I've
taken the liberty of lifting this article from the October issue of
Prospect. I hope the author doesn't mind . . .
Spain’s
hidden treasure
Spanish
golden age drama is more than a match for Shakespeare and co., argues James Woodall.
When
the National Theatre stages a play by a 17th-century Spanish friar
this month, it might seem as if a jewel of exquisite rarity were
going on display. To an English-speaking audience, the 16th and 17th
centuries are the era of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and co—the
undisputed master dramatists of their age. Yet for power and sheer
productivity, the Spanish Golden Age—the Siglo de Oro, 1580-1680—is
more than a match. Extant plays in Castilian outnumber, by many
hundreds, all the work of the playwrights of Elizabethan and Stuart
England put together.
Opening
at the National Theatre is one of them. Damned
by Despair,
by Tirso de Molina, is a fascinatingly dense study of criminality and
redemption. It concerns a pious hermit who chooses to test his and
others’ commitment to God; but the Devil leads the hermit astray
and links his fate with that of Enrico, a Neapolitan outlaw. With a
femme fatale adding some glamour, the story becomes an allegory about
who deserves heaven—the contrasting men being, it is thought, two
sides of the playwright himself: one contemplative, one of action.
Frank McGuinness’s taut, colloquial adaptation keeps the play,
clearly of its time, thrillingly contemporary.
Tirso
de Molina was an exceptional figure born at an exceptional moment in
history. In the late 16th century Spain was enriching itself on
magnificent plunder from its transatlantic empire. Painters,
musicians and writers flocked to its relatively new capital, Madrid
(chosen in 1561 over Toledo, just to the south). By the 1620s, the
arts under Philip III were flourishing with a profusion unparalleled
elsewhere in Europe. This was the glittering era of Miguel de
Cervantes, the painter Diego Velázquez, the master playwright Lope
de Vega—a great influence on Tirso—and composer Tomás Luis de
Victoria.
Tirso
joined the religious Order of the Merced in 1600 and led an itinerant
life, including two years in Santo Domingo, and periods of banishment
from Madrid in Seville and Cuenca. Of the 100-plus plays Tirso
probably wrote, around 70 survive. Though little biographical data
about him remains, the reason for his being cast out by the Order—and
despite his nom
de plume—was
almost certainly his profane plays.
This
cleric knew, in his head at least, an unholy amount about the human
libido. An abiding Tirso creation was none other than Don Juan, the
protagonist of The
Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest,
which was first performed around 1616. It provides the template for
the most compelling man in western art, and the most priapic.
What
was going on here—a Catholic priest writing apparently lewd dramas
which were neither censored nor shelved?
There
was a rampant public appetite for drama in imperial Spain. By the
1580s, courtyards—“corrales”—were being used as theatres,
with a platform thrusting out into a space for spectators, similar to
the theatrical environments, open to the sky, that Shakespeare knew.
In Madrid there were two corrales: the Príncipe and the Cruz. Here,
dramas such as those by Lope de Vega—the age’s most prolific
playwright by far—and of course Tirso’s, were performed for
audiences hungry for tales of transgression, sex, revenge and
salvation. Plays flew from these writers’ desks like news scripts.
Like Shakespeare they knew what their punters wanted; and unlike in
Shakespeare’s time, women were not legally barred from acting. This
was real, human stuff—“planks, people and a passion,” to adapt
very loosely a celebrated Lope definition of theatre.
Tirso,
Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca constitute a redoubtable
triumvirate of 17th-century Spanish drama. (Even Cervantes began his
career as a dramatist.) Of the three Tirso had the most acute
insights into human nature. Calderón, who died aged 81 in 1681, was
a great poet, a perfectionist, a philosophical pessimist, and
monastic. His 1630s play, Life
Is a Dream,
with its themes of mental isolation, vengeance and life’s illusory
thinness, is regularly and widely performed.
Not
so the plays of Lope, who might have written some 1,500, of which
around 400 remain and are known to be by him. Through a 60-year
career, he produced plays of intrigue, of honour defiled and
restored, historical dramas, romances and comedies. Some titles,
because they have had occasional outings in English, will be
familiar: Fuenteovejuna,
Punishment
without Revenge,
The
Dog in the Manger.
Though
not a poet of Calderón’s stature—think more Orton crossed with
Ayckbourn—Lope was prodigiously popular in his lifetime. His
industry alone was responsible for the huge business that was Spanish
theatre in the mid-17th century, a fecundity that has never been
matched. For sheer, bold inventiveness only Athens in the 5th century
BC and late-Elizabethan London can rival it.
If
today Lope and Co remain a hard sell, it’s not least because of
patchy translation of their plays. Tirso at the National Theatre this
month is the tip of a gigantic iceberg. If McGuinness or any other
potential translator-adapter out there is keen, consider this: around
another 1,999 Golden Age Spanish plays are available.
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