In Spain for about 700 years, Arabs, Jews and Christians lived together and created a great civilization. This civilization was Arab and Islamic and was remarkably tolerant at a time when, in Europe, non-Christians and Jews were persecuted. The Arabs (or Moors) founded the first universities - the name university is a translation of the Arabic word - and built great cities whose buildings still are among the finest in Spain.

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In Spain for about 700 years, Arabs, Jews and Christians lived together and created a great civilization. This civilization was Arab and Islamic and was remarkably tolerant at a time when, in Europe, non-Christians and Jews were persecuted. The Arabs (or Moors) founded the first universities - the name 'university' is a translation of the Arabic word - and built great cities whose buildings still are among the finest in Spain.

Spanish Drama - Background Dates and Terms

711 - Arab control over all Spain. Arab civilization far in advance of that of Europe. Universities, scholarship technology, great architecture, music, etc. all were to influence Spain. Ideas of chivalry, honor flourished. Great cities, superior to any in europe, were created where Jews and Arabs shared in the culture.The period, also of great Arab and Jewish scholarship. (Ibn.Sinn, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides).

1200: Christian kingdoms of northern Europe unite to drive Arabs out of Spain. Most of Spain reconquered. South eastern Spain remained in Arab hands.
1480 Spanish Inquisition set up to discover and punish heresy

1492. Ferdinand and Isabella unite Spain and expel remaining Arabs.
'Discovery' of 'New World'. Spain begins looting the gold of the Americas, enslaving native population. Arabs and Jews forced to convert to Christianity or be deported.
Spain begins conquest of parts of north Africa.

1550 Spain the most powerful kingdom in Europe

1587 Women first licensed to appear on the stage. Subject of controversy but women remained in acting companies.

1600 Beginning of decline of Spanish empire

Religious drama

Arab occupation prevented widespread religious drama. With recovery of territory, religious drama was an important tool of propaganda. Until 1550 this drama similar to European medieval drama.

1550- autos sacramentales 'sacramental actions'. Associated with Corpus Christi. These plays were a combination of cycle plays and moralities. Performed by trade guilds.

1551-58 City Council of Madrid assumes control of play production.
Professional companies employed. Spain's finest dramatists
write for this religious theater. Troupes tour to other cities.

carros - wagons on which the plays were performed. At first two, then four wagons for each play. Wagons were two-storied, made of wooden frames. Plays presented in city square in front of public buildings.

1647 - 1681 Calderon the sole author of all autos sacramentales performed in Madrid

THE SECULAR DRAMA

1200 Strong influence of Italian theatre. Study of classical drama begins.
commedia dell'arte Italian masked comedy troupes, popular in Spain

corrales Public theatres of the secular drama. Controlled by charitable fraternities. (corrales = courtyards).

1499 First important secular 'drama', The Comedy of Calisto and Melibea .
by Fernando De Rojas (1465-1541)
Actually this was a novel in dialogue form. Not performed, but strongly influenced later dramatists.


Court entertainments

1598 Given regularly at court under Philip III

1621-1665 Major period of court entertainments. Lavish indoor and
outdoor performances

Formula plays:
auto sacramentales
comedias de capa y espada.
comedias de cuerpo.


Major playwrights

Juan del Encina (1469 - 1529) Founder of the Spanish drama.

Lope de Vega, (1562-1635) Spain's first great dramatist, begins to write for the stage. Wrote perhaps 1,500 plays. After a busy political and commercial life, and countless love-affairs, he becomes a priest in 1614.

Tirso de Molina (1584 - 1648 A friar, wrote about 400 plays. Most
famous is El Burlador de Sevilla (The Trickster of Seville) the first Don Juan drama


Calderon de la Barca (1600 - 1681) Becomes a priest in 1651but continues to write for the theater. Writes approximately 200 -plays, mostly for the court theatre. Some argue he is the greatest Spanish dramatist. Others prefer Lope de Vega.
He is the last major dramatist of Spain until Frederico García Lorca in the twentieth century.

Spanish dramatists favored the three-act structure for drama, and did not adhere to the so-called 'rules' of classical drama, of which they were aware.

BACKGROUND TO SPANISH DRAMA.

Q. Where was the first theatre in the New World founded?
A. Lima, Peru.

[At a conference on peace in the middle east, held in Madrid, the Spanish Prime Minister, then Felipe Gonzalez, pointed out that Spain was a very appropriate place for the meeting: for it had been in Spain that, for about 700 years, Arabs, Jews and Christians had lived together and created a great civilization. This civilization was Arab and Islamic and was remarkably tolerant at a time when, in Europe, non-Christians and Jews were persecuted. The Arabs (or Moors) founded the first universities - the name university is a translation of the Arabic word - and built great cities whose buildings still are among the finest in Spain. While the rest of Europe remained a very backward part of the world for centuries, Moorish Spain became a brilliant center of culture, learning, and the arts - except for the art of drama, for Islam prohibited mimetic art. At the universities, Arab and Jewish scholars translated the Greek classics, and Arab scientists advanced beyond the discoveries of classical medicine and physics.

