The Pennsylvania State University

It is hardly surprising that during the final part of the Franco era and the initial years of the transition from dictatorship to democracy, committed Spanish playwrights have turned increasingly to the past to dramatize images of the nation at crucial periods that present important parallels with their own time²⁰. Their dramas thus reflect the continuity of an ongoing historical process that culminates in the audience's present. By returning to epochs like the nineteenth century, when the traditionalist mentality of an old Spain clashed with the more liberal outlook of a new Spain, dramatists such as Antonio Buero Vallejo, José Martín Recuerda, and José María Rodríguez Méndez sought to bring the spectators to identify with the proponents of progress in a conflict that remained unresolved in the 1970s.

If one considers the historical theater of the entire Franco era and thereafter, it becomes obvious that the most vital dramas are those written by authors who spoke from a position of nonconformity or dissent²¹. Of course it has always been those works of Spanish literature that express the conflict between writers and the reality they portray that have proved to be of the broadest interest, as the cases of Cervantes, Quevedo, and Valle-Inclán amply demonstrate.

The critical stance adopted by Buero Vallejo in Un soñador para un pueblo, 1958, marked the beginning of the new historical drama of post-civil-war Spain. Buero's drama represented a clean break with the conformist dramas prevalent during the earlier part of the century, with their «official» version of Spain's past and present glories and national virtues. Such aproblematical dramas as those of Marquina, Pemán, and Luca de Tena had continued the Golden Age and Romantic tradition, idealizing an imperial past and ignoring the problems of the present²².

In sharp contrast to those rightist dramatists who magnified the past, exalting the castizo or «pure» ideals of Catholicism and nationalism and glorifying dubious epochs, Buero and other disaffected dramatists who have followed his path attempt to show the tragedy that Spanish history had been and continued to be during the Franco era. Their plays, like those of Pemán, Luca de Tena, etc., thus represent a judgment. However the judgment is not the same.

If the judgment is not the same, neither is the purpose. The aim of such dramatists as Buero Vallejo, Martín Recuerda, Rodríguez Méndez, Alfonso Sastre, Domingo Miras, Jaime Salom, Antonio Gala, and others, as they confront the spectators with their own history, is not to mourn lost virtues and values but to provoke an awareness of the errors of Spain, both past and present²³. If history was a closed book for traditionalist or conservative playwrights, for Buero and other authors of the new historical theater, the future is undetermined -if not for their characters, certainly for the spectators, who are the only ones that can affect it. Traditionalist or conservative playwrights yearned to restore the past; Buero and others look toward the future. Whereas the former displayed more interest in a reality that was, the latter dream of a reality to be, a reality in the making. Change is obviously a goal implicit in the critical vision.

It is not by chance that authors of the new historical drama show a definite preference for the same historical period: the nineteenth century. It is there that they see the origins of contemporary Spain, rather than in the supposed glories of the Empire so dear to Francoist   —21→   historians and playwrights²⁴. The interest of anti-Franco dramatists in the nineteenth century, with its conflict between the «two Spains», is natural. The struggle between the rigid, traditionalist Spain of Catholic conservatism and the open, forward-looking Spain of the Progressives is the key to the tragedy that continued through the Franco period and the initial years of the transition, i. e., the late 1970s.

Well-known dramas set in the past century include Buero's El sueño de la razón, 1970, and Recuerda's Las arrecogías del Beaterio de Santa María Egipciaca, 1977, both of which focus on the civil discord during the reign of Fernando VII²⁵, an epoch clearly resembling the Franco period, as well as Buero's La detonación, 1977, which depicts the Regency, an era paralleling the post-Franco transition. Rodríguez Méndez's Bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandanga, 1978, deals with the Restoration of 1874, which, behind an up-dated façade, represented the survival of a traditional ideology and bourgeois value system. It is in this epoch, with its contradictions and political hypocrisy so strongly attacked by Valle-Inclán, that R. Méndez sees the origin of many of the ills of modern Spain. This paper will deal with the latter three plays.

When the new historical theater does deal with the Empire, it is not to mourn lost values, as had the dramas of Pemán, etc., but to show the reverse side of the coin²⁶. In their grandiloquent evocation of Spain's imperial past, «official» writers reflected the Franco regime's vision of itself as heir to the most glorious period of Spain's history prior to what they saw as the disasters of Liberalism. However, M. Recuerda's El engañao, 1981, shows the impoverishment and suffering of a populace forced to pay for religious wars that resulted not in glory but in destruction and Buero's Las Meninas, 1960, portrays the moral and economic decadence, the pretense and hypocrisy under Felipe IV²⁷.

