Like the field of political power, Spain’s theatre was a site of struggle, during the first decades of the twentieth century, between forces of continuity and renewal. The latter term suggests a critical assessment of the theatre as a stagnant institution, one of the main issues in a long debate over the “crisis of the theatre,” perhaps the clearest manifestation of the battle to reshape the theatrical field. Critics and playwrights alike took sides, often depending on whether they profited from the status quo, which was governed by commercial interests. The distinction between theatre as business and theatre as art was basic to the language of reform and to the many experiments launched by individuals or small groups during this period.

The many calls for renewal sought to bring Spain’s stage up to date (European ventures, like Jacques Copeau’s Vieux Colombier and the Moscow Art Theatre, were evident models) by promoting at least four advances: (1) expansion of the stage’s thematic range to include questions of sexuality, social justice, and institutional oppression; (2) changes in the economic structure of the free commercial market in favor of state-funded programs, collectives, or companies supported by community subscription; (3) modernization of stagecraft to take advantage of expressive possibilities offered by mechanical innovations like electric lighting and rotating stages; and (4) the staging of Avant-Garde plays in and beyond the small art-theatres, whether by Spanish or foreign companies. These goals were shared by a small but significant coterie of authors, directors, actors, actresses, and critics who occasionally joined forces to launch experimental programs.

Noucentisme designates the dominant cultural movement in Catalonia from 1906, the year of Solidaritat Catalana (the Unified Catalanist Front), to 1923, when the political, cultural, and economic entente broke down under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Noucentisme is often understood merely to characterize the ideological support given by a group of artists and intellectuals to the Lliga Regionalista de Catalunya. Under the leadership of Enric Prat de la Riba (1870–1917), this reformist party created the Mancomunitat, an embryonic autonomous government. Through a dexterous use of the meager competencies and resources of this institution, Prat developed an inchoate infrastructure with a view to modernizing Catalonia. This entailed, among other things, consolidating its industrial economy. It would be misleading, however, to identify the Lliga narrowly with class interests. As Joan Fuster remarks, to speak about this party as if it were the political equivalent of the Catalan bourgeoisie would be inaccurate, for the bourgeoisie that threw in its lot with Cambó’s (1876–1947) and Prat’s regionalism was not the same bourgeoisie that followed Alfonso Sala after Primo de Rivera’s coup in September 1923.

Prat tackled the difficult task of building proto-governmental structures in a society that was devoid of political power. Lacking the legal basis and the means for actual governance, he laid the foundations of a modern civic society by intervening in the areas of education, technical expertise, and culture. The noucentistes saw themselves as purveyors of the idealism required for an ambitious project steered by the politicians and energized by the country’s economic leadership.

In one of his very last poems, 'A Thanksgiving', Auden directed a wry backward glance over his life, for each stage of which, so he claimed, he chose to be directed by different masters. At first, when moor and woodland were sacred, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Frost were to hand. Once love struck in, Yeats and Graves proved a help. Then, without warning, 'the whole / Economy suddenly crumbled: / there, to instruct me, was Brecht'. And when Hitler and Stalin did 'hair-raising things', Kierkegaard, Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis 'guided me back to belief'. This necessarily concertinas a wide stretch of years. More interestingly, it avoids mention of the name that, during the period of the crumbling economy, meant at least as much to Auden as Brecht did - Karl Marx. This is not to say that Auden was ever a wholly committed Marxist. Though in 1932 he wrote a poem called, on first publication, 'A Communist to Others', he never joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, nor did he waste time on flat, ephemeral pamphlets or boring meetings. Nevertheless, during the 1930s he made much use of Marx's ideas, as he admits in New Year Letter, where at one point he notes that 'We hoped; we waited for the day / The State would wither clean away, / Expecting the Millennium / That theory promised us would come. / It didn't.' Stan Smith has noted that the 'abrupt reversal on the enjambment enacts the dialectical process, setting up an antithesis of theory and event' (Smith, p. 135). This is not therefore so much a dismissal of Marx as a recognition that his theory is itself part of the dialectical process in which 'we' believe.

