Conventional histories of literature examine the literary qualities of dramatic texts, yet the interrelationship between writing and theatre, between two fundamentally different forms of human creativity, is also a valid concern. Theatre implies a live performance, an essentially evanescent and fluid communal activity; writing embodies a far more stable and enduring personal enterprise. The relationship between writing and performance, between scriptura and theatrica was particularly complex in the Middle Ages when theatrum was broadly defined as a place for sights and sounds, and theatrica embraced a wide range of theatrical activities often lacking a verbal script. Yet almost everything we know about the medieval theatre we owe to medieval writing. Some texts are authentic playscripts incorporated into miscellanies. Few such texts survive, however, because directors normally copied the actors’ roles on scraps of parchment that eventually went astray. Other texts were intentionally reworked in the process of being transcribed, while still other writings contain not the dialogue but a description of the stage props and costumes, financial costs of mounting the show, audience response, or merely the time and place of the performance. The elite nature of scriptura also means that many popular forms of theatrica have often gone unrecorded or appear in negative appraisals.

Colorful church rituals including liturgical dramas have endured better than most medieval performances because they were recorded in medieval service books, although the dramatic scripts did not always survive unscathed. In Catalonia strong ties to Italy and France and the shift already in the eighth century from the Visigothic rite to the Roman–French encouraged the assimilation and development of church drama.

In an essay in El furgón de cola (“The Caboose,” 1976) on the situation of the Spanish writer in the 1960s, Juan Goytisolo (1931–) wrote, “la literatura española contemporánea es un espejo de la lucha oscura, humilde y cotidiana del pueblo español por su libertad perdida” (“contemporary Spanish literature is a mirror of the dark, humble, daily struggle of the Spanish people for its lost liberty”). While Goytisolo’s views on the literary culture of the Franco period would change in the waning years of the dictatorship, this statement reflects a widely held sentiment on the part of a variety of Spanish intellectuals during the three and a half decades of the regime. Even those writers who had not sided with the Second Republic – Dionisio Ridruejo (1912–1975), José María Pemán (1898–1981), Camilo José Cela (1916–2002), Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1898–1988) are a few examples – were confronted with the daunting obstacles to freedom of expression that had been written into Spanish law. For Goytisolo these prohibitions amounted to what he called “el toro de la censura” (“the censorship bull”), a bull that had gored many Spanish writers regardless of their literary skills.

It would be reductive, however, to subsume all the literature of that period – prose, poetry, essays, drama – into an all-encompassing category of a committed open resistance to the government’s impositions. Resistance to the dominant ideology took many forms, often corresponding to the transformations of Spanish economics and politics. Within this pattern the most important developments for literary culture revolved around the censorship laws.

Is there such a thing as a literature in exile? Writers such as Camilo José Cela (1916–2002) or Francisco Umbral (1935–), both of whom remained in Spain during the Franco years, have contested the value of the 1939 Spanish émigrés’ legacy. Francisco Ayala (1906–), one of the most representative intellectuals to emigrate to the Americas (Argentina, Puerto Rico, United States), upon his return to Spain voiced his doubts about exile literature and separated his intraexile or supraexile contributions in an allegorical mode – La cabeza del cordero (“The Lamb’s Head,” 1949), Los usurpadores (“The Usurpers,” 1949), and Historia de Macacos (“Macacos’ Tales,” 1955) – from any exilic connections. In post-Franco Spain, to disregard exile followed the stream of consensual oblivion regarding the memory of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Ayala, a sociologist by training, understood that in order to be considered within the hegemonic cultural canon in democratic Spain, exile labels had to be rejected.

Still, his position did not reflect the view of most of the individuals who joined the extensive diaspora following the War in 1939. Most intellectuals did not have the chance to return and live through the post-Franco era, nor to view how their history slowly became politically “correct” in the late nineties, particularly when the cultural apparatus of the state signaled that exile was no longer a source of controversy, due to the cushion furnished by chronological distance and the vanishing of the protagonists. More recently, novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina (1956–) and critic Miguel García Posada (1944–) suggested that neither a formal nor a generational justification identified exile as a segregated area of production or study.

