was published in 1605 and was an immediate
success not only in Spain but across Europe. Cashing
in on the success, someone brought out a spurious
sequel, provoking Cervantes into writing a second
part himself. It appeared in 1615, not long before
Cervantes
died, which was apparently on the same day as
Shakespeare (23
April 1616).
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

CERVANTES
"Don Quixote " Illustrations by G. Dore
see also:
CERVANTES
"Don Quixote " Illustrations by G. Dore
born September 29?, 1547, Alcalá de Henares, Spain
died April 22, 1616, Madrid
in full Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Spanish novelist,
playwright, and poet, the creator of Don Quixote (1605,
1615) and the most important and celebrated figure in
Spanish literature. His novel Don Quixote has been
translated, in full or in part, into more than 60 languages.
Editions continue regularly to be printed, and critical
discussion of the work has proceeded unabated since the 18th
century. At the same time, owing to their widespread
representation in art, drama, and film, the figures of Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza are probably familiar visually to
more people than any other imaginary characters in world
literature. Cervantes was a great experimenter. He tried his
hand in all the major literary genres save the epic. He was
a notable short-story writer, and a few of those in his
collection of Novelas exemplares (1613; Exemplary Stories)
attain a level close to that of Don Quixote, on a miniature
scale.
Cervantes was born some 20 miles from Madrid, probably on
September 29 (the day of San Miguel). He was certainly
baptized on October 9. He was the fourth of seven children
in a family whose origins were of the minor gentry but which
had come down in the world. His father was a barber-surgeonwho
set bones, performed bloodlettings, and attended
lessermedical needs. The family moved from town to town, and
little is known of Cervantes's early education. The
supposition, based on a passage in one of the Exemplary
Stories, that he studied for a time under the Jesuits,
though not unlikely, remains conjectural. Unlike most
Spanish writers of his time, including some of humble
origin, he apparently did not go to a university. What is
certain is that at some stage he became an avid reader of
books. The head of a municipal school in Madrid, a man with
Erasmist intellectual leanings named Juan López de Hoyos,
refers to aMiguel de Cervantes as his “beloved pupil.” This
was in 1569, when the future author was 21, so—if this was
the same Cervantes—he must either have been a pupil-teacher
at the school or have studied earlier under López de Hoyos.
His first published poem, on the death of Philip II's young
queen, Elizabeth of Valois, appeared at this time.
Soldier and slave
That same year he left Spain for Italy. Whether this was
because he was the “student” of the same name wanted by the
law for involvement in a wounding incident is another
mystery; the evidence is contradictory. In any event, in
going to Italy Cervantes was doing what many young Spaniards
of the time did to further their careers in one way or
another. It seems that for a time he served as chamberlainin
the household of Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva in Rome. However,
by 1570 he had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish infantry
regiment stationed in Naples, then a possession of the
Spanish crown. He was there for about a year before he saw
active service.
Relations with the Ottoman Empire under Selim II were
reaching a crisis, and the Turks occupied Cyprus in 1570. A
confrontation between the Turkish fleet and the naval
forcesof Venice, the papacy, and Spain was inevitable. In
mid-September 1571 Cervantes sailed on board the Marquesa,
part of the large fleet under the command of Don Juan de
Austria that engaged the enemy on October 7 in the Gulf of
Lepanto near Corinth. The fierce battle ended in a crushing
defeat for the Turks that was ultimately to break their
control of the Mediterranean. There are independent accounts
of Cervantes's conduct in the action, and they concur in
testifying to his personal courage. Though stricken with a
fever, he refused to stay below and joined the thick of the
fighting. He received two gunshot wounds in the chest, and a
third rendered his left hand useless for the rest of his
life. He always looked back on his conduct in the battle
with pride. From 1572 to 1575, based mainly in Naples, he
continued his soldier's life; he was at Navarino and saw
action in Tunis and La Goleta. He must also, when
opportunity offered, have been familiarizing himself with
Italian literature. Perhaps with a recommendation for
promotion to the rank of captain, more likely just leaving
the army, he set sail for Spain in September 1575 with
letters of commendation to the king from the duque de Sessa
and Don Juan himself.
On this voyage his ship was attacked and captured by Barbary
corsairs, and Cervantes, together with his brother Rodrigo,
was sold into slavery in Algiers, the centre of the
Christian slave traffic in the Muslim world. The letters he
carried magnified his importance in the eyes of his captors.
This had the effect of raising his ransom price, and thus
prolonging his captivity, while also, it appears, protecting
his person from punishment by death, mutilation, or torture
when his four daring bids to escape were frustrated. His
masters, the renegade Dali Mami and later Hasan Paşa,
treated him with considerable leniency in the
circumstances,whatever the reason. At least two contemporary
records of the life led by Christian captives in Algiers at
this time mention Cervantes. He clearly made a name for
himself for courage and leadership among the captive
community. Atlong last, in September 1580, three years after
Rodrigo had earned his freedom, Miguel's family, with the
aid and intervention of the Trinitarian friars, raised the
500 gold escudos demanded for his release. It was only just
in time, right before Hasan Paşa sailed for Constantinople
(now Istanbul), taking his unsold slaves with him. Not
surprisingly, this, the most adventurous period of
Cervantes's life, supplied subject matter for several of his
literary works, notably the Captive's tale in Don Quixote
and the two Algiersplays, El trato de Argel (“The Traffic of
Algiers”) and Los baños de Argel (“The Bagnios [an obsolete
word for “prisons”] of Algiers”), as well as episodes in a
number of other writings, although never in straight
autobiographical form.
Civil servant and writer
Back in Spain, Cervantes spent most of the rest of his life
ina manner that contrasted entirely with his decade of
action and danger. He would be constantly short of money and
in tedious and exacting employment; it would be 25 years
before he scored a major literary success with Don Quixote.
On his return home he found that prices had risen and the
standard of living for many, particularly those of the
middle class, like his family, had fallen. The euphoria of
Lepanto was a thing of the past. Cervantes's war record did
not now bring the recompense he expected. He applied
unsuccessfully for several administrative posts in Spain's
American empire. The most he succeeded in acquiring was a
brief appointment as royal messenger to Oran, Algeria, in
1581. In vain he followed Philip II and the court to Lisbon
in newly annexed Portugal.
About this time he had an affair with a young married
woman named Ana de Villafranca (or Ana Franca de Rojas), the
fruit of which was a daughter. Isabel de Saavedra,
Cervantes's only child, was later brought up in her father's
household. Late in 1584 he married Catalina de Salazar y
Palacios, 18 years his junior. She had a small property in
the village of Esquivias in La Mancha. Little is known about
their emotional relationship. There is no reason to suppose
that the marriage did not settle down into an adequate
companionableness, despite Cervantes's enforced long
absences from home. Neither is there any special reason to
suppose that Catalina was an inspiration or a model for
characters in the poetry Cervantes was now writing or in his
first published fiction, La Galatea (1585; Galatea: A
Pastoral Romance), in the newly fashionable genre of the
pastoral romance. The publisher, Blas de Robles, paid him
1,336 reales for it, a good price for a first book. The
dedication of the work to Ascanio Colonna, a friend of
Acquaviva, was a bid for patronage that does not seem to
have been productive. Doubtless helped by a small circle of
literary friends, such as the poet Luis Gálvez de Montalvo,
the book did bring Cervantes's name before a sophisticated
reading public. But the only later editions in Spanish to
appear in the author's lifetime were those of Lisbon, 1590,
and Paris, 1611. La Galatea breaks off in mid-narrative;
judging by his repeatedly expressed hopes of writing a
sequel, Cervantes evidently maintained a lasting fondness
for the work.
Cervantes also turned his hand to the writing of drama at
this time, the early dawn of the Golden Age of the Spanish
theatre. He contracted to write two plays for the theatrical
manager Gaspar de Porras in 1585, one of which, La confusa
(“Confusion”), he later described as the best he ever
wrote.Many years afterward he claimed to have written 20 or
30 plays in this period, which, he noted, were received by
the public without being booed off the stage or having the
actorspelted with vegetables. The number is vague; only two
certainly survive from this time, the historical tragedy of
La Numancia (1580s; Numantia: A Tragedy) and El trato de
Argel (1580s; “The Traffic of Algiers”). He names nine
plays, the titles of a few of which sound like the originals
of plays reworked and published years later in the
collection Ocho comedias, y ocho entremeses nuevos (1615;
“Eight Plays and Eight New Interludes”). Fixed theatre sites
were just becoming established in the major cities of Spain,
and there was an expanding market geared to satisfying the
demandsof a public ever more hungry for entertainment. Lope
de Vega was about to respond to the call, stamping his
personal imprint on the Spanish comedia and rendering all
earlier drama, including that of Cervantes, old-fashioned or
inadequate by comparison. Though destined to be a
disappointed dramatist, Cervantes went on trying to get
managers to accept his stage works. By 1587 it was clear
that he was not going to make a living from literature, and
hewas obliged to turn in a very different direction.
Cervantes became a commissary of provisions for the great
Armada. Requisitioning corn and oil from grudging rural
communities was a thankless task, but it was at least a
steady job, with a certain status. It took him traveling all
overAndalusia, an experience he was to put to good use in
his writing. He was responsible for finances of labyrinthine
complexity, and the failure to balance his books landed him
in prolonged and repeated trouble with his superiors. There
also was constant argument with municipal and church
authorities, the latter of which more than once
excommunicated him. The surviving documentation of the
accountancy and negotiations involved is considerable.
After the disastrous defeat of the Armada in 1588, Cervantes
gravitated to Sevilla (Seville), the commercial capital of
Spain and one of the largest cities in Europe. In 1590 he
applied to the Council of the Indies for any one of four
major crown posts vacant in Central and South America. His
petition was curtly rejected. Wrangles over his accounts and
arrears of salary dragged on. He seems to have kept some
contact with the literary world; there is a record of his
buying certain books, and he must have managed to find time
for reading. In 1592 he signed a contract to supply six
plays to a theatrical manager, one Rodrigo Osorio. Nothing
came of this. His commissary work continued, and the
litigation came to a head; in September 1592 he was
imprisoned for a few days in Castro del Río.
In 1594 Cervantes was in Madrid seeking a new post. He
received an appointment that took him back to Andalusia to
collect overdue taxes. Although it was in effect a
promotion, the job was no more rewarding than the previous
one and was similarly fraught with financial difficulties
and confrontations. Cervantes was not by temperament a
businessman. Probably by mutual agreement the appointment
was terminated in 1596. The previous year he had won first
prize (three silver spoons) in a poetry competition in
Zaragoza. Back in Sevilla, he likely started seriously
writing stories at about this time, not to mention a
wickedly satirical sonnet on the conduct of the duque de
Medina Sidonia, to be followed by one obliquely
disrespectful of the recently deceased king himself. Again
he met with financial troubles. In the summer of 1597
discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed
him in the Crown Jail of Sevilla. He was confined until the
endof April 1598 and perhaps conceived there the idea of Don
Quixote, as a remark in the first prologue suggests:
And so, what was to be expected of a sterile and
uncultivated wit such as that which I possess if not an
offspring that was dried up, shriveled, and eccentric: a
story filled with thoughts that never occurred to anyone
else, of a sort that might be engendered in a prison where
every annoyance has its home and every mournful sound its
habitation?
Information about Cervantes's life over the next four or
five years is sparse. He had left Sevilla, and, perhaps for
a while in Esquivias and Madrid, later for certain in
Valladolid (where the royal court established itself from
1601 to 1606), he must have been writing the first part of
Don Quixote. Early versions of two of his stories, "Rinconete
y Cortadillo" (“Rinconete and Cortadillo”) and "El celoso
extremeño" (“The Jealous Extremaduran”), found their way
into a miscellaneous compilation, unpublished, made by one
Francisco Porras de la Cámara.
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CERVANTES
"Don Quixote " Illustrations by G. Dore
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DON
QUIXOTE
The
hero of
Cervantes's masterpiece, from
whom we gain the word 'quixotic', is an
elderly, stick-thin and destitute
nobleman of La Mancha, labouring under
delusions induced by reading too many
chivalric romances. He embarks on a
one-man knightly crusade through Andalucia, riding his emaciated
'charger', Rosinante, and accompanied by
his weary, cynical but loyal 'squire',
the tubby Sancho Panza, seeking
adventures through which he may gain
honour and fame. He treats everyone he
meets as if they are characters from
pastoral or chivalric romance, including
Dulcinea, a humble peasant girl whom he
sees as the exquisite high-born maiden
that every chivalrous knight required to
spur him on his quest. In perhaps the
most famous episode, the gallant hero
attacks windmills that he takes for
giants (hence our phrase, 'tilting at
windmills'); in another, he rides to
assist a great Christian host fighting a
Muslim army, heedless of Sancho Panza's
advice that they are in fact a flock of
sheep. His exploits generally end in
bruises and embarrassment.
Don Quixote is one of the funniest
books ever written, but as in all good
humour there are deeper resonances.
Cervantes himself declared that his
purpose was to put an end to the
popularity of Spanish chivalric
romances. The book is certainly fine
satire: the Don is the very antithesis
of a knightly hero, being old, ugly and
barmv. Yet he is also sympathetic. He
represents romantic imagination and
idealism as against the earthy realism
of the picaresque Sancho Pan/a. By
combining these two traditions, broadly
'medieval' and 'modern',
Cervantes creates a rich
tapestry, incorporating a picture of
contemporary life and culture, with
vivid, comic characters equalled on this
scale perhaps only by Chaucer and
Dickens.
"Blessings on him who
invented sleep, the
mantle that covers all
human thoughts, the food
that satisfies hunger,
the drink that slakes
thirst, the lire that
warms cold, the cold
that moderates heat, and
lastly, the common
currency that buys all
things, the balance and
weight that equalizes
the shepherd and the
king, the simpleton and
the sage"
Cervantes,
Don
Quixote, ch. 68.
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SPAIN AND
DON QUIXOTE
In the
end Don Quixote, having been tricked by
friends, returns sadly home, rid of his
delusions, renouncing the knightly
enterprise. 1 he curtain is coming down,
just as the curtain was coming down on
the 'golden age' of Spain, an age built
largely on illusions — such as the
belief that importing American treasure
by the ton would make the country rich.
But while Spam, the greatest Christian
power, entered its decline, Spanish
literature, with Castilian
now-established as the language of
Spanish culture, flourished. Besides the
world-renowned figures of
Cervantes and
Lope de Vega, Mateo Aleman's
Guzman de Alffarache, an orthodox
picaresque novel, was also read all over
Europe. Francisco de Quevedo,
best known as a satirist, wrote a
picaresque novel, The Rogue, in
1626, and many playwrights found an
audience, despite Lope de Vega's
prodigious output. Still, the enduring
image of the country is the dusty plain
of La Mancha, heroically if unsteadily
traversed by a lean and lengthy Don,
'the Knight of the Doleful Countenance',
followed by a short round squire on his
donkey, with windmills slowly turning m
the background. The image has fascinated
the world, and it is as Spanish as dry
sherry.
Mateo Aleman

Mateo Alemán, (baptized
September 28, 1547, Sevilla,
Spain—d. c. 1614, Mexico),
novelist, a master stylist
best known for his early,
highly popular picaresque
novel, Guzmán de Alfarache.
Descended from Jews who
had been forcibly converted
to Catholicism, Alemán
expressed many aspects of
the experiences and feelings
of the New Christians in
16th-century Spain. His most
important literary work,
Guzmán de Alfarache (1599; a
second part, 1604; Eng.
trans., The Spanish Rogue,
1622, 1924), which brought
him fame throughout Europe
but little profit, is one of
the earliest picaresque
novels. The first part ran
through many editions,
almost all pirated; even
before he could finish the
second part, a spurious
sequel had appeared.
Alemán’s life, in many ways
like that of his
protagonist, Guzmán, was
afflicted with severe
economic and personal
reverses. He was the son of
a prison doctor and studied
medicine at Salamanca and
Alcalá for four years after
graduating from the
University of Sevilla
(Seville) in 1564, but he
never practiced. In 1580 he
was imprisoned for debt.
Only after he emigrated to
Mexico in 1608 did his
fortunes become settled and
his life stable.
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Francisco de Quevedo

Francisco Gómez de
Quevedo y Villegas, (b.
Sept. 17, 1580, Madrid,
Spain—d. Sept. 8, 1645,
Villanueva de los Infantes),
poet and master satirist of
Spain’s Golden Age, who, as
a virtuoso of language, is
unequaled in Spanish
literature.
Quevedo was born to a
family of wealth and
distinction. He studied at
the universities of Alcalá
and Valladolid from 1596 to
1606, was versed in several
languages, and by the age of
23 had distinguished himself
as a poet and wit. His elder
contemporaries, Miguel de
Cervantes and Lope de Vega,
both expressed their esteem
for his poetry, but Quevedo
was more interested in a
political career. In 1613 he
became a counsellor to the
Duke de Osuna, viceroy of
Sicily and later of Naples,
whom he served with
distinction for seven years.
On the ascension of Philip
IV of Spain, Osuna fell from
favour and Quevedo was
placed under house arrest.
He thereafter refused
political appointment and
devoted himself to writing,
producing a steady stream of
satirical verse and prose
aimed at the follies of his
contemporaries. In 1639 he
was again arrested,
supposedly for a satirical
poem, and was confined in a
monastery. Released in 1643,
broken in health, he died
shortly after.
Quevedo reveals his
complex personality in the
extreme variety of tone in
his works, ranging from the
obscene to the devout. His
learning and wide culture
impelled him to write works
of high moral seriousness,
treatises on Stoic
philosophy, and translations
of Epictetus and Seneca, but
he demonstrates equal
familiarity with low life
and the cant of the
underworld.
The bulk of his satirical
writings were aimed at
specific abuses of the day
and are no longer of
interest, but he is
remembered for his
picaresque novel La vida del
buscón (1626; “The Life of a
Scoundrel”), which describes
the adventures of “Paul the
Sharper” in a grotesquely
distorted world of thieves,
connivers, and impostors.
Quevedo’s Sueños (1627;
Dreams), fantasies of hell
and death, written at
intervals from 1606 to 1622,
shows his development as a
master of the then new
Baroque style conceptismo, a
complicated form of
expression depending on puns
and elaborate conceits. An
anthology of his poems in
English translation was
published in 1969.
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Mystical writings
The flowering of Spanish mysticism coincided with
the Counter-Reformation, although antecedents
appear, particularly in the expatriate Spanish Jew
León Hebreo, whose Dialoghi di amore (1535; “The
Dialogues of Love”), written in Italian, profoundly
influenced 16th-century and later Spanish thought.
The mystics’ literary importance derives from
attempts to transcend language’s limitations,
liberating previously untapped resources of
expression. The writings of St. Teresa of Ávila,
notably her autobiography and letters, reveal a
great novelist in embryo. In his prose as in his
poetry, Fray Luis de León showed passionate
devotion, sincerity, and profound feeling for nature
in a style of singular purity; he also wrote a
conservative tract on educating women, La perfecta
casada (1583; The Perfect Wife), glossing Proverbs
31. St. John of the Cross achieved preeminence
through poems of exalted style expressing the
experience of mystic union.
Writings about women
Among the feminine voices that defended women’s
interests during the Renaissance and Siglo de Oro
were Sor Teresa de Cartagena in the 15th century and
Luisa de Padilla, Isabel de Liaño, and Sor María de
Santa Isabel in the early 16th century. They were
champions of women’s rights to education and free
choice in matrimony. Traditionalist reactions during
the Counter-Reformation included treatises on the
training of women, such as Fray Alonso de Herrera’s
Espejo de la perfecta casada (c. 1637, “Mirror of
the Perfect Wife”).
Later drama
The drama achieved its true splendour in the genius
of
Lope de Vega (in full Lope Félix de Vega Carpio).
Its manifesto was
Lope’s own treatise, Arte nuevo de
hacer comedias en este tiempo (1609; “New Art of
Writing Plays at This Time”), which rejected
Neoclassical “rules,” opting to blend comedy and
tragedy with metrical variety, and made public
opinion the arbiter of good taste. The new comedia
(“drama”) advocated respect for the crown, church,
and human personality. The last was symbolized in
the theme that
Lope considered best of all: the pundonor (“point of honour”), grounded in a gender
code that made women the repository of family
honour, which could be tarnished or lost by the
woman’s slightest indiscretion.
Lope’s drama was
concerned less with character than with action and
intrigue, seldom approaching the essence of tragedy.
What this great Spanish playwright did possess was a
remarkable sense of stagecraft and the ability to
make the most intricate plot gripping.
Lope, who claimed authorship of more than 1,800
comedias, towered over his contemporaries. With his
unerring sense of what could move an audience, he
exploited evocations of Spain’s greatness, making
its drama “national” in the truest sense. Two main
categories of his work are the native historical
drama and the comedia capa y espada
(“cloak-and-sword drama”) of contemporary manners.
Lope ransacked the literary past for heroic themes,
chosen to illustrate aspects of the national
character or of social solidarity. The
cloak-and-sword play, which dominated drama after
Lope, was pure entertainment, exploiting disguise,
falling in and out of love, and false alarms about honour. In it affairs of the lady and her gallant
are often parodied through the actions of the
servants. The cloak-and-sword play delighted by the
dexterity of its intricate plotting, its sparkling
dialogue, and the entangled relationships depicted
between the sexes.
The greatest of
Lope’s immediate successors,
Tirso de Molina (pseudonym of Fray Gabriel Téllez),
first dramatized the Don Juan legend in his Burlador
de Sevilla (1630; “The Trickster of Sevilla”). La
prudencia en la mujer (1634; “Prudence in Woman”)
figured among Spain’s greatest historical dramas, as
did El condenado por desconfiado (1635; The Doubter
Damned) among theological plays. Tirso’s
cloak-and-sword comedies excelled in liveliness.
Mexican-born Juan Ruiz de Alarcón struck a
distinctive note. His 20 plays were sober, studied,
and imbued with serious moral purpose, and his
Verdad sospechosa (1634; “The Truth Suspected”)
inspired the great French dramatist
Pierre
Corneille’s Menteur (1643).
Corneille’s famous Le
Cid (1637) similarly drew upon the conflict between
love and honour presented in Las mocedades del Cid
(1599?; “The Youthful Exploits of the Cid”) by
Guillén de Castro y Bellvís.
Although their names were suppressed and their
works left largely unperformed for centuries,
several women dramatists of the Siglo de Oro left
extant plays. Ángela de Acevedo—a lady-in-waiting to
Elizabeth (Isabel de Borbón), wife of King Philip
IV—left three extant plays of unknown dates: El
muerto disimulado (“The Pretending Dead Man”), La
Margarita del Tajo que dió nombre a Santarem
(“Margarita of Tajo Who Named Santarem”), and Dicha
y desdicha del juego y devoción de la Virgen (“Bliss
and Misfortune in Gaming and Devotion to the
Virgin”). Ana Caro Mallén de Soto, friend of the
novelist María de Zayas, wrote El Conde Partinuplés
(“Count Partinuples”) and Valor, agravio y mujer
(“Valour, Dishonour, and Woman”), both probably
during the 1640s. Feliciana Enríquez de
Guzmán—thought to have flourished about 1565 but
whose identity is disputed—wrote Tragicomedia de los
jardines y campos Sabeos (“Tragicomedy of the
Sabaean Gardens and Fields”). In the middle of the
17th century María de Zayas wrote Traición en la
amistad (“Betrayal in Friendship”). Sor Marcela de
San Félix was an illegitimate daughter of
Lope de
Vega; born Marcela del Carpio, she entered a convent
at age 16 and wrote, directed, and acted in six
one-act allegorical plays, the Coloquios
espirituales (“Spiritual Colloquies”). She also
penned short dramatic panegyrics, romances, and
other books. Common denominators in these women’s
works are religious themes, honour, friendship,
love, and misfortune.
Tirso de Molina

