Hey there! I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater
and that’s right, pal, today we’ll be discussing the Golden Age of Spanish drama, and Spaniards
are prolific.
Like tens of thousands of plays prolific.
And we have lots of them!
So hey that’s fun!
We examine the origins and style of Spanish drama, check out its unique theater design
and, uh, cucumber-throwing; we’ll meet a couple of Golden Age literary heavyweights,
and take a closer look at “Life is a Dream,” Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s beautiful,
allegorical mind-mash of a play.
Get your cloaks, your swords, and your pageant wagons ready!
¡Vamos a España!
[INTRO MUSIC]
The Spanish Renaissance starts in the 15th century,
when Isabella of Castile marries Ferdinand II of Aragon,
and humanism really comes into vogue.
You may remember humanism from our Italian Renaissance episode as the idea that earthly
life isn’t just some garbage that happens on the way to heaven, but maybe like, kinda
cool in its own right so ... make a few things and be good to each other, yeah?
Except then, in this case, we immediately get the Spanish Inquisition.
...so....yes, art and literature...
...but also the prosecution of a hundred and fifty thousand and execution of thousands
of Jews and Moors in the name of Christian Orthodoxy.
Which is the opposite of being good to each other.
What this meant for theater was that while England’s stages saw a disconnect from religion,
with plays on spiritual themes explicitly outlawed, in Spain sacred and secular drama
remained closely intertwined.
Most playwrights wrote in both genres.
The most active genre was a religious drama
called the autos sacramentales or sacramental acts.
Autos originated in the late medieval period and have some serious overlap with English
morality plays: they’re allegorical dramas concerned with virtue and vice.
Autos were supposed to focus on the mystery of the Eucharist, or communion, and how bread
and wine become the body and blood of Christ.
But topics varied a lot.
Trade guilds staged plays at first, then cities took over, hiring professional troops and
encouraging playwrights to create new scripts.
In Madrid, which became the capital of Spain in 1560, three or four autos were produced
every year, usually a mix of new plays and revivals.
The plays were performed using elaborate two-story pageant wagons, called carros.
These would parade around the city, pulled by bulls with gilded horns and accompanied
by musicians, jugglers, and giant paper puppets.
When the carros reached a playing site, they were joined by another wagon, which opened
and became the stage.
The autos were performed in Spain until 1765, when–REAL SHOCKER HERE–they were outlawed
for being unholy—too much dancing, too many farcical interludes—too much fun!
While the autos were going strong though, secular drama began to crystallize.
The first important play was not actually… a play.
It was Calisto and Melibea, aka La Celestina, a novel in dialogue written around 1500.
In it, a bachelor enlists a Procuress–aka, a madam–to woo a young, sheltered woman;
the bachelor’s servants kill the madam in a botched sort of doublecross.
The bachelor then falls off a ladder and dies
visiting his love and she commits suicide in despair.
This takes 16 acts; 21 in the revised edition!
So yeah, no one’s gonna be staging that.
But it was widely read, and other writers
were inspired by its mix of high drama and low comedy.
Around the same time, a few Spanish dramatists who’d spent some time in Italy started writing
comedies and pastorals.
These plays were about shepherds and shepherdesses and country life, though were only presented
at the court, so their influence was limited.
But late in the sixteenth century, a professional theater emerged alongside countless new forms.
Spanish playwrights loved new forms.
We’ve got chivalric plays about knights and ladies.
We’ve got plays about the minor nobility.
We got situation comedies, and comedies of manners.
We got mythology plays, and miracle plays, and a whole genre of plays about corpses.
[Mike turns to Yorick] Yeah, I bet you could get a part.
I mean, you may have to work on your range a little bit.
And, ya know, like, delivering lines.
Spain had a pretty unusual theater design: some of the best seats in the house were actually
in ... a house.
The first professional theaters were built
in the 1570s, and they’re called corrales, or courtyards.
Because they were built in courtyards.
The houses on either side were the walls of the theater,
and the middle patio was for standing spectators.
If you had a little more money you could sit on in the gradas,
rows of seats with rooves..or...roofs? rooves? whichever one you like.
Either way, covered. Covers overhead.
In the back of the theater was a snack bar that sold fruit and drinks.
And above it, a gallery where women sat and sometimes threw fruit.
Also cucumbers.
Sometimes, there were police to keep the women from getting too rowdy.
The windows of the houses helped to form private boxes, or aposentos.
Usually, grilles were placed over the windows so that residents couldn’t sneak in, though
some homeowners made special arrangements for box seats.
The boxes were the only places where men and women could sit together.