Lope de Vega’s life, throughout most of its seventy-two years, was notoriously turbulent and riddled with contradictions. Baptized in Madrid on 6 December 1562, he was the son of an embroiderer from La Montaña, undoubtedly one of the many craftsmen who were flocking to Spain’s new capital. Lope’s much-mocked pretensions to noble lineage were certainly unfounded, but twentieth-century suggestions of converse antecedents remain unproven too. Having studied, after its foundation in 1572, at the local Jesuit college, between 1577 and 1581 he attended the University of Alcalá (and may have studied later at Salamanca). In 1583 he saw active service in an expedition to the Azores.

The next few years were marked by a passion that would haunt him forever after, for Elena Osorio (often Filis in his verse), the daughter of an actor–manager for whom he wrote some of his earliest plays. Eventually supplanted by a rich and noble rival, he spread savage poetic libels, for which, early in 1588, he was exiled, for eight years from Madrid and two from Castile. Later that year he abducted and married Isabel de Urbina (Belisa), and enlisted to join the Armada, though he may not have left the peninsula. His banishment took the pair to Valencia, to Toledo, and for some years after 1591 to the cultivated court of the fifth Duke of Alba, near Salamanca.

The specificity of the Catalan Avant-Garde can be explained in terms of the tensions that defined the situation of Catalan writers in the first decades of the twentieth century. The two main axes of these tensions were the strong class polarization and the polarization Catalonia–Spain. A third axis, less conspicuous but crucial for the artist’s self-consciousness, was constituted by the range of aesthetic sensibility. Here we find the division between artists or connoisseurs and philistines (or pompiers, to use the prevailing terminology). Never mind that this division was internal to the bourgeoisie; it turned out to be crucial for the appearance of the Avant-Garde. The latter depended on the existence of a well-defined aesthetic milieu whose nomos it could transgress in the name of the sensibility that generated the milieu. The reason for this double game of affirmation and destruction is simple. Art cannot be assailed from outside its own space without the attacker becoming a philistine. Thus the paradox obtains that the insensitive philistine, whom the modernistes had ridiculed in the shape of Rusiñol’s Senyor Esteve (“Mr. Esteve”), now came under fire for defending art – socially legitimated art, that is.

The specificity of the Avant-Garde in Catalonia, as in the rest of the Spanish state, emanated from the narrowness of art’s autonomy. The precariousness of this social space for art, which the modernistes had striven to create, accounts for the “tameness” of an Avant-Garde that could not defect from the commitment to forge a differentiated aesthetic sphere. From this perspective, the Avant-Garde appears as an extension of Modernisme.

Court, language, and empire in the age of Charles V

During the rule of Charles V, Spanish literature achieves an international dimension through the work of Archbishop Fray Antonio de Guevara (1474–1546). His attempt to connect with a new reading public outside restricted humanistic groups accounts for Guevara’s immense popularity in Spain and Europe, and makes him into a writer who paved the way for the modern essay and the novel. Guevara’s chosen topics are usually entrenched in Renaissance culture, but their didacticism becomes subverted by a lighthearted demeanor, the use of apocryphal sources, or the overwhelming presence of rhetorical devices. Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (“Contempt for Life at Court and a Praise for Life in the Country,” 1539) exemplifies his ability to play with a constellation of motives mainly stemming from the medieval controversies about courtly life. Here the author’s argumentation annuls the traditional dichotomy announced in the title; his apparent diatribe against the court in favor of country life finally contains a somewhat resigned admission that, with all its evils, only the court grants a certain degree of individual autonomy.

Other authors depart from Guevara’s rhetorical self-consciousness. Juan de Valdés (1510–1541) wrote in Italy the Diálogo de la lengua (“Dialogue About Language”), which confirms the rise of the vernacular Castilian language as a vehicle of culture. By defending the autonomy of his native language, Valdés aligns himself with Pietro Bembo (1470–1547) or Baldassare Castiglione (1474–1529), who in different ways reveal a similar concern for the Italian language. In Spain, the Gramática de la lengua castellana (“Grammar of Castilian Language,” 1492), written by Antonio de Nebrija (1444?–1522) constitutes a key reference, but, unlike Nebrija, Valdés follows a non-prescriptive approach.