In contrast to the preference for the same historical period, i. e., the nineteenth century, is the marked variety in dramatic art. The critical vision unites works in which history assumes varying dramatic patterns or shapes, three of the most important of which are illustrated by the dramas to be analyzed. Buero's plays are tragedy; M. Recuerda's, festival; and R. Méndez's, popular chronicle.

Buero's history plays present committed intellectuals into whose very minds he leads the spectators, allowing them to share inner hopes and ideals that survive despite the external defeat with which the plays invariably end.

For Buero, history is tragedy. Buero understands the tragic as the conflict between the protagonist's free will and the limitations imposed by circumstances -a conflict not inexorably resolved in favor of the latter. The open or dialectical nature of his conception makes tragedy the ideal pattern into which to structure what might otherwise be a chaos of events since it is in accord with his understandings of the historical process. Buero has written extensively on the nature of tragedy and maintains that «lo trágico» is always an expression of a hope that embraces both faith and doubt. Even if the situation seems closed, there always remains the implicit possibility of posterior hope, of a solution to be found by the spectators after the cathartic action of the tragedy.

The intellectuals that Buero chooses as protagonists come to represent the conscience of their epoch. Author surrogates, they proclaim, with clear vision, the truth about Spain. The action is mainly inward or psychological. It involves the preservation of the protagonists' integrity in the face of a public order that, as the facts demand, progressively isolates and defeats them. This pattern is seen in Un soñador para un pueblo, Las Meninas, El sueño de la razón, but perhaps most clearly in La detonación, Buero's most recent historical drama²⁸.

La detonación, which opened in September 1977 in Madrid's Teatro Bellas Artes, focuses on the period immediately following the action of El sueño de la razón: the years of Fernando VII, who died in 1833, and the regency of María Cristina. The latter period was a time of struggle to find a viable form of liberal monarchy to which Spain could be rallied against the absolutists or Carlists, who soon brought her to open civil war. José Mariano de Larra, Buero's protagonist, remains one of Spain's most lucid and penetrating political writers. His essays portray a restless country that, like present-day Spain, was emerging from authoritarianism. La detonación, Buero's first work written in the post-Franco epoch, constitutes   —22→   a valid mirror for Spaniards living the transition of the late 1970s.

Events of the ten years preceding Larra's suicide in 1838 are presented by means of an extended flashback: memories race through his mind in the seconds before he pulls the trigger of his gun. This flashback permits the audience to enter the very mind of the tormented protagonist and to see, along with him, the actions, thoughts, and even dreams that he not only re-enacts but witnesses as spectator of his own theater. These recollections are presented in the distorted and grotesque way that he now perceives them. The tragedy thus takes the form of a phantasmagoric delirium whose nightmarish quality is accentuated by a vertiginously frantic rhythm that accelerates as the end approaches²⁹. The action moves constantly between three parts of a multiple-stage set: Larra's apartment, the Ministerial offices with their constantly changing parade of ministers and government censors, and the «Parnasillo» or café where the writers of the day discuss both literature and politics. Words about government repression spoken in Larra's apartment are followed, as the writer becomes lost in thought, by the appearance in their offices of the minister and censor. We witness the writers in the café cheering or decrying the decrees of the ministry and the minister reacting to the writers' cries³⁰. The feverish pace of events is made to seem more nearly normal as the voices of Larra's servant Pedro and his young daughter Adelita call to him from off stage, in an exaggeratedly slow manner.

Buero's dramatic technique is no doubt inspired by the lugubrious and macabre elements that predominate in the essays of Larra's last years, as his normal satire gave way to an increasingly grotesque aesthetic. This grotesque aesthetic sprang from the nightmare that culminated in his suicide. Buero makes it clear that this suicide was the result not so much of an unfortunate love affair, as of despair over the destiny of his country.

If La detonación is a portrayal of a political period that closely parallels the present, it is also a reflection on the role of the committed intellectual in a repressive society. Like Velázquez of Las Meninas and Goya of El sueño de la razón, Buero's Larra evinces the dramatist's own passion for truth in a time of falsehood and deception. The greatness of all is their refusal to live a lie. Buero represents the falsehood Larra sees by masks worn by all of the characters save the protagonist himself and romantic writer and fellow Liberal José de Espronceda. These masks fall as Larra exposes the truth behind each of them. This use of masks is doubtlessly suggested by a 1833 essay of Larra entitled «El mundo todo es máscaras; todo el año es carnaval»³¹. Larra's only mask is his satire. However, for those able to understand, it reveals rather than hides. Without sacrificing his independence, Larra succeeds in fulfilling his mission as a critic of Spanish society in a time of absolutism.