Auden discusses only two theoretical systems at any length, Freudianism and Marxism, though he does glance at myth criticism. This leaves out two important contemporaries, the rhetorically based formalism known as New Criticism, and the linguistically based formalism which runs from Saussure through Jakobson to structuralism, Lacanian psychology, poststructuralism and deconstruction. In the period since Auden's death, critical trends have put less emphasis on such text-based theories and favoured the greater historical and social orientation of post-Marxism, cultural poetics, reader response, critical discourse theory and multiculturalism. While the descendants of Saussure's linguistic formalism can produce valuable readings, they require the acquisition of a highly technical apparatus and, in the case of Lacan and Derrida, the conquest of perplexing idiolects. To avoid equally perplexing because overly compressed explanations, this group must be relegated to passing references. More accessible are the culturally based approaches of the last three decades. Because these readings derive many of their premises from Freud and Marx, Auden's comments on those authors can furnish a basis for drawing inferences about the later theories. That leaves New Criticism, which Auden seldom addressed and might be set aside, except that it dominated literary studies in America for most of the poet's lifetime. On the related grounds of supporting enquiry into recent critical thought and illuminating the relatively hostile theoretical environment in which Auden worked, this introduction will focus on his three main contemporaries, New Criticism, Freudianism and Marxism.

From their earliest instances, literary canons have been linked to the concept of nation and to nation-building practices. In ancient societies, they were in themselves signs of the power of sovereigns, and their contents scripts for the performance of collective identities organized around these sovereigns. While Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, has postulated premodern social orders as governed by vertical power relations characterized by the threat of force – the “power of death” – the qualification can be made that, even then, such relations were enabled by the existence of shared codes generating loyalty and preventing rebellion. Among these, literature was preeminent, and, as Itamar Even-Zohar has suggested, it remained so in the making of modern nations according to “the European model.” This type of nation-building, of which Spain is one of the earliest and most successful examples, depends on creating “socio-cultural cohesion,“ vitally through the production of a standardized language that will be recognized as common by a collection of relatively heterogeneous peoples, and the ensuing production of texts in that language. These become a common patrimony for all individuals in that community, and in turn are taken to express the original and differentiating factors of their nationality.

While the grounds for the establishment of such a modern national literary system go back to King Alfonso X’s (1221–1284) designation of Castilian as the shared language of culture, it is the eighteenth century that sees the outset of a veritable historical consciousness with regard to Spanish literature. Intellectuals of this century gradually implement a separation between classical or universal and Spanish literature.

Larra (1809–1837), the best journalist in nineteenth-century Spain and one of the century’s greatest prose stylists, was the son of an afrancesado physician who emigrated to France in 1813. Upon his return to Spain four years later, he enrolled in various courses of study without ever completing a degree. He founded two newspapers – El Duende Satírico del Día (“The Satiric Sprite of the Day,” 1828) and El Pobrecito Hablador (“The Poor Little Chatterer,” 1832) – and published numerous articles in other newspapers: La Revista Española (“The Spanish Journal,” December 1832 – January/February 1835), El Correo de las Damas (“The Ladies’ Journal,” June 1833 – May 1834), El Observador (“The Observer,” October–December 1834), El Español (“The Spaniard,” November 1835 –February 1837), El Mundo (“The World,” December 1836 – January 1837), and El Redactor General (“The General Editor,” December 1836). The wit and mordacity of his satire drew wide attention and high public praise (he was also well compensated for his work). Larra wrote one historical novel, El doncel de don Enrique el doliente (“Don Enrique the Sorrowful’s Young Nobleman,” 1834), one play, Macías (1834), and many adaptations and translations of European plays, but it is his newspaper work which is most remembered today. His writing, marked by both historical and personal events, can be divided into two stages: one of hope and optimism, the other of doubt and despair. Nevertheless, due largely to his ongoing battles with the crushing censorship that severely cramped his style, his despair is evident in both stages, and when that censorship came first to threaten his professional autonomy, and later his personal safety, Larra fled discouraged, first from Spain and then from life itself.

A striking feature of Auden's prose is its accumulated quantity. Two volumes have appeared so far in Edward Mendelson's ongoing edition of the Complete Works, and his preface to the latest indicates that at least four will be needed to contain Auden's total output in the medium. This prediction seems amply justified. Prose vols. i and ii, at 836 and 556 pages respectively, have only reached 1948, and thus exclude much - though not all - of what was collected during Auden's lifetime in The Enchafèd Flood (1951), The Dyer's Hand (1963), Secondary Worlds (1968) and Forewords and Afterwords (1973). A Certain World (1970) must also come into the reckoning, that autobiography disguised as a commonplace book, in which Auden's own reflections intermingle with a preponderance of material drawn eclectically from other sources; and since the edition so far has included the work of his literary collaborators, the likelihood is that its subsequent volumes will contain this book, as well as the others listed above and all post-1948 prose previously uncollected. There is, then, a great deal of material: Auden's prose will constitute the largest generic component, when the edition of his Complete Works stands finally, and magnificently, completed.