Tirso de Molina, pseudonym of Gabriel
Téllez (b. March 9?, 1584, Madrid,
Spain—d. March 12, 1648, Soria), one of
the outstanding dramatists of the Golden
Age of Spanish literature.
Tirso studied at the University of
Alcalá and in 1601 was professed in the
Mercedarian Order. As the order’s
official historian he wrote Historia
general de la orden de la Merced in
1637. He was also a theologian of
repute. Guided to drama by an inborn
sense of the theatrical and inspired by
the achievements of Lope de Vega,
creator of the Spanish comedia, Tirso
built on the “free-and-easy”
prescriptions that Lope had propounded
for dramatic construction. In his plays
he sometimes accentuated the religious
and philosophical aspects that attracted
his theological interest; at other times
he drew on his own topographical and
historical knowledge, gained while
traveling for his order through Spain,
Portugal, and the West Indies. Sometimes
he borrowed from the vast common stock
of Spanish stage material, and at other
times he relied on his own powerful
imagination.
Three of his dramas appeared in his
Cigarrales de Toledo (1621; “Weekend
Retreats of Toledo”), a set of verses,
tales, plays, and critical observations
that, arranged after the Italian fashion
in a picturesque framework, affect to
provide a series of summer recreations
for a group of friends. Otherwise his
extant output of about 80 dramas—a
fragment of the whole—was published
chiefly in five Partes between 1627 and
1636. The second part presents
apparently insoluble problems of
authenticity, and the authorship of
certain other of his plays outside this
part has also been disputed.
The most powerful dramas associated
with his name are two tragedies, El
burlador de Sevilla (“The Seducer of
Seville”) and El condenado por
desconfiado (1635; The Doubted Damned).
The first introduced into literature the
hero-villain Don Juan, a libertine whom
Tirso derived from popular legends but
recreated with originality. The figure
of Don Juan subsequently became one of
the most famous in all literature
through Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera
Don Giovanni (1787). El burlador rises
to a majestic climax of nervous tension
when Don Juan is confronted with the
statue-ghost of the man he has killed,
and deliberately chooses to defy this
emanation of his diseased conscience. El
condenado por desconfiado dramatizes a
theological paradox: the case of a
notorious evildoer who has kept and
developed the little faith he had, and
who is granted salvation by an act of
divine grace, contrasted with the
example of a hitherto good-living
hermit, eternally damned for allowing
his one-time faith to shrivel. Tirso was
at his best when portraying the
psychological conflicts and
contradictions involved in these master
characters. At times he reaches
Shakespearean standards of insight,
tragic sublimity, and irony. The same
qualities are found in isolated scenes
of his historical dramas, for example in
Antona García (1635), which is notable
for its objective analysis of mob
emotion; in La prudencia en la mujer
(1634; “Prudence in Woman”), with its
modern interpretation of ancient
regional strife; and in the biblical La
venganza de Tamar (1634), with its
violently realistic scenes.
When inspired, Tirso could dramatize
personality and make his best characters
memorable as individuals. He is more
stark and daring than Lope but less
ingenious, more spiritually independent
than Pedro Calderón de la Barca but less
poetic. His plays of social types and
manners, such as El vergonzoso en
palacio (written 1611, published 1621;
“The Bashful Man in the Palace”), are
animated, varied in mood, and usually
lyrical. At the same time, however,
Tirso’s style is erratic and sometimes
trite. In pure comedy he excels in
cloak-and-sword situations; and in, for
example, Don Gil de las calzas verdes
(1635; “Don Gil of the Green
Stockings”), he manipulates a complex,
rapidly moving plot with exhilarating
vitality. His tragedies and comedies are
both famous for their clowns, whose wit
has a tonic air of spontaneity.
Naturalness in diction suited his
dramatic purpose better than the
ornamental rhetoric then coming into
vogue, and generally he avoided
affectations, remaining in this respect
nearer to Lope than to Calderón. Tirso
was not as consistently brilliant as
these great contemporaries, but his
finest comedies rival theirs, and his
best tragedies surpass them.
Ivy Lilian McClelland
|
LOPE DE VEGA
The period was also a fruitful one for drama in the golden age
of Spain. As in England, all parts in Spanish plays in the 16th
century were played by males, and actors were organized into
companies run by a manager. Public theatres were owned by local
authorities or religious organizations and were set up in large
open yards between buildings. The actual theatres were similar
to those in England, with a platform stage backed by a building
on two storeys, the spectators on balconies in the houses
surrounding the yard or benches in the 'pit'. In the 17th
century, the patronage of the Court became increasingly
important, and stage design fell increasingly under Italian
influence.
The greatest Spanish playwright was
Lope de Vega
(1562-1635), "the Spanish Shakespeare", a passionate man, author
of many love poems (to a variety of lovers), and of a ferocious
attack on the depredations of the English, in particular Sir
Francis Drake (Lope took part in the Armada). He had an
inexhaustible imagination and is said to have written nearly
1,500 plays. About 500 survive, in every possible style, sacred
and secular, pastoral and heroic, romance, tragedy and low-life
comedy. He is remembered above all for the Spanish comedia,
criticized at the time for its rejection of Aristotelian
principles but very popular with less learned audiences. His
influence spread well beyond Spain.
Lope's follower and nearest rival was
Calderon de la Barca
(1600—81), a royal chaplain and author of over 100 plays,
similarly diverse in type, though later in life Calderon
concentrated on highly regarded religious allegories.
Lope de Vega

Spanish author
born Nov. 25, 1562, Madrid died Aug. 27, 1635, Madrid
Main in full Lope Félix De Vega Carpio, byname The Phoenix Of Spain, Spanish
El Fénix De España outstanding dramatist of the Spanish Golden Age,
author of as many as 1,800 plays and several hundred shorter dramatic
pieces, of which 431 plays and 50 shorter pieces are extant.
Life. Lope de Vega was the second son and third child of Francisca Fernandez
Flores and Félix de Vega, an embroiderer. He was taught Latin and
Castilian in 1572–73 by the poet Vicente Espinel, and the following year
he entered the Jesuit Imperial College, where he learned the rudiments
of the humanities. Captivated by his talent and grace, the bishop of
Ávila took him to the Alcalá de Henares (Universidad Complutense) in
1577 to study for the priesthood, but Vega soon left the Alcalá on the
heels of a married woman.
On his father’s death in 1578, the embroidery shop passed to the
husband of one of the poet’s sisters, Isabel del Carpio. Vega later
adopted the noble name of Carpio in order to give an aristocratic tone
to his own. He acquired a humanistic education from his abundant though
haphazard readings in erudite anthologies. In 1583 he took part in the
Spanish expedition against the Azores.
By this time Vega had established himself as a playwright in Madrid
and was living from his comedias (tragicomic social dramas). He also
exercised an undefined role as gentleman attendant or secretary to
various nobles, adapting his role as servant or panderer according to
the situation. By this time, also, the poet’s life was already launched
on a course of tempestuous passion. The “remote beauty” who took him
from the Alcalá was followed by Elena Osorio, an actress of exceptional
beauty and maturity. His romantic involvement with her was intense,
violent, and marred by Vega’s jealousy over Elena’s liaison with the
powerful gallant Don Francisco Perrenot de Granvelle, nephew of the
cardinal de Granvelle. Finally, when Elena abandoned the poet, he wrote
such fierce libels against her and her family that he landed in prison.
The libel continued in a court case in 1588, which sent him into exile
from Castile for eight years. In the middle of this incredible court
scandal, Vega abducted Isabel de Urbina (the “Belisa” of many of his
poems), the beautiful 16-year-old sister of Philip II’s earl marshal.
They were forced to marry, and the new husband immediately departed with
the Spanish Armada against England. On his return, he passed the
remainder of his exile in Valencia, at that time a centre of
considerable dramatic activity, and took to the serious writing of
plays. Here, too, he engaged in writing romanceros, or ballad poetry,
which had become fashionable. In 1590 he was appointed secretary to the
duke of Alba, whom he followed to Toledo and then to the ducal estate at
Alba de Tormes, where his wife died in childbirth in 1595. He auctioned
off everything he owned and left for Madrid, where his public
concubinage with the widow Antonia Trillo de Armenta caused him another
lawsuit (1596).
He had left the duke’s service in 1595, and in 1598 he went to the
home of the marqués de Sarriá, with whom he remained until 1600.
Sometime around 1595 he also met the illiterate and singularly beautiful
actress Micaela de Luján, who was to be for nearly 20 years the poet’s
most peaceful love; she was the “Camila Lucinda” of numerous magnificent
verses composed for her by Vega. He took a second wife, Juana de Guardo,
the daughter of a wealthy pork butcher, by whom he had two children,
Carlos Félix and Feliciana. He was mercilessly pilloried by his literary
enemies for such an opportunistic union.
Height of literary productivity.
From 1605 until his death he remained a confidential secretary and
counselor to the duke of Sessa, with whom he maintained a voluminous and
revealing correspondence. In 1608 he was also named to a sinecure
position as a familiar of the Inquisition and then prosecutor (promotor
fiscal) of the Apostolic Chamber. By this time, Vega had become a famous
poet and was already regarded as the “phoenix of Spanish wits.” In 1609
he published Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo (“New Art of
Writing Plays in This Time”), a poetic treatise in which he defended his
own plays with more wit than effectiveness.
In 1610, in the midst of full literary production—on the road to his
500 comedias—Vega moved his household definitively from Toledo to
Madrid. In Madrid, Vega was afflicted by painful circumstances that
complicated his life in a period when he was still very creative. Juana
became ill, miscarried, and lived in precarious health under Vega’s
constant care; Carlos Félix, his favourite son, also became ill and
died, in 1612. Juana died in childbirth with Feliciana, and Micaela de
Luján must also have died during that time, since Vega took into his own
home the children remaining from this relationship, Marcela and Lope
Félix, or Lopito.
These heartbreaks moved the poet to a deep religious crisis. In 1609
he entered the first of several religious orders. From this time on he
wrote almost exclusively religious works, though he also continued his
theatrical work, which was financially indispensable. In 1614 he entered
the priesthood, but his continued service as secretary and panderer to
his patron, the duke of Sessa, hindered him from obtaining the
ecclesiastical benefits he sought. The duke, fearful of losing Vega’s
services, succeeded in having one of the poet’s former lovers, the
actress Lucia de Salcedo, seduce Vega. The duke thus permanently
recovered his secretary. Vega thereafter became involved in new and
scandalous romantic relationships. In 1627 his verse epic on the life
and execution of Mary, queen of Scots, La corona trágica, which was
dedicated to Pope Urban VIII, brought in reward a doctorate in theology
of the Collegium Sapientiae and the cross of the Order of Malta, out of
which came his proud use of the title Frey (“Brother”). His closing
years were full of gloom. His last lover, Marta de Nevares, who shared
his life from 1619 until her death in 1632, lost first her sight and
then her sanity in the 1620s. The death at sea of his son Lope Félix del
Carpio y Luján and the abduction and abandonment of his youngest
daughter, Antonia Clara, both in 1634, were blows that rent his soul.
His own death in Madrid in August 1635 evoked national mourning.
Works. Vega became identified as a playwright with the comedia, a comprehensive
term for the new drama of Spain’s Golden Age. Vega’s productivity for
the stage, however exaggerated by report, remains phenomenal. He claimed
to have written an average of 20 sheets a day throughout his life and
left untouched scarcely a vein of writing then current. Cervantes called
him “the prodigy of nature.” Juan Pérez de Montalván, his first
biographer, in his Fama póstuma (1636), attributed to Vega a total of
1,800 plays, as well as more than 400 autos sacramentales (short
allegorical plays on sacramental subjects). The dramatist’s own first
figure of 230 plays in 1603 rises to 1,500 in 1632; more than 100, he
boasts, were composed and staged in 24 hours. The titles are known of
723 plays and 44 autos, and the texts survive of 426 and 42,
respectively.
The earliest firm date for a play written by Vega is 1593. His 18
months in Valencia in 1589–90, during which he was writing for a living,
seem to have been decisive in shaping his vocation and his talent. The
influence in particular of the Valencian playwright Cristóbal de Virués
(1550–1609) was obviously profound. Toward the end of his life, in El
laurel de Apolo, Vega credits Virués with having, in his “famous
tragedies,” laid the very foundations of the comedia. Virués’ five
tragedies, written between 1579 and 1590, do indeed display a gradual
evolution from a set imitation of Greek tragedy as understood by the
Romans to the very threshold of romantic comedy. In the process the five
acts previously typical of Spanish plays have become three; the
classical chorus has given way to comment within the play, including
that implicit in the expansion of a servant’s role to that of confidant;
the unities of time, place, and action have disappeared, leaving instead
to each act its own setting in time and space; and hendecasyllabic blank
verse has yielded to a metrical variety that, seeking to reflect
changing moods and situations, also suggests the notable degree of
lyricism soon to permeate the drama. The Spanish drama’s confusing of
tragic effect with a mere accumulation of tragic happenings has
deflected the emphasis from in-depth character portrayal to that of
complexity of plot, action, and incident, and the resulting emphasis on
intrigues, misunderstandings, and other devices of intricate and
complicated dramatic plotting have broken down the old divisions between
dramatic genres in favour of an essentially mixed kind, tragicomedy,
that would itself soon be known simply as comedia. Finally, from
initially portraying kings and princes of remote ages, Virués began to
depict near-contemporary Spain and ordinary men and women.
There can be no claiming that Vega learned his whole art from Virués.
Bartolomé de Torres Naharro at the beginning of the 16th century had
already adumbrated the cloak and sword (cape y espada) play of
middle-class manners. A decade before Virués, Juan de la Cueva had
discovered the dramatic interest latent in earlier Spanish history and
its potential appeal to a public acutely responsive to national
greatness. In the formation of the comedia this proved another decisive
factor on which Vega fastened instinctively.
It was at this point that Vega picked up the inheritance and, by
sheer force of creative genius and fertility of invention, gave the
comedia its basic formula and raised it to a peak of splendour. The
comedia’s manual was Vega’s own poetic treatise, El arte nuevo de hacer
comedias en este tiempo, in which he firmly rejected the Classical and
Neoclassical “rules,” opted for a blend of comedy and tragedy and for
metrical variety, and made public opinion the ultimate arbiter of taste.
The comedia was essentially, therefore, a social drama, ringing a
thousand changes on the accepted foundations of society: respect for
crown, for church, and for the human personality, the latter being
symbolized in the “point of honour” (pundonor) that Vega commended as
the best theme of all “since there are none but are strongly moved
thereby.” This “point of honour” was a matter largely of convention,
“honour” being equivalent, in a very limited and brittle sense, to
social reputation; men were expected to be brave and proud and not to
put up with an insult, while “honour” for women basically meant
maintaining their chastity (if unmarried) or their fidelity (if
married). It followed that this was a drama less of character than of
action and intrigue that rarely, if ever, grasped the true essence of
tragedy.
Few of the plays that Vega wrote were perfect, but he had an unerring
sense for the theme and detail that could move an audience conscious of
being on the crest of its country’s greatness to respond to a mirroring
on the stage of some of the basic ingredients of that greatness. Because
of him the comedia became a vast sounding board for every chord in the
Spanish consciousness, a “national” drama in the truest sense.
In theme Vega’s plays range over a vast horizon. Traditionally his
plays have been grouped as religious, mythological, classical,
historical (foreign and national), pastoral, chivalric, fantastic, and
of contemporary manners. In essence the categories come down to two,
both Spanish in setting: the heroic, historical play based on some
national story or legend, and the cloak and sword drama of contemporary
manners and intrigue.
For his historical plays Vega ransacked the medieval chronicle, the
romancero, and popular legend and song for heroic themes, chosen for the
most part as throwing into relief some aspect either of the national
character or of that social solidarity on which contemporary Spain’s
greatness rested. The conception of the crown as fount of justice and
bulwark of the humble against oppression inspires some of his finest
plays. Peribáñez y el comendador de Ocaña (Peribáñez and the Commander
of Ocaña), El mejor alcalde, el rey (The King, the Greatest Alcalde),
and Fuente Ovejuna (All Citizens Are Soldiers) are still memorable and
highly dramatic vindications of the inalienable rights of the
individual, as is El caballero de Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo) on a
more exalted social plane. In Fuente Ovejuna the entire village assumes
responsibility before the king for the slaying of its overlord and wins
his exoneration. This experiment in mass psychology, the best known
outside Spain of all his plays, evoked a particular response from
audiences in tsarist Russia.
Vega’s cloak and sword plays are all compounded of the same
ingredients and feature the same basic situations: gallants and ladies
falling endlessly in and out of love, the “point of honour” being
sometimes engaged, but very rarely the heart, while servants imitate or
parody the main action and one, the gracioso, exercises his wit and
common sense in commenting on the follies of his social superiors. El
perro del hortelano (The Gardener’s Dog), Por la puente Juana (Across
the Bridge, Joan), La dama boba (The Lady Nit-Wit), La moza de cántaro
(The Girl with the Jug), and El villano en su rincón (The Peasant’s
House Is His Castle) are reckoned among the best in this minor if
still-entertaining kind of play.
All Vega’s plays suffer from haste of composition, partly a
consequence of the public’s insatiable desire for novelty. His first
acts are commonly his best, with the third a hasty cutting of knots or
tying up of loose ends that takes scant account both of probability and
of psychology. There was, too, a limit to his inventiveness in the
recurrence of basic themes and situations, particularly in his cloak and
sword plays. But Vega’s defects, like his strength, derive from the
accuracy with which he projected onto the stage the essence of his
country and age. Vega’s plays remain true to the great age of Spain into
which he had been born and which he had come to know, intuitively rather
than by study, as no one had ever known it before.
Vega’s nondramatic works in verse and prose filled 21 volumes in
1776–79. Much of this vast output has withered, but its variety remains
impressive. Vega wrote pastoral romances, verse histories of recent
events, verse biographies of Spanish saints, long epic poems and
burlesques upon such works, and prose tales, imitating or adapting works
by Ariosto and Cervantes in the process. His lyric compositions—ballads,
elegies, epistles, sonnets (there are 1,587 of these)—are myriad.
Formally they rely much on the conceit, and in content they provide a
running commentary on the poet’s whole emotional life.
Among specific nondramatic works that deserve to be mentioned are the
7,000-line Laurel de Apolo (1630), depicting Apollo’s crowning of the
poets of Spain on Helicon, which remains of interest as a guide to the
poets and poetasters of the day; La Dorotea (1632), a thinly veiled
chapter of autobiography cast in dialogue form that grows in critical
esteem as the most mature and reflective of his writings; and, listed
last because it provides a bridge and key to his plays, the Arte nuevo
de hacer comedias en este tiempo. This verse apology rested on the sound
Aristotelian principle that the dramatist’s first duty is to hold and
satisfy his audience: the comedia, he says in effect, had developed in
response to what the Spanish public demanded of the theatre. The
treatise provides a clear picture of the principles and conventions of a
drama entitled to be called national in its close identification with
the social values and emotional responses of the age.
|
Culteranismo and conceptismo
In poetry and prose the early 17th century in Spain
was marked by the rise and spread of two
interrelated stylistic movements, often considered
typical of the Baroque. Authors shared an elitist
desire to communicate only with the initiated, so
that writings in both styles present considerable
interpretive difficulties. Culteranismo, the ornate,
roundabout, high-flown style of which Luis de
Góngora y Argote was archpriest, attempted to
ennoble the language by re-Latinizing it. Poets
writing in this style created hermetic vocabulary
and used stilted syntax and word order, with
expression garbed (and disguised) in Classical myth,
allusion, and complicated metaphor, all of which
rendered their work sometimes incomprehensible.
Góngora’s major poetic achievement (Soledades [1613;
“Solitudes”]) invited many untalented imitations of
his uniquely elaborate style, which came to be known
as Gongorism (gongorismo). The other stylistic
movement, conceptismo, played on ideas as
culteranismo did on language. Aiming at the
semblance of profundity, conceptista style was
concise, aphoristic, and epigrammatic and thus
belonged primarily to prose, especially satire.
Concerned with stripping appearances from reality,
it had as its best outlet the essay.
Francisco Gómez
de Quevedo y Villegas, the greatest satirist of his
time and a master of language, was, in Sueños (1627;
“Dreams”), an outstanding exponent of conceptismo;
similar traits appear in his picaresque satire La
vida del buscón llamado don Pablos (1626; “The Life
of the Trickster Called Don Pablos”; Eng. trans. The
Scavenger and The Swindler). Baltasar Gracián
reduced conceptista refinement to an exact code in
Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642, 2nd ed. 1648;
“Subtlety and the Art of Genius”); he also tried to
codify in a series of treatises the art of living.
Gracián’s thought in his allegorical novel El
criticón (1651, 1653, 1657; The Critick) reflected a
pessimistic vision of life as “daily dying.”
The plays of
Calderón
Pedro Calderón de la Barca adapted
Lope de Vega’s
formula for producing tightly structured dramas
wherein formal artistry and poetic texture combine
with thematic profundity and unified dramatic
purpose. One of the world’s outstanding dramatists,
Calderón wrote plays that were effective in both the
public playhouses and Madrid’s newly built court
theatre of Buen Retiro, whose elaborate stage
technology allowed him to excel in mythological
drama (La estatua de Prometeo [1669; “The Statue of
Prometheus”]).
Calderón contributed to an emerging
musical comedy form, the zarzuela (El jardín de
Falerina [1648; “The Garden of Falerina”]), and
cultivated many subgenres; his numerous secular
plays encompassed both comedy and tragedy. His best
comedies provide subtle critiques of urban mores,
combining laughter with tragic foreboding (La dama
duende [1629; The Phantom Lady]). His tragedies
probe the human predicament, exploring personal and
collective guilt (Las tres justicias en una [c.
1637; Three Judgments at a Blow]), the bathos of
limited vision and lack of communication (El pintor
de su deshonra [c. 1645; The Painter of His Own
Dishonour]), the destructiveness of certain social
codes (El médico de su honra [1635; The Surgeon of
His Honour]), and the conflict between the
constructive nature of reason and the destructive
violence of self-centred passion (La hija del aire
[1653; “The Daughter of the Air”]). His best-known
plays, appropriately classified as high drama,
include El alcalde de Zalamea (c. 1640; The Mayor of
Zalamea), which rejects social honour’s tyranny,
preferring the inner nature of true human worth and
dignity. Philosophical problems of determinism and
free will dominate La vida es sueño (1635; Life Is a
Dream), a masterpiece that explores escaping from
life’s confusion to awareness of reality and
self-knowledge.
Calderón’s overtly religious plays range from
Jesuit drama emphasizing conversion (El mágico
prodigioso [1637; The Wonder-Working Magician]) and
heroic saintliness (El príncipe constante [1629; The
Constant Prince]) to his autos sacramentales,
liturgical plays employing formal abstractions and
symbols to expound the Fall of Man and Christian
redemption, in which he brought to perfection the
medieval tradition of the morality play. These
liturgical plays range in their artistry from the
immediate metaphorical appeal of El gran teatro del
mundo (c. 1635; The Great Theatre of the World) to
the increasingly elaborate patterns of his later
productions (La nave del mercader [1674; “The
Merchant’s Ship”]).
After
Calderón’s death, Spanish drama languished
for 100 years. Culteranismo and conceptismo,
although symptoms rather than causes of decline,
contributed to stifling imaginative literature, and,
by the close of the 17th century, all production
characterizing the Siglo de Oro had essentially
ceased.
Pedro Calderón