Of all his protagonists, Larra is the one with whom Buero most closely identifies. His words during the discussion in the «Parnasillo» on the possible stances of the writer in the face of government censorship reflect the posture of Buero himself during the Franco era. Rejecting the position, not only of those writers who collaborate with a repressive regime, but of those who remain silent when unable to speak clearly and of those who provoke confrontations that prove suicidal, Larra maintains that the responsible writer must practice the art of the possible, resorting, if necessary, to literary conventions or masks -always effective weapons in difficult times.

In the dialogue of La detonación Buero intercalates passages from Larra's political essays. The writer quotes himself and his disembodied voice furnishes still further relevant commentary. The lucidity of Larra's advice contrasts sharply to the delirium of his nightmare. This cold lucidity was, perhaps, his own mask in his final years of torment. The dialectics of the tragedy he in the confrontation of divergent points of view that provide multiple perspectives on the politics of the time and often expose the egoistic motives of public figures.

Buero's Larra is both martyr and prophet; and, since the tragedy depicts an epoch with closer parallels to the present than any other of Buero's historical dramas, the truths Larra unmasks constitute a significant political message. The satirist mocks the 1834 «Estatuto real» of Liberal Martínez de la Rosa. Fearful of anarchy on the part of the masses, the minister compromised, limiting suffrage and adding an upper chamber or Estamento de Próceres to the Cortes. His politics of moderation   —23→   -with its emphasis on order, the continuity in power of cabinet members who had served under Fernando, and reforms that were purely administrative- is not unlike the politics of the early years of the post-Franco transition. Moreover, Larra's charge that the Liberals' refusal to recognize the ancient rights of the Basques prolonged the Carlist War (in which the latter, along with the clergy, supported the pretender) has special significance in the late 1970s, when the problem of regional autonomy is paramount. Moreover, Larra points out that it is precisely the Liberals' failure to curtail Carlism that led to the street violence and massacre of friars by mobs resentful of the government's impotence. In the words of Larra, Buero thus warns against unfounded fears and half-way measures that paralyze a nation, thwarting a true break with the past.

Under Martínez de la Rosa, the Moderados betrayed the hope for change; the Exaltados, the other Liberal party, were no different. The masks of the ministers of both of these two parties, which alternated in power during the Regency, fall to reveal the same man (i.e., the same actor). The Exaltados's limitation of suffrage to the wealthy and the disentailment of church proprieties in a way that put these lands in the hands of the highest bidders rather than the peasants under the minister Mendizábal, a wealthy financier, are indignantly denounced by Larra as betrayals of the common people. His words about the necessity for economic justice and for interesting the masses in the political process are as relevant now as then. Moreover, Larra unmasks the opportunism of Mendizábal and Istúriz -representatives of the mercantile interests of two different sectors of the middle class- that prevent them from working together to benefit the common people. Then, as in the late 1970s, ministers alternated but nothing changed. The best-known secret of Madrid, Larra states, is that the Liberals do not really exist.

It is, to a great extent, this political nightmare that results in Larra's suicide. At the end of the tragedy, the current minister, along with Larra's wife, the married woman he loved, and other persons, lift the pistol a bit closer to his temple. Buero shows Larra's sense of guilt over the class privileges he enjoyed as another factor. In surrealistic sequences, the writer dreams that he is forced to shoot in firing squads on both sides in the Carlist conflict (in which the rich could avoid conscription) and to contemplate horrors such as the body of his daughter mutilated in the fratricidal war, the atrocities of which shocked all Europe. In addition, Buero uses Larra's servant Pedro -who served as the writer's alter ego in the essay, «La nochebuena, 1836» -to reproach the latter for intellectual pride and unconscious class prejudice incompatible with his politics. Buero thus reveals his protagonist's defects and inner contradictions³².

At the end of the drama, it is Pedro, symbol of the common people and hope for the future, who serves as the voice of history, commenting, in a brief epilogue, on the futility of Larra's suicide and the need for endless perseverance. Pedro expresses Buero's wish that the shot with which the tragedy ends will awaken the spectators to greater awareness. Freedom succumbed in Larra's time; it is Buero's hope that the same thing will not happen in the spectators; as Spain commences the transition of the late 1970s³³. Buero's tragic protagonist is a victim of history but the dramatist reminds the audience that his failings were unnecessary. Moreover, the outward defeat of the protagonist implies the survival of his inner hopes and ideals.