Calderón: witness and mirror to a contradictory century

The year 2000 marked the fourth centenary of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s birth. In addition to the official celebrations – exhibitions, books, conferences – there were brilliant performances of his plays, especially Calixto Bieito’s surprising and groundbreaking version of La vida es sueño (“Life is a Dream”). Some thought that, at last, Calderón was descending from the erudite library bookshelves onto the boards of present-day stages. However, on 3 December, a harsh article in the Catalan edition of El País read:

In the critical perspectives on the literature of the 1920s and 1930s that were engineered, often opportunistically, in the postwar period, prose writers received scant attention and were usually left to languish in the shadow of a select group of poets. As those perspectives, together with the generic distinctions they stressed, became more entrenched, reiterated in response to pressures that were as much pedagogical as they were political or aesthetic, so the marginal status of the prose writers of the time was reinforced. It has taken a considerable effort in recent decades to pull back into focus the complex realities of the period in order to acknowledge that the climate of renewal and innovation identified with poetry also determined other forms of writing as well as the creative arts as a whole. It has become increasingly evident that during those years prose writers either pursued objectives that complemented those of contemporary poets or developed alongside them their own independent initiatives that helped to shape the literary sensibilities of the time. No credible review of the literature of the so-called “Silver Age” of Spanish letters can now afford to overlook those practitioners of prose. The difficulty lies, rather, in doing justice to the range of their writing and the different directions in which it moved.

The death of Franco on 20 November 1975 was not a milestone in the history of Spanish culture. What came to be called discreetly “the inevitable biological fact” was something that politicians had been expecting for some time. It is also commonly accepted that the “Transition” began in 1973, when Admiral Carrero Blanco died in an attack by ETA. As far as intellectual life was concerned, since the beginning of the 1960s the “culture of Francoism” was little more than a phantom, sustained by second-rate writers, by valetudinarian academics, and by functionaries on the payroll of the Ministerio de Información y Turismo (“Ministry of Information and Tourism”). Not even the celebration of “Twenty-five Years of Peace” in 1964, conceived by Minister Manuel Fraga Iribarne with the intention of presenting a less harsh idea of the Franco victory of 1939, had been very well received among intellectuals. Two years later, a new Press Law served to make visible a climate of general discontent which turned into outrage because of the numerous prohibitions and sanctions that its application generated.

By 1975, opposition to the Franco régime was expressed almost openly. It is true that at that time important books still could not circulate: the confessional series by Juan Goytisolo (1931–) initiated by Señas de Identidad (“Marks of Identity,” 1966) had been published in Mexico, as was Si te dicen que caí (“The Fallen,” 1973) by Juan Marsé, and Recuento (“Retelling,” 1973), the tale with which Luis Goytisolo (1935–) initiated his Antagonía tetralogy. Colección particular (“Personal Collection”), a compilation of Jaime Gil de Biedma’s poetry, was banned in 1969 and did not appear until September 1975 as Las personas del verbo (“People of the Word”).

The theatre in Spain during the first three decades of the twentieth century presents a variety of faces to the historian. It was first and foremost a thriving industry employing thousands of actors and actresses who traveled a circuit of theatres that covered the peninsula and extended to Spanish cities in Africa and the former American colonies, especially Havana and Buenos Aires. Theatres were the favored sites of public entertainment, and, until film achieved rival status in the mid 1920s, they constituted a principal network for communication between social classes. Theatre also provided a reliable, and respectable, source of pleasure, both on and off the stage. Finally, the stage was a space reserved for the nation’s self-representation as a collective body, a forum in which national concerns, myths, and memories were debated, celebrated, and debunked.

Theatre thus served society’s needs on many levels. Here I will emphasize the commercial, social, and cultural conditions that influenced how plays were written, staged (or suppressed), and received. Because productions were almost entirely financed by private investors, authors who wrote professionally tended to cultivate one of the five established sectors of the market: (1) the one-act play with or without music (sainete) based on popular, melodramatic plots involving lower-class types; (2) the elaborate musical comedy (opereta, revista) which became the dominant theatrical mode after the First World War; (3) the sentimental comedy that engaged current social problems for the entertainment and elucidation of the middle classes; (4) the farcical comedy aimed especially at petit-bourgeois audiences (juguete cómico, astracán); (5) the sophisticated comedy, drama, and musical play (zarzuela grande), whose audiences were drawn from the educated elite.