Spanish author
born Jan. 17, 1600, Madrid, Spain
died May 25, 1681, Madrid
Main
dramatist and poet who succeeded Lope de Vega as the greatest Spanish
playwright of the Golden Age. Among his best-known secular dramas are El
médico de su honra (1635; The Surgeon of His Honour), La vida es sueño
(1635; Life Is a Dream), El alcalde de Zalamea (c. 1640; The Mayor of
Zalamea), and La hija del aire (1653; “The Daughter of the Air”),
sometimes considered his masterpiece. He also wrote operas and plays
with religious and mythological themes.
Early life
Calderón’s father, a fairly well-to-do government official who died in
1615, was a man of harsh and dictatorial temper. Strained family
relations apparently had a profound effect on the youthful Calderón, for
several of his plays show a preoccupation with the psychological and
moral effects of unnatural family life, presenting anarchical behaviour
directly traced to the abuse of paternal authority.
Destined for the church, Calderón matriculated at the University of
Alcalá in 1614 but transferred a year later to Salamanca, where he
continued his studies in arts, law, and probably theology until 1619 or
1620. Abandoning an ecclesiastical career, he entered the service of the
constable of Castile and in 1623 began to write plays for the court,
rapidly becoming the leading member of the small group of dramatic poets
whom King Philip IV gathered around him. In 1636 the king made him a
Knight of the Military Order of St. James. Calderón’s popularity was not
confined to the court, for these early plays were also acclaimed in the
public theatres, and on the death of Lope de Vega (1635) Calderón became
the master of the Spanish stage. On the outbreak of the Catalan
rebellion, he enlisted in 1640 in a cavalry company of knights of the
military orders and served with distinction until 1642, when he was
invalided out of the army. In 1645 he entered the service of the Duke de
Alba, probably as secretary. A few years later an illegitimate son was
born to him; nothing is known about the mother, and the idea that sorrow
at her death led him to return to his first vocation, the priesthood, is
pure surmise. He was ordained in 1651 and announced that he would write
no more for the stage. This intention he kept as regards the public
theatres, but at the king’s command he continued to write regularly for
the court theatre. He also wrote each year the two Corpus Christi plays
for Madrid. Appointed a prebendary of Toledo Cathedral, he took up
residence in 1653. The fine meditative religious poem Psalle et sile
(“Sing Psalms and Keep Silent”) is of this period. Receiving permission
to hold his prebend without residence, he returned to Madrid in 1657 and
was appointed honorary chaplain to the king in 1663.
Aesthetic milieu and achievement
The court patronage that Calderón enjoyed constitutes the most important
single influence in the development of his art.
The court drama grew out of the popular drama, and at first there was
no distinction in themes and style between the two. The construction,
however, of a special theatre in the new palace, the Buen Retiro,
completed in 1633, made possible spectacular productions beyond the
resources of the public stage. The court plays became a distinctive
Baroque genre, combining drama with dancing, music, and the visual arts
and departing from contemporary life into the world of classical
mythology and ancient history. Thus Calderón, as court dramatist, became
associated with the rise of opera in Spain. In 1648 he wrote El jardín
de Falerina (“The Garden of Falerina”), the first of his zarzuelas,
plays in two acts with alternating spoken and sung dialogue. In 1660 he
wrote his first opera, the one-act La púrpura de la rosa (“The Purple of
the Rose”), with all of the dialogue set to music. This was followed by
Celos, aun del aire matan (1660; “Jealousy Even of the Air Can Kill”),
an opera in three acts with music by Juan Hidalgo. As in the Italian
tradition, the music was subordinate to the poetry, and all of
Calderón’s musical plays are poetic dramas in their own right.
Calderón’s drama must be placed within the context of the court
theatre, with its conscious development of an unrealistic and stylized
art form. For two centuries after his death, his preeminence remained
unchallenged, but the realistic canons of criticism that came to the
fore toward the end of the 19th century produced a reaction in favour of
the more “lifelike” drama of Lope de Vega. Calderón appeared mannered
and conventional: the structure of his plots artificially contrived, his
characters stiff and unconvincing, his verse often affected and
rhetorical. Although he used technical devices and stylistic mannerisms
that by constant repetition became conventional, Calderón remained
sufficiently detached to make his characters, on occasion, poke fun at
his own conventions. This detachment indicates a conception of art as a
formal medium that employs its artistic devices so as to compress and
abstract the externals of human life, the better to express its
essentials.
In this direction Calderón developed the dramatic form and
conventions established by Lope de Vega, based on primacy of action over
characterization, with unity in the theme rather than in the plot. He
created a tightly knit structure of his own, while leaving intact the
formal framework of Lope’s drama. From the start he manifested his
technical skill by utilizing the characters and incidents of his plots
in the development of a dominant idea. As his art matured his plots
became more complex and the action more constricted and compact. The
creation of complex dramatic patterns in which the artistic effect
arises from perception of the totality of the design through the
inseparability of the parts is Calderón’s greatest achievement as a
craftsman. El pintor de su deshonra (c. 1645; The Painter of His Own
Dishonor) and La cisma de Ingalaterra (c. 1627; “The Schism of England”)
are masterly examples of this technique, in which poetic imagery,
characters, and action are subtly interconnected by dominant symbols
that elucidate the significance of the theme. Although rhetorical
devices typical of the Spanish Baroque style remained a feature of his
diction, his verse developed away from excessive ornamentation toward a
taut style compressed and controlled by a penetrating mind.
Secular plays
The difficulties that Calderón’s art presents to the modern reader have
tended to obscure the originality of his themes. Accepting the
conventions of the comedy of intrigue, a favourite form on the Spanish
stage, he used them for a fundamentally serious purpose: La dama duende
(1629; The Phantom Lady) is a neat and lively example. In Casa con dos
puertas, mala es de guardar (1629; “A House with Two Doors Is Difficult
to Guard”), the intrigues of secret courtship and the disguises that it
necessitates are so presented that the traditional seclusion of women on
which these intrigues are based is shown to create social disorder by
breeding enmity and endangering love and friendship. No siempre lo peor
es cierto (c. 1640; “The Worst Is Not Always True”) and No hay cosa como
callar (1639; “Silence Is Golden”) mark the peak of this development:
although the conventions of comedy remain, the overtones are tragic.
Both plays also implicitly criticize the accepted code of honour.
Calderón’s rejection of the rigid assumptions of the code of honour is
evident also in his tragedies. In the famous El alcalde de Zalamea, the
secrecy and the vengeance demanded by the code are rejected. This play
also presents a powerful contrast between the aristocracy and the
people: the degeneration of the aristocratic ideal is exposed, wealth is
associated with manual labour, and honour is shown to be the consequence
and prerogative of moral integrity regardless of class. Yet Calderón’s
humanity has been questioned in connection with El médico de su honra.
The critics who allege that he approves of the murder of an innocent
wife because honour demands it overlook the fact that the horror one
feels at this deed is precisely what he intended.
A keynote of Calderon’s tragic view of life is his deep-seated
realization that a man can be responsible through his own wrongdoing for
the wrongdoing of another. This realization probably derives from
Calderón’s own family experience. In La devoción de la cruz (c. 1625;
Devotion to the Cross) and Las tres justicias en una (c. 1637; Three
Judgments at a Blow), the heart of the tragedy lies in the fact that the
greatest sinner is also the most sinned against—in that others, before
he was born, had begun to dig his grave. El pintor de su deshonra is
built on a similar plot.
The fully developed court plays are best represented by La hija del
aire. This play in two parts dramatizes the legend of Semiramis (the
warrior queen of Babylon whose greed for political power led her to
conceal and impersonate her son on his accession). It is often
considered Calderón’s masterpiece. Highly stylized, it conveys a strong
impression of violence. It presents, with considerable complexity, the
contrast between passion and reason. Passion, in its self-seeking, in
its grasping for power and devouring of everything in the urge to
domination, breeds disorder and leads to destruction; reason, in its
sacrificing of self-interest to justice and loyalty, produces order.
This basic contrast underlies the themes of Calderón’s last period, its
various aspects being expanded in a number of interesting variations,
many directly concerned with the positive values of civilization. Though
none has the intensity of La hija del aire, most exemplify a thoughtful,
dignified, and restrained art. Mythological themes predominate, with a
more or less allegorical treatment, as in Eco y Narciso (1661; “Echo and
Narcissus”), La estatua de Prometeo (1669; “The Statue of Prometheus”),
and Fieras afemina amor (1669; “Wild Beasts Are Tamed by Love”).
Religious plays
Calderón’s vision of the human world in his secular plays is one of
confusion and discord arising out of the inevitable clash of values in
the natural order. His religious plays round off his view of life by
confronting natural values with supernatural ones. The most
characteristic of these religious plays, following the tradition
established outside Spain by the Jesuit drama, are based on stories of
conversion and martyrdom, usually of the saints of the early church. One
of the most beautiful is El príncipe constante (1629; The Constant
Prince), which dramatizes the martyrdom of Prince Ferdinand of Portugal.
El mágico prodigioso (1637; The Wonder-Working Magician) is a more
complex religious play; Los dos amantes del cielo (The Two Lovers of
Heaven) and El Joséf de las mujeres (c. 1640; “The Joseph of Womankind”)
are the most subtle and difficult. The basic human experience upon which
Calderón relies for rational support of religious faith is decay and
death and the consequent incapacity of the world to fulfill its promise
of happiness. This promise is centred in such natural values as beauty,
love, wealth, and power that, although true values if pursued with
prudence, cannot satisfy the mind’s aspiration for truth or the heart’s
longing for happiness. Only the apprehension of an “infinite Good” can
assuage the restlessness of men.
This religious philosophy is given its most moving expression, in
terms of Christian dogma, in the autos sacramentales. Seventy-six of
these allegorical plays, written for open-air performance on the Feast
of Corpus Christi, are extant. In them Calderón brought the tradition of
the medieval morality play to a high degree of artistic perfection. The
range of his scriptural, patristic, and scholastic learning, together
with the assurance of his structural technique and poetic diction,
enable him to endow the abstract concepts of dogmatic and moral theology
with convincing dramatic life. At their weakest the autos tend to depend
for their effect upon the ingenuity of their allegories, but at their
best they are imbued with profound moral and spiritual insight and with
a poetic feeling varying from tenderness to forcefulness. La cena de
Baltasar (c. 1630; Belshazzar’s Feast) and El gran teatro del mundo (c.
1635; The Great Theatre of the World) are fine examples of the early
style; the greater complexity of his middle period is represented by No
hay más fortuna que Dios (c. 1652; “There Is No Fortune but God”) and Lo
que va del hombre a Dios (1652–57; “The Gulf Between Man and God”). But
his highest achievement in this type of drama is to be found among those
autos of his old age that dramatize the dogmas of the Fall and the
redemption, notably La viña del Señor (1674; “The Lord’s Vineyard”), La
nave del mercader (1674; “The Merchant’s Ship”), El nuevo hospicio de
pobres (1675; “The New Hospital for the Poor”), El día mayor de los días
(1678; “The Greatest Day of Days”), and El pastor fido (1678; “The
Faithful Shepherd”). Here is found Calderón’s most moving expression of
his compassionate understanding of human waywardness.
To have found a dramatic form that conveys the doctrines of the
Christian faith gives Calderón a special place in literature. But his
greatness is not confined to this; the depth and consistency of his
thought, his supremely intelligent craftsmanship and artistic integrity,
his psychological insight, and the rationality and humanity of his moral
standards make him one of the major figures of world drama.
Alexander A. Parker
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Benedict de Spinoza

Dutch-Jewish philosopher Hebrew forename Baruch, Latin forename Bendictus, Portuguese Bento De
Espinosa (English: ) born Nov. 24, 1632, Amsterdam died Feb. 21, 1677, The Hague
Main Dutch-Jewish philosopher, the foremost exponent of 17th-century
Rationalism.
Early life and career.
Spinoza’s grandfather and father were Portuguese and had been
crypto-Jews after the Spanish Inquisition had compelled them to embrace
Christianity. Later, after Holland’s successful revolt against Spain and
the granting of religious freedom, they found refuge in Amsterdam. His
mother, who also came from Portugal, died when Benedict was barely six
years old. The Spinozas were prosperous merchants and respected members
of the Jewish community, and it may be assumed that Spinoza attended the
school for Jewish boys founded in Amsterdam in about 1638. Outside
school hours the boys had private lessons in secular subjects. Spinoza
was taught Latin by a German scholar, who may also have taught him
German; and he knew to some extent all of the other significant
continental languages. In March 1654 Benedict’s father died. There was
some litigation over the estate, with Benedict’s only surviving
stepsister claiming it all. Benedict won the lawsuit but allowed her to
retain nearly everything.
His studies so far had been mainly Jewish, but he was an independent
thinker and had found more than enough in his Jewish studies to wean him
from orthodox doctrines and interpretations of Scripture; moreover, the
tendency to revolt against tradition and authority was much in the air
in the 17th century. But the Jewish religious leaders in Amsterdam were
fearful that heresies (which were no less anti-Christian than
anti-Jewish) might give offense in a country that did not yet regard the
Jews as citizens. Spinoza soon incurred the disapproval of the synagogue
authorities. In conversations with other students, he had held that
there is nothing in the Bible to support the views that God had no body,
that angels really exist, or that the soul is immortal; and he had also
expressed his belief that the author of the Pentateuch (the first five
books of the Bible) was no wiser in physics or even in theology than
were they, the students. The Jewish authorities, after trying vainly to
silence Spinoza with bribes and threats, excommunicated him in July
1656, and he was banished from Amsterdam for a short period by the civil
authorities. There is no evidence that he had really wanted to break
away from the Jewish community, and indeed the scanty knowledge
available would suggest the opposite. On Dec. 5, 1655, for example, he
had attended the synagogue and made an offering that, in view of his
poverty, must have been a rare event for him, and, about the time of his
excommunication, he had addressed a defense of his views to the
synagogue.
Among Spinoza’s Christian acquaintances was Franciscus van den Enden,
who was a former Jesuit, an ardent classical scholar, and something of a
poet and dramatist and who had opened a school in Amsterdam. For a time,
Spinoza stayed with him, helping with the teaching of the schoolchildren
and receiving aid in his own further education. In this way he improved
his knowledge of Latin, learned some Greek, and was introduced to
Neoscholastic philosophy. It may have also been through van den Enden’s
school that Spinoza became acquainted with the “new philosophy” of René
Descartes, later acknowledged to be the father of modern philosophy.
Spinoza’s other Christian acquaintances were mostly of the Collegiants,
a brotherhood that later merged with the Mennonites; they were
especially interested in Cartesianism, the dualistic philosophy of
Descartes and his followers.
At the same time, he was becoming expert at making lenses, supporting
himself partly by grinding and polishing lenses for spectacles,
telescopes, and microscopes; he also did tutoring. A kind of reading and
discussion circle for the study of religious and philosophical problems
came into being under the guidance of Spinoza. In order to collect his
thoughts, however, and reduce them to a system, he withdrew in 1660 to
Rijnsburg, a quiet village on the Rhine, near Leiden. Rijnsburg was the
headquarters of the Collegiants, and Spinoza’s lodgings there were with
a surgeon named Hermann Homan. In Homan’s cottage Spinoza wrote Korte
Verhandeling van God, de Mensch en deszelfs Welstand (written c. 1662;
Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being, 1910) and
Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione (“Treatise on the Correction of the
Understanding”), both of which were ready by April 1662. He also
completed the greater part of his geometrical version of Descartes’s
Principia Philosophiae and the first book of his Ethica. Spinoza’s
attitude in these works already showed a departure from Cartesianism. It
was also during this stay that he met Heinrich Oldenburg, soon to become
one of the two first secretaries of the Royal Society in London.
Influence of Descartes and the geometrical method.
His version of Descartes’s Principia was prepared while Spinoza was
giving instruction in the philosophy of Descartes to a private pupil. It
was published by his Cartesian friends under the title Renati des Cartes
Principiorum Philosophiae Pars I et II, More Geometrico Demonstratae,
per Benedictum de Spinoza (1663), with an introduction explaining that
Spinoza did not share the views expressed in the book. This was the only
book published in Spinoza’s lifetime with his name on the title page.
The philosophy of Spinoza may thus be regarded as a development from
and a reaction to that of his contemporary Descartes (1596–1650). Though
it has been argued that Spinoza was also much influenced by medieval
philosophy (especially Jewish), he seems to have been much more
conscious of the Cartesian influence, and his most striking doctrines
are most easily understood as solutions of Cartesian difficulties.
Clearly, he had studied Descartes in detail. He accepted Descartes’s
physics in general, though he did express some dissatisfaction with it
toward the end of his life. As for the Cartesian metaphysics, he found
three unsatisfactory features: the transcendence of God, the substantial
dualism of mind and body, and the ascription of free will both to God
and to human beings. In Spinoza’s eyes, those doctrines made the world
unintelligible. It was impossible to explain the relation between God
and the world or between mind and body or to account for events
occasioned by free will.
The publication of Spinoza’s version of Descartes’s Principia had
been intended to prepare the way for that of his own philosophy, for he
had both to secure the patronage of influential men and to show the more
philosophically minded that his rejection of Cartesianism was not out of
ignorance.
Spinoza became dissatisfied with the informal method of exposition
that he had adopted in the Korte Verhandeling and the De Intellectus
Emendatione and turned instead to the geometrical method in the manner
of Euclid’s Elements. He assumed without question that it is possible to
construct a system of metaphysics that will render it completely
intelligible. It is therefore possible, in his view, to present
metaphysics deductively—that is, as a series of theorems derived by
necessary steps from self-evident premises expressed in terms that are
either self-explanatory or defined with unquestionable correctness. His
masterpiece, the Ethica, was set out in this manner—Ordine Geometrico
Demonstrata, according to the reading of its subtitle. Its first part,
“De Deo” (“Concerning God”), was finished and in the hands of his
friends early in 1663. Initially the work was intended to have three
parts only, but it eventually appeared (in 1677) in five parts.
Spinoza’s desire for an impersonal presentation was probably his chief
motive for adopting the geometrical method, appreciating that the method
guarantees true conclusions only if the axioms are true and the
definitions correct. Spinoza, like his contemporaries, held that
definitions are not arbitrary but that there is a sense in which they
may be correct or incorrect.
The question was discussed at length in his unfinished Tractatus de
Intellectus Emendatione. A sound definition, he held, should make clear
the possibility or the necessity of the existence of the object defined.
Because the Ethica begins with the definition of “substance,” the
necessary existent, the entire system is vulnerable to anyone disputing
that definition, however cogent the subsequent reasoning may be. In
fact, as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a Rationalist philosopher and
mathematician, pointed out, though the system is closely knit, its
demonstrations do not proceed with mathematical rigour.
Period of the “Ethica.” In June 1663 Spinoza moved to Voorburg, near
The Hague, and it appears that by June 1665 he was nearing the
completion of the three-part version of the Ethica. During the next few
years, however, he was at work on his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
which was published anonymously at Amsterdam in 1670. This work aroused
great interest and was to go through five editions in as many years. It
was intended “to show that not only is liberty to philosophize
compatible with devout piety and with the peace of the state, but that
to take away such liberty is to destroy the public peace and even piety
itself.” As this work shows, Spinoza was far ahead of his time in
advocating the application of the historical method to the
interpretation of the biblical sources. He argued that the inspiration
of the prophets of the Old Testament extended only to their moral and
practical doctrines and that their factual beliefs were merely those
appropriate to their time and are not philosophically significant.
Complete freedom of scientific and metaphysical speculation is therefore
consistent with all that is important in the Bible. Miracles are
explained as natural events misinterpreted and stressed for their moral
effect.
In May 1670 Spinoza moved to The Hague, where he remained until his
death. He began to compose a Hebrew grammar, Compendium Grammatices
Linguae Hebraeae, but did not finish it; instead, he returned to the
Ethica, although the prospect of its publication became increasingly
remote. There were many denunciations of his Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus as an instrument “forged in hell by a renegade Jew
and the devil.” When the Ethica was completed in 1675, Spinoza had to
abandon the idea of publishing it, though manuscript copies were
circulated among his close friends.
Last years and posthumous influence.
Spinoza concentrated his attention on political problems and began his
Tractatus Politicus, which he did not live to finish. During the post-Ethica
period, he was visited by several important people, among them
Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus (in 1675), a scientist and
philosopher, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (in 1676), like Spinoza, one
of the foremost Rationalists of the time. Leibniz, having heard of
Spinoza as an authority on optics, had sent him an optical tract and had
then received from Spinoza a copy of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
which deeply interested him. According to Leibniz’ own account, he
“conversed with him often and at great length.” Spinoza, however, was
now in an advanced stage of consumption, aggravated by the inhaling of
glass dust from the polishing of lenses in his shop. He died in 1677,
leaving no heir, and his few possessions were sold by auction. These
included about 160 books, the catalog of which has been preserved.
In accordance with Spinoza’s previous instructions, several of his
friends prepared his manuscripts secretly for the press, and they were
sent to a publisher in Amsterdam. The Opera Posthuma (Dutch version:
Nagelate Schriften), published before the end of 1677, was composed of
the Ethica, Tractatus Politicus, and Tractatus de Intellectus
Emendatione, as well as letters and the Hebrew grammar. His Stelkonstige
reeckening van den regenboog (“On the Rainbow”) and his Reeckening van
kanssen (“On the Calculation of Chances”) were printed together in 1687.
The Korte Verhandeling was lost to the world until E. Boehmer’s
publication of it in 1852.
Spinoza has an assured place in the intellectual history of the
Western world, though his direct influence on technical philosophy has
not been great. Throughout the 18th century he was almost universally
decried as an atheist—or sometimes used as a cover for the detailing of
atheist ideas. The tone had been set by Pierre Bayle, a Skeptical
philosopher and encyclopaedist, in whose Dictionnaire historique et
critique Spinozism was described as “the most monstrous hypothesis
imaginable, the most absurd”; and even David Hume, a Scottish Skeptic
and historian, felt obliged to speak of the “hideous hypothesis” of
Spinoza.
Spinoza was rendered intellectually respectable by the efforts of
literary critics, especially of the Germans G.E. Lessing and J.W. von
Goethe and the English poet S.T. Coleridge, who admired the man and
found austere excitement in his works, in which they saw an intensely
religious attitude entirely divorced from dogma. Spinoza has also been
much studied by professional philosophers since the beginning of the
19th century. Both absolute Idealists and Marxists have read their own
doctrines into his work, and Empiricists, while rejecting his
metaphysical approach, have developed certain detailed suggestions from
his theory of knowledge and psychology.
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The 18th century
New critical approaches
In 1700 Charles II, the last monarch of the Habsburg
dynasty, died without an heir, thereby provoking the
War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), a European
conflict over control of Spain. The resultant
establishment of the Bourbon dynasty initiated
French domination of Spain’s political and cultural
life. Following patterns of the Enlightenment in
England and France, numerous academies were created,
such as the Real Academia de la Lengua Española
(1713, now the Real Academia Española [Royal Spanish
Academy]), founded to guard linguistic integrity.
Men of letters began again to study abroad,
discovering how far Spain had diverged from the
intellectual course of western Europe. New inquiries
into the national heritage led scholars to unearth
forgotten medieval literature. Gregorio Mayáns y
Siscar produced the first biographical study of
Cervantes in 1737, and church historian Enrique
Flórez, embarking in 1754 on a vast historical
enterprise, España sagrada, resurrected the cultural
backgrounds of medieval Christian Spain. Literary
landmarks included the first publication of the
12th-century epic Poema de mío Cid, the works of
Gonzalo de Berceo, and Juan Ruiz’s Libro de buen
amor.
Debates concerning values of the old and the new
raged during the century’s middle decades,
compelling both sides to initiate new critical
approaches to literature. Leaders included Ignacio
de Luzán Claramunt, whose work on poetics launched
the great Neoclassical polemic in Spain, and Benito
Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro, a Benedictine monk who
assailed error, prejudice, and superstition wherever
he found them, contributing significantly to Spain’s
intellectual emancipation. Fray Martín Sarmiento
(Benedictine name of Pedro José García Balboa), a
scholar and friend of Feijóo, treated subjects from
religion and philosophy to science and child
rearing; much of his work remains unpublished.
Feijóo’s monumental Theatro crítico universal
(1726–39; “Universal Critical Theatre”), a
compendium of knowledge, exemplifies the interests
and achievements of the encyclopaedists. Another
major encyclopaedic talent, Gaspar Melchor de
Jovellanos, produced streams of reports, essays,
memoirs, and studies on agriculture, the economy,
political organization, law, industry, natural
science, and literature, as well as ways to improve
them, in addition to writing Neoclassical drama and
poetry.
Pedro de Montengón y Paret introduced narrative
genres then popular in France—philosophical and
pedagogical novels in the style of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau—with such works as Eusebio (1786–88), a
four-volume novel set in America that exalted the
religion of nature. Montengón also published El
Antenor (1778) and El Rodrigo, romance épico (1793;
“Roderick, Epic Ballad”). Fray Gerundio (1758) by
José Francisco de Isla, satirizing exaggerated
pulpit oratory, reincorporated aspects of the
picaresque novel. This genre was also echoed in
works of Diego de Torres Villarroel, whose Vida,
ascendencia, nacimiento, crianza y aventuras
(1743–58; “Life, Ancestry, Birth, Upbringing, and
Adventures”), whether a novel or an autobiography,
remains among the century’s most readable
narratives. Torres Villarroel experimented with all
literary genres, and his collected works, published
1794–99, are fertile sources for studying
18th-century character, aesthetics, and literary
style. Josefa Amar y Borbón defended women’s
admission to learned academies, asserting their
equal intelligence in Discurso en defensa del
talento de las mujeres y de su aptitud para el
gobierno y otros cargos en que se emplean los
hombres (1786; “Discourse in Defense of the Talent
of Women and Their Aptitude for Government and Other
Positions in Which Men Are Employed”). Amar
published on many topics, most frequently women’s
right to education.
About 1775 Diego González led the Salamanca
poetry revival group seeking inspiration in Fray
Luis de León; two decades later a group at Sevilla
turned to Fernando de Herrera. Juan Meléndez Valdés,
a disciple of English philosopher John Locke and
English poet Edward Young, best exemplified the new
influences on poetry during this period. Employing
Classical and Renaissance models, these reformers
rejected Baroque excess, restoring poetry’s clarity
and harmony. Tomás de Iriarte—a Neoclassical poet,
dramatist, theoretician, and translator—produced
successful comedies (e.g., El señorito mimado [1787;
“The Pampered Youth”] and La señorita malcriada
[1788; “The Ill-Bred Miss”]) and the satire Los
literatos en cuaresma (1772; “Writers in Lent”),
which attacked Neoclassicism’s foes. His fame rests
on Fábulas literarias (1782; “Literary Fables”), a
collection of fables and Neoclassical precepts
rendered in verse. The fabulist, literary critic,
and poet Félix María Samaniego published an
enduringly popular collection, Fábulas en verso
(1781; “Fables in Verse”), which—with Iriarte’s
fables—is among Neoclassicism’s most enjoyable,
best-loved poetic productions.
In drama, the second half of the century
witnessed disputes concerning the Neoclassical
“rules” (chiefly the unities of place, time, and
action). La Raquel (1778), a Neoclassical tragedy by
Vicente García de la Huerta, showed the capabilities
of the reformist school. Ramón de la Cruz,
representing the Spanish “nationalist” dramatists
against the afrancesados (imitators of French
models), resurrected the earlier pasos and longer
entremeses of Lope de Rueda, Cervantes, and Luis
Quiñones de Benavente. Satires of the Madrid scene,
Cruz’s one-act sketches neither transgressed the
unities nor offended the purist; they delighted the
public, bringing drama back to observation of life
and society. Leandro Fernández de Moratín applied
the lesson to full-length plays, producing effective
comedies imbued with deep social seriousness. His
dialogue in La comedia nueva (1792; “The New
Comedy”) and El sí de las niñas (1806; The Maiden’s
Consent) ranks with the 18th century’s best prose.
The work of the dramatist, poet, essayist, and
short-fiction writer José de Cadalso y Vázquez
(pseudonym Dalmiro) moves between Neoclassic
aesthetics and Romantic cosmic despair. Scion of a
distinguished noble family, he chose a military
career and died in 1782, at age 41, during Spain’s
unsuccessful attempt to recover Gibraltar from Great
Britain. Banished from Madrid to Aragón in 1768 on
suspicion of being the author of a sharp satire, he
wrote the poems later collected in Ocios de mi
juventud (1773; “Pastimes of My Youth”). In 1770 he
returned to Madrid, where his close friendships with
Moratín and leading actresses prompted his heroic
tragedy Don Sancho García (1771) as well as Solaya;
o, los circasianos (“Solaya; or, The Circassians”)
and La Numantina (“The Girl from Numancia”).
Cadalso’s most important works are two satires—Los
eruditos a la violeta (published 1772; “Wise Men
Without Learning”) and the brilliant Cartas
marruecas (written c. 1774, published 1793;
“Moroccan Letters”), inspired by the epistolary
fictions of Oliver Goldsmith and Montesquieu—and the
enigmatic Noches lúgubres (written c. 1774,
published 1798; “Mournful Nights”), a Gothic and
Byronic work that anticipates Romanticism.
Benito
Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro

Friar
Benito Jerónimo Feijóo y Montenegro
(Spanish pronunciation: [be'nito
xe'ronimo fej'xoo]; 8 October 1676 – 26
September 1764) was a Spanish monk and
scholar noted for encouraging scientific
and empirical thought in an effort to
debunk myths and superstitions.
He
joined the Benedictine order at the age
of 12, and had taken classes in Galicia,
León, and Salamanca. He later taught
theology and philosophy at the
University of Oviedo, where he earned a
professorship in theology. Feijóo was a
prominent essayist for the Spanish, and
his critiques, letters, and plays helped
change the steadfast beliefs of many
during the 18th century.
His two
famous works, Teatro crítico universal
(1726-1739) and Cartas eruditas y
curiosas, are multi-volume collections
of essays that cover a range of
subjects, from education, law, and
medicine, to superstitions and popular
beliefs. He is also of interest as a
writer in the Galician language. He also
wrote what is considered to be one of
the first pieces of feminist literature
in his essay entitled "Defensa de las
mujeres". In which, he discusses the
lack of reason and/or evidence, a huge
focus of the Enlightenment, in the
attitudes towards women during that era
in Spain. However, in some occasions, he
showed certain credulity, assuming as a
natural possibility the existence of the
"Anfibio de Liérganes" (Lierganes
Amphibious Man), a being half man, half
fish.
Father
Feijoo was a debunker of myths. He had
great interest in natural science and
many of his essays touch on topics
related to this subject and to the many
myths about creatures and lands that
abounded at that time. One example of
how far his naturalistic bent went can
be found in a story told by Julio A.
Feijoo, one of his descendents, born in
Cuba in 1910. Father Feijoo believed
that demonic possession was a
psychological phenomenon. Once he was
called upon to perform an exorcism, and
in order to demonstrate that this
phenomenon was more due to
suggestibility than anything else, in
performing a spurious exorcism on the
"possessed" subject, he read from
Bocaccio's famous bawdy work the
Decameron. Upon hearing the Latin lines,
the "possessed" individual settled down
and declared himself to be free of
demonic influence.
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Félix María Samaniego