2. This long and powerful hold of the Arab and Islamic world over the Iberian peninsula was bound to have profound effect upon the nature of later Spanish culture and on the character of its people. Spain is unlike the other European nations. Many of its distinctive characteristics e.g. bull-fighting, flamenco dancing, go back to its Moorish past. In the drama, the extreme emphasis on codes of honor, on chivalry, on mysticism, on fantasy, on exaggerated moods of love, from ecstasy to despair, have their parallels, and possibly origins, in Arabic culture and literature.

3. But this Arabic background also was the cause of the contradictions in Spanish culture. For, with the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Spain in 1492 - or their forced conversion - Spain also sought to repudiate its past and to put an exaggerated and dangerous emphasis upon purity of blood and race. The centuries of intermarriages between Arab, Christian and Jew meant that no Spaniard or Portuguese could be 100% sure of his or her so-called purity of blood. Even persecutors of Moors and Jews often had Moorish or Jewish ancestry – as King Ferdinand had. This obsession with family honor and with blood line, is a feature of many of the dramas. And, while RELIGION was forbidden as a subject on the English stage, it was aggressively present on the Spanish.

4. Many Arabs and Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity or else be expelled from the country, pretended to be Christian while privately practicing their own faith. And in order to find out who was genuinely Christian or not, Spain created the Spanish Inquisition. If heretics were discovered, they were publicly humiliated then burned to death in what were called autos da fé - or acts of faith, which were public celebrations. I have read that 10,000 people were burned to death in one year in Seville alone. The conquistadors, therefore, could hardly profess outrage at the sacrifices of the Aztec civilization in Mexico which, on arrival, they proceeded to destroy.

5. Yet Spain was, at the same time, a very brilliant civilization. The age of Cortez, Pizarro and the Inquisition was also the age of great painters like Velàsquez, and El Greco;of the great writers Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderon de la Barca, of the mystics, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila.

6. The period of drama that stretches from Cervantes, who wrote thirty plays, to Calderon, who wrote two hundred, has been called the Golden Age of Spanish Drama, and it can only be compared to the period in England between Marlowe and John Ford. This Golden Age of Drama arose at a time when Spain itself, unlike Elizabethan/Jacobean England, was passing its peak of power. It was the single most powerful nation in Europe, but it was on the verge of economic collapse: much of this due to the false economy that was created by Spain's plunder of the New World. This plunder provided individuals with unlimited funds for a while, but discouraged creating a native industry.

And, as if to ensure that the economy would be given no chance, in 1609 all the Moriscos in the country, that is, the Arabs who had converted to Christianity, were forced to leave Spain. As they were precisely the most industrious segment of the population, the Spanish economy was dealt a death blow.

At the same time, the obsession with purity of blood, of being 'noble' meant that most professions were considered impossibly demeaning: Spanish nobles, and they were very numerous,, were notorious for having, at the same time, absolutely no funds and an inexhaustible stock of pride. Much of this is the subject of the plots of the plays, especially the "cape and sword" comedies. It made for very good dramatic plots, of wounded honor, of revenge, of chivalrous sentiments, but it was ruinous for the Spanish economy.

At the end of this period, in the early 18th. century, Spain's power was finished. The 18th. century British statesman, Edmund Burke, was to call Spain a great whale stranded on the beach of Europe: that is, expiring helplessly.

7. But, before it expired, it created a very unique literature. Spanish literature contains the two of the greatest archetypes of modern literature - Don Quixote and Don Juan. The gift for creating archetypes, figures who represent universal rather than individual characteristics, that keep recurring in the history of the race, may come from a way of looking at everyday reality as not truly real: that true reality lies behind the world of appearances. The Greeks , who thought this way, created a theater of myths and masks. Platonic philosophy continued the idea. And, from what little I have read so far, it seems to have been true of Spanish culture, which could dismiss its own poverty-stricken world as of little importance while seeing that the only importance lay in the great universal drama dictated by God. This is the theme of one of Calderon's plays, The Great Theatre of the World where everyone of earth, from King to Beggar, is already given his/her role to play in Heaven before their birth, and are then judged as to how they performed in God's theatre of the world. This way of thinking will help you understand Calderon's Life Is A Dream This idea goes beyond Prospero's statement that "we are such things as dreams are made on/And our little life is rounded with a sleep”. In Calderon's case, it means that his plays are forms of allegory, where the stage action is merely a 'figure' for a larger action. Where confusions on earth will become clarities in heaven.

Don Quixote expresses the Spanish propensity for fantasy, for escaping from reality into a dream world: Don Juan converts obsessive eroticism into a metaphysical rebellion against God. He is the erotic version of DR. FAUSTUS. Don Juan had more mistresses than Lope de Vega wrote plays. (1,003 in Spain alone, according to Leporello in Don Giovanni and he is equally active all over Europe) (Lope's total of plays is about 1,500: though his tally of mistresses was also impressive). Don Juan lived in Seville, and Seville, together with the capital of Spain, Madrid, (then a huge metropolis of over 400,000 people) were considered the two most dissolute cities in Europe. "The most immoral and frolicsome" one of my sources notes. In odd combination with an intense and other-worldly mysticism such as we will find in Life Is A Dream, this was also a very down to earth and dissolute culture. Cervantes has presented us with a similar contradiction in the two figures, the idealist, Don Quixote and his pragmatic yet gullible servant, Sancho Panza.