In common with other European societies, the earliest vernacular narrative poetry in Spain originated in the form of the heroic epic, a type of poem that has often been defined as dealing with the pursuit of honor through risk. Narrative poetry of this type generally developed later than its lyric equivalent, and this can be attributed to the fact that its content requires the existence of a degree of social, political, and cultural sophistication on the part of the audience for whom it was intended. This sophistication, however, does not imply that vernacular poets and their audiences were yet fully literate, because the earliest epics were likely to have been orally composed and diffused by juglares (“minstrels”), whose works were seldom committed to writing; of those that were, it is thought that many were obtained as a result of dictation, and none has survived in its original form. The essence of this type of poetry lies in its communal spirit and in the telling of great deeds undertaken by larger-than-life heroes whose actions embody the values of the community and celebrate the existence of a bygone, heroic age. Its effect is threefold: it informs and entertains while also inspiring the audience to emulate the heroism of their forebears.

The earliest heroic epics in Spanish dealt with the Counts of Castile and the events that were believed to have transpired under their rule. If other types of epic were composed, no record of them has survived, and so these texts represent the first steps in the establishment of an autonomous Castilian identity. The earliest poem, the Siete infantes de Lara (“Seven Princes of Lara”), has long since been lost, but as it was reworked into chronicles by scribes who plundered it for information, its contents can be partially reconstructed on the basis of assonance (or vowel rhyme) patterns that became fossilized within their prose. Some 550 or so lines have so far been reconstructed, and although not all critics remain convinced of their authenticity, they nonetheless tell an interesting story.

The Spanish stage of the early post-Civil-War period reflected the ideological split that continued after Franco’s victory in 1939. When Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916–2000), a former political prisoner who fought on the losing side in the Civil War, had his tragedy, Historia de una escalera (“Story of a Stairway”) premièred in 1949, Spain found a new voice and a new vehicle for revealing a reality absent from a stage dominated by rightist plays glorifying National Catholicism and the imperial dream, on the one hand, and by light comedies, on the other. While the first plays represented an “official” or Francoist culture and the second, a culture of “evasion,” Buero’s play represented a dissident culture that brought to the stage the harsh reality of the early postwar period.

The “official” theatre – heroic pieces by playwrights such as José María Pemán (1897–1981) and Juan Ignacio Luca de Tena (1897–1975) – reflected the Franco régime’s vision of itself as heir to what it considered Spain’s past glories and national virtues as they idealized a dubious past while ignoring real problems of their own present. While such plays, of little lasting value, continued the Spanish Romantic tradition, the serious comedies of Miguel Mihura (1905–1977), Edgar Neville (1899–1967), José López Rubio (1903–1996), and Víctor Ruiz Iriarte (1912–1982) participated in international currents of their time. Mihura’s Tres sombreros de copa (“Three Top Hats,” 1952) has been recognized as a precursor of the Theatre of the Absurd. López Rubio’s and Ruiz Iriarte’s plays are also characterized by experimentation with the absurd as well as by metatheatre (theatre about theatre) and various forms of theatricalist staging.

Both Wystan Auden's grandfathers were clergymen: his last poems were haikus that described or took the form of prayer. There is a rounded integrity about his Christian antecedents and his Christian end. Yet many of his admirers mistrust, dislike or minimise the religious elements in his poetry, and celebrate him for his intellectual power, the profusion of his ethical ideas and the rich diversity of his creative output. He was an encyclopaedist who liked to collect, classify and interpret large amounts of information, and strove to integrate natural phenomena, spiritual experiences, human history and intimate emotions into a system in which both body, spirit, feelings and intellect cohered. His poems drew ideas from the work of other poets as well as from novelists, historians, theologians, psychologists, philosophers, political scientists and anthropologists. He was the first great English poet to be born in the twentieth century, and the first whose work was profoundly influenced by psychoanalytical and Marxist theories. As a child he trusted machines better than people, and when young was numbered among the 'pylon poets' who celebrated new technology. Yet experiences during the 1930s nudged him back towards Christian faith, which became more explicit after he moved from England to live in the USA in 1939.