Félix
María Samaniego, (b. Oct. 12, 1745,
Laguardia, Spain—d. Aug. 11, 1801,
Laguardia), poet whose books of fables
for schoolchildren have a grace and
simplicity that has won them a place as
the first poems that Spanish children
learn to recite in school.
Born
into an aristocratic Basque family,
Samaniego came under the influence of
the French Encyclopédistes during his
early travels in France. Returning to
his native country, he devoted the rest
of his life to the welfare of his fellow
Basques. He joined the Basque Society
and taught at its seminary, composing
the Fábulas morales (1781; “Moral
Fables”) for its students. They were an
immediate success and were quickly
established as part of the Spanish
curriculum. The next year, Samaniego
became involved in a literary dispute
with his former friend and fellow
fabulist Tomás de Iriarte, and, because
of an anonymous attack on Iriarte that
contained criticisms of the church,
Samaniego was imprisoned in a monastery
in 1793.
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Leandro Fernández de Moratín

Leandro Fernández de Moratín, (b. March
10, 1760, Madrid, Spain—d. July 21,
1828, Paris, France), dramatist and
poet, the most influential Neoclassic
literary figure of the Spanish
Enlightenment.
The son
of the poet and playwright Nicolás
Fernández de Moratín, he was an
apologist of the French Encyclopaedists,
a translator of Molière and William
Shakespeare, and a satirist of
contemporary society. The two
predominant themes of his plays are
dramatic criticism, as seen in La
comedia nueva (1792; “The New Comedy”),
in which he satirizes the absurd
characters and plots of the popular
plays of the time, and attacks on
excessive parental authority and
marriages of convenience, as seen in El
sí de las niñas (1806; The Maiden’s
Consent). Because of political and
ecclesiastical opposition to his French
sympathies, he spent most of his life
after 1814 in France, where he died; he
was buried between his models Molière
and Jean de La Fontaine, but his remains
were later transferred to Madrid.
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Women writers
Several women writers emerged during the
Enlightenment and were active from 1770 onward in
the male-dominated Spanish theatre. They wrote
Neoclassic drama: comedias lacrimosas (tearful
plays), zarzuelas (musical comedies), sainetes,
Romantic tragedies, and costumbrista comedies. While
some women wrote for small private audiences
(convents and literary salons), others wrote for the
public stage: Margarita Hickey and María Rosa Gálvez
were both quite successful, with the former
producing translations of Jean Racine and Voltaire
and the latter composing some 13 original plays from
opera and light comedy to high tragedy. Gálvez’s
Moratín-style comedy Los figurones literarios (1804;
“The Literary Nobodies”) ridicules pedantry; her
tragedy Florinda (1804) attempts to vindicate the
woman blamed for Spain’s loss to the Muslims; and
her biblical drama Amnón (1804) recounts the
biblical rape of Tamar by her brother Amnon.
Neoclassical poet Manuel José Quintana praised
Gálvez’s odes and elegies and considered her the
best woman writer of her time.
Some women exerted influence during the
Enlightenment through their salons; that of Josefa
de Zúñiga y Castro, countess of Lemos, called the
Academia del Buen Gusto (Academy of Good Taste), was
famous, as were those of the duchess of Alba and the
countess-duchess of Benavente. The number of
periodicals for women increased dramatically, and La
Pensadora Gaditana (1763–64), the first Spanish
newspaper for women, was published by Beatriz
Cienfuegos (believed by some to have been a man’s
pseudonym). But the death of King Charles III in
1788 and the horror spread by the French Revolution
brought an abrupt halt to Spain’s incursion into the
Age of Reason.
The 19th century
The Romantic movement
Early 19th-century Spanish literature suffered as a
result of the Napoleonic Wars and their economic
repercussions. Spain experienced soaring inflation,
and manpower across the peninsula was at low ebb as
a result of emigration and military service. Spain’s
agriculture was crippled, its cottage industries
dwindled and nearly disappeared, and
industrialization lagged behind that of other
western European countries. These problems were
further aggravated by the loss of its American
colonies. Ferdinand VII’s anachronistic attempts to
restore absolutist monarchy drove many liberals into
exile in England and France, both countries then
under the sway of Romanticism. Traditional
scholarship has viewed Spanish Romanticism as
imported by liberals returning after Ferdinand’s
death in 1833, the year frequently deemed the
beginning of Spanish Romanticism. Some, however,
recognize Cadalso and several lesser cultivators of
Gothic fiction as 18th-century Spanish antecedents.
Debates that prepared the way for Romanticism
flourished from 1814 onward: in Cádiz in discussions
of literary values initiated by Johann Niklaus Böhl
von Faber, in Barcelona with the founding of the
literary periodical El europeo (“The European”) in
1823, and in Madrid with Agustín Durán’s essay
(1828) on Siglo de Oro drama and his Colección de
romances antiguos (1828–32; “Collection of Ancient
Ballads”).
Romanticism in Spain was, in many respects, a
return to its earlier classics, a continuation of
the rediscovery initiated by 18th-century scholars.
Important formal traits of Spanish Romantic
drama—mingling genres, rejecting the unities,
diversifying metrics—had characterized
Lope de Vega
and his contemporaries, whose themes reappeared in
Romantic garb. Some have therefore argued that the
native flowering of Spanish Romanticism was not a
tardy import; its principles were instead already
present in Spain, but their full expression was
delayed by the reactionary, tyrannical monarchy’s
persecution of members of a movement that was, at
its beginning, liberal and democratic. Production of
Romantic dramas was also postponed until after
Ferdinand VII’s death.
Spanish Romanticism, typically understood as
having two branches, had no single leader. José de Espronceda y Delgado and his works epitomize the
“Byronic,” revolutionary, metaphysical vein of
Spanish Romanticism, and his Estudiante de Salamanca
(in two parts, 1836 and 1837; “Student of
Salamanca”), Canciones (1840; “Songs”), and El
diablo mundo (unfinished, published 1840; “The
Devilish World”) were among the period’s most
celebrated subjective lyrics. The enormously
successful drama Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino
(1835; “Don Alvaro; or, The Force of Destiny”) by
Ángel de Saavedra, duque de Rivas, and the preface,
by the critic Antonio Alcalá Galiano, to Saavedra’s
narrative poem El moro expósito (1834; “The
Foundling Moor”) embody the Christian and
monarchical aesthetics and ideology of the second,
more traditional branch of Spanish Romanticism,
whose quintessential representative is José Zorrilla
y Moral, author of the period’s most enduring drama,
Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Prolific, facile, and
declamatory, Zorrilla produced huge numbers of
plays, lyric and narrative verse collections, and
enormously popular rewrites of Siglo de Oro plays
and legends; he was treated as a national hero.
One major Romantic theme concerned liberty and
individual freedom. The late Romantic poet Gustavo
Adolfo Bécquer, in Rimas (published posthumously in
1871; “Rhymes”), expressed his own tortured
emotions, suffering, and solitude but also
celebrated love, poetry, and intimacy while
experimenting with free verse. Rimas influenced more
20th-century Spanish poets than any other
19th-century work.
A number of notable women writers emerged under
Romanticism. Carolina Coronado’s early fame rested
on a collection of poetry, Poesías, first published
in 1843. Her poems sounded many feminist notes,
although she in later life became conservative. In
1850 she published two short novels, Adoración and
Paquita. La Sigea (1854), the first of three
historical novels, re-created the experience of the
Renaissance humanist Luisa Sigea de Velasco; Jarilla
and La rueda de desgracia (“The Wheel of
Misfortune”) appeared in 1873. Poet, dramatist, and
prose writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was born
in Cuba but spent most of her adult life in Spain.
She was the author of a pioneering abolitionist
novel, Sab (1841), as well as novels on Mexico’s
Aztec past and a protofeminist novel (Dos mujeres
[1842; “Two Women”]). She also wrote 16 full-length
original plays, 4 of which were major successes.
Rosalía de Castro is known primarily for her poetry
and novels in Galician, but her last collection of
poems, En las orillas del Sar (1884; Beside the
River Sar), written in Castilian, brought her a
wider audience.
While poetry and theatre claimed the major
honours, Spanish Romanticism also produced many
novels—but none that rivaled those of Scottish
contemporary Sir Walter Scott. The best, El Señor de
Bembibre (1844) by Enrique Gil y Carrasco, reflects
Gil’s carefully researched history of the Templars
in Spain. Other important novels are Mariano José de
Larra’s El doncel de Don Enrique el doliente (1834;
“The Page of King Enrique the Invalid”) and
Espronceda’s Sancho Saldaña (1834).
José de Espronceda y Delgado

José de
Espronceda y Delgado, (b. March 25,
1808, Almendralejo, Spain—d. May 23,
1842, Madrid), Romantic poet and
revolutionary, often called the Spanish
Lord Byron.
He fled
Spain in 1826 for revolutionary
activities and in London began a
tempestuous affair with Teresa Mancha
(the subject of Canto a Teresa) that
dominated the next 10 years of his life.
He participated in the July Revolution
of France (1830), and following the
death of Ferdinand VII in 1833 he was
allowed to return to Spain, where he was
a founder-member of the Republican Party
and was imprisoned several times for
revolutionary activities. His historical
novel Sancho Saldaña (1834), influenced
by Sir Walter Scott, was written in
prison in Badajoz. El estudiante de
Salamanca (1839; “The Student of
Salamanca”), a milestone of Iberian
Romanticism, is a variant of the Don
Juan legend that carries to extremes the
antisocial and antireligious attitudes
of its protagonist. Espronceda was most
admired for his lyric poetry, and his
Poesías (1840; “Poems”) shows the
influence of both Lord Byron and Scott.
The unfinished poem El diablo mundo
(“The Devilish World”) contains
ideological reflections and is
considered one of his best works.
Espronceda served as secretary of the
diplomatic legation to The Hague (1840)
and deputy to the Cortes from Almeria
(1842). He also wrote several
plays—Blanca de Borbón (1870), Ni el tío
ni el sobrino (1834; “Neither the Uncle
nor the Nephew”), and Amor venga sus
agravios (1838; “Love Avenges Its
Affronts”).
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Ángel de Saavedra, duque de Rivas

Ángel
de Saavedra , duke de Rivas, (b. March
10, 1791, Córdoba, Spain—d. June 22,
1865, Madrid), Spanish poet, dramatist,
and politician, whose fame rests
principally on his play Don Álvaro, o la
fuerza del sino (“Don Álvaro, or the
Power of Fate”), which marked the
triumph of Romantic drama in Spain.
After
entering politics Saavedra was condemned
to death in 1823 for his extreme liberal
views. He fled to London and lived
subsequently in Italy, Malta, and
France, where he earned his living by
painting. During his exile he came under
that Romantic influence which, already
visible in El moro expósito (1834; “The
Foundling Moor”), was to triumph in his
Romances históricos (1841; “Historical
Romances”), both significant examples of
his Romantic poetry.
Returning to Spain after the amnesty of
1833, he presently inherited the title
of duke de Rivas and on March 22, 1835,
staged Don Álvaro, whose place in the
history of the Spanish theatre is
analogous to that of Victor Hugo’s drama
Hernani in France. The Italian composer
Giuseppe Verdi later used Don Álvaro as
the source for his opera La forza del
destino. Saavedra’s later dramas are
undistinguished. In 1836 he became
minister of the interior under Francisco
de Istúriz and in the following year was
again compelled to flee the country
owing to his conversion to conservative
opinions. Returning to Spain in 1838, he
entered the Senate and was subsequently
ambassador in Naples and Paris. He died
while serving as president of the
Spanish Royal Academy.
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José Zorrilla
y Moral

José
Zorrilla y Moral, (b. Feb. 21, 1817,
Valladolid, Spain—d. Jan. 23, 1893,
Madrid), poet and dramatist, the major
figure of the nationalist wing of the
Spanish Romantic movement. His work was
enormously popular and is now regarded
as quintessentially Spanish in style and
tone.
After
studying law at Toledo and Valladolid,
Zorilla y Moral left the university and
went to Madrid to devote himself to
literature. In 1837 he became an
overnight success with his recitation of
an elegy at the funeral of the poet
Mariano José de Larra. He ran away from
his wife and financial distress and was
abroad from 1855 to 1866, where he wrote
prolifically but remained insolvent. In
1889 he was crowned as the national poet
and was granted a government pension.
Zorrilla wrote effortlessly: he was an
improviser who made his name with his
leyendas (“legends”), which told of
remote times and places. His first
collection of verse legends, Cantos del
trovador (1841), however, suffered—like
much of his other poetry—from its
carelessness and verbosity.
Zorrilla’s greatest success was achieved
with his version of the Don Juan story,
the play Don Juan Tenorio (1844).
Written while he was in his 20s and
later despised by him as a failure, it
was the most popular play of
19th-century Spain and is still
frequently performed. Like his other
works, it exhibits those typically
Spanish qualities that have made
Zorrilla a uniquely national author:
picturesque characters, intrigues and
coincidences in its plot, lyrical
flights, and great Romantic colouring.
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Costumbrismo
Costumbrismo began before Romanticism, contributing
to both Romanticism and the later realism movement
through realistic prose. The cuadro de costumbres
and artículo de costumbres—short literary sketches
on customs, manners, or character—were two types of
costumbrista writing, typically published in the
popular press or included as an element of longer
literary works such as novels. The cuadro was
inclined to description for its own sake, whereas
the artículo was more critical and satirical. Cartas
de un pobrecito holgazán (1820; “Letters from a Poor
Idler”) by Sebastián de Miñano points the way, but
the most important costumbrista titles were by
Larra, an outstanding prose writer and the best
critical mind of his age, who dissected society
pitilessly in Artículos (1835–37). Ramón de Mesonero
Romanos in Escenas matritenses (1836–42; “Scenes of
Madrid”) humorously portrayed contemporary life, and Serafín Estébanez Calderón depicted the manners,
folklore, and history of Andalusia in Escenas
andaluzas (1847; “Andalusian Sketches”). Such
writings, realistically observing everyday life and
regional elements, bridged the transition to
realism.
Revival of the Spanish novel
For two centuries the novel, Spain’s greatest
contribution to literature, had languished. Early
revival novels are of interest more for their powers
of observation and description (a continuation of
costumbrismo) than for their imaginative or
narrative quality. Fernán Caballero (pseudonym of
Cecilia Böhl de Faber) essayed techniques of
observation new to the novel in La gaviota (1849;
The Seagull). The regional novel’s flowering began
with El sombrero de tres picos (1874; The
Three-Cornered Hat), a sparkling tale of peasant
malice by Pedro Antonio de Alarcón. Andalusian
regionalism prevailed in many of Juan Valera’s
novels, but his remarkable psychological insights in
Pepita Jiménez (1874) and Doña Luz (1879) made him
the father of Spain’s psychological novel. He was a
prolific writer, his works ranging from poetry and
newspaper articles to critical essays and memoirs.
Regionalist José María de Pereda produced minute
re-creations of nature, which was depicted as an
abiding reality that dwarfed individuals. His most
celebrated novels, Sotileza (1884; “Subtlety”) and
Peñas arriba (1895; “Up the Mountains”), support a
rigid class structure and traditional values of
religion, family, and country life. Emilia, condesa
(countess) de Pardo Bazán, attempted to combine the
aesthetics of naturalism with traditional Roman
Catholic values in her novels of Galicia, Los pazos
de Ulloa (1886; The Son of a Bondwoman) and La madre
naturaleza (1887; “Mother Nature”), sparking
considerable controversy. Her 19 major novels also
represent mainstream Spanish realism, experiments
with Symbolism, and spiritualism; she figures among
Spain’s major short-story writers with some 800
stories. Armando Palacio Valdés was the novelist of
Asturias, his native province, while Jacinto Octavio
Picón was more cosmopolitan; both experimented with
naturalism. The reputed author of more than 100
works, María del Pilar Sinués y Navarro made women
her primary subjects, treating marriage, motherhood,
domestic life, and women’s education. Ana García de
la Torre (Ana García del Espinar), a more
progressive contemporary, treated problems of class,
gender, and the proletariat, writing especially on
the “working girl” and portraying utopian workers’
socialist movements.
Benito Pérez Galdós, Spain’s most significant
novelist after Cervantes, perfected the Spanish
realistic novel and created a new type of historical
novel, imaginatively reproducing many turbulent
chapters of Spain’s 19th-century history. His
Episodios nacionales (1873–79 and 1898–1912;
“National Episodes”) comprise 46 volumes and cover
the 70 years from the Napoleonic Wars to Spain’s
short-lived First Republic. Galdós’s enduring fame
rests, however, on what have come to be known as the
Novelas españolas contemporáneas (“Contemporary
Spanish Novels”), especially his portrayals of
Madrid’s bureaucracy and its middle class and pueblo
(working class). Included among these many novels is
his masterpiece, Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87;
Fortunata and Jacinta), a paradigm of Spanish
realism. This massive four-volume work presents the
whole of Madrid’s social spectrum via the families,
loves, and acquaintances of the two women in the
life of a wealthy but weak bourgeois: Fortunata, his
mistress and the mother of his son, and Jacinta, his
wife. The novel has been seen as an allegory of the
sterility of the upper classes, but its complexity
transcends facile summary. His later works represent
naturalism or reflect turn-of-the-century
spiritualism. Galdós was a liberal crusader whose
criticism of the Roman Catholic Church’s
interventions in civic matters, of caciquism
(caciquismo, or political bossism), and of
reactionary power-grabs made him many enemies. He
also wrote more than 20 successful and often
controversial plays. Some have argued that his
political enemies conspired to deny him the Nobel
Prize, but today he ranks with such world-class
realists as the English novelist Charles Dickens and
the French novelist Honoré de Balzac.
In the late 1880s—a time of nascent
industrialism, a growing proletariat, and an influx
of international labour organizers—other
naturalistic novelists followed, notably Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. A crusader, adventurer, and
short-story writer, he achieved enormous
international success with novels widely translated
and adapted for the screen and became Spain’s
best-known novelist in the first third of the 20th
century, though he was seldom well received at home.
Contemporaneous with the Generation of 1898 but
belonging aesthetically to the 19th century, Blasco
Ibáñez wrote regional novels of Valencia, crusaded
for socialism, and treated contemporary social
problems from an anarchist perspective in such
novels as La bodega (1905; “The Wine Vault”; Eng.
trans. The Fruit of the Vine) and La horda (1905;
The Mob). He won international renown with Los
cuatro jinetes del apocalipsis (1916; The Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse), on World War I, and
Mare nostrum (1918; Our Sea), on German submarine
warfare in the Mediterranean.
Leopoldo Alas (byname Clarín), like Valera a
well-respected critic and author of volumes of
influential articles, has long been considered a
naturalist, but his works exhibit none of the
sordidness and social determinism typical of that
movement. Rich in detail, his writings abound in
irony and satire as they expose the evils of Spanish
Restoration society, most notably in La Regenta
(1884–85; “The Regent’s Wife”; Eng. trans. La
Regenta), which is today considered Spain’s most
significant novel of the 19th century. Alas’s
masterful short stories rank with the best in
Spanish and world literature.
Benito Pérez Galdós

Benito
Pérez Galdós, (b. May 10, 1843, Las
Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain—d. Jan. 4,
1920, Madrid), writer who was regarded
as the greatest Spanish novelist since
Miguel de Cervantes. His enormous output
of short novels chronicling the history
and society of 19th-century Spain earned
him comparison with Honoré de Balzac and
Charles Dickens.
Born
into a middle-class family, Pérez Galdós
went to Madrid in 1862 to study law but
soon abandoned his studies and took up
journalism. After the success of his
first novel, La fontana de oro (1870;
“The Fountain of Gold”), he began a
series of novels retelling Spain’s
history from the Battle of Trafalgar
(1805) to the restoration of the
Bourbons in Spain (1874). The entire
cycle of 46 novels would come to be
known as the Episodios nacionales
(1873–1912; “National Episodes”). In
these works Galdós perfected a unique
type of historical fiction that was
based on meticulous research using
memoirs, old newspaper articles, and
eyewitness accounts. The resulting
novels are vivid, realistic, and
accurate accounts of historical events
as they must have appeared to those
participating in them. The Napoleonic
occupation of Spain and the struggles
between liberals and absolutists
preceding the death of Ferdinand VII in
1833 are respectively treated in the
first two series of 10 novels each, all
composed in the 1870s.
In the
1880s and ’90s Pérez Galdós wrote a long
series of novels dealing with
contemporary Spain, beginning with Doña
Perfecta (1876). Known as the Novelas
españolas contemporáneas (“Contemporary
Spanish Novels”), these books were
written at the height of the author’s
literary maturity and include some of
his finest works, notably La desheredada
(1881; The Disinherited Lady) and his
masterpiece, the four-volume novel
Fortunata y Jacinta (1886–87), a study
of two unhappily married women from
different social classes. Pérez Galdós’
earlier novels in the series show a
reforming liberal zeal and an
intransigent opposition to Spain’s
ubiquitous and powerful clergy, but
after the 1880s he displayed a newly
tolerant acceptance of Spain’s
idiosyncracies and a greater sympathy
for his country. He demonstrated a
phenomenal knowledge of Madrid, of which
he showed himself the supreme
chronicler. He also displayed a deep
understanding of madness and abnormal
psychological states. Pérez Galdós
gradually came to admit more elements of
spirituality into his work, eventually
accepting them as an integral part of
reality, as evident in the important
late novels Nazarín (1895) and
Misericordia (1897; Compassion).
Financial difficulties prompted Pérez
Galdós in 1898 to begin a third series
of novels (covering the Carlist wars of
the 1830s) in the Episodios nacionales,
and he eventually went on to write a
fourth series (covering the period from
1845 to 1868) and begin a fifth, so that
by 1912 he had brought his history of
Spain down to 1877 and retold events of
which he himself had been a witness. The
books of the fifth series, however, and
his last works showed a decline in
mental powers compounded by the
blindness that overtook him in 1912.
Pérez
Galdós also wrote plays, some of which
were immensely popular, but their
success was largely owing to the
political views presented in them rather
than to their artistic value.
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Vicente Blasco Ibánez

