Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage

Baroque Lorca: An Archaist Playwright for the New Stage defines Federico García Lorca’s trajectory in the theater as a lifelong search for an audience. It studies a wide range of dramatic writings that Lorca created for the theater, in direct response to the conditions of his contemporary industry, and situates the theory and praxis of his theatrical reform in dialogue with other modernist renovators of the stage. This book makes special emphasis on how Lorca engaged with the tradition of Spanish Baroque, in particular with Cervantes and Calderón, to break away from the conventions of the illusionist stage. The five chapters of the book analyze Lorca’s different attempts to change the dynamics of the Spanish stage from 1920 to his assassination in 1936: His initial incursions in the arenas of symbolist and historical drama (, ); his interest in puppetry ( and ) and the two ‘human’ farces and ; the central piece in his project of ‘impossible’ theater (); his most explicitly political play, one that takes the violence to the spectators’ seats (); and his three plays adopting, an altering, the contemporary formula of ‘rural drama’ ( , and ).
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