Filled with social tensions and political turmoil, the last years of Franco’s régime mark the demise of engaged and social poetry and see the beginning of the strong leadership of a group of poets called the novísimos (“newest”), even while a large number of contemporary poets maintained their own independent voices and particular styles. It was José María Castellet who started using the term novísimos in 1970 in his anthology Nueve novísimos poetas españoles (“Nine Newest Spanish Poets”), in which he includes some of the most distinguished poets of the time: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939–2003), Antonio Martínez Sarrión (1939–), José María Álvarez (1942–), Félix de Azúa (1944–), Pedro Gimferrer (1945–), Guillermo Carnero (1947–), Leopoldo María Panero (1948–), Vicente Molina Foix (1946–), and Ana María Moix (1947–). From the very beginning this group sought to overcome the primacy of social poetry. The sense of social and political engagement and the hegemony of Realism had brought to poetry a certain platitudinous tone that urgently called for renewal. The new poetic language was sensorial, refined, and acquired a certain aesthetic primacy; as Castellet states, “la forma del mensaje es su verdadero mensaje” (“the form of the message is its true content”). Mass culture (movies, detective stories, rock music, popular myths), the camp sensibility (as defined and popularized in Spain by Susan Sontag), and all kinds of literary, historic, and artistic references enrich the poems of the novísimos, which reflected the improved economic and cultural standards of the country. These poets believed that art should not serve any practical purpose and they rebelled against the use of poetry as a weapon to achieve social or political change.

Nineteenth-century Spanish women writers were hampered by limited access to the means of production coupled with a reigning attitude that a woman’s mission was to service and strengthen the family unit by working within the confines of the domestic sphere. Yet despite the fact that they largely embraced the conservative and nationalist ideology of their era, a substantial number of women were sufficiently ambitious to establish their literary reputation even when faced with hostile writing environments. According to Íñigo Sánchez-Llama, early and mid nineteenth-century women writers were not as marginalized as we imagine them to be today; especially those who embraced the reigning Neo-Catholic ideology were able to participate fully in Spanish popular culture ushered in by the expansion of the literary magazine and book trade. This is because Isabeline society, unlike that following the revolution of 1868, held a less “virile” notion of writing that permitted the canonization of a substantial group of writers whose piety, patriotism, and virtue were above reproach. If they are ignored and misunderstood today it is partially because of the rejection of their Neo-Catholic ideology by the generations that followed them. Nevertheless, publishing success both before and after the 1868 revolution implied a delicate balance between professionalism and the celebration, or at least acknowledgment, of the dominant sexual ideologues who looked askance at women’s careers in the public sphere. Women seeking validation as writers commonly launched their careers by writing lyric poetry, a mode of expression, according to Susan Kirkpatrick, that afforded greater latitude than prose in which to voice dissatisfactions and desires and which consequently played a significant role in modernizing Spanish society by allowing women to constitute themselves as public figures.

Auden liked systems. He liked to categorise and pigeonhole, but invariably with the awareness that all systems and categories only work on their own terms, that the systematiser is implicated in his creations, that consciousness, while freeing us to explain ourselves to ourselves and to each other, also imprisons us in the explanations we have framed. There can be no one to stand outside and watch (except God). Hence the provisionality, audible in all his poetry if carefully listened to, of the various systems of belief he entertained one after the other, Freudian, Marxist, liberal humanist, even and finally Christian - although this last came to seem to Auden the one that gave him the most room to manoeuvre. Such freedom within restraint characterises also, and especially, Auden's attitude to poetry. Poetic form may be arbitrary, but within its limits and limitations it permits, or rather induces, quest and discovery, although the object of discovery, especially for the Christian Auden, is always out of reach.

A comprehensive treatment of the subject of this chapter would involve much of what made Auden an influential writer, conceivably touching on nearly every poem, play and libretto he wrote, as well as a fair proportion of his prose, published and unpublished. Little of his writing from the 1920s and 1930s does not involve 'desire', even restricted to its psychological meanings, and with his extensive reading of Sigmund Freud, D. H. Lawrence and Georg Groddeck, among others, Auden did much to adapt psychoanalytic thought for Anglo-American modernism. If he wrote some of the most memorable love poetry of his time, this also constituted a sophisticated engagement with a body of erotic and Romantic writing stretching from Plato through Petrarch and Dante to Shakespeare. Along with T. S. Eliot, he ranks as one of the most important English-language religious poets of the last hundred years, for whom the interrelation of Eros and Agape was an abiding concern. It is easier, in other words, to say what Auden wrote that does not impinge on love, sex and desire, than what does.