Vicente
Blasco Ibáñez, (b. Jan. 29, 1867,
Valencia, Spain—d. Jan. 28, 1928, Menton,
Fr.), Spanish writer and politician, who
achieved world renown for his novels
dealing with World War I, the most
famous of which, Los cuatro jinetes del
Apocalipsis (1916; The Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse, 1918), was used as the
basis for two U.S. films. He was
associated with the Generation of ’98.
At the
age of 18, while studying law at Madrid
and contributing articles to political
journals, Blasco Ibáñez wrote an
antimonarchist poem for which he was
sent to prison—the first of many such
punishments for his political beliefs.
He founded the republican journal El
Pueblo in 1891 and was first elected to
the Cortes (parliament) in 1901, to
which he was returned seven times before
he voluntarily exiled himself in 1923
and settled on the French Riviera. He
did so because of his opposition to the
military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de
Rivera.
Blasco
Ibáñez’ early work, composed mainly of
regional novels such as Flor de mayo
(1895; Mayflower, 1921), La barraca
(1898; The Cabin, 1917), and Cañas y
barro (1902; Reeds and Mud, 1966), is
marked by a vigorous and intense realism
and considerable dramatic force in the
depiction of the life of Valencia. Later
novels, such as La bodega (1906; The
Fruit of the Vine, 1919), are held to
have suffered from a heavy ideological
treatment of serious social problems.
More popular novels, Sangre y arena
(1909; Blood and Sand, 1922); La maja
desnuda (1906; Woman Triumphant); his
best known, Los cuatro jinetes del
Apocalipsis; and others, brought him
fame but cost him critical approval
because of their sensational nature. He
became a member of the French Legion of
Honour in 1906.
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Post-Romantic drama and poetry
Realistic drama in Spain produced few masterpieces
but established a bourgeois comedy of manners
further developed in the 20th century. Manuel Tamayo
y Baus achieved fame with Un drama nuevo (1867; A
New Drama), whose characters, members of
William
Shakespeare’s acting company, include
Shakespeare
himself. Adelardo López de Ayala pilloried bourgeois
vices in El tejado de vidrio (1857; “The Glass
Roof”) and Consuelo (1870). The more than 60 plays
of José Echegaray y Eizaguirre include both
enormously popular melodramas lacking verisimilitude
of character, motivation, and situation and serious
bourgeois dramas of social problems. In 1904 he
shared the Nobel Prize for Literature with the
Provençal poet Frédéric Mistral. Joaquín Dicenta
utilized class conflict and social injustice as
themes, dramatizing working-class conditions in Juan
José (performed 1895).
In poetry, realistic trends produced little of
note. Ramón de Campoamor y Campoosorio wrote Doloras
(1845; “Sufferings”), Pequeños poemas (1871; “Little
Poems”), and Humoradas (1886; “Pleasant Jokes”),
works that attempted to establish a poetry of ideas.
The poet, playwright, and politician Gaspar Núñez de
Arce published Gritos del combate (1875; “Combat
Cries”), patriotic declamatory exhortations
defending democracy. He used a realistic approach to
treat contemporary moral, religious, and political
conflicts in his works, although his work also shows
Romantic and medieval themes.
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The modern period
The Generation of 1898
Novels and essays
For some two decades before 1900, political and
social unrest grew in Spain, conditions that
inspired Ángel Ganivet’s influential Idearium
español (1897; Spain, an Interpretation), which
analyzed Spanish character. The Spanish empire,
founded in 1492, ended with defeat in the
Spanish-American War of 1898, which prompted Spanish
intellectuals to diagnose their country’s ills and
to seek ways to jolt the nation out of what they
perceived to be its abulia (lack of will). The novel
acquired new seriousness, and critical,
psychological, and philosophical essays gained
unprecedented importance. Novelists and essayists
constituted what Azorín (pseudonym of José Martínez
Ruiz) named the Generation of 1898, today considered
an “Age of Silver,” second only to Spain’s Siglo de
Oro (Golden Age).
Miguel de Unamuno studied national problems
perceptively in En torno al casticismo (1895), a
collection of essays whose title—which means,
roughly, “Concerning Spanishness”—reflects its
analysis of the “essence” of Spanish national
identity. In Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905; The
Life of Don Quixote and Sancho) Unamuno explored the
same subject by way of an examination of Cervantes’s
fictional characters. He despairingly questioned
immortality in his most important work, Del
sentimiento trágico de la vida (1913; The Tragic
Sense of Life in Men and Peoples). A provocative,
somewhat unsystematic thinker, Unamuno aimed at
sowing spiritual disquiet. The novel became his
medium for exploring personality, as in Niebla
(1914; Mist), Abel Sánchez (1917), and Tres novelas
ejemplares y un prólogo (1920; “Three Cautionary
Tales and a Prologue”), with his final spiritual
position—Kierkegaardian existentialism—revealed in
San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1933; “San Manuel Bueno,
Martyr”). Unamuno was an influential journalist and
an unsuccessful but powerful dramatist who also
ranks among Spain’s greatest 20th-century poets.
In novels such as Don Juan (1922) and Doña Inés
(1925), Azorín created retrospective, introspective,
and nearly motionless narratives that shared many of
the qualities of works by his contemporary
Marcel
Proust. Azorín’s essays—in El alma castellana (1900;
“The Castilian Soul”), La ruta de Don Quijote (1905;
“Don Quixote’s Route”), Castilla (1912), and
numerous additional volumes—reinterpreted and sought
to eternalize earlier literary values and visions of
rural Spain. An artistic critic and sensitive
miniaturist, he excelled in precision and ekphrasis
(description of a visual work of art). Philosopher
José Ortega y Gasset developed themes from criticism
and psychology (Meditaciones del Quijote [1914;
“Meditations on Quixote”]) to national problems
(España invertebrada [1921; Invertebrate Spain]) and
international concerns (El tema de nuestro tiempo
[1923; The Modern Theme], La rebelión de las masas
[1929; The Revolt of the Masses]). He and Unamuno
were Spain’s intellectual leaders during the first
half of the 20th century.
Novelist Pío Baroja repudiated tradition,
religion, and most forms of social organization and
government, initially advocating something
approaching anarchism but later turning more
conservative. A neonaturalist, he saw the world as a
cruel place, and many of his works—including the
trilogies La raza (1908–11; “The Race”) and La lucha
por la vida (1903–04; “The Struggle for Life”) and
the two-part Agonías de nuestro tiempo (1926;
“Agonies of Our Time”)—portray squalid, subhuman
conditions, prostitutes and criminals, and ignorance
and disease. His most-read work is El árbol de la
ciencia (1911; The Tree of Knowledge), which tells
the story of the education of the protagonist, a
medical student; it depicts the shortcomings of
those teaching medicine, the callousness of many
doctors treating Spanish society’s most vulnerable,
and the abject poverty and filth in the village
where the protagonist first practices. Baroja also
wrote adventure novels that glorified the “man of
action,” a type that recurs throughout his novels.
In his later works he experimented with
Impressionism and Surrealism.
Sometimes omitted from the Generation of 1898,
given his Modernist beginnings, Ramón María del
Valle-Inclán—a poet, journalist, essayist,
short-story writer, and profoundly influential
dramatist and novelist—suffered critical neglect
following his death in 1936 when the Francisco
Franco regime prohibited studies of Republican
writers. The three stages of his literary evolution
exhibit radical aesthetic change, beginning with
exquisite, sometimes decadent, erotic Modernista
tales, as in his four Sonatas (1902–05; Eng. trans.
The Pleasant Memoirs of the Marquis de Bradomin:
Four Sonatas). Each represents a season (of the year
and of human life) corresponding to the youth,
plenitude, maturity, and old age of the narrator, a
decadent Don Juan; intertextual allusions, nostalgia
for an idealized past, aristocratic posing,
melancholy, underlying parody, and humour abound.
The trilogy Comedias bárbaras (1907, 1908, 1923),
set in an anachronistic, semifeudal Galicia and
linked by a single protagonist, is in dialogue form,
which gives these novels the feel of impossibly long
cinematographic dramas. This series initiated
Valle’s aesthetic movement away from Modernismo’s
quest for beauty, which continued with his violent
trilogy (1908–09) on the 19th-century Carlist wars. Valle’s third artistic stage,
characterized by his invention of the esperpento
style, is expressionistic, involving deliberate
distortion and calculated inversion of heroic models
and values. “Esperpentic” visions appear in the
novels Tirano Banderas (1926; Eng. trans. The
Tyrant), La corte de los milagros (1927; “The Court
of Miracles”), and Viva mi dueño (1928; “Long Live
My Lord”), the last two belonging to another
trilogy, El ruedo ibérico (“The Iberian Cycle”).
Valle’s works usually treat his native Galicia;
Tirano Banderas, satirizing desultory revolutions
and set in a fictional Latin American country, is
sometimes considered his masterpiece.
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George Santayana

Spanish philosopher
original name Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz De Santayana
born December 16, 1863, Madrid, Spain
died September 26, 1952, Rome, Italy
Main
Spanish-American philosopher, poet, and humanist who made important
contributions to aesthetics, speculative philosophy, and literary
criticism. From 1912 he resided in Europe, chiefly in France and Italy.
Early life and career
George Santayana was born in Madrid of Spanish parents. He never
relinquished his Spanish citizenship, and, although he was to write in
English with subtlety and poise, he did not begin to learn that language
until taken to join his mother in Boston in 1872. Santayana was to
reside in New England for most of the ensuing 40 years. He went through
the Boston Latin School and Harvard College, graduating summa cum laude
in 1886. He then spent two years studying philosophy at the University
of Berlin before returning to Harvard to complete his doctoral thesis
under the pragmatist William James. He joined the faculty of philosophy
in 1889, forming with James and the idealist Josiah Royce a brilliant
triumvirate of philosophers. Yet his attachment to Europe was strong. He
spent his summers in Spain with his father, visited England, and spent
his sabbatical leaves abroad: at the University of Cambridge, in Italy
and the East, and at the Sorbonne.
At Harvard he began to write. The Sense of Beauty (1896) was an
important contribution to aesthetics. The essay, which is concerned with
the nature and elements of aesthetic feelings, holds that to judge that
anything is beautiful is “virtually to establish an ideal” and that to
understand why something is thought to be beautiful enables one to
distinguish transitory ideals from those that, springing from more
fundamental feelings, are “comparatively permanent and universal.” The
vital affinity between aesthetic faculties and moral faculties is
illustrated in Santayana’s next book, Interpretations of Poetry and
Religion (1900), particularly in the discussion of the poetry of Robert
Browning, which is a model of its kind.
The Life of Reason (1905–06) was a major theoretical work consisting
of five volumes. Conceived in his student days after a reading of G.W.F.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, it was described by Santayana as “a
presumptive biography of the human intellect.” The life of reason, for
Santayana as for Hegel, is not restricted to purely intellectual
activities, for reason in all of its manifestations is a union of
impulse and ideation. It is instinct become reflective and enlightened.
The theory is given practical illustration in a series of essays,
gathered into two volumes: Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante,
and Goethe (1910); and Winds of Doctrine (1913), in which the poetry of
Percy Bysshe Shelley and the philosophies of Henri Bergson, a French
evolutionary philosopher, and of Bertrand Russell are trenchantly
discussed.
Return to Europe
Santayana was appointed a full Harvard professor in 1907. In 1912,
however, while he was in Europe, his mother died, and he sent in his
resignation from there. He never returned to America, although several
attractive offers were made by Harvard in an attempt to draw him back.
Santayana’s resignation astonished his colleagues, for it came at the
height of his career. All of his books were admired and influential, and
there seemed to be an intimate connection between them and his teaching.
Clearly, he was a gifted teacher: interested in his students, devoid of
pedantry, and with a superb capacity for analyzing philosophies and
related poetry with lucid sympathy while judging them by standards that
remained rational and humane. His resignation, nevertheless, can be seen
as inevitable: he disliked the academic straitjacket; he wished to
devote himself exclusively to his writing; and he was ill at ease in
America. His Latin heritage and allegiance gave to his thinking a
striking range and perspective, but the net result was to make him want
“to say plausibly in English as many un-English things as possible.”
From the strain of doing this, he was thankful to escape.
When World War I began, Santayana was in Oxford, and he settled there
for the duration. Though he enjoyed the friendship of several eminent
people, the war saddened him, and he led a secluded life. Egotism in
German Philosophy appeared in 1916, making clear his strong allegiance
to the Allied cause; he also wrote a number of popular essays centring
on the English character and countryside. At the end of the war he was
offered a life membership in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, but he
declined.
Santayana’s system of philosophy
In 1924 he settled permanently in Rome. The atmosphere was congenial to
a native-born Roman Catholic who, though evolving into a philosophical
materialist for whom the world of spirit was wholly ideal and
nonexistent, had always admired the Catholic and classical traditions.
Three new books consolidated his reputation as a humanist critic and man
of letters, and this side was brought to perfect expression in a novel,
The Last Puritan (1935).
The bulk of his energies in the interwar years, however, went into
speculative philosophy. Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) marks an
important departure from his earlier philosophy and serves as “a
critical introduction” to and résumé of his new system developed in the
four-volume Realms of Being (1928, 1930, 1937, 1940), an ontological
(nature of being) treatise of great concentration and finish. In these
later works Santayana enhanced his stature as a philosopher by achieving
greater theoretical precision, depth, and coherence. Scepticism and
Animal Faith conveys better than any other volume the essential import
of his philosophy. It formulates his theory of immediately apprehended
essences and describes the role played by “animal faith” in various
forms of knowledge.
In Realms of Being extraordinarily complex problems are elucidated
with luminous succinctness: Santayana makes his way with athletic ease
through forests in which ontological philosophers like Edmund Husserl or
Existentialist ones like Jean-Paul Sartre flounder self-indulgently.
“The realm of essence,” in Santayana’s system, is that of the mind’s
certain and indubitable knowledge. Essences are universals that have
being or reality but do not exist. They include colours, tastes, and
odours as well as the ideal objects of thought and imagination. “The
realm of matter” is the world of natural objects; belief in it rests—as
does all belief concerning existence—on animal faith. Naturalism, the
dominant theme of his entire philosophy, appears in his insistence that
matter is prior to the other realms.
Such a philosophy enabled Santayana to accept imperturbably another
onset of war. He took rooms in a Catholic nursing home and began a
three-volume autobiography, Persons and Places (1944, 1945, 1953). When
Rome was liberated in 1944, the 80-year-old author found himself visited
by an “avalanche” of American admirers. By now he was immersed in
Dominations and Powers (1951), an analysis of man in society; and then
with heroic tenacity—for he was nearly deaf and half blind—he gave
himself to translating Lorenzo de’ Medici’s love poem, “Ambra,” during
which he was overtaken by his last illness. He died in September 1952, a
few months before his 89th birthday, and was buried, as he had wished,
in the Catholic cemetery of Rome in a plot reserved for Spanish
nationals.
Norman V. Henfrey
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Miguel de
Unamuno

Miguel
de Unamuno, in full Miguel De Unamuno Y
Jugo (b. Sept. 29, 1864, Bilbao,
Spain—d. Dec. 31, 1936, Salamanca),
educator, philosopher, and author whose
essays had considerable influence in
early 20th-century Spain.
Unamuno
was the son of Basque parents. After
attending the Vizcayan Institute of
Bilbao, he entered the University of
Madrid in 1880 and in four years
received a doctorate in philosophy and
letters. Six years later he became
professor of Greek language and
literature at the University of
Salamanca.
In 1901
Unamuno became rector of the university,
but he was relieved of his duties in
1914 after publicly espousing the Allied
cause in World War I. His opposition in
1924 to General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s
rule in Spain resulted in his forced
exile to the Canary Islands, from which
he escaped to France. When Primo de
Rivera’s dictatorship fell, Unamuno
returned to the University of Salamanca
and was reelected rector of the
university in 1931, but in October 1936
he denounced General Francisco Franco’s
Falangists, was removed once again as
rector, and was placed under house
arrest. He died of a heart attack two
months later.
Unamuno
was an early existentialist who
concerned himself largely with the
tension between intellect and emotion,
faith and reason. At the heart of his
view of life was his personal and
passionate longing for immortality.
According to Unamuno, man’s hunger to
live on after death is constantly denied
by his reason and can only be satisfied
by faith, and the resulting tension
results in unceasing agony.
Although he also wrote poetry and plays,
Unamuno was most influential as an
essayist and novelist. If his vigorous
and iconoclastic essays have any common
theme, it is that of the need to
preserve one’s personal integrity in the
face of social conformity, fanaticism,
and hypocrisy. His first published work
was the essays collected in En torno al
casticismo (1895), in which he
critically examined Spain’s isolated and
anachronistic position in western Europe
at the time. His Vida de Don Quijote y
Sancho (1905; Life of Don Quixote and
Sancho) is a detailed analysis of Miguel
de Cervantes’ literary characters.
Unamuno’s mature philosophy found its
fullest expression in Del sentimiento
trágico de la vida en los hombres y en
los pueblos (1913; The Tragic Sense of
Life in Men and Peoples), in which he
stressed the vital role spiritual
anxiety plays in driving man to live the
fullest possible life. This and other
themes were explored in La agonía del
cristianismo (1925; The Agony of
Christianity).
Unamuno’s novels are intensely
psychological depictions of agonized
characters who illustrate and give voice
to his own philosophical ideas. His most
famous novel is Abel Sánchez: una
historia de pasión (1917; Abel Sanchez),
a modern re-creation of the biblical
story of Cain and Abel, which centres on
the painfully conflicting impulses of
the character representing Cain. His
other novels include Amor y pedagogía
(1902; “Love and Pedagogy”), which
describes a father’s attempt to raise
his son scientifically, ending in
failure and the son’s ruin; Niebla
(1914; Mist); and San Manuel Bueno,
mártir (1933; “Saint Manuel the Good,
Martyr”), the story of an unbelieving
priest. Unamuno’s El Cristo de Velázquez
(1920; The Christ of Velázquez), a study
in poetic form of the great Spanish
painter, is regarded as a superb example
of modern Spanish verse.
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Azorín

Azorín,
pseudonym of José Martínez Ruiz (b. June
8/11, 1873, Monóvar, Spain—d. March 2,
1967, Madrid), novelist, essayist, and
the foremost Spanish literary critic of
his day. He was one of a group of
writers who were engaged at the turn of
the 20th century in a concerted attempt
to revitalize Spanish life and letters.
Azorín was the first to identify this
group as the Generation of ’98—a name
that prevails.
Azorín
studied law at Valencia, Granada, and
Salamanca, but later he went to Madrid
to be a journalist, only to find that
his outspokenness closed most doors. He
then wrote a trilogy of novels, La
voluntad (1902; “Volition”), Antonio
Azorín (1903), and Las confesiones de un
pequeño filósofo (1904; “The Confessions
of a Minor Philosopher”), which are
actually little more than
impressionistic essays written in
dialogue. This trilogy operated with
unifying force on the Generation of ’98,
however. Animated by a deep patriotism,
Azorín tirelessly sought through his
work to bring to light what he believed
was of lasting value in Spanish culture.
His book El alma castellana (1900; “The
Castilian Soul”) and his essay
collections La ruta de Don Quijote
(1905; “The Route of Don Quixote”) and
Una hora de España 1560–1590 (1924; An
Hour of Spain, 1560–1590) carefully and
subtly reconstruct the spirit of Spanish
life, directing the reader’s sensibility
by the suggestive power of their prose.
Azorín’s literary criticism, such as Al
margen de los clásicos (1915; “Marginal
Notes to the Classics”), helped to open
up new avenues of literary taste and to
arouse a new enthusiasm for the Spanish
classics at a time when a large portion
of Spanish literature was virtually
unavailable to the public. The
simplicity of Azorín’s style attracted
innumerable imitators, all of whom
failed to achieve his intellectual
subtlety, vitality, and poetic rhythm.
Because
he was interested in keeping Spain aware
of current foreign thinking, Azorín
edited the periodical Revista de
Occidente (“Magazine of the West”) from
1923 to 1936. He spent the period of the
Spanish Civil War in Paris, writing for
the Argentine newspaper La Nación, but
he returned to Madrid in 1949. After his
death a museum including his library was
opened at Monóvar.
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Pío Baroja

Pío
Baroja, (b. December 28, 1872, San
Sebastián, Spain—d. October 30, 1956,
Madrid), Basque writer who is considered
to be the foremost Spanish novelist of
his generation.
After
receiving his medical degree, Baroja
practiced medicine for a short time in a
village in northern Spain, later
returning to Madrid to work in the
family bakery. As a member of the
Generation of ’98, Baroja revolted
against the stultification of Spanish
life. His first two books, a collection
of short stories, Vidas sombrías (1900;
“Sombre Lives”), and a novel, La casa de
Aizgorri (1900; The House of the
Aizgorri, 1958), clearly show the
direction his later work would take.
Attempting to arouse people to action,
he wrote 11 trilogies dealing with
contemporary social problems, the best
known of which, La lucha por la vida
(1904; The Struggle for Life, 1922–24),
portrays the misery and squalor in the
poor sections of Madrid. Himself a
confirmed rebel and nonconformist,
Baroja wrote at length about vagabonds
and people who reflected his own
thinking; El árbol de la ciencia (1911;
The Tree of Knowledge, 1928) is
considered to be basically
autobiographical. Of the almost 100
novels he wrote, the most ambitious
project was Memorias de un hombre de
acción (1913–28; “Memoirs of a Man of
Action”), a series of 14 novels and 8
volumes of shorter narratives dealing
with a 19th-century insurgent and his
era. One of his best novels, Zalacaín el
aventurero (1909), is written in an
intentionally abrupt style reflecting
Baroja’s vision of reality as
disjointed.
Because
of his anti-Christian views, his
stubborn insistence on nonconformity,
and a somewhat pessimistic attitude,
Baroja’s novels never achieved great
popularity. His terse and unadorned
style, which relied heavily upon
understatement, is said to have had
great influence on Ernest Hemingway.
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Ramón María del
Valle-Inclán

Ramón
María del Valle-Inclán, (b. Oct. 28,
1866, Villanueva de Arosa, Spain—d. Jan.
5, 1936, Santiago de Compostela),
Spanish novelist, dramatist, and poet
who combined a sensuous use of language
with bitter social satire.
Valle-Inclán
was raised in rural Galicia, and after
attending law school and visiting Mexico
City he settled in Madrid, where he
became known for his colourful
personality. He early came under French
Symbolist influence, and his first
notable works, the four novelettes known
as the Sonatas (1902–05), feature a
beautifully evocative prose and a tone
of refined and elegant decadence. They
narrate the seductions and other doings
of a Galician womanizer who is partly an
autobiographical figure. In his
subsequent works Valle-Inclán developed
a style that is rich in both popular and
literary appeal, as in several plays
featuring the patriarchal Don Juan
Manuel de Montenegro and his brood of
wild sons.
Some of
Valle-Inclán’s later plays and novels
are in the manner he called esperpento
(“horrible, nauseating persons, or
things”). This intentionally absurd and
cruelly satirical style is intended to
express the tragic meaning of Spanish
life—which he saw as a gross deformation
of European civilization—through the
systematic distortion of classic heroes.
The best of his esperpento plays are
Luces de Bohemia (1920; “Lights of
Bohemia”) and Los cuernos de Don
Friolera (1921; “Don Friolera’s Horns”).
His major novels of the later period
include two works, La corte de los
milagros (1927) and Viva mi dueño
(1928), as well as an unfinished one,
Baza de espadas (1958), that were part
of an unfinished nine-volume cycle of
historical novels collectively entitled
El ruedo ibérico (1927–28; “The Iberian
Circle”); the completed works deal with
the political corruption and social
degradation of Spain in the latter 19th
century. Valle-Inclán’s novel Tirano
Banderas (1926) is a vivid portrayal of
a Latin-American despot.
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Poetry
Rubén Darío, Latin America’s greatest poet, took
Modernismo to Spain in 1892. Modernismo rejected
19th-century bourgeois materialism and instead
sought specifically aesthetic values. Darío greatly
enriched the musical resources of Spanish verse with
the daring use of new rhythms and metres, creating
an introspective, cosmopolitan, and aesthetically
beautiful poetry.
Antonio Machado, one of the 20th century’s
greatest poets, explored memory through recurrent
symbols of multiple meanings, the dimly drawn
boundaries of dream and reality, and time past and
present. A consummate creator of introspective
Modernist poems in Soledades (1903, augmented 1907;
“Solitudes”), Machado abandoned the cult of beauty
in Campos de Castilla (1912, augmented 1917; “Fields
of Castile”), producing powerful visions of the
Spanish condition and the character of the Spanish
people that became a guiding precedent for postwar
“social” poets. In his anguished grappling with
Spain’s problems—a characteristic of the Generation
of 1898—Machado correctly foresaw the coming Civil
War.
Juan Ramón Jiménez, recipient of the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1956, practiced the aesthetics of
Modernismo during his first two decades. Anguished
by transient reality, Jiménez next sought salvation
in an absorbing, manic dedication to poetry stripped
of adornment—what he called poesía desnuda (“naked
poetry”)—as in Eternidades (1918; “Eternities”) and
Piedra y cielo (1919; “Stone and Sky”). Seeking
Platonic absolutes in his final years, he produced
measured, exact poetry that increasingly exulted in
mystical discoveries of transcendence within the
immanence of self and physical reality. Jiménez’s
voluminous output—Rimas (1902; “Rhymes”); Sonetos
espirituales (1914–15) (1917; “Spiritual Sonnets
[1914–15]”); Diario de un poeta recién casado (1917;
“Diary of a Poet Recently Married”); Animal de fondo
(1947; “Animal of the Depth”)—springs from his
lifelong pursuit of poetry and its modes of
expression. Sofía Pérez Casanova de Lutoslawski, a
successful early Modernist poet, spent her married
life outside Spain. A pioneering feminist and social
worker, she was also a prolific novelist, a
translator, and an author of short stories, essays,
and children’s books. She became a foreign
correspondent during World War I and the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
Rubén Darío

Rubén
Darío, pseudonym of Félix Rubén García
Sarmiento (b. January 18, 1867, Metapa,
Nicaragua—d. February 6, 1916, León),
influential Nicaraguan poet, journalist,
and diplomat. As a leader of the Spanish
American literary movement known as
Modernismo, which flourished at the end
of the 19th century, he revivified and
modernized poetry in Spanish on both
sides of the Atlantic through his
experiments with rhythm, metre, and
imagery. Darío developed a highly
original poetic style that founded a
tradition.
Life
and work
Precocious and prolific, from the
age of 14 he signed the name Rubén Darío
to his poems and stories of love,
heroism, and adventure, which, although
imitative in form, showed a strikingly
vivid imagination. In 1886 he left
Nicaragua, beginning the travels that
continued throughout his life. He
settled for a time in Chile, where in
1888 he published his first major work,
Azul (“Blue”), a collection of short
stories, descriptive sketches, and
verse. This volume was soon recognized
in Europe and Latin America as the
herald of a new era in Spanish American
literature. Darío had only recently
become acquainted with French Parnassian
poetry, and Azul represents his attempt
to apply to Spanish the tenets of that
stylistic movement. In the prose works
in Azul he discarded the traditional
long and grammatically complex Spanish
sentence structure, replacing it with
simple and direct language. Both the
prose and poetry in this volume are
generally concerned with objective
description, and both deal with exotic
subjects, chiefly classical mythology,
France, and Asia. As a whole, the volume
exhibits Darío’s concern with “art for
art’s sake,” and it reveals little
interest in everyday life.
After
his return to Central America in 1889
and two brief marriages (the first ended
by his wife’s death and the other by
separation), he left to take up an
appointment in 1893 as Colombian consul
in Buenos Aires, where he found the
cosmopolitan atmosphere stimulating.
Young writers there hailed him as their
leader, and the modernist movement
organized around him. Darío’s next
significant work, Prosas profanas y
otros poemas (1896; “Profane Hymns and
Other Poems”), a collection of verse,
continued the innovative stylistic
trends of Azul but treated its exotic
scenes and personages in a manner more
symbolic than objective, for it was
influenced by the contemporary French
Symbolist poets.
Darío
went to Europe in 1898 as a
correspondent for the Buenos Aires
newspaper La Nación. Based in Paris and
Majorca, he traveled extensively on the
European continent on journalistic and
diplomatic missions. By this time, world
events and his own advancing age had
brought about a profound change in his
outlook on life. He became vitally
concerned with the world outside the
realm of art: the possible threat of
North American imperialism after the
defeat of Spain in 1898, the solidarity
of Spanish-speaking peoples, the future
of Spanish America after the collapse of
Spain’s empire in the New World, and the
age-old problems of human existence. The
collection that is generally considered
to be his masterpiece, Cantos de vida y
esperanza (1905; “Songs of Life and
Hope”), reflects these concerns and is
the culmination of his technical
experimentation and his artistic
resourcefulness.
On the
outbreak of World War I in 1914, Darío
left Europe, physically ill and on the
brink of poverty. In an attempt to
alleviate his financial difficulties, he
began a lecture tour of North America,
but he developed pneumonia in New York
and died shortly after his return to his
homeland.
Among
the many editions of Darío’s work in
Spanish is Obras completas, 2 vol.
(1971), edited by A.M. Plancarte.
Selected Poems, translated by Lysander
Kemp (1965), contains an introduction by
Octavio Paz and a tribute—originally
given before the Buenos Aires Pen Club
in 1933—by Federico García Lorca and
Pablo Neruda.
Assessment
In addition to the three major
collections on which his greatest fame
rests, Darío wrote approximately 100
short stories and tales, several volumes
of poetry and penetrating literary
criticism, and the journalistic articles
that appeared in La Nación and
elsewhere.
From
the standpoint of artistic
resourcefulness and technical
perfection, Darío is considered by many
to be one of the greatest poets who ever
wrote in Spanish. Throughout his career
he boldly experimented with many forms
of verse, and he probably introduced
more metrical innovations than any other
Spanish-language poet. Darío’s poetry is
notable for its remarkable musicality,
grace, and sonority, and he had a
masterly command of rhyme and metrical
structure. His earlier anecdotal and
descriptive poems treat faraway places,
mythology, and other exotic subjects
with a rich lyricism, while the later
poems in Cantos de vida contain a
pronounced philosophical note and
exhibit a poignant and powerful sense of
the tragic side of life.
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Antonio Machado