Medieval Spanish literature is changing rapidly. The end of the Franco regime and Spain’s membership in the European Union have transformed the Spanish nation, giving new life to cultural diversity within Spain at the same time that economic and even political differences among the nation-states of Western Europe have been renegotiated in view of common European goals. Transnational corporations and global movements of large populations have changed the way we think of centers of power and the ethnic composition of “peoples.” The old European order of monolingual and monocultural nation-states has been rocked to its foundations and, to a significant extent, those foundations rested upon a particular way of conceiving the European Middle Ages. The Middle Ages provided the early evidence of the language, literature and the “soul” of the people who would create the modern nation-state. This evidence then served, in a rather circular way, to confirm the naturalness of the nation-state as the inevitable outcome of historical forces in place for centuries if not millennia. The Middle Ages legitimized the modern nation-state. Such a view is obviously reductive, not to mention teleological. It must focus on those aspects of the Middle Ages which can be made to predict the cultural, political, ethnic, and linguistic unity which constitute the founding myth of modern European nations.

In this era of pan-European union and regional autonomous governments within Spain, however, the destiny of the order of nation-states seems much less manifest than it was thirty years ago. If this destiny has changed then it is also time for us to re-examine with a critical eye the foundational narratives of that destiny, including the stories we tell about the history of something we have called “medieval Spanish literature.”

In the multiple realms and layers that comprise the contemporary Spanish theatrical landscape, “crisis” would seem to be the word that most often lingers in the air, as though it were a common mantra, ready to roll off the tongue of so many theatre professionals with such enormous ease, and even enthusiasm, that one is prompted to wonder whether it might indeed be a miracle that the contemporary technological revolution – coupled with perpetual quandaries concerning public and private funding for the arts – had not by now brought an end to the evolution of the oldest of live arts, or, at the very least, an end to drama as we know it.

In 1996, José Ramón Fernández, a playwright based in Madrid, went so far as to underscore the presence of a curious inclination toward self-destruction in the theatre profession in Spain, where grim prognostications and dismal portrayals of the current theatrical panorama are surpassed only by the horrors of Francisco de Goya’s black paintings. In the year 2000, Barcelona playwright/poet Joan Casas (1950–) dared to pose the provocative hypothesis that the often-cited “new Catalan dramaturgy,” in effect, might be merely a “mirage.” (“Dramaturgy,” in Spain, generally refers to the art of writing plays and/or the textual organization and design of the mise en scène.) Furthermore, during the past decade, the tempestuous cultural-political milieu surrounding the construction and reconstruction of several architecturally striking and ostensibly lavish public theatre venues – which include, in Barcelona, the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, the new Teatre Lliure, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu, and, in Madrid, the Teatro Real, the Teatro Olimpia, and the Teatro María Guerrero (the historic home of Spain’s Centro Dramático Nacional [CDN]) – has spawned a hallucinatory display of melodramatic moments, impassioned accusations, and hysterical outbursts, witnessed both on and off the stage.

The rise of narrative prose fiction in sixteenth-century Spain is an intricate process that is difficult to synthesize. In a vast universe of texts, it cannot be reduced to a clean outline or progression. Many types of fiction appeared, infiltrated and mutually influenced each other, and extended their individual and collective vitality well beyond the moment of their origins to affect later, newly emerging kinds of narrative. Any history of prose fiction of the period must therefore be constructed by force of generalization and at the expense of detail and objectivity. Two things remain clear, however: the sheer profusion of styles that appeared and the absence of any single controlling tendency, or commanding genre, that eclipsed all others. Five kinds of prose narrative stand out and serve as necessary antecedents for understanding Cervantes and the development of the novel in the early seventeenth century. These are the chivalric, pastoral, Moorish, Byzantine, and picaresque romances, which constituted the core genres, if that is what they may be called, that developed out of a broad and varied process of narrative invention and reciprocal influence in early modern Spain. Put simply, the Iberian peninsula during the sixteenth century can be seen as a vast laboratory for literary experimentation and innovation where the writing of imaginative prose remained a serious and persistent cultural activity. Literary historians have in large part, however, dismissed much of what was produced during this period, banishing it to the footnotes of cultural history, while, with perhaps the exception of Lazarillo de Tormes, privileging lyric genres and characterizing the developments in sixteenth-century narrative prose as the necessary but flawed precursors of a later group of mature, transcendent works and forms.