In his tragedy Buero uses reasoning and argument to juxtapose contrary ideas or views and to seek their resolution. Recuerda's approach to history is much more visceral. Opposing forces are characterized in absolute terms and the ambiguities and subtleties that characterize Buero's more intellectual investigations of history are replaced by crude, elemental emotion. Recuerda's purpose is clearly to arouse the audience's unqualified admiration for his protagonists; it is therefore appropriate that his history plays assume the form of festivals or celebrations in which he brings the spectators to participate, enveloping them with song and dance, intimate poetry and savage violence³⁴. Whereas Buero uses well-known intellectuals as protagonists, Martín Recuerda chooses popular heroes of his native Granada in Las arrecogías del Beaterio de Santa María Egipciaca and his later El engañao, immersing them in the world of the common people whose fate they share. In Las arrecogías, which premiered February 1977 in Madrid's Teatro de la Comedia, the suffering   —24→   of Mariana Pineda, martyr for the cause of Spanish freedom, is merged with the suffering of her sister prisoners. Recuerda's drama, which takes place during the epoch of Fernando VII, is an attack upon Francoism. Its action takes place in Granada, a focal point of the Liberal conspiracy in the south, and the drama depicts the final days before Mariana's execution for treason in 1831, after she commissioned the embroidering of a rebel flag for an uprising being planned by the Liberals.

Recuerda postulates the existence of other political prisoners in the convent where Mariana was held before her execution and merges her story with theirs. Suspecting that the convent, founded originally as a reformatory for women of the streets (or arrecogías), was actually used to hold those of Liberal sympathies, the playwright surrounds his protagonist with women whose stories, although fictional, are no less significant than hers: Aniceta, a flower vendor, Paula, a dockworker denounced as a mason by a Royalist lover, Concepción, a scrubwoman who fled her village carrying a rebel banner, Chirrina, a dancer and prostitute from Cádiz who fought with the Liberals, etc.³⁵ In Buero's dramas, one character is usually used to represent the masses, who are the victims of history (e. g., Pedro of La detonación); Recuerda, however, creates an entire convent of forgotten martyrs. It is with them that Mariana, although a noblewoman, identifies and by whom she is, in turn, finally accepted.

For Buero, history is tragedy; for Recuerda, it is festival. Recuerda's history plays are celebrations that feature songs and dances popular with the common people of Granada. Recuerda understands the theater not as representation, but as spectacle. His history plays have little in common with the more dialectical dramas of Buero with their strong appeal to the intellect as well as the emotion. Recuerda's spectacles -El engañao even more than Las arrecogías- depend, not on the complexity of thought or analysis of more mimetic forms, but on theatrical effects so powerful that they approach the operatic. The effect of such a profoundly moving spectacle can, of course, be scarcely communicated by the bare text.

Las arrecogías, which is subtitled Fiesta española en dos partes, is popular theater, in which various forms of flamenco songs and dance -coplas, tanguillos, fandangos, vitos, etc.- are used to establish a communal experience with the audience; spectators and actors celebrate together the heroism of the protagonist. Even before the action begins, musicians and dancers wander throughout the theater house, playing, singing, and distributing flowers to the spectators. Then, on stage, in the cobblestone streets of Granada, which form a continuation of the house aisles, music from a nearby bullring mingles with the «Te Deum» of the nuns behind the convent walls; and a chorus of dancers -Lolilla and her seamstresses, dressed for the festivities of Corpus Christi, serve as narrators- singing of conspiracies and executions, and ironically declaring their own indifference to such matters as the musicians play in the aisles. Recuerda -who is well-known for his work as director as well as playwright- avoids making stage and house two closed worlds. He places the audience inside the spectacle, engulfing it with auditory, plastic, and choreographic effects that fuse to form a popular fresco. Stage and house merge as Granada of the 1830s becomes Spain of the 1970s. Actors and spectators celebrate the same fiesta and experience the same drama.

The action consists of a chain of violent confrontations among the common, uneducated prisoners, driven to near frenzy by the threat of execution. Other struggles occur between these women and Mariana, as well as between Mariana and the nuns who serve as jailors and, most importantly, between Mariana and the hated police chief, Pedrosa. The tension of these clashes is resolved in the songs of the spectacle. For example, the prisoners sing impassioned coplas near the beginning, when they parade defiantly with a banner that Lolilla has thrown over the convent wall in order to show the solidarity of those outside; they later chant plaintive verses, pounding the floor in a cante jondo rhythm, at the arrival of a young gypsy girl whose hands have been crushed by police who suspect her of embroidering Mariana's flag. The songs, which have something of the ceremonial quality of a religious rite, reach a climax as the gypsy girl, herself, joins in. Then, as the house lights suddenly come on, Mariana sings of the Liberals who will rescue them, encouraged by the «olés» of the others who now accept her as one of their own. The prisoners' singing and dancing -accompanied by rhythmic stamping of heels and clapping of   —25→   hands- becomes increasingly fierce as they attempt to arouse the audience, defying it to emulate their own rebellion. While the chorus of prisoners performs on stage, the chorus of seamstresses performs in the house aisles and throws flowers. The festival thus spreads throughout the entire theater. Then, when Mariana and the other prisoners have descended into the house aisles, the spectators thus become prisoners and the entire theater is turned into a convent.