Antonio
Machado, in full Antonio Machado y Ruiz
(b. July 26, 1875, Sevilla, Spain—d.
February 22, 1939, Collioure, France),
outstanding Spanish poet and playwright
of Spain’s Generation of ’98.
Machado
received a doctoral degree in literature
in Madrid, attended the Sorbonne, and
became a secondary school French
teacher. He rejected the modernism of
his contemporaries and adopted what he
called “eternal poetry,” which was
informed more by intuition than by
intellect. Three stages can be
distinguished in his artistic evolution.
The first, typified by the poems in
Soledades (1903; “Solitudes”) and
Soledades, galerías, y otros poemas
(1907; “Solitudes, Galleries, and Other
Poems”), established his links with
romanticism. These poems are concerned
largely with evoking memories and dreams
and with the subjective identification
of the poet with natural phenomena,
especially the sunset. In his second
stage Machado turned away from pure
introspection, and in Campos de Castilla
(1912; “Plains of Castile”) he sought to
capture the stark landscape and spirit
of Castile in a severely denuded and
sombre style. His later works, Nuevas
canciones (1924; “New Songs”) and
Poesías completas (1928; “Complete
Poems”), express profound Existential
views and reflect on the solitude of the
poet. He also wrote plays in
collaboration with his brother Manuel
and a collection of philosophical
reflections with strong Existentialist
overtones, Juan de Mairena (1936). A
strong supporter of the Spanish
Republic, Machado fled Spain when the
Republic collapsed in early 1939; he
died soon afterward in exile.
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Juan Ramón Jiménez

Juan
Ramón Jiménez, (b. Dec. 24, 1881, Moguer,
Spain—d. May 29, 1958, San Juan, P.R.),
Spanish poet awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1956.
After
studying briefly at the University of
Salamanca, Jiménez went to Madrid (1900)
at the invitation of the poet Rubén
Darío. His first two volumes of poetry,
Almas de violeta (“Souls of Violet”) and
Ninfeas (“Waterlilies”), came out that
same year. The two books, printed in
violet and green, respectively, so
embarrassed Jiménez in his later years
by their excessive sentiment that he
destroyed every copy he could find. A
man of frail constitution, he left
Madrid for reasons of health. His
published volumes of that period,
including Pastorales (1911), Jardines
lejanos (1905; “Distant Gardens”), and
Elegías puras (1908; “Pure Elegies”),
clearly reflect the influence of Darío,
with their emphasis on individuality and
subjectivity expressed in free verse.
Jiménez
returned to Madrid in 1912 and, for the
next four years, lived at the Residencia
de Estudiantes and worked as an editor
of that educational institution’s
periodicals. In 1916 he traveled to New
York City, where he married Zenobia
Camprubí Aymar, the Spanish translator
of the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore.
Shortly after his return to Spain, he
published Diario de un poeta recién
casado (1917; “Diary of a Poet Recently
Married”), which was issued in 1948
under the title Diario de un poeta y mar
(“Diary of a Poet and the Sea”). That
volume marked his transition to what he
called “la poesía desnuda” (“naked
poetry”), an attempt to strip his poetry
of all extraneous matter and to produce
it in free verse, without formal metres,
of a purer nature. During the Spanish
Civil War (1936–39), he allied himself
with the Republican forces, until he
voluntarily exiled himself to Puerto
Rico, where he spent most of the rest of
his life.
Although primarily a poet, Jiménez
achieved popularity in the United States
with the translation of his prose work
Platero y yo (1917; Platero and I), the
story of a man and his donkey. He also
collaborated with his wife in the
translation of the Irish playwright John
Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea
(1920). His poetic output during his
life was immense. Among his better-known
works are Sonetos espirituales 1914–1915
(1916; “Spiritual Sonnets, 1914–15”),
Piedra y cielo (1919; “Stones and Sky”),
Poesía, en verso, 1917–1923 (1923),
Poesía en prosa y verso (1932; “Poetry
in Prose and Verse”), Voces de mi copla
(1945; “Voices of My Song”), and Animal
de fondo (1947; “Animal at Bottom”). A
collection of 300 poems (1903–53) in
English translation by Eloise Roach was
published in 1962.
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Drama
Contemporaneous with the Generation of 1898 but
ideologically and aesthetically distinct was Jacinto Benavente y Martínez. A prolific playwright noted
for his craftsmanship and wit, he profoundly altered
Spanish theatrical practice and fare. Excelling in
the comedy of manners with sparkling dialogue and
satiric touches, Benavente never alienated his
devoted upper-class public. Los intereses creados
(1907; The Bonds of Interest), echoing the
16th-century commedia dell’arte, is his most
enduring work. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature
in 1922. The poetic, nostalgic drama of Eduardo
Marquina revived lyric theatre, together with the
so-called género chico (light dramatic or operatic
one-act playlets). Serafín and Joaquín Alvarez
Quintero appropriated the latter’s popular
costumbrista setting for comedy, while Carlos
Arniches developed it in satirical pieces (often
compared with the 18th-century sainete) and Pedro
Muñoz Seca used it in popular farces.
More-intellectual theatrical experiments by Unamuno
attempted the drama of ideas; Azorín renewed comedy,
introducing lessons from vaudeville, and produced
experimental Surrealist works.
Although undervalued during his lifetime because
his radically innovative, shocking works went mostly
unproduced, Valle-Inclán is today considered Spain’s
most significant dramatist since
Calderón. This
brilliant, original playwright attempted, often
futilely, to overcome Spanish theatre’s bourgeois
complacency and artistic mediocrity. His dramas
inveighed against hypocrisy and corrupt values with
mordant irony. Luces de Bohemia (1920; Bohemian
Lights) illustrates his theory and practice of
esperpento, an aesthetic formula he also used in his
fiction to depict reality through a deliberately
exaggerated mimesis of its grotesqueness. His work
sometimes recalls that of Luis Buñuel, Salvador
Dalí, or Picasso. Jacinto Grau, another would-be
reformer, attempted tragedy in El Conde Alarcos
(1917), adding dignity to his pessimistic view of an
absurd reality in El señor de Pigmalión (1921).
Generally overlooked is María de la O Lejárraga, who
collaborated with her husband, Gregorio Martínez
Sierra, and wrote most of the essays, poems, short
stories, novels, and newspaper articles they
published jointly, plus the more than 50 plays on
which their fame rests. She continued writing his
plays even after he abandoned her for another woman.
Their best-known plays include Canción de cuna
(1911; Cradle Song) and El reino de Dios (1916; The
Kingdom of God), which feature strong, resourceful,
maternal women who represent an idealization of
motherhood, a typical feature of their plays.
Brothers Manuel and Antonio Machado collaborated on
several lyric plays during the 1920s and early
1930s.
Jacinto Benavente y Martínez

Jacinto
Benavente y Martínez, (b. Aug. 12, 1866,
Madrid, Spain—d. July 14, 1954, Madrid),
one of the foremost Spanish dramatists
of the 20th century, who was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922. He
returned drama to reality by way of
social criticism: declamatory verse
giving way to prose, melodrama to
comedy, formula to experience, impulsive
action to dialogue and the play of
minds. Benavente showed a preoccupation
with aesthetics and later with ethics.
The
extent to which he broadened the scope
of the theatre is shown by the range of
his plays—e.g., Los intereses creados
(performed 1903, published 1907; The
Bonds of Interest, performed 1919), his
most celebrated work, based on the
Italian commedia dell’arte; Los
malhechores del bien (performed 1905;
The Evil Doers of Good); La noche del
sábado (performed 1903; Saturday Night,
performed 1926); and La malquerida
(1913; “The Passion Flower”), a rural
tragedy with the theme of incest. La
malquerida was his most successful play
in Spain and in North and South America.
Señora Ama (1908), said to be his own
favourite play, is an idyllic comedy set
among the people of Castile.
In 1928
his play Para el cielo y los altares
(“Toward Heaven and the Altars”),
prophesying the fall of the Spanish
monarchy, was prohibited by the
government. During the Spanish Civil War
Benavente lived in Barcelona and
Valencia and was for a time under
arrest. In 1941 he reestablished himself
in public favour with Lo increíble (“The
Incredible”). His extraordinary
productivity as a dramatist (he wrote
more than 150 plays) recalled Spain’s
Golden Age and the prolific writer Lope
de Vega. With the exception, however, of
the harsh tragedy La infanzona (1948;
“The Ancient Noblewoman”) and El lebrel
del cielo (1952), inspired by Francis
Thompson’s poem “Hound of Heaven,”
Benavente’s later works did not add much
to his fame.
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Novecentismo
The term novecentistas applies to a generation of
writers that fall between the Generation of 1898 and
the vanguardist Generation of 1927. The
novecentistas—sometimes also called the Generation
of 1914—were more classical and less revolutionary
than their predecessors. They sought to renew
intellectual and aesthetic standards while
reaffirming Classical values. Ortega y Gasset
exerted influence over the novel as a genre with La
deshumanización del arte (1925; The Dehumanization
of Art), which analyzed contemporary
“depersonalized” (i.e., nonrepresentational) art.
Ramón Pérez de Ayala made the novel a polished art
form and a forum for philosophical discussion.
Belarmino y Apolonio (1921; Belarmino and Apolonio)
examines the age-old debate between faith and
reason, utilizing symbolic characters and multiple
narrative viewpoints, while Tigre Juan (1926; Tiger
Juan) dissects traditional Spanish concepts of
honour and matrimony. Gabriel Miró’s polished
descriptive prose slowed and nearly displaced the
novelistic action; like Pérez de Ayala, he dealt
repeatedly with ecclesiastical intrusions into civil
life and satirized the lack of sexual education in
Spanish culture. Benjamín Jarnés and others
attempted to apply vanguardist and experimental
techniques to the novel, emphasizing minimal action,
alienated characters, the psychological probing of
memory, and experiments with internal monologue.
Vanguardism’s paradigmatic exponent, Ramón Gómez de
la Serna, was the author of some 100 novels,
biographies, dramas, collections of articles and
short stories, books on art, and works of humour.
Among women writers, Carmen de Burgos Seguí
(pseudonym Colombine) wrote hundreds of articles,
more than 50 short stories, some dozen long novels
and numerous short ones, many practical books for
women, and socially oriented treatises on subjects
such as divorce. An active suffragist and opponent
of the death penalty, she treated feminist themes
(La malcasada [“The Unhappily Married Woman”], En la
sima [1915; “On Top”], La rampa [1917; “The Ramp”])
as well as spiritualism, the occult, and the
supernatural (El retorno [“The Reappearance”], Los
espirituados [1923; “The Possessed”]). Concepción
(Concha) Espina, often considered the first Spanish
woman writer to earn her living exclusively from her
writings, enjoyed tremendous popularity and was
twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. Her novels,
with their detailed descriptions, most nearly
approach the regional novel as epitomized by Pereda;
their melodrama and moralizing also show Espina’s
independence from novecentismo’s influence. El metal
de los muertos (1920; The Metal of the Dead), a work
of social-protest fiction, was among her most
successful works, as were La esfinge maragata (1914;
Mariflor) and Altar mayor (1926; “High Altar”).
The Generation of 1927
The name Generation of 1927 identifies poets that
emerged about 1927, the 300-year anniversary of the
death of Baroque poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, to
whom these poets paid homage and which sparked a
brief flash of neo-Gongorism. These outstanding
poets—among them Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, Dámaso Alonso, Luis Cernuda, Gerardo Diego,
Federico
García Lorca,
Jorge Guillén, and Pedro Salinas—drew
upon the past (ballads, traditional songs, early
metrical structure, and Góngora’s poetry), but they
also incorporated vanguardism (Surrealism, Futurism,
Ultraism), producing intensely personal poetry.
Images and metaphors—frequently illogical, hermetic,
or irrational—became central to poetic creation.
Most of these poets experimented with free verse or
exotic forms drawn from the Japanese, Arabic, and
Afro-Caribbean literary traditions. By the end of
the Spanish Civil War, in 1939, many writers of the
Generation of 1927 were dead or in exile.
Federico
García Lorca, a consummate artist, musician, dramatist,
and poet, captured the stark emotions and powerful
effects that characterize traditional song and
ballad forms. In Romancero gitano (1928; The Gypsy
Ballads), he blended popular styles with
sophisticated mythic and symbolic elements evoking
mysterious, ambivalent visions of nature. Symbols
and metaphors turn hermetic in Poeta en Nueva York
(1940; Poet in New York), a Surrealist reflection of
urban inhumanity and disorientation written during
his visit to the United States in 1929–30. Salinas
sought pure poetry through clearly focused poems and
a heightened sensitivity to language. In La voz a ti
debida (1934; “The Voice Inspired by You”; Eng.
trans. Truth of Two and Other Poems), profoundly
personal love experiences inspire subtle
observations on the solidity of external reality and
the fleeting world of subjective perception.
Guillén’s lifelong poetic effort, Cántico (Cántico:
A Selection), first published in 1928 and repeatedly
enlarged in successive editions, constitutes a
disciplined hymn to the joys of everyday reality.
Later works (Clamor [1957–63; “Clamour”] and
Homenaje [1967; “Homage”]) displayed keener
awareness of suffering and disorder.
Vicente Aleixandre, influenced by Surrealism, dabbled in
the subconscious and created his own personal myths.
In La destrucción o el amor (1935; Destruction or
Love), he evoked human despair and cosmic violence.
With his postwar “social” poetry, Aleixandre moved
beyond pure poetry, broadening his focus without
abandoning a cosmic vision (Mundo a solas [1950;
World Alone], Historia del corazón [1954; “History
of the Heart”], En un vasto dominio [1962; “In a
Vast Dominion”]). He received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1977. Like
Lorca,
Alberti initially
incorporated popular forms and folk elements. The
playful poetry of Marinero en tierra (1925;
“Landlocked Sailor”) yielded to stylistic
complexities in Cal y canto (1927; “Quicklime and
Song”) and to the sombre, introspective mood of
Sobre los ángeles (1929; Concerning the Angels), a
Surrealist collection reflecting personal crisis.
Rafael Alberti joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, and
during the Civil War and his subsequent exile in
Argentina, he wrote poetry of political commitment;
later he resumed personal, intimate themes.
Cernuda’s poetry, as suggested by the title of his
collected works La realidad y el deseo (first
published 1936; “Reality and Desire”), contemplates
the gulf between harsh reality and ideal personal
aspirations. The tension, melancholy, and sense of
alienation resulting from the unbridgeable gap
between these realms pervade Cernuda’s work.
This generation of Spanish poetry also includes
Emilio Prados and Manuel Altolaguirre. Miguel
Hernández, a younger poet of the Civil War, bridged
the gap between the Generation of 1927 and the
post-Civil War poets.
Rafael Alberti

Rafael
Alberti, (b. Dec. 16, 1902, Puerto de
Santa María, Spain—d. Oct. 28, 1999,
Puerto de Santa María), Spanish writer
of Italian Irish ancestry, regarded as
one of the major Spanish poets of the
20th century.
Alberti
studied art in Madrid and enjoyed some
success as a painter before 1923, when
he began writing and publishing poems in
magazines. His first book of poetry,
Marinero en tierra (1925; “Sailor on
Land”), recalled the sea of his native
Cádiz region and won a national prize. A
member of the so-called Generation of
1927, Alberti helped to celebrate the
tercentenary of Luis de Góngora in 1927,
and Góngorist influence is apparent in
the work published in that period, El
alba del alhelí (1927; “The Dawn of the
Wallflower”) and Cal y canto (1928;
“Quicklime and Song”). With his next
book, the somewhat Surrealist Sobre los
ángeles (1929; Concerning the Angels),
Alberti established himself as a mature
and individual voice.
In the
1930s Alberti’s work became overtly
political; he wrote plays, traveled
widely, joined the Communist Party—from
which he was later expelled—and founded
a review, Octubre. He fought for the
Republic in the Spanish Civil War and
afterward fled to Argentina, where he
worked for the Losado publishing house
and resumed both his poetry and his
earlier interest, painting. In 1941 he
published a collection of poems, Entre
el clavel y la espada (“Between the
Carnation and the Sword”), and in 1942 a
book of drama, prose, and poetry about
the Civil War, De un momento a otro
(“From One Moment to Another”). He
published a collection of poems inspired
by painting, A la pintura (1945; “On
Painting”), and collections on maritime
themes, such as Pleamar (1944; “High
Tide”). After 1961, he lived in Italy,
returning to Spain in 1977. Alberti’s
autobiography, La arboleda perdida (The
Lost Grove), was published in two
volumes, the first in 1942 and the
second in 1975.
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Vicente Aleixandre

Vicente
Aleixandre, (b. April 26, 1898, Sevilla,
Spain—d. December 14, 1984, Madrid),
Spanish poet, a member of the Generation
of 1927, who received the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1977. He was strongly
influenced by the Surrealist technique
of poetic composition.
Aleixandre was the son of a railway
engineer. He studied law and business
management and from 1920 to 1922 taught
commercial law. He became seriously ill
in 1925 and during his convalescence
wrote his first poems. He remained in
Spain during the Spanish Civil War
although his poetry was banned from 1936
to 1944. In 1949 Aleixandre was elected
to the Spanish Royal Academy.
Aleixandre was considered a master of
free verse, the style that appears in
his first major book, La destrucción o
el amor (1935; “Destruction or Love”),
which was awarded the National Prize for
Literature. In this work the poet
explored the theme of human
identification with the physical cosmos.
Similar themes appear in Sombra del
paraíso (1944; “Shadow of Paradise”). A
greater emphasis upon human life is
found in Historia del corazón (1954;
“History of the Heart”) and En un vasto
dominio (1962; “In a Vast Domain”),
works that deal with time, death, and
human solidarity.
Aleixandre’s later poetry is of a
metaphysical nature; he explores death,
knowledge, and experience in Poemas de
la consumación (1968; “Poems of
Consummation”) and Diálogos del
conocimiento (1974; “Dialogues of
Insight”). In addition to writing poetry
of great originality and depth,
Aleixandre also published the prose work
Los encuentros (1958; “The Meetings”), a
book of fond sketches of his fellow
writers.
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Federico
García Lorca
"Poems"

Spanish
writer
born
June 5, 1898, Fuente Vaqueros, Granada
province, Spain
died August 18 or 19, 1936, between
Víznar and Alfacar, Granada province
Main
Spanish poet and playwright who, in a
career that spanned just 19 years,
resurrected and revitalized the most
basic strains of Spanish poetry and
theatre. He is known primarily for his
Andalusian works, including the poetry
collections Romancero gitano (1928;
Gypsy Ballads) and Llanto por Ignacio
Sánchez Mejías (1935; “Lament for
Ignacio Sánchez Mejías,” Eng. trans.
Lament for a Bullfighter), and the
tragedies Bodas de sangre (1933; Blood
Wedding), Yerma (1934; Eng. trans. Yerma),
and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936; The
House of Bernarda Alba). In the early
1930s Lorca helped inaugurate a second
Golden Age of the Spanish theatre. He
was executed by a Nationalist firing
squad in the first months of the Spanish
Civil War.
Early years
The eldest of four children born to
a wealthy landowner and his
schoolteacher wife, Lorca grew up in
rural Andalusia, surrounded by images
and social conditions that influenced
his work lifelong. At age 10 he moved
with his family to Granada, where he
attended a private, secular institute in
addition to a Catholic public school.
Lorca enrolled in the University of
Granada but was a hapless student best
known for his extraordinary talents as a
pianist. He took nine years to complete
a bachelor’s degree. Despite plans to
become a musician and composer, he
turned to writing in his late teens. His
first experiments in prose, poetry, and
drama reveal an intense spiritual and
sexual malaise along with an adolescent
devotion to such authors as Shakespeare,
Goethe, the Spanish poet Antonio
Machado, and the Nicaraguan poet Rubén
Darío, father of Hispanic Modernismo, a
late and decadent flowering of
Romanticism.
In 1919 Lorca moved to the Residencia de
Estudiantes in Madrid, a prestigious and
socially progressive men’s residence
hall. It remained his home in the
Spanish capital for the next decade. His
fellow residents included the filmmaker
Luis Buñuel and the artist Salvador Dalí,
who later became a close companion. In
Madrid, Lorca also befriended the
renowned older poet Juan Ramón Jiménez
and a circle of poets his own age, among
them Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, and
Pedro Salinas.
Early poetry and plays
A consummate stylist, Lorca sought
throughout his career to juxtapose and
meld genres. His poems, plays, and prose
often evoke other, chiefly popular,
forms of music, art, and literature. His
first book, Impresiones y paisajes
(1918; Impressions and Landscapes), a
prose work in the modernista tradition,
chronicled Lorca’s sentimental response
to a series of journeys through Spain as
a university student. Libro de poemas
(“Book of Poems”), an uneven collection
of predominantly modernista poems culled
from his juvenilia, followed in 1921.
Both efforts disappointed Lorca and
reinforced his inherent resistance to
publication, a fact that led to frequent
delays in the publication and production
of his work. Lorca preferred to perform
his poems and plays, and his histrionic
recitations drew innumerable admirers.
The Spanish stage director Gregorio
Martínez Sierra premiered Lorca’s first
full-length play, El maleficio de la
mariposa (The Butterfly’s Evil Spell in
Five Plays: Comedies and Tragi-Comedies,
1970), a symbolist work about a lovesick
cockroach, in Madrid in 1920. Critics
and audiences ridiculed the drama, and
it closed after four performances.
Lorca’s next full-length play, the
historical verse drama Mariana Pineda
(written 1923; Eng. trans. Mariana
Pineda), opened in 1927 in a production
with sets by Dalí and received mixed
notices.
In the early 1920s, Lorca began
experimenting with short, elliptical
verse forms inspired by Spanish folk
song, Japanese haiku, and contemporary
avant-garde poetics. He wrote a
prodigious series of brief poems
arranged in thematic “suites,” later
collected and published in 1983 under
the title Suites. (Virtually all of
Lorca’s poetry—that contained in the
volume under discussion and in the other
Spanish volumes mentioned in this
biography—has been translated in
Collected Poems, 1991). In 1922 Lorca
collaborated with the eminent Andalusian
composer Manuel de Falla on a festival
of cante jondo (“deep song”) in Granada.
The endeavour heightened Lorca’s
interest in popular Andalusian song, and
in a blaze of inspiration he wrote a
series of poems based on songs of the
Andalusian Gypsies (Roma). Even more
compressed than Suites, Poema del cante
jondo (written 1921–25, published 1931;
Poem of the Deep Song), offers a radical
synthesis of the traditional and the
avant-garde. The series signaled Lorca’s
emergence as a mature poet. His
collaboration with Falla further
prompted Lorca to investigate the
Spanish puppet theatre tradition, and in
1923 he wrote Los títeres de Cachiporra
(“The Billy-Club Puppets”), the first of
several versions of a puppet play
inspired by the classic Andalusian Grand
Guignol.
From 1925 to 1928, Lorca was
passionately involved with Salvador Dalí.
The intensity of their relationship led
Lorca to acknowledge, if not entirely
accept, his own homosexuality. At Dalí’s
urging, the poet began to experiment
more boldly with avant-garde currents in
the art world, notably surrealism,
although he refused to align himself
with any movement. In poems such as “Oda
a Salvador Dalí” (1925–26; “Ode to
Salvador Dalí”), Canciones (written
1924, published 1926; Songs), and a
series of abstruse prose poems, Lorca
sought to create a more objective
poetry, devoid of private sentiment and
the “planes of reality.” He joined his
contemporaries in exalting Don Luis de
Góngora, a 16th-century Spanish poet
known for his dispassionate, densely
metaphorical verse. Lorca and his fellow
poets commemorated the tricentennial of
Góngora’s death in 1927 and became known
thereafter as the “Generation of 1927.”
Lorca also sought to articulate in
public lectures his own evolving
aesthetic.
Meanwhile, Lorca continued to mine the
popular Spanish tradition in his plays
La zapatera prodigiosa (written 1924,
premiered 1930; The Shoemaker’s
Prodigious Wife), a classic farce, and
El amor de don Perlimplín con Belisa en
su jardín (written 1925, premiered 1933;
The Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa
in Their Garden in Five Plays: Comedies
and Tragi-Comedies, 1970), a “grotesque
tragedy” partially drawn from an
18th-century Spanish comic strip. Both
plays reveal themes common to Lorca’s
work: the capriciousness of time, the
destructive powers of love and death,
the phantoms of identity, art,
childhood, and sex.
In 1928, with Dalí’s encouragement,
Lorca publicly exhibited his drawings. A
gifted draughtsman blessed with a
startling visual imagination, Lorca
produced hundreds of sketches in his
lifetime.
Romancero gitano
The publication in 1928 of Romancero
gitano (written 1921–27; Gypsy Ballads),
a poetry sequence inspired by the
traditional Spanish romance, or ballad,
catapulted Lorca into the national
spotlight. A lyrical evocation of the
sensual world of the Andalusian Gypsy,
the collection enthralled Spanish
readers, many of whom mistook Lorca for
a Gypsy. The book’s first edition sold
out within a year. Throughout the work’s
18 ballads, Lorca combines lyrical and
narrative modes in fresh ways to form
what he described as a tragic “poem of
Andalusia.” Formally, the poems embrace
the conventions of medieval Spanish
balladry: a nonstanzaic construction, in
medias res openings, and abrupt endings.
But in their wit, objectivity, and
metaphorical novelty, they are brazenly
contemporary. One of the collection’s
most famous poems, “Ballad of the
Spanish Civil Guard,” reads, in part:
Los caballos negros son.
Las herraduras son negras.
Sobre las capas relucen
manchas de tinta y de cera.
Tienen, por eso no lloran,
de plomo las calaveras.
Con el alma de charol
vienen por la carretera.
Black are the horses,
the horseshoes are black.
Glistening on their capes
are stains of ink and of wax.
Their skulls—and this is why
they do not cry—are cast in lead.
They ride the roads
with souls of patent leather.
Lorca’s
sudden fame destroyed his privacy. This,
coupled with the demise of his
friendship with Dalí, the collapse of
another love affair, and a profound
spiritual crisis, plunged Lorca into
severe depression. He sought both
release and newfound inspiration by
visiting New York and Cuba in 1929–30.
Later poetry and plays
Lorca’s stay in the United States
and Cuba yielded Poeta en Nueva York
(published 1940; Poet in New York), a
series of poems whose dense, at times
hallucinatory images, free-verse lines,
and thematic preoccupation with urban
decay and social injustice mark an
audacious departure from Lorca’s
previous work. The collection is
redolent of Charles Baudelaire, Edgar
Allan Poe, T.S. Eliot, and Stephen Crane
and pays homage to Walt Whitman:
… hermosura viril
que en montes de carbón, anuncios y
ferrocarriles,
soñabas ser un río y dormir como un río
con aquel camarada que pondría en tu
pecho
un pequeño dolor de ignorante leopardo.
… virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards,
and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping
like a river
with that comrade who would place in
your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.
In
Cuba, Lorca wrote El público (“The
Audience”), a complex, multifaceted
play, expressionist in technique, that
brashly explores the nature of
homosexual passion. Lorca deemed the
work, which remained unproduced until
1978, “a poem to be hissed.” On his
return to Spain, he completed a second
play aimed at rupturing the bounds of
conventional dramaturgy, Así que pasen
cinco años (1931; Once Five Years Pass),
and he assumed the directorship of a
traveling student theatre group, La
Barraca (the name of makeshift wooden
stalls housing puppet shows and popular
fairs in Spain), sponsored by the
country’s progressive new Republican
government.
With the 1933 premiere of his first
Andalusian tragedy, Blood Wedding, an
expressionist work that recalls ancient
Greek, Renaissance, and Baroque sources,
Lorca achieved his first major
theatrical success and helped inaugurate
the most brilliant era of Spanish
theatre since the Golden Age. In 1933–34
he went to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to
oversee several productions of his plays
and to give a lecture series. While
there he befriended the Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda, with whom he collaborated
on a tribute to Rubén Darío. Despite his
new focus on theatre, Lorca continued to
write poetry. With others in the
Generation of 1927, he embraced a
“rehumanization” of poetry, as opposed
to the “dehumanization” José Ortega y
Gasset had described in his 1925 essay
“The Dehumanization of Art.” Eloquent
evidence of Lorca’s return to the
personal are Divan del Tamarit (written
1931–1934, published 1940; “The Divan at
Tamarit”), a set of love poems inspired
by Arabic verse forms; Seis poemas
galegos (written 1932–1934, published
1935; “Six Galician Poems”); and Sonetos
del amor oscuro (written 1935, published
1984; “Sonnets of Dark Love”), an
11-sonnet sequence recalling a failed
love affair. The three collections
underscore Lorca’s abiding insistence on
the interdependence of love and death:
No hay nadie que, al dar un beso,
no sienta la sonrisa de la gente sin
rostro,
ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recién
nacido,
olvide las inmóviles calaveras de
caballo.
There is no one who can kiss
without feeling the smile of those
without faces;
there is no one who can touch
an infant and forget the immobile skulls
of horses.
Divan
del Tamarit also expresses Lorca’s
lifelong interest in Arab-Andalusian
(frequently referred to as “Moorish”)
culture, which he viewed as central to
his identity as an Andalusian poet. He
regarded the Catholic reconquest of
Granada in 1492 as a tragic loss. Divan
del Tamarit responds to a widespread
revival of interest in Arab-Andalusian
culture, especially literature, in the
1930s.
In 1934 Lorca responded to the goring
and death of a bullfighter friend with
the majestic Lament for a Bullfighter, a
work famous for its incantatory opening
refrain, “A las cinco de la tarde” (“At
five in the afternoon”). The four-part
poem, his longest, confirms Lorca as the
greatest of Spain’s elegiac poets.
A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.
At five in the afternoon.
It was exactly five in the afternoon.
A boy brought the white sheet
at five in the afternoon.
A frail of lime ready preserved
at five in the afternoon.
The rest was death, and death alone
at five in the afternoon.
During
the last two years of his life, Lorca
premiered Yerma (1934), the second of
his Andalusian tragedies, and completed
a first draft of The House of Bernarda
Alba, his third tragedy. Childhood
events and personalities inform both
Bernarda Alba and Doña Rosita la soltera
(written 1934, premiered 1935; Doña
Rosita the Spinster), the most
Chekhovian of Lorca’s plays, as well as
Don̄a Rosita’s intended sequel, the
unfinished Los sueños de mi prima
Aurelia (1936; “The Dreams of My Cousin
Aurelia”). In 1935 Lorca undertook his
most overtly political play, El sueño de
la vida (“The Dream of Life”), a
technically innovative work based on
recent events in Spain.
Lorca was at work on Aurelia and
Bernarda Alba in the summer of 1936 when
the Spanish Civil War broke out. On
August 16, he was arrested in Granada by
Nationalist forces, who abhorred his
homosexuality and his liberal views, and
imprisoned without a trial. On the night
of August 18 or 19 (the precise date has
never been verified), he was driven to a
remote hillside outside town and shot.
In 1986 the Spanish government marked
the 50th anniversary of Lorca’s death by
erecting a monument on the site of his
murder. The gesture bears witness to
Lorca’s stature as the most important
Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th
century, a man whose work continues to
influence writers and artists throughout
the world and to speak to readers
everywhere of all that is most central
to the human condition.
Leslie Anne Stainton
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Jorge Guillén