The radical force of these very first words of Letters from Iceland (1937, p. 9) still impresses; their insistence on group authorship is in keeping with Auden's left-wing politics of the time and markedly out of step with the predominant individualism of twentieth-century travel writing. Even in terms of its formal authorship, Letters from Iceland is a joint composition by two writers, as was Auden's other travel book, Journey to a War (1939).

The significance of Auden's co-authored works has been underlined by Stan Smith, who identifies them as those ‘which most conspicuously insist on their status as texts, not representations of the real, but aware of their own artifice . . . They are also the works which most directly confront the artifice of a capitalist society in crisis’ (Smith, p. 109). Auden’s travel books were written in a decade when social and economic insecurity and political polarities saw ‘abrupt and important changes in outlook and affiliation’; and when disorder and instability (for the middle class in particular) ‘led to the radicalization of many intellectuals, and a crisis in outlook [that was] reflected in every aspect of art and culture’.

Groups and poetics

For years literary historians have reluctantly used concepts such as “Generation of 1927” or “Grupo del 27,” and “Generation of 1936” to refer to the poetry of the first half of the twentieth century in Spain. Perhaps it is more exact to refer (following María Zambrano’s designation) to a “momento histórico” (“historic moment”), that is an impressive convergence that brought together certain individuals and certain poetic modalities which produced publications and public events which had a strong impact on the formation of a literary canon. The 1920s and 1930s were the peak of a period of intense literary and artistic renovation, a period which has justly been called a “Silver Age” in Spanish culture, abruptly interrupted by the Civil War.

Overall we can distinguish a few characteristics which define the moment. One is the vindication (and mixing together) of figures of the Spanish poetic tradition such as Góngora and Garcilaso, Bécquer and Darío, and of course the major poet of the first decades of the century, Juan Ramón Jiménez. All of these poets were considered to be models of a certain artistic purity and interest in poetical form. This implied that new authors were attracted to the Avant-Garde and experimentation with form, and the consolidation of a model taken from Stéphane Mallarmé: the “Book” as a way to organize poetry collections. Some of the new authors had a genuine sense of verse and rhythm (Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández). Others wrote luminous intellectual constructs where everyday life shines under new light (Pedro Salinas, Jorge Guillén).

Much of what was written, published, and read in early modern Spain could be described as “religious literature” – over 3,000 books, by one estimate. The figures for subcategories of religious works are similarly impressive. Melquíades Andrés Martín’s recent history of mysticism in Golden Age Spain includes a bibliography of 1,200 “books of spirituality” written in Latin, Catalan, and Spanish; 444 individual hagiobiographies were published between 1480 and 1700, a figure that does not include re-editions, popular collections of saints’ lives, or the 507 works on the Virgin Mary. The total figure for “religious literature” would be even greater if we included popular religious printing (inexpensive broadsheets, pamphlet-sized catechisms, and primers, almost all of which have been lost); farsas (short mystery plays) and autos sacramentales (one-act plays celebrating the Eucharist); ecclesiastical publications (Holy Scripture and works of the church fathers, works on canon law, sermons, and guides for the clergy); devotional poetry; and imaginative literature such as Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and Cervantes’ Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigisumunda (both narratives of Christian redemption), or the many chivalric and pastoral novels allegorized “a lo divino” (“in the divine style”). Suffice it to say that religious literature, even when the most narrow definition of this term is applied, enjoyed wide diffusion. Inventories of sixteenth-century printer–booksellers reveal stocks of tens of thousands of religious works available for the cost of a few maravedís – a fraction of an unskilled laborer’s daily wage. Although few of these works, even the “best-sellers” of their day, form part of our contemporary academic canon, literary historians such as Keith Whinnom and Elizabeth Rhodes have begun to recognize the need to understand their cultural significance and the reasons for their appeal for the men and women of early modern Spain.