These violent songs contrast to the softly-sung old ballad heard after Mariana's sentence is read later on in the drama. Rendered in a deliberately threatening manner, these songs represent an assault upon the audience, an attempt to break through its defenses. Not only the fury of flamenco, but jarring noises -cries of the prisoners, the clang of chains beaten against bars, blows of the hammers from the scaffold being erected for Mariana's execution, and violent funeral bells- assault the spectator's sensitivity from all sides even as the spectacle envelops them so that they come to identify with the prisoners. As in Artaud's «Theater of Cruelty», and in Valle-Inclán's esperpentos, violence represents both a means and an end; for Recuerda's aim is clearly a break with the established order³⁶.

The writer's purpose is to stress his protagonist's heroism; there is little of the complexity of political thought that characterizes Buero's historical dramas, especially a play like La detonación. History serves primarily to magnify and opposing forces are characterized in absolute terms -those who serve the cause of the common people and those who oppose it. Recuerda's primary aim is to incite the audience's admiration for Mariana -a martyr in the literal sense of the word. The Liberal ideals for which Mariana dies are expressed in speeches to Pedrosa and to her lover, both of which are quite moving in their effect and convincingly demonstrate the depth of her political commitment, Recuerda thus portrays Mariana as the real revolutionary that she was historically³⁷. Her vitality and rebelliousness are typical of the female characters that Recuerda -like Lorca- excels in creating. In both speeches the heroic impulse is sustained and intensified through rhetoric and brilliance of language.

Despite the emphasis on the public dimension of the protagonist, of patriotic assertion over serious self-questioning, Mariana's profoundly human quality is underscored at the end, when she feels herself misunderstood by the only man she has loved. Nevertheless, when she chooses to die, refusing the pardon offered in exchange for the names of her coconspirators, she is not alone. The other prisoners demand to die with her as the hammering of the scaffold becomes deafening -a noise that seems incongruous given the sunshine, scent of lemon-blossoms and music from the bullfight of Corpus Christi. The spectacle concludes with songs of the seamstresses, bells, and finally, cries of the prisoners that Mariana is dead. In Recuerda's celebration, the individual drama of Mariana becomes the collective drama of her sister prisoners; it also becomes the drama of the spectators who, together with the actors, participate in the festival. The example of Mariana and the other prisoners of the 1830s constitutes an invitation to the audience of the 1970s. The prisoners' cries that Mariana is dead, like Larra's shot, resound across the decades, arousing the audience to greater consciousness, awakening it from its lethargy. The various types of audience involvement used by Buero and Recuerda thus have an identical purpose.

A brief epilogue underscores the play's relevance to the 1970s, when many political dissidents, especially Basques, were awaiting execution; the actress who played Mariana explains that, if the amnesty later proclaimed by a dying Fernando had been granted a few months earlier, Mariana and many other victims now forgotten -like the prisoners of the convent- would not have died. The applause of the audience, openly solicited by the actors, thus represents a plea for amnesty and freedom³⁸.

Much more than Buero or even M. Recuerda, R. Méndez focuses on the everyday life of the masses. Given this emphasis and given, also, the interest he has always displayed in the género chico³⁹, it is not surprising that such plays as Historia de unos cuantos, 1975, and Bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandanga, whose 1978 performance in the Bellas Artes Theater opened Madrid's new Centro Dramático Nacional, are popular chronicles. Through the eyes of the populace the dramatist presents major events of Spain's history, utilizing a succession of sketches or   —26→   cuadros de costumbres. Like Recuerda, Rodríguez Méndez writes historical theater that is essentially popular. We have seen that like Buero, Recuerda centers his dramas on famous historical figures who stand in opposition to the established order of their time. Although vindicated by the playwright, they are defeated by forces they oppose. In Recuerda's drama the common people are used mainly to build up these famous figures in the eyes of the audience. Rodríguez Méndez, however, focuses exclusively on the masses, eschewing the use of historical personages. As in Brecht's Mother Courage, history is seen «from below», from the viewpoint of the outcasts who are its victims. Instead of magnifying the words and deeds of the famous, R. Méndez portrays the everyday life of the masses -the «intrahistoria» that Unamuno emphasized -a life which continues largely unchanged despite successive alternations of political systems. The victimization of R. Méndez's protagonists results not from any ideological stance, as is the case in the dramas of Buero and Recuerda, but from their social circumstances.