Jorge
Guillén, (b. January 18, 1893,
Valladolid, Spain—d. February 6, 1984,
Málaga), Spanish lyric poet who
experimented with different metres and
used verbs rarely but whose work proved
more accessible than that of other
experimental poets.
The son
of a newspaper publisher, Guillén
studied in Switzerland and at the
University of Granada before graduating
from the University of Madrid in 1913.
He taught Spanish at the University of
Paris from 1917 to 1923 and began
publishing his poetry. He earned a
doctorate at the University of Madrid in
1924 and taught at the University of
Murcia, the University of Sevilla
(Seville), and the University of Oxford.
In 1927 he participated in the
tercentenary of Luis de Góngora, became
a member of the Generation of 1927, and
in 1928 published his collection Cántico
(“Canticle”; Cantico: A Selection of
Spanish Poems), which he expanded in
subsequent editions in 1936, 1945, and
1950. He was influenced by Paul Valéry
and Juan Ramón Jiménez, who sought “pure
poetry,” emphasizing the musical
properties of language over narrative
and didactic motives.
Guillén
went to the United States during the
Spanish Civil War, taught Spanish at
Wellesley College (1940–57), and later
lectured at numerous other universities
in the United States, Europe, Canada,
and Latin America. From 1957 to 1963 he
published Clamor, a three-volume
collection of poems in which a sad
awareness of the evanescence and
limitations of life replaces the
uncomplicated positivism of Cantico.
Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the
Poet (1979) is a selection of bilingual
editions of poems from various stages of
Guillén’s career, accompanied by
comments by the poet.
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Women poets
Several significant women poets belong
chronologically to the Generation of 1927, including
Rosa Chacel, a major essayist, poet, and novelist.
Her polished, intellectual verse appeared in A la
orilla de un pozo (1936; At the Edge of a Well), a
collection of neo-Gongoristic sonnets, and in Versos
prohibidos (1978; “Prohibited Verse”), a mixture of
unrhymed pieces that resemble in their metre blank
verse and alexandrines and in their form epistles,
sonnets, and odes. Frequent themes are philosophical
inspiration, faith, religiosity, separation, menace
(echoing the Civil War), friendships, and her
wanderings. Concha Méndez published four major
poetry collections before the Civil War drove her
into exile. Drawing upon traditional popular forms
and the oral tradition, Méndez’s prewar poetry—such
as that in Vida a vida (1932; “Life to Life”)—exudes
optimism and vitality, recalling the neopopular airs
of Lorca and Alberti. Her exile poetry expresses
pessimism, loss, violence, horror, anguish,
uncertainty, and pain (e.g., Lluvias enlazadas
[1939; “Interlaced Rains”]). Her last book was Vida;
o, río (1979; “Life; or, The River”). Marina Romero
Serrano spent three decades in exile in the United
States teaching Spanish and writing poetry, critical
works, and children’s books. Nostalgia de mañana
(1943; “Nostalgia for Tomorrow”) reflects her
generation’s predilection for traditional metrics;
her other works represent pure poetry and avoid the
confessional and autobiographical mode. Her most
personal collection, Honda raíz (1989; “Deep
Roots”), treats lost love remembered, moving from
joy to loss and infinite longing.
Ernestina de Champourcin published four volumes
of exuberant, personal, intellectual poetry before
going into exile (1936–72) with her husband, José
Domenchina, a minor poet of the Generation of 1927.
Presencia a oscuras (1952; “Presence in Darkness”)
reacted to the marginality she felt while in exile
and commenced a spiritual quest intensified by
Domenchina’s death in 1959. El nombre que me diste
(1960; “The Name You Gave Me”), Cartas cerradas
(1968; “Sealed Letters”), and Poemas del ser y estar
(1972; “Poems of Being and State”), collected with
poetry written 1972–91, appeared as Poesía a través
del tiempo (1991; “Poetry Across Time”).
Characterizing her mature writing are religious
preoccupations and mystic language. Champourcin
ranks with the truly significant poets of her
generation. Lesser figures include Pilar de
Valderrama and Josefina de la Torre.
Carmen Conde Abellán, a socialist and Republican
supporter, suffered postwar “internal exile” in
Spain while her husband was a political prisoner.
She was contemporaneous with and involved in
Surrealism, Ultraism, and prewar experimentation
with prose poems, but she is rarely included with
the Generation of 1927; her preoccupation with
issues of social justice—especially education of the
poor—is often taken as a pretext for this exclusion,
even though survivors of that generation remaining
in Spain also produced “social” poetry. A novelist,
memorialist, biographer, anthologist, critic,
archivist, and author of juvenile fiction, Conde
published nearly 100 titles, including nine novels
and several plays. She became the first woman
elected to the Royal Spanish Academy (1978) and was
the most honoured woman of her generation. Conde
assiduously cultivated poetry’s universal themes:
love, suffering, nature, dreams, memory, solitude,
death, estrangement, religious questing, grief. Her
most important works include Ansia de la gracia
(1945; “Longing for Grace”) and Mujer sin Edén
(1947; Woman Without Eden). The latter implicitly
equated the fall of the Spanish Republican
government with the Fall of Man, also using Cain and
Abel motifs to symbolize the country’s Civil War.
Slightly younger, María Concepción Zardoya González,
who wrote under the name Concha Zardoya, published
25 poetry collections between 1946 and 1987. She was
born in Chile of Spanish parents and lived in Spain
in the 1930s; she later spent three decades in the
United States before returning in 1977 to Spain,
where she remained until her death. Rich in personal
experience and spiritual intimacy, her poetry ranks
among the best women’s lyrics in 20th-century Spain;
it records a personal history of war and loss, exile
and nostalgia, pain, solitude, and existential
doubt.
Reform of the drama
Lorca towered above his contemporaries with intense
poetic dramas that depict elemental passions and
characters symbolizing humanity’s tragic impotence
against fate. His dramatic poetry was modern yet
traditional, personal yet universal. The tragic
trilogy Bodas de sangre (1933; Blood Wedding), Yerma
(1934; Eng. trans. Yerma), and La casa de Bernarda
Alba (1936; The House of Bernarda Alba) depicted
extremes of passion involving the traditional
Spanish theme of honour and its violent effects on
women.
Alberti’s contribution to dramatic reform
imaginatively adapted classical forms of Spanish
drama. In El hombre deshabitado (1931; “The
Uninhabited Man”), a modern allegorical play in the
manner of Calderón’s autos sacramentales, he created
poetic, fatalistic myths out of realistic themes and
folk motifs. The renovation of the drama attempted
by Azorín, Valle-Inclán, Grau, and others of the
Generation of 1898 and continued by the Generation
of 1927 (especially Lorca and Alberti) had little
effect on the commercial theatre, their efforts
ending abruptly with the outbreak of the Civil War.
The Spanish Civil War and beyond
The novel
The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) drove into political
exile some promising novelists whose narrative art
matured abroad. Max Aub analyzed the civil conflict
in the artistically and thematically impressive
cycle of novels El laberinto mágico (1943–68; “The
Magic Labyrinth”). Ramón José Sender, whose
pre-Civil War novels had been realistic and overtly
sociopolitical, developed an interest in the
mysterious and irrational. While Crónica del alba
(1942–66; “Chronicle of the Dawn”), a series of
novels, dwelt realistically on the Civil War, the
magical, myth-dominated worlds of Epitalamio del
prieto Trinidad (1942; Dark Wedding) and Las
criaturas saturnianas (1968; “Saturnine Beings”)
reflected more universal concerns. Prolific,
tendentious, opinionated, and arbitrary, Sender
produced some 70 novels of unequal quality, the most
esteemed being Mosén Millán (1953; later published
as Réquiem por un campesino español; Eng. trans.
Requiem for a Spanish Peasant). After more than
three decades in exile, Sender returned to Spain to
a hero’s welcome from younger compatriots. The
diplomat, legal scholar, and critic Francisco Ayala
showed a youthful vanguardism early in his career;
in later short stories (the collections Los
usurpadores [1949; Usurpers] and La cabeza del
cordero [1949; “The Lamb’s Head”]) and novels
(Muertes de perro [1958; Death as a Way of Life,
1964] and its sequel El fondo del vaso [1962; “In
the Bottom of the Glass”]), he cultivated themes
that allowed him to obliquely re-create aspects of
the Civil War as well as to address more-universal
social concerns. These works offer devastating
appraisals of the Spanish political scene from
multiple perspectives and with complex narrative
techniques. Considered by some to be the best prose
writer of his era in the Spanish language, Ayala has
published many volumes of essays on philosophy,
pedagogy, sociology, and political theory.
The Civil War decimated Spanish intellectuals,
artists, and writers, and the country’s culture went
into decline, uninterrupted by a brief spate of
triunfalismo (“triumphalism”) that lasted through
the 1940s, when the victorious Falange, the Spanish
fascist party, engaged in propagandistic
self-glorification. Triunfalismo’s literary
expression produced works that were monothematic and
repetitive and that insulted the vanquished, showing
them as animals.
Psychologically perceptive despite
its violence, La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942;
The Family of Pascual Duarte) of Camilo José Cela
popularized a harsh, sordid, unsentimental realism
(tempered by expressionistic distortion) known as
tremendismo. Continuing his literary
experimentation, Cela attained greater technical
heights in La colmena (1951; The Hive), portraying
divided Madrid society during the harsh winter of
1941–42. By his death, in 2002, Cela—who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989—had published by
his own count more than 100 books, including a dozen
novels, numerous story collections, travel books,
critical essays, poetry, and literary sketches.
Joining Cela in reviving Spanish fiction during the
1940s was Carmen Laforet, whose Nada (1945,
“Nothing”; Eng. trans. Andrea), with its bewildered
adolescent’s perspective of war’s aftermath, became
an instant best seller.
The sociopolitical trauma of civil conflict with
its cultural and economic uncertainty revived
outmoded forms of realism. Conservative craftsmen
such as Juan Antonio de Zunzunegui and Ignacio
Agustí produced conventional realistic novels. José
María Gironella scored great popular success with
his controversial epic trilogy on the Civil War: Los
cipreses creen en Dios (1953; The Cypresses Believe
in God), Un millón de muertos (1961; The Million
Dead), and Ha estallado la paz (1966; Peace After
War).
A second postwar current, “social literature,” or
“critical realism,” arrived with the so-called
Midcentury Generation, who were adolescents during
the war; it expressed more vigorous, if necessarily
covert, opposition to the dictatorship. In such
works as La hoja roja (1959; “The Red Leaf”), which
examines poverty and loneliness among the elderly,
and Las ratas (1962; “Rats”; Eng. trans. Smoke on
the Ground), which depicts the miserable existence
of uneducated cave dwellers, Miguel Delibes conveyed
critical concern for a society whose natural values
are under constant threat. Greater technical
expertise and thematic originality are evinced in
his Cinco horas con Mario (1966; “Five Hours with
Mario”), a powerful novel wherein domestic conflict
represents contending ideologies in the Civil War,
and Parábola del náufrago (1969; “Parable of the
Shipwrecked Man”), which examines the individual’s
plight in a dehumanized technocracy. A publisher,
lawyer, teacher, and journalist, Delibes was the
author of more than 50 volumes of novels, memoirs,
essays, and travel and hunting books and received
the prestigious Cervantes Prize in 1993. El hereje
(1998; The Heretic), perhaps his masterpiece,
depicts the abuse of power by the Spanish
Inquisition. Elena Quiroga, a conscientious stylist,
experimented with varying forms and themes,
employing a dead protagonist in Algo pasa en la
calle (1954; “Something’s Happening in the Street”)
to examine domestic conflict aggravated by Franco’s
outlawing of divorce. Quiroga’s novels typically
portrayed women and children. Her crowning
achievement is the novelistic cycle of Tadea:
Tristura (1960; “Sadness”), Escribo tu nombre (1965;
“I Write Your Name”), and Se acabó todo, muchacha
triste (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”), begun in
the late 1960s but left unfinished at Quiroga’s
death in 1995. The cycle portrays the difficulties
of growing up female under Franco through the
character Tadea, the novels’ protagonist. In 1983
Quiroga became the second woman elected to the Royal
Spanish Academy. Social realism also characterizes
the largely testimonial, semiautobiographical novels
of Dolores Medio, who frequently depicted working
girls, schoolteachers, and aspiring writers as
positive feminine role models opposing the
dictatorship’s discouragement of education for
women: Nosotros los Rivero (1952; “We Riveros”), El
pez sigue flotando (1959; “The Fish Stays Afloat”),
Diario de una maestra (1961; “A Schoolteacher’s
Diary”).
Often deprived of access to 19th-century realist
and naturalist models, some post-Civil War writers
reinvented these modes. Others more closely followed
(usually via translations) the Italian Neorealists
or the theories of Hungarian critic György Lukács in
his The Historical Novel (1955). The Spanish
Neorealistic variants with their testimonial thrust
subjected aesthetic considerations to their content,
exhibiting the pedestrian style, simplistic
techniques, and repetitive themes traditionally
attributed to engagé (socially committed)
literature.
During the 1950s, several competent, committed
younger novelists strengthened intellectual dissent.
Ana María Matute, among the most honoured novelists
of her generation, typically employed lyric and
expressionistic style with fictions set in
mountainous areas of Old Castile, as in Los hijos
muertos (1958; The Lost Children), which sought to
reconcile war-born hatreds by showing irreparable
losses on both sides. Her trilogy Los mercaderes
(“The Merchants”)—Primera memoria (1959; School of
the Sun, also published as The Awakening), Los
soldados lloran de noche (1964; Soldiers Cry by
Night), and La trampa (1969; The Trap)—divides
humanity into heroes (considered idealists and
martyrs) and merchants (motivated only by money).
Matute’s greatest popular success, Olvidado rey Gudú
(1996; “Forgotten King Gudú”), is an antiwar
statement disguised as a neochivalric adventure.
Juan Goytisolo, long an expatriate in France and
Morocco, moved from an impassive, cinematographic
style in his fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s to
New Novel experimentalism in his Mendiola
trilogy—Señas de identidad (1966; Marks of
Identity), Reivindicación del conde don Julián
(1970; Count Julian), and Juan sin tierra (1975;
Juan the Landless), all filled with literary
borrowings, shifting narrative perspectives,
nonlinear chronology, neo-Baroque complexities of
plot, and an emphasis upon language rather than
action. His brother Luis Goytisolo, a novelist and
short-story writer, dissected the Catalan
bourgeoisie and chronicled Barcelona’s history from
the war through the Franco years. His most
significant accomplishment, his tetralogy Antagonía,
comprises Recuento (1973; “Recounting”), Los verdes
de mayo hasta el mar (1976; “May’s Greenery as Far
as the Sea”), La cólera de Aquiles (1979; “The Rage
of Achilles”), and Teoría del conocimiento (1981;
“Theory of Knowledge”), which reveal him as a
consummate practitioner of metafiction, pushing the
limits of the self-conscious novel while destroying
Francoist myths and creating new, liberating ones.
Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s El Jarama (1956; “The
Jarama”; Eng. trans. The One Day of the Week),
masterfully utilizing pseudoscientific impassivity
and cinematographic techniques, depicts the
monotonous existence of urban youth via their
aimless conversations and exposes postwar apathy.
Other young writers who first emerged in the 1950s
were Jesús Fernández Santos, Juan García Hortelano,
Jesús López Pacheco, and Daniel Sueiro.
By the 1960s, gray, pedestrian critical realism
had run its course. Luis Martín-Santos broke the
mold with his epoch-making Tiempo de silencio (1962;
Time of Silence), which revisited the familiar topic
of life in post-Civil War Spain via conscious
artistry, psychoanalytic perspectives, and narrative
techniques—such as stream of consciousness and
interior monologue—that echoed
James Joyce. Had Martín-Santos not died at age 39, Spanish fiction in
the 1970s and ’80s might have reached greater
heights. Ignacio Aldecoa was the most gifted
short-story writer of his generation and among the
most talented exponents of objectivism with his
novels Gran sol (1957; “Great Sole”) and Parte de
una historia (1967; “Part of a Story”). Significant
innovation appears in Juan Benet Goitia, a novelist,
critic, dramatist, and short-story writer whose
Volverás a Región (1967; “You Will Return to
Región”) combined density of form, myth and allegory
presented in tangled neo-Baroque syntax and lexicon,
and scathing sarcasm. These features were typical of
the numerous subsequent novels of his Región series.
Described in minute topographical detail, Benet’s
Región is an area that resembles Spain’s northern
mountains, perhaps León. It is isolated, almost
inaccessible, and terribly provincial; critics have
seen it as a microcosm of Spain. Preferring British
and American paradigms that devoted more attention
to style, subjectivity, and psychological narrative
than did the dominant trends in Spanish literature
of the period, Benet condemned costumbrismo and
social realism as unimaginative. Carmen Martín
Gaite, a gifted observer of contemporary mores and a
methodical observer of gender roles and conflicts,
portrayed the constraints upon women in patriarchal
societies. Her novels, from Entre visillos (1958;
Behind the Curtains) to El cuarto de atrás (1978;
The Back Room) and La reina de las nieves (1994;
“Snow Queen”; Eng. trans. The Farewell Angel), trace
the consequences of social conditions in Franco
society on individuals. She also documented these
conditions in essays such as Usos amorosos de la
postguerra española (1987; Courtship Customs in
Postwar Spain), which describes the ideological
indoctrination to which the Falange subjected girls
and young women. Although he published his first
novel in 1943, Gonzalo Torrente Ballester came to
prominence only in the 1970s. He moved from Joycean
models to realism to fantasy before achieving
astounding success with his metaliterary, postmodern
romps La saga/fuga de J.B. (1972; “J.B.’s Flight and
Fugue”) and Fragmentos de apocalipsis (1977;
“Fragments of Apocalypse”). He received the
Cervantes Prize in 1985.
Established writers of the Franco era continued
producing until the new millennium—Cela,
Delibes, Matute, Martín Gaite, Torrente, the
Goytisolos—nearly all evolving and reflecting the
impact of postmodernism, with some writing in the
New Novel mode. During the 1980s and 1990s, new
fictional paradigms emerged as exiles returned; new
subgenres included detective fiction, a feminine
neo-Gothic novel, science fiction, adventure novels,
and the thriller. Despite this proliferation of
modes, many novelists continued producing what might
be considered “traditional” narrative. José Jiménez
Lozano investigates Inquisitorial repression,
recondite religious issues, and esoteric historical
themes drawn from a variety of cultures in such
novels as Historia de un otoño (1971; “History of
Autumn”) and El sambenito (1972; “The Saffron
Tunic”). He received the Cervantes Prize in 2002, as
had Delibes (1993) and Cela (1995) before him.
Francisco Umbral, a prolific journalist, novelist,
and essayist often compared to 17th-century satirist
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas for his style
and to 19th-century journalist Mariano José de Larra
for his biting critiques of contemporary society,
won the Cervantes Prize in 2000.
The Generation of 1968 was recognized in the
1980s as a distinct novelistic group. It includes
Esther Tusquets, Álvaro Pombo, and Javier Tomeo,
together with nearly a dozen others who belong to
this group chronologically if not by reason of
aesthetic or thematic similarities. Tusquets is best
known for a trilogy of thematically related but
independent novels: El mismo mar de todos los
veranos (1978; The Same Sea As Every Summer), El
amor es un juego solitario (1979; Love Is a Solitary
Game), and Varada tras el último naufragio (1980;
“Beached After the Last Shipwreck”; Eng. trans.
Stranded), all of which explore the solitude of
middle-aged women and their deceptions in love.
Pombo, originally known as a poet, turned later to
the novel; El metro de platino iradiado (1990; “The
Metre of Irradiated Platinum”) is considered by many
his masterpiece. He was elected to the Spanish
Academy in 2004. Tomeo is an Aragonese essayist,
dramatist, and novelist whose works, with their
strange, solitary characters, emphasize that
“normal” is but a theoretical concept. His novels
include Amado monstruo (1985; Dear Monster) and
Napoleón VII (1999). He is also known for his short
stories, anthologized in Los nuevos inquisidores
(2004; “The New Inquisitors”).
Camilo José Cela