And even then, they had to prove they were members of the same family, and even then,
the women still usually wore masks.
Audiences were lively and noisy.
If they liked a performance, they would shout “Victor!”
They brought whistles and rattles with them.
Plays were scheduled every day except Saturday, beginning in the afternoon.
They usually featured a bunch of singing and dancing before the action.
There were eight to twelve professional companies licensed by the court.
Most of them had about twenty actors and a few young apprentices.
Women acted, though sometimes there were laws against it.
And the church remained worried about immorality and cross-dressing.
Spain had a LOT of playwrights.
And you're gonna need a lot of playwrights if you’re going
to write thirty thousand plays in a hundred years.
Yeah, you heard right.
That’s one estimate of the Spanish Golden Age or Siglio de Oro.
And guess what: We have most of ‘em!
There are so many that scholars haven’t even studied them all.
It’s like Frank Zappa records, or R.L. Stine novels.
Fans of the Spanish Golden Age are spoiled for choice.
Cervantes, when he wasn’t writing both parts of Don Quixote, wrote some great plays.
So did Tirso de Molina, who gave us our version of the Don Juan legend.
But today we’re going to take a brief look at two dramatists, Felix Lope de Vega and
Pedro Calderon de la Barca.
Lope was born in Madrid in 1562.
Cervantes called him “The Phoenix of Wits,” for his unparalleled output.
He is one of the most prolific literary figures in ALL of history, having written nearly a
thousand plays, of which we have 450.
He also wrote three thousand sonnets.
Shakespeare only wrote 154 - WHAT A SLACKER.
Remember how I said that most Spanish plays were about love and honor?
Yeah, that was because of Lope.
That’s his bag.
He was big into juicy female roles, funny low life characters and suspenseful plots
that magically end happily.
A few of his plays are still performed, including Fuenteovejuna, or “The Sheep Well,” where
some abused villagers come together to kill a rapey ruler.
Calderon, born in 1600, eventually became even more popular than Lope.
We have a hundred of his plays, and eighty of those were autos sacramentales.
For more than thirty years, his autos were
the only ones performed in Madrid, and they are beautiful.
In terms of secular plays, he specialized
in cape and sword comedies and philosophical dramas.
His plays aren’t as light or eventful as Lope’s, but they are more thoughtful and
often more elegant, and they have really beautiful poetry.
Let’s look more closely at one of Calderon’s plays,
1635’s “Life Is a Dream” or La Vida es Sueño.
Let’s dream together, Thought Bubble:
A woman, disguised as a man, is wandering
through the hills of Poland, as you do, when she finds a man chained to a tower.
That beardy guy is Segismundo.
It turns out that he’s the heir to the Polish throne. Congrats!
Meanwhile back at the palace, King Basilio
is conveniently explaining why he had to chain a dude up.
When Segismundo was born, the king received a prophecy that Segismundo would
kill him and destroy the country, so he tried to prevent it.
Haven’t we seen this in Greek tragedy somewhere?
But King Basilio has decided to give Segismundo a chance.
He has a tutor drug Segismundo and carry him to the palace.
When Segismundo wakes up, he’s told that
he’s a prince and should go do some princely things.
It doesn’t go so well.
He gets lustful.
He gets angry.
He throws a servant off of a balcony.
He challenges a nobleman to a duel.
So the king has him sedated again and returned to his tower.
Segismundo wakes up, believing that his time at the palace was just a dream.
He tells his tutor about the dream, and the tutor tells him that even in dreams we have
to try to act nobly and not throw people off balconies.
The people find out about the king’s experiment, and that they have a prince!
They rebel, because succession is super important to them, I guess, and Segismundo gets a chance
for revenge, and his royal right.
But Segismundo spares the king.
So the king, realizing that Segismundo has changed, acknowledges him as a son and heir.
And Segismundo promises to behave with goodness and virtue—asleep or awake.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
At the end, Segismundo says:
What is life?
A frenzy.
What is life?
An illusion, A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is small; For all of life is a dream,
And dreams, are only dreams.
Nice, right?
This is a religious allegory, based on the idea that life is a dream until death wakens
us to a greater life with god.
It’s also an invitation to us in the audience to think about our own lives and how we should
conduct them, whether we’re directing our actions towards an eventual heaven or working
toward making life better here on earth.
Calderon died in 1681, and the Golden Age of Spanish theatre kinda died with him.
But don’t start crying into your mantilla just yet, because next time we’ll drop in
on France, where neoclassicism, based on some
pretty weird readings of Aristotle, is going strong.
Until then… curtain!
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