R. Méndez's dramas are popular chronicles that consist of a succession of sketches of everyday life, each of which is significant not only for what it contributes to the whole, but in itself⁴⁰. The stage directions incorporate extensive descriptive and narrative passages usually associated with the novel. The roots of his earthy realism are to be found in the picaresque novel, with its antiheroes that reflected the decay of Spain's Empire, in the sainetes, or brief sketches of everyday life and customs in Madrid's poorer quarters, by Ramón de la Cruz and Ricardo de la Vega, as well as in the esperpentos, that Valle-Inclán likened to reflections of classical heroes in the concave mirrors of the amusement arcade in Madrid's Callejón del Gato. The nineteenth-century género chico arose in opposition to, or as a counter image of, the heroic, bourgeois drama. R. Méndez, like Valle-Inclán, uses the género chico as the basis for dramas in which the popular sketch of customs ceases to be an end in itself and becomes an instrument of exposition and implicit denunciation.

Bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandanga is a tragi-comedy set in the arrabales or shantytowns of Madrid. The time is 1898, the year of the «disaster» in which Spain lost the last part of what was her Empire. The play depicts Spain's moral and economic decadence, especially the disintegration of the illiterate and degraded masses. The Bourbon Restoration of 1875-1931, following the failure of the short-lived First Republic of 1873-1874, represented the survival, behind an updated façade, of a traditional ideology that survived from the past. Moreover, under the respectable surface of a parliamentary system, abuse and privilege were rampant; power rested with the large landholders, army, and Church; the alternation of Liberals and Conservatives had little meaning as elections were managed (thus nullifying the newly-voted universal suffrage of 1890); and the new worker movement, which was severely fragmented, remained outside the political arena.

Impoverished and embittered masses of workers and peasants provided cannon fodder for the colonial wars in Cuba and Morocco and suffered the results of the economic depression that followed the defeat of 1898. The discredited oligarchy, which retained power only because its enemies were divided and survived in the form of the Franco regime, evinced the contradictions and hypocrisy of a middle class that wanted a more democratic system but refused to abandon the rights of capital and property. In this period R. Méndez sees the roots of many of Spain's continuing problems. In fact the discrimination against, and alienation of, the masses during the Restoration is little different from the fate of the isolated and marginal outcasts he presents in many of his dramas depicting life in the 1960s.

Bodas que fueron famosas depicts the marriage of Pingajo, a draftee back from Cuba, who wins his thirteen-year old virgin bride in a game with two rogues -Salamanca, a pickpocket, and Petate, an ex-convict. The protagonist is not a hero but an antihero, having received his nickname («Rag») because he displayed such cowardliness in battle that he was stood up like a scarecrow to frighten off the enemy. Martyrdom thus loses the dignity it has in the dramas of Buero and Recuerda. Pingajo seems un able to realize or question his own degradation. With a bravado that conceals his timidity and fear, he apes the words and gestures of the powerful, even donning for his wedding the stolen dress uniform of a hussar lieutenant -all in an unconscious effort to feel part of a society that rejects him.

It is Pingajo's fear of a beating for having returned late to the barrack as well as an   —27→   extreme naivete, that makes him promise to hand over his future bride to his lieutenant so that the latter may have the pleasure of deflowering her. Nevertheless, the tenderness Pingajo feels for his fiancée -who appears sucking lollypops and looking at him with big dumb eyes like those of a carnival doll- prevents him from sacrificing her. When, instead, he holds up the Casino to pay for a splendid wedding feast -the only way he can command respect in a hostile world- he is shot, victim of a society of which he was never a part, in a ritual he does not understand.

The sainete, together with the nineteenth-century zarzuela, is the source of the characters that R. Méndez, eschewing unnecessary psychological analysis, presents in all their rich simplicity, of the popular language, and of the local color of the most picturesque of the eight sketches into which the chronicle is structured. The detailed descriptions that begin each sketch, which often seem designed especially for the reader, constitute frescos of popular turn-of-the-century Madrid.