Camilo
José Cela, in full Camilo José Cela
Trulock (b. May 11, 1916, Iria Flavia,
Spain—d. January 17, 2002, Madrid),
Spanish writer who won the Nobel Prize
for Literature in 1989. He is perhaps
best known for his novel La familia de
Pascual Duarte (1942; The Family of
Pascual Duarte) and is considered to
have given new life to Spanish
literature. His literary
production—primarily novels, short
narratives, and travel diaries—is
characterized by experimentation and
innovation in form and content. Cela is
also credited by some critics with
having established the narrative style
known as tremendismo, a tendency to
emphasize violence and grotesque
imagery.
Cela
attended the University of Madrid before
and after the Spanish Civil War
(1936–39), during which he served with
Franco’s army. His first novel, Pascual
Duarte, established his European
reputation. Traditional in form, it was
both a popular and a critical success.
His second novel, La colmena (1951; The
Hive), with its fragmented chronology
and large cast of characters, is an
innovative and perceptive story of
postwar Madrid. It solidified Cela’s
critical and popular reputation. Another
of his better-known avant-garde novels,
San Camilo, 1936 (1969), is one
continuous stream of consciousness. His
later novels include Cristo versus
Arizona (1988; “Christ Versus Arizona”)
and the Galician trilogy—Mazurca para
dos muertos (1983; Mazurka for Two Dead
People), La cruz de San Andrés (1994;
“St. Andrew’s Cross”), and Madera de boj
(1999; Boxwood).
Cela’s
acute powers of observation and skill in
colourful description also are apparent
in his travel books, based on his trips
through rural Spain and his visits to
Latin American countries. The most noted
of these are Viaje a la Alcarría (1948;
Journey to the Alcarría), Del Miño al
Bidasoa (1952; “From the Miño to the
Bidasoa”), and Judíos, moros y
cristianos (1956; “Jews, Moors, and
Christians”). He retraced the itinerary
of his first travel book for Nuevo viaje
a la Alcarría (1986). Among his numerous
short narratives are Esas nubes que
pasan (1945; “The Passing Clouds”) and
the four works included in the
collection El molino de viento, y otras
novelas cortas (1956; “The Windmill and
Other Short Fiction”). Cela also wrote
essays, poetry, and memoirs and in his
later years made frequent television
appearances.
In 1955
Cela settled in Majorca, where he
founded a well-respected literary
review, Papeles de Son Armadans
(1956–79), and published books in fine
editions. He began in 1968 to publish
his multivolume Diccionario secreto, a
compilation of “unprintable” but
well-known words and phrases. He became
a member of the Spanish Academy in 1957.
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Miguel Delibes

Miguel
Delibes, (b. Oct. 17, 1920, Valladolid,
Spain—d. March 12, 2010, Valladolid),
Spanish novelist, essayist, and
journalist who wrote widely of travel,
the outdoors, sport, and his native
Valladolid. His realist fiction is best
known for its critical analysis of
20th-century Spanish society.
Delibes
was the third of eight sons born to a
schoolteacher and a government
administrator. As a boy, he developed a
love of sport and the outdoors. At 17 he
enlisted in the Spanish navy, hoping to
avoid infantry combat in the Spanish
Civil War. The war, however, would
affect him powerfully and figure in his
later writings. Following his military
service, Delibes returned home, where he
studied commerce and law at the
University of Valladolid. He was also
hired as a caricaturist for the
Valladolid newspaper El Norte de
Castilla (“The North of Castile”). His
future wife, Ángeles de Castro,
encouraged Delibes to pursue his love of
literature, and he finished his first
novel, La sombra del ciprés es alargada
(“The Shadow of the Cypress Is
Extended”), in 1948. Delibes became
director of El Norte de Castilla in
1958, but his advocacy for Castilian
causes in the face of government
censorship brought about his resignation
in 1963. The plight of Castile also
informed his novel Las ratas (1962; “The
Rats”; Eng. trans. Smoke on the Ground).
From
the 1950s onward Delibes published
widely. Major titles include El camino
(1950; The Path), La hoja roja (1959;
“The Red Leaf”), Cinco horas con Mario
(1966; Five Hours with Mario), Las
guerras de nuestros antepasados (1975;
The Wars of Our Ancestors), and El
hereje (1998; The Heretic). Delibes
suffered years of depression following
his wife’s death in 1974. Nearly two
decades later she would form the
dominant figure of his novel Señora de
rojo sobre fondo gris (1991; “Lady in
Red on a Gray Background”). Many of
Delibes’s works were adapted for screen
and stage, and he collected numerous
awards, including the Cervantes Prize in
1993.
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Ana María
Matute

Ana
María Matute, (b. July 26, 1926,
Barcelona, Spain), Spanish novelist
known for her sympathetic treatment of
the lives of children and adolescents,
their feelings of betrayal and
isolation, and their rites of passage.
Matute’s education suffered because of
childhood illnesses, the family’s
frequent moves between Barcelona and
Madrid, and the disruptions of the
Spanish Civil War (1936–39), which left
her family largely housebound in
Barcelona. She broke the monotony of the
war years by editing a magazine for her
siblings. While in her teens, she
published short stories and became a
professional musician.
Matute
frequently used biblical allusion in her
works and often used the story of Cain
and Abel to symbolize the familial
division caused by the Spanish Civil
War; her first novel was titled Los Abel
(1948; “The Abel Family”). The novels
Fiesta al noroeste (1952; “Celebration
in the Northwest”), Pequeño teatro
(1954; “Little Theatre”), and Los hijos
muertos (1958; The Lost Children)
followed. Matute then wrote a trilogy
consisting of Primera memoria (1959;
U.K. title, The Awakening; U.S. title,
School of the Sun), about children
thrust into an adult world by the
Spanish Civil War; a war novel, Los
soldados lloran de noche (1964; “The
Soldiers Cry by Night”); and La trampa
(1969; “The Trap”), in which the
children of Primera memoria are
presented as adults. Matute set La torre
vigía (1971; “The Watchtower”) in
10th-century Europe to examine the
themes of chivalry, idealism, poverty,
and prejudice. After publishing this
novel, she was silent for 25 years. Her
novel Olvidado Rey Gudú, a massive
allegorical folk epic that spans four
generations in the story of rulers,
gnomes, witches, and other creatures in
the mythical medieval kingdom of Olar,
was published in 1996.
In
addition to the novels for which she is
best known, Matute wrote several
collections of short stories, including
Los niños tontos (1956; “The Foolish
Children”) and Algunos muchachos (1968;
The Heliotrope Wall). She also wrote
several works for children.
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Theatre
Post-Civil War Spain suffered no lack of skillful
playwrights to provide politically acceptable
entertainment; Edgar Neville, José López Rubio,
Víctor Ruiz Iriarte, Miguel Mihura, and Alfonso Paso
added variety to the ingenious, parodic farces of
Enrique Jardiel Poncela and the soul-searching
dramas of Alejandro Casona and Joaquín Calvo Sotelo.
The period’s most significant dramatist was Antonio
Buero Vallejo, a former political prisoner; Historia
de una escalera (1949; The Story of a Stairway), a
symbolic social drama, marks the rebirth of Spanish
theatre after the war. Subtle and imaginative, Buero
used myth, history, and contemporary life as
dramatic metaphors to explore and critique society
in such works as En la ardiente oscuridad (1950; In
the Burning Darkness), Un soñador para un pueblo
(1958; “A Dreamer for a People”), and El concierto
de San Ovidio (1962; The Concert at Saint Ovide,
1967). Later works exhibit increased philosophical,
political, and metaphysical concerns: Aventura en lo
gris (1963; “Adventure in Gray”), El tragaluz (1967;
“The Skylight”), El sueño de la razón (1970; The
Sleep of Reason), and La fundación (1974; The
Foundation). Written in the 1960s, La doble historia
del doctor Valmy (“The Double Case History of Doctor
Valmy”) was performed in Spain for the first time in
1976; the play’s political content made it too
controversial to stage there during Franco’s rule.
Alfonso Sastre rejected Buero’s formula, preferring
more-direct Marxist approaches to social problems,
but censors prohibited many of his dramas. A
dramatic theorist and existentialist, Sastre in his
works presents individuals ensnared in Kafkaesque
bureaucratic structures, struggling but failing
while the struggle itself endures and advances (as
exemplified in Cuatro dramas de la revolución [1963;
“Four Revolutionary Dramas”]). Sastre’s first major
production, Escuadra hacia la muerte (1953; Death
Squad), a disturbing Cold War drama, presents
soldiers who have been accused of “unpardonable”
offenses and condemned to stand guard in a
no-man’s-land where they await the advance of an
unknown enemy and face almost certain death. Other
plays demonstrate the socially committed
individual’s duty to sacrifice personal feeling for
the sake of revolution (El pan de todos [1957; “The
Bread of All”], Guillermo Tell tiene los ojos
tristes [1960; Sad Are the Eyes of William Tell]).
Sastre’s plays are examples of the social realism
practiced by the Grupo Realista (Realist Group)
during the 1950s and ’60s. Epitomizing this group’s
realist style is Lauro Olmo’s La camisa (1962; The
Shirt), which depicts unemployed workers too
poverty-stricken to seek employment because doing so
requires a clean shirt. Like the social novel,
social theatre featured generic or collective
protagonists, economic injustices, and social-class
conflicts, their depictions calculated to suggest
Franco’s responsibility for the exploitation and
suffering of the underprivileged. Carlos Muñiz
Higuera’s plays convey social protests via
expressionist techniques: El grillo (1957; “The
Cricket”) portrays the plight of an office worker
who is perpetually overlooked for promotion, and El
tintero (1961; “The Inkwell”) depicts a humble
office worker driven to suicide by a dehumanized
bureaucracy. Muñiz Higuera depicts individuals who
must adapt to dominant reactionary values or be
destroyed; his work recalls Valle-Inclán’s
esperpento manner and German playwright Bertolt
Brecht’s epic theatre. Other exponents of
social-protest theater include José Martín Recuerda,
whose subject matter is hypocrisy, cruelty, and
repression in Andalusian towns and villages, and
José María Rodríguez Méndez, a novelist, story
writer, essayist, and critic whose dramas expose the
plight of common people, especially the youth,
portrayed as victims (soldiers recruited to serve as
cannon fodder, students forced to compete in sordid,
degrading conditions for posts in a dehumanizing
system). Long-censored members of the Realist Group
were compared to contemporaneous British playwrights
and novelists called the Angry Young Men.
The Silenced Group, also called the Underground
Theatre (Teatro Subterráneo), includes playwrights
repeatedly censored under Franco and avoided
thereafter by the theatrical establishment for their
radically subversive political allegories
questioning the legitimacy of power, capitalism, and
other “contemporary fundamentals.” Their extravagant
farces and mordant satires demythologized Spain and
its “glorious” past. This group includes Antonio
Martínez Ballesteros, Manuel Martínez Mediero, José
Ruibal, Eduardo Quiles, Francisco Nieva, Luis
Matilla, and Luis Riaza.
Antonio Gala, a multitalented, original, and
commercially successful playwright, debunked
historical myths while commenting allegorically on
contemporary Spain via expressionistic humour and
comedy. Jaime Salom, like Gala, defies ideological
classification. His psychological drama of the
Spanish Civil War, La casa de las Chivas (1968;
“House of the Chivas”), holds Madrid box-office
records. His later works pose political, social, or
religious questions; La piel del limón (1976;
“Bitter Lemon”), a plea for divorce reform, was
among the longest-running plays of the 1970s. Salom
is often compared to Buero Vallejo and American
playwright Arthur Miller. The most important woman
dramatist of the last decades of the 20th century,
Ana Diosdado, gained national recognition with
Olvida los tambores (1970; “Forget the Drums”).
Other woman dramatists are Paloma Pedrero, Pilar
Enciso, Lidia Falcón, Maribel Lázaro, Carmen Resino,
and María Manuela Reina.
Some relaxation of censorship in the 1960s
prompted interest in the Theatre of the Absurd, its
main exponent in Spain being longtime expatriate
Fernando Arrabal, a playwright, novelist, and
filmmaker who has drawn some of the raw material for
his works from his traumatic childhood. Critics have
identified a violent resentment of his conservative,
pro-Franco mother and innumerable Freudian complexes
in Arrabal’s plays, and his childlike
characters—both innocent and criminal, tender and
sadistic, all existing within a Kafkaesque
atmosphere—afford these plays enormous
individuality. Using black humour and grotesque and
Surrealist elements, Arrabal creates nightmarish
works.
Following Franco’s death, several new, younger
dramatists gained recognition in the 1980s.
Acclaimed by critics and audiences alike were
Fernando Fernán Gómez, Fermín Cabal, and Luis Alonso
de Santos. Replete with intertextual references and
cinematographic staging techniques, these
playwrights’ works treat contemporary problems but
approach them more playfully than their socially
committed predecessors. Other playwrights who
emerged in the closing years of the 20th century
include Miguel Romeo Esteo, Francisco Rojas
Zorrilla, Angel García Pintado, Marcial Suárez,
Jerónimo López Mozo, Domingo Miras, and Alberto
Miralles.
Poetry
The Civil War and its traumatic aftermath prompted
the abandonment of pure poetry for simpler
approaches. Formal discipline, devotion to clarity
through direct imagery, and a reduced vocabulary
were stressed, and the social and human content
increased. Leaders of postwar poesía social (social
poetry) are sometimes referred to as a “Basque
triumvirate”: Gabriel Celaya, a prewar Surrealist
who became a leading spokesman for the opposition to
Franco; Blas de Otero, an existentialist writing in
the vein of Antonio Machado’s Campos de Castilla;
and Ángela Figuera, a teacher, writer of children’s
stories, feminist, and social activist, best known
for poetry celebrating women and motherhood and
denouncing the abuse of women and children. “Social”
poets shared utilitarian views of their art: poetry
became a tool for changing society, the poet being
merely another worker struggling toward a better
future. These altruistic writers renounced artistic
experimentation and aesthetic gratification in
favour of propagandistic goals, sociological themes,
and authorial self-effacement. Some describe
poetry’s trajectory during this period from “pure”
to “social” as a move from yo to nosotros (“I” to
“we”), from personal to collective concerns.
Aleixandre and Alonso, survivors of the Generation
of 1927, wrote poetry in the social vein after the
Civil War, as did Jesús López Pachecho and many
younger poets.
Yet, notwithstanding the predominance of social
poetry during the 1950s and ’60s, many important
poets—such as Luis Felipe Vivanco and Luis
Rosales—did not share its concerns, and social
poetry as a movement suffered desertions even before
the much-publicized launching of the novísimos in
1970. Some, such as Vicente Gaos and Gloria Fuertes,
preferred existential emphases. Others made poetry
an epistemological inquiry or method, including
Francisco Brines, Jaime Gil de Biedma, and José
Ángel Valente.
The “newest” poets (novísimos)—among them Pere
Gimferrer, Antonio Colinas, Leopoldo Panero, and
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán—rejected social engagement,
preferring experimental modes from Surrealism to
camp. Their poetry, often neo-Baroque,
self-consciously cosmopolitan, and intertextual, was
a late 20th-century variant of culteranismo; it
emphasized museums, foreign films, international
travel—anything but contemporary Spain with its
problems. Paralleling the New Novel of the 1970s,
they cultivated language for its own sake and
showcased their individuality and culture,
abandoning social poetry’s authorial invisibility.
Among poets who gained prominence after Franco
are Guillermo Carnero, whose work is characterized
by a plethora of cultural references and centred
upon the theme of death; Jaime Siles, whose
abstract, reflexive poetry belongs to Spain’s
so-called poesía de pensamiento (“poetry of
thought”); and Luis Antonio de Villena, an outspoken
representative of Spain’s gay revolution. Prominent
women poets during the closing decades of the 20th
century include María Victoria Atencia, known for
poetry inspired by domestic situations, for her
cultivation of the themes of art, music, and
painting, and for her later existentialist
contemplations; Pureza Canelo, known especially for
her ecological poetry and feminist volumes; Juana
Castro; Clara Janés; and Ana Rossetti, noteworthy
for her erotic verse.
William C. Atkinson
Angel M. García-Gómez
Janet I. Pérez
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Catalan literature
The Catalan language is a branch of peninsular
rather than of southern Gallo-Romance. It shows,
nonetheless, many traces of kinship with Provençal,
and the literature in its origins used the Occitan
language (langue d’oc, the dialects of Old French
spoken south of the Loire River) and the poetic
forms cultivated by troubadours north of the
Pyrenees.
Medieval period
Poetry
The early Catalan troubadours Guillem de Bergadà,
Hug de Mataplana, Guillem de Cervera, and others
were genuine Provençal poets. About 100 years later,
in the late 14th century, Provençal influence
apparently lessened, and poets turned to northern
France for inspiration. They took over the long
French narratives on romance themes such as the
Arthurian cycle and used the noves rimades metre, a
sequence of octosyllabic rhymed couplets. Several
poets working in this tradition carried the new
interest in the langue d’oïl (the dialects of Old
French spoken north of the Loire) to the extent of
incorporating passages of French poetry in their
poems.
The great period of Catalan poetry was the 15th
century, after John I of Aragon had established in
1393 a poetic academy in Barcelona on the model of
the academy in Toulouse with jocs florals (“floral
games,” or poetry congresses), including literary
competitions. This royal encouragement continued
under Martin I and Ferdinand I and helped to
emancipate the literary style from foreign
influences. As the century advanced, Valencia
emerged as a new focus of literary activity: a
school of poetry developing there was noted for its
characteristic use of eight-line decasyllabic verses
with crossed, or “chained,” rhymes and final
four-line refrain, illustrating a turning away from
French models and a new inspiration from Italy. The
cants d’amor and cants de mort (“songs of love” and
“songs of death”) by Ausiàs March contained the
finest verses ever written in Catalan, exerted
influence in 16th-century Castile, and continue to
influence modern Catalan poets. Jaume Roig’s Lo
spill o llibre de les dones (c. 1460; “The Mirror or
Book of Women”) was very different—a caustic satire
on woman, written in more than 16,000 four-syllable
lines, portraying contemporary Valencian life
vividly. Johan Roiç de Corella, a Valencian
lyricist, was perhaps the best representative of the
Renaissance.
After the union of Aragon with Castile, the
Castilian language predominated throughout Spain,
spelling a long eclipse of Catalan literature.
Nevertheless, Juan Boscán Almogáver inaugurated a
new Castilian school of poetry, and Castilians
regard him as a landmark in the history of their
Renaissance; by the time Boscán’s works were
published (1543), Catalan poetry had been dead for
50 years.
Prose
Though the oldest document (the text of an oath by a
bishop of Urgel) dates from c. 1100, literary prose
did not begin until the end of the 13th century. It
was written in the everyday speech found in charters
from the time of James I’s accession to the
Aragonese throne in 1213; four great chronicles that
survive represent the peak of medieval Catalan
prose. The anonymous Llibre dels feyts del rey en
Jacme (“Book of the Deeds of King James”), compiled
after James I’s death in 1276, and Ramon Muntaner’s
account of the Grand Catalan Company’s expedition to
the Morea in southern Greece and of James II’s
conquest of Sardinia were distinguished by skill of
narration and quality of language. Bernat Desclot’s
chronicle deals with the reign of Peter I the Great;
though the account of Peter IV the Ceremonious is
ascribed to Bernat Desclot, it was planned and
revised by the King himself.
Ramon Llull was unequaled in his encyclopaedic
production, in Catalan, Arabic, and Latin, covering
every branch of medieval knowledge and thought. His
exhaustive theological treatise Llibre de
contemplació en Déu (c. 1272; “Book of the
Contemplation of God”) began Catalonia’s golden age
of literature, providing incidentally a mine of
information on contemporary society. The Llibre
d’Evast e Blanquerna (c. 1284; Blanquerna; a
Thirteenth Century Romance) founded Catalan fiction.
It included the Llibre d’amic e amat (Book of the
Lover and the Beloved), a masterpiece of mysticism,
while his Fèlix (c. 1288) and Llibre de l’orde de
cauaylería (between 1275 and 1281; The Book of the
Order of Chivalry) were instructive works in a
narrative framework.
Bernat Metge began the “classical age” by
translating Boccaccio’s story of Griselda from
Petrarch’s Latin version and, clothing his
scholastic learning with poetic imagination,
achieved the stylistic masterpiece of Catalan prose.
The chivalric romance Tirant lo Blanc (c. 1460) by
Joanot Martorell was notable of its kind for the
theme, drawn from Muntaner, of the real adventures
of the Catalans in the Middle East. The anonymous
late 14th-century Curial e Güelfa draws on Desclot
and is the only other Catalan romance in this vein.
The beginnings of drama were represented by a
15th-century Assumption play, Misteri d’Elch, which
is still performed annually at Elche on the Feast of
the Assumption.
Decline: 16th–18th centuryWith the loss of
political independence, literary and linguistic
independence was also lost, and Catalan fell to the
level of a patois, kept alive only in the
countryside and in the pulpit. The 16th century
furnishes a single poet worthy of the name: Pere
Serafí, some of whose Cants d’amor (1565), written
in imitation of Ausiàs March but less obscure, are
graceful enough to merit remembrance. In prose, only
scholars, chiefly antiquaries and historians, still
wrote in Catalan. Forty years of research and
abundant documentation give interest to the Crònica
universal del principat de Cathalunya, a history of
the Catalan kingdom, of Jeroni Pujadas, of which
only the first part (1609) is in Catalan.
Thereafter, the eclipse was almost complete. Catalan
remained only as the language of folk song and
ballad; in these—first collected in the Romancerillo
catalán (1853; “Little Collection of Catalan
Ballads”) by Manuel Milà i Fontanals, the historian
who played a considerable part in the Catalan
revival—it lived on until the reawakening.
The Renaixensa and afterIn 1814 appeared the
Gramática y apologia de la llengua cathalana
(“Grammar and Apology of the Catalan Language”) of
Josep Pau Ballot i Torres, a forerunner of the
literary and linguistic renascence (Renaixensa) that
marked the Romantic period in Catalonia. The
pioneers, however, saw the inadequacies of the
ancient language for the expression of spiritual and
intellectual ideas. The Institut d’Estudis Catalans,
founded in Barcelona in 1907, has played a notable
part in the deliberate enrichment and purifying of
Catalan as a vehicle for contemporary thought.
Bonaventura Carles Aribau’s patriotic Oda a la
pátria (1832; “Ode to the Fatherland”) and the poems
of Joaquim Rubió i Ors and Victor Balaguer prepared
the way for the mysticism of Jacintó Verdaguer
Santaló, a great epic poet (L’Atlántida [1877],
Canigó [1886]). Miguel Costa i Llobera cultivated a
classical perfection of form. In Joan Maragall i
Gorina, Catalonia found its first great modern poet
who, in spiritual quality, exerted a powerful
influence on later poets.
The foundations of modern Catalan prose were laid
by the critical writings of Rubió i Ors, Francisco
Pi i Margall, one of the four presidents of the
Spanish Republic of 1873, and Josep Torras i Bages
(La tradició catalana [1892; “The Catalan
Tradition”]). One of the best and most influential
writers in prose was the essayist Eugenio d’Ors
(pseudonym “Xenius”), whose philosophical novel La
ben plantada (1911; “Firmly Rooted”) was one of the
most notable works in modern Catalan literature.
Catalan dramatists have produced plays of
considerable originality. Àngel Guimerà achieved a
European reputation with Terra baixa (1896;
“Lowlands”), which inspired a German and a French
opera and was widely translated. The many social
dramas of Ignasi Iglésias, inspired by the early
works of Gerhart Hauptmann, included one
near-masterpiece, Els Vells (1903). Adrià Gual,
author of several works of fantasy, did his best
work as director of the Teatre Intim, founded in
Barcelona in 1898, which familiarized the public
with the great drama of all countries and ages.
Further development of modern Catalan literature
was delayed by the dictatorship (1923–30) of Miguel
Primo de Rivera, who banned the use of any language
other than Castilian, and by the Civil War of
1936–39. Many Catalan men of letters fled abroad,
and those who remained found the political climate
hardly conducive to productive literary activity.
Conditions in Catalonia improved only slightly
during the postwar years as the government of Gen.
Francisco Franco adopted a generally repressive
policy toward Catalan culture. Although some Catalan
writers chose to ignore the prevailing realities and
cultivated what could be construed as a literature
of artistic escape, the most influential poets of
the period, Salvador Espriu and Pere Quart
(pseudonym of Joan Oliver), began writing poetry
that dealt with social issues in a decidedly
Realistic mode. Other recent Catalan authors of
note, such as the prose writers Mercè Rodoreda and
Josep Maria Espinàs, also have largely grounded
their works in contemporary social life.
Galician literature
Medieval poetryGalician is closely related to
Portuguese, and there is no separating the two
languages in the three great repositories of
medieval verse, the 14th-century Cancioneiro
(“Songbook”) da Ajuda, Cancioneiro da Vaticana, and
Colocci-Brancuti. Indigenous lyric origins were
overlaid by Provençal influence, and a dominance of
emotion over thought identified Galician with
subjective lyricism, so that for over a century
Castilian poets made it their medium for lyrics. Of
116 names in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana, 75 have
been tentatively identified as Galician; none
achieved particular individuality. Macías El
Enamorado (flourished mid-14th century) was the last
Galician troubadour; Galicians thereafter wrote in
Castilian, and, though there were echoes of their
tradition, the Renaissance and Castilian political
hegemony finally ended Galician literature until the
19th century.
The modern revivalThe Romantic movement, like the
Peninsular War, revived local feeling and interest
in things Galician but not in the language. The
xogos froraes (“floral games,” or poetry congresses;
an equivalent of Catalan and Provençal jocs florals)
of 1861, with the first dictionary (1863) and first
grammar (1864) of Galician, marked a change.
Francisco Añón y Paz was the first notable poet in
the resurrected idiom, his most stirring notes being
love of country and of freedom. Rosalía de Castro,
the greatest name in Galician literature, identified
herself with the spirit and people of the Galician
countryside in Cantares gallegos (1863; “Galician
Songs”); her Follas novas (1880; “New Leaves”),
introspective to the verge of despair, reflected
deep personal sorrows. Eduardo Pondal y Abente, a
bard of a dimly sensed heroic past, was concerned
with nature and Celtic mythology. Valentín Lamas
Carvajal has been remembered as the voice of the
peasant.
Prose showed no comparable achievement. Aurelio
Ribalta, Manuel Lugrís Freire, and Heraclio Pérez
Placer wrote short stories but were overshadowed by
novelists of stature—Emilia, condesa de Pardo Bazán,
and Rosalía de Castro—who chose to write for a
larger public in Castilian.
The 20th century has produced, especially since
1920, a continuing abundance of Galician poets, not
yet sufficiently differentiated, who underline the
identification of Galician literature with a
markedly poetic regional temperament and language.
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