Few twentieth-century Spanish minds match those of Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968), José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955), and Eugeni D’Ors (1881–1954). Spanish critics situate Pidal in the Generation of 1898, and Ortega and D’Ors in the Generation of 1914. Non-Castilian by birth like most authors of the Generation of 1898, born around the same date as they, like them Pidal glorified Castile, its landscape, inhabitants, history, and traditions. Ortega and D’Ors, like other coevals, specialized in rigorous theory and produced their first great works around 1914. However, generation theory is losing ground in criticism of Spanish literature: invented in France and Germany, the theory does not apply well to a nation with high illiteracy at the time and a tiny intelligentsia in intimate contact, engaged in intellectual cross-fertilization, ages and birthplaces notwithstanding. Ortega himself, one of the inventors of the notion of 1898, in early writings classified himself as a member of that very generation. Concerned about Spanish decadence, he wrote on similar themes. Probably more universal and precise is the classification of all three as Modernists: all three appreciate modernity in their métiers over tradition, and place tradition at the service of the new; all three evince the impact of the crisis between traditional religion and post-Darwinian science; finally, all three – amidst the crisis of religious ideals – apotheosize creative efforts in their own fields of endeavor.

Cervantes’ Don Quijote was published in 1605. Its immense popularity in Spain, which quickly spread to other European countries – for example, via Thomas Shelton’s (1612) and César Oudin’s (1614) translations of Part 1 into English and French respectively – stimulated Cervantes into adding a second part in 1615. In the seventeenth century, both in Spain and outside, it was generally perceived as a robust, hilarious work of comedy. The coarse continuation of Cervantes’ story by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (dates unknown) (Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1614) typifies the tone. This is not the only way in which, from the viewpoint of posterity, the reactions of Spaniards in this period to this work seem somewhat odd and superficial. Despite scores of imitations of particular incidents in it, or allusions to it, in subsequent literature, the only Spanish writers who systematically treat it as a model of fictional prose-narrative are Avellaneda and Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo (1581–1635). In this respect, it would not become a canonical paradigm until the eighteenth century. Moreover, despite the high esteem in which it was held by Spanish men of letters, amongst them great writers like Tirso de Molina and Calderón, it was never quite elevated to classic status, as were the works of Garcilaso, Alemán, Fernando de Rojas, Góngora, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Calderón. In a way, Cervantes himself contributes to this result. In the prologue of Don Quijote Part 1, he makes a virtue of playing up his novel’s risibility and popular appeal, and mocks the didactic gravity of contemporary works of literary entertainment – features which, in the eyes of Spanish litterati, redeemed two other masterpieces of comic prose, Celestina and Guzmán de Alfarache.

No one alive today has significant personal memories of Juan Valera (1824–1905), Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833–1891), José María de Pereda (1833–1906), or Leopoldo Alas “Clarín” (1852–1901). No active scholar or critic can recall Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920), Narcís Oller (1845–1930), Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921), Jacinto Octavio Picón (1852–1923), Armando Palacio Valdés (1853–1938), or José Ortega Munilla (1856–1922). By contrast there are still great numbers of persons, in Spain and abroad, whose literary consciousness was formed by generations of novelists, critics, and teachers hostile or, at best, indifferent to much of Spanish culture between the late seventeenth century and the Restoration period. Especially unattractive to these Modernists, Vanguardists, and Postmodernists was and continues to be the Realist imperative to create socio-mimetic fictions centered on the typical or representative people, manners, conflicts, and particular times, places, and settings of regional and national life.

Hence, against the historically and societally homologous fictions of Scott, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray, Tolstoy, Twain, and the Spanish Realists, there arose early in the twentieth century an opposed way of thinking about all genres of art. Since then this mindset has remained potent. A reminder of its prestige and force was the October 2001 death of the last surviving Spanish Surrealist, Eugenio F. Granell (b. 1914). In a necrological piece in the Madrilenian newspaper La Razón, César Antonio Molina cited from Granell’s essay, “Apuntes sobre el realismo artístico” (“Notes on Artistic Realism,” 26 October): “La realidad mayor en el arte es una independencia absoluta de la vida cotidiana y sus acciones. El arte está fuera de lo diario al hacerse eterno – al hacerse arte y al margen de lo accidental” (“The greatest reality in art is an absolute independence from daily life and its actions. Art is beyond the daily upon making itself eternal – upon making itself art and beyond what is accidental”).