In the animated sketch of the Retiro Park, where Pingajo takes Fandanga on a Sunday afternoon, a gallery of the types that characterized the Restoration parade before the audience's eyes -barquilleros, soldiers and their girls, pensioned government workers dozing on benches, street musicians with violins, and organ grinders- as the notes of the music mingle in a rustic symphony.

In the sketch of the wedding feast, organ grinders play tunes from the zarzuela and bullring and a chorus of children make music with pots and mortars, as they sing the popular song that inspired the play. The streets, gaily decorated with brightly colored paper chains and flowers, recreate a Goya fresco. A table with huge paellas and wine-skins, all bought with money from the robbery of the Casino, awaits the guests. According to the description in the stage directions, it is as if the Verbena of St. Isidro had moved its tents to the miserable shantytown or as if the famous Camacho, who gave a splendid wedding banquet in Don Quijote, had descended from the lands of La Mancha to invite its humble inhabitants to a sumptuous meal. Members of the wedding party, decked out in manila shawls and other finery given them by Pingajo, dance the popular jerigonza. However, the colorful scene soon darkens into a grotesque etching as police appear, fix the guests in their gun sights, and arrest Pingajo and his two accomplices.

The epilogue is reminiscent of Valle-Inclán's sarcastic distortion (as is the barrack scene in which Pingajo is mocked by the other soldiers, who spread his arms apart as if he were a scarecrow, dance around him like grotesque bats, and beat him over the head). Pingajo is shot after the lieutenant props him up lopsidedly to keep him from fainting with fear and sticks a limp cigarette in his mouth. Wrapped in a ragged Spanish flag-symbol of a debased nation -he is an esperpentic hero redeemed only by his refusal to sacrifice Fandanga.

Like Valle-Inclán (who, via Brecht, has exerted a greater influence on serious contemporary theater in Spain than any other figure), R. Méndez approaches history with a high degree of ironic distancing not seen in Buero or Recuerda's dramas. It is an irony that in no way negates the humanity of his vision or the sympathy inspired by the characters. Nevertheless, despite this sympathy, R. Méndez's protagonist is a negative example. Martyrdom (if the term may be used to refer to the fate of those who are simply destroyed by circumstances they do not comprehend and whose death represents no inner triumph that can arouse the admiration of the audience) loses the heroic, or at least exemplary quality glimpsed especially in Recuerda's drama, with its magnification of the protagonist. Nevertheless, martyr or simply victim, Pingajo, like the preceding protagonists, illustrates the tragic sense of Spanish history; and his execution evinces the continuing violence that is a recurring motif in the dramas analyzed⁴¹.

The tragedies of Buero, the festivals of M. Recuerda, and the popular chronicles of R. Méndez are all at least as concerned with the late 1970s as with the epoch they ostensibly portray. The purpose in portraying past epochs that evince the existence of the «two Spains» is obviously not to perpetuate the concept of a divided nation but rather to underscore the responsibility of all Spaniards and to facilitate the type of meditation that may enable Spaniards to understand the lessons of history. These three playwrights are more concerned to shape the future than to recount the past for its own sake. History acquires a sense of immediacy as they focus on moments in the nineteenth century that evince conflicts pointing to, or anticipating, issues still   —28→   relevant to the 1970s. Since these moments prefigure later stages of the historical process with which some emotional identification may be expected on the part of the spectators, the latter are brought to experience the force of historical continuity emphasized by Hegelian and Marxist theories of history. By presenting the struggle between the «two Spains» in such a way that the viewers sympathize with the values of those who, like the Liberals or Constitutionalists of the era of Fernando VII or the Progresistas of the Regency, looked toward the future, the playwrights hope to move their audience to identify with these same values in their own time.

M. Recuerda and Buero capture moments that are potentially positive. The efforts of the Constitutionalists and of the Progresistas suggest that freedom is, at least, conceivable. However, Buero shows, also, how a positive movement, such as that of the Progresistas, can go wrong as leaders betray their ideals. In like manner, R. Méndez demonstrates how a seemingly respectable system such as the parliamentary government of the Restauration, can become thoroughly corrupted. Both dramatists thus seek to make their viewers into more critical participants in the historical process by helping them avoid the traps of the past.

Hope is thus implicit in all three dramas. Past and present become one and the spectators are left with a question as to the future that only they can answer. This open vision of history makes possible the active relationship the playwrights establish between their drama and the audience. Through both emotive identification and the distancing that encourages critical reflection and judgment, they seek to change fundamental attitudes of their spectators. It is the hope of Buero Vallejo, M. Recuerda, and R. Méndez that, by summoning up the past and remembering it together, Spaniards may overcome its negative legacy. To delve into the past is to look toward the future with increased awareness.