LACK OF DRIVE TOWARDS A REALISTIC DRAMATURGY
In contrast to the English drama, Spain retained a powerful set of theatrical conventions derived from the medieval world view and its theatre. These conventions had a vitality that had been forfeited by the English drama and so we find them strongly present.. Spanish dramatists did not have to invent a ‘secular space’ and displace the religious elements with secular equivalents. The customs and rituals of the church, influenced it to remain more formal, ‘brilliant’ ‘artificial’ and ceremonial.

English translations of Spanish drama tend to flatten out the structure, to put it all in one meter (iambic pentameter) and so miss the transitions, musical accompaniments, etc. In the original, the Spanish meters are varied and elaborately rhymed.

The Theater
1. During the Golden Age of Spanish drama, the Spanish public was theatre-crazy. For one thing, the theatre, like cinema and T.V. today, created a fantasy world in which the public could escape the actual misery of everyday life.. Every major city had its theatre companies (unlike Britain and France) and the actors and actresses were worshipped and followed, just as film stars were in the days of Valentino and Garbo. These actors and actresses earned enormous salaries. Maria Calderóna, the actress and mistress of King Philip IV., earned a salary comparable to a major film star's today.

Apart from a few occasions, there was surprisingly little friction between the Church and the theatre companies. One reason for this was that, from the beginning, the theatre was associated with religious organizations and charities, called 'sodalities'.

9. The majority of theatre companies were poor, consisting only of travelling groups three or four actors, a couple of benches and boards laid across them to make a stage - much like the setting up the mountebank stage in Volpone. A couple of curtains, for changing behind, might be the only other features. Cervantes claimed that his entire theatrical property could be carried in one bag.

Cervantes describes a typical staging :
It consisted of four benches arranged around a square space.
Six boards were laid over the benches so that the stage was raised
four spans high above the ground. The stage setting was an
old curtain that could be drawn to one side by two cords and
provided a sort of dressing room. The musicians stood
behind the curtain and sang any old ballad without guitar
accompaniment.

Travellers from other countries were always amazed at the poverty of the Spanish theatre props for a country where drama was so popular. It was really a form of street theater, somewhat like the San Francisco Mime Troupe, or the Brechtian Lehrstücke where the spectators were happy to use their imaginations instead of requiring scenery.

The more established companies would perform in corrales - these were courtyards, belonging to some religious organization, consisting of the courtyard, or pit area, where the male members of the audience would stand, and closed off upper sections, the balconies, where the women were segregated. Performances were in the afternoons, only, and had to end at sunset.

Also in the audience, in the pit, groups of playgoers, known as 'mosqueteros' would assemble and would kill a play if they did not like it - like the opening scene in Cyrano de Bergerac where Cyrano stops the performance of an actor he despises. In this case the theatre is French, but the situation is similar!

Even in these corrales, the stage was extremely primitive - very narrow, with at most a painted backcloth for scenery. For upper level or balcony scenes, the actual balcony of the courtyard would be used. The whole illusion of the play had to be created entirely by the actor and the words he spoke.

In Madrid, however, the royal court, influenced by the Italian theater, had a theatre constructed in 1607, and, eventually, the public began to ask for more elaborate staging. A play like Life Is A Dream (1630) probably had simple, popular stagings and an elaborate court presentation – much like Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in London that transferred from the popular playhouses to the Court.

THE COSTUMES, were quite luxurious, supplying one element of fantasy which the audience wanted. Maria Calderona's costumes for a performance could cost seven times more than Lope de Vega got for writing the play. And there was an unceasing demand for plays, as in the Elizabethan theatre, Audiences refused to see repeats and required a new play each time. This will explain the astonishing productive capacity of a dramatist like Lope de Vega, who must hold the world's record at least one thousand-five hundred plays. Four hundred and seventy have survived.

Formula Plays
Lope managed this amazing output by writing plays to well-tried formulae. Three main kinds of formula plays existed:

1. autos sacramentales.
2. comedias de capa y espada (cloak and sword comedies)
3, comedies de cuerpo (situation plays).

This classification into three types was mainly for the convenience of producers who needed to know what actors to employ and which costumes and settings would be appropriate for the performance. With formula plays, actors could learn their roles very quickly, as they fitted into certain 'types' - more like the practice of actor-managers in nineteenth century melodramas than the commedia del'arte practice of improvisation.

Each play by Lope de Vega would consist of 3,000 lines on average, and would take two and a half hours to perform. The plays would be in three acts, and would mix comic and tragic elements, as we see in Fuente Ovejuna.

Lope insisted that, unlike the French, he totally ignored the so-called classical rules of drama when he sat down to write, and this is true of the other Spanish writers, too. They are as independent-minded as were the British. They were more concerned to give the public what it wanted than to make drama conform to academic ideal forms. For this reason, Spanish drama of the Golden Age is still performed today as a popular drama.

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