A bride runs off with her former lover on her wedding day; the two men kill each other in a wood, watched by the Moon and a beggar woman who is Death (1933)
Blood Wedding — the first of the rural trilogy, based on a real killing in Almería.
Literature · Playwrights
Federico García Lorca
1898–1936 · Spanish
Generation of '27 — Andalusian lyric drama and surrealism
Federico García Lorca was Spain's greatest modern poet and playwright, a leading figure of the Generation of '27. He fused Andalusian folk song, gypsy ballad and surrealist image into poetry, and wrote three rural tragedies about women trapped by honour, blood and sterility. He was murdered by Nationalist forces near Granada in the first weeks of the Spanish Civil War, aged 38, and his body has never been found.
How to spot them
- ▸Andalusia: Granada, gypsies, knives, civil guards, the moon and blood
- ▸The 'rural trilogy' of tragedies, all of them about women shut in
- ▸'Duende' — the dark, earthy spirit he lectured on, felt in flamenco and bullfighting
- ▸Ran La Barraca, a travelling student theatre company, under the Second Republic
- ▸Shot by Nationalist militia in August 1936; the grave has never been located
Key works
A farmer's wife in a Spanish village, tormented by childlessness, strangles her husband at a pilgrimage (1934)
Yerma — the second of the rural trilogy; the title means 'barren'.
A widow imposes eight years of mourning on her five unmarried daughters and bolts the doors against the village (1936)
The House of Bernarda Alba — finished weeks before his death and not staged until 1945, in Buenos Aires.
A 1928 ballad collection of knives, moons, civil guards and the Andalusian night that made its author a celebrity (1928)
Romancero gitano (Gypsy Ballads) — hugely popular, to his own irritation.
A surrealist book of poems written after a year at Columbia University, raging at the machines, the money and Harlem (1940)
Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York) — published posthumously.
An elegy for a bullfighter gored at Manzanares, built on the refrain 'at five in the afternoon' (1935)
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías — often called the greatest Spanish elegy of the century.
A farce in which a shoemaker's much younger wife scandalises the village while he is away, and he returns disguised as a puppeteer (1930)
The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife.
A play of five acts about a Granada widow hanged in 1831 for embroidering a liberal flag (1927)
Mariana Pineda — his first stage success, with sets by his friend Salvador Dalí.
Key ideas
- 'Duende': the dark, wounding power in a performance, distinct from muse or angel
- Honour, blood and the confinement of women in rural Spanish society
- Folk forms — ballad, lullaby, saeta, cante jondo — raised into modernist poetry
- Theatre as a public service that should be taken out to villages, the basis of La Barraca
Quick-fire facts
- •Born on 5 June 1898 at Fuente Vaqueros, in the plain outside Granada
- •At the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid he shared rooms and arguments with Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel
- •A gifted pianist who collected and arranged Spanish folk songs with Manuel de Falla
- •Directed La Barraca, a touring student theatre, from 1931 under the Second Republic
- •Shot near the village of Alfacar, outside Granada, on or about 18 August 1936
- •His body has never been found despite repeated excavations
- •His work was effectively banned in Spain for years under Franco
- •The rural trilogy is Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba
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Sources
- Ian Gibson — Federico García Lorca: A Life
- Gwynne Edwards — Lorca: Three Plays (introduction)