In The Politics of History, radical historian Howard Zinn points out that the rise of democracy means that physical force on the part of governments is often replaced by deception and mystification as means of concealing what is wrong and maintaining the status quo. This makes the kind of awareness or knowledge imparted by historical drama all the more important; for, although such knowledge «cannot confront force directly, it can counteract the deception that makes the government's force legitimate» (6-7). This idea is quite similar to Buero's message in La Fundación, 1974, where he warns that the journey to true freedom leads through a series of concentric prisons, each of which contains scarcely more light than the preceding one, and that it is possible for an entire nation to be deceived or brainwashed into believing that it is free when it is, in fact, enslaved. If awareness or knowledge is power, it is obviously a power that has lost none of its relevance⁴².

Buero Vallejo, Antonio. El Concierto de San Ovidio. La Fundación. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1977.

——. La detonación. Las palabras en la arena. Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1979.

Carr, Raymond and Juan Pablo Fusi. Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981.

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Díaz, Janet W. «Buero Vallejo's Larra: La detonación». Estreno 5.1 (1979): 33-5.

Fernández, Insuela. «Bodas que fueron famosas ...: Degradación e ironía»: Archivum (University of Oviedo) 31-32 (1981-82): 289-304.

Gala, Antonio. Noviembre y un poco de hierba. Petra Regalada. Ed. Phyllis Zatlin. Madrid: Cátedra, 1981.

Gilmour, David. The Transformation of Spain: From Franco to the Constitutional Monarchy. London: Quartet Books, 1985.

Halsey, Martha T. «El engañao and the Primitive Christianity of Juan de Dios». The American Hispanist 4.32-33 (1979): 3-7.

——. «Goya in the Theater: Buero Vallejo's El sueño de la razón». Kentucky Romance Quarterly 18 (1971): 201-21.

Iglesias Feijoo, Luis. La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo. Santiago de Compostela, 1982.

Ilie, Paul. «Larra's Nightmare». Revista Hispánica Moderna 38 (1974-75): 153-66.

Jones, Margaret E. W. «The Modern Spanish Theater: The Historical Perspective». Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 11 (1977): 199-218.

Lindenberger, Herbert. Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1975.

López Mozo, Jerónimo. Anarchía 36. Pipirijaina Textos 6 (January-February 1978): 11-58.

—— and Luis Matilla. Como reses. Madrid: Nuestra Cultura, 1980.

Martín Recuerda, José. Génesis de «El Engañao»: Versión dramática de la otra cara del Imperio. Salamanca, 1979.

——. El engañao. Caballos desbocaos. Ed. Martha T. Halsey and Ángel Cobo. Madrid: Cátedra, 1981.

——. «Entrevista con J. Martín Recuerda». Primer Acto 169 (1974): 8-11.

——. Las salvajes en Puente San Gil. Las arrecogías del Beaterio de Santa María Egipciaca. Ed. Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Madrid: Cátedra, 1977.

——. La tragedia de España en la obra dramática de R. Méndez (desde la restauración hasta la dictadura de Franco). Salamanca, 1979.

Nigro, Kirsten F. «The State of the Art: Theater in Madrid». The American Hispanist 4.28 (1978): 2-3, 23.

Olmo, Lauro. Pablo Iglesias/Paulo Iglesias. La Coruña: Ediciós do Castro, 1984. Bilingual edition in Castilian and Galician.

Ortiz de Villajos. Doña Mariana Pineda: su vida; su muerte. Madrid, 1931.

Rodríguez Méndez, José María. Bodas que fueron famosas del Pingajo y la Fandanga. Flor de Otoño. Ed. José Martín Recuerda. Madrid: Cátedra, 1979.

——. Comentarios impertinentes sobre el teatro español. Barcelona, 1972.

——. La incultura teatral en España. Barcelona, 1974.

Ruggeri Marchetti, Magda. «Sobre La detonación de Antonio Buero Vallejo». Boletín de la AEPE (Asociación Europea de Profesores de Español) 20 (Madrid, 1979): 1-8.

Ruiz Ramón, Francisco. «Las arrecogías de Martín Recuerda en U.S.A.» Estreno 6.2 (1980): 4-6.

——. «Introducción al drama histórico contemporáneo», in Estudios de teatro español clásico y contemporáneo. Madrid, 1978. 215-42.

Sastre, Alfonso. El camarada oscuro. Pipirijaina Textos 10 (1979): 10-71.

Zinn, Howard. The Politics of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.

Hispania [Publicaciones periódicas]. Volume 71, Number 1, March 1988