Notes about Garcia Lorca, Blood Wedding, and the Spanish Theater

In the 1920’s there was widespread agreement that the Spanish theater was in a deep crisis. Books and newspaper articles deplored the mediocrity of playwrights, the ignorance of critics, actors, and audiences, and the indifference of government officials. Lorca wrote of this situation, “One must think of the theater of the future. Everything that now exists in Spain is dead. Either the theater changes radically, or it dies away forever. There is no other solution.”
Lorca’s earliest works exemplify a deep concern for social justice; by 1935 Lorca had declared himself an “enthusiastic, devoted follower of the theater of social reform.” He defined theater as:

…a school of laughter and lamentation, an open tribunal where the
people can introduce old and mistaken mores as evidence, and can use
living examples to explain eternal norms of the heart…The theater is an
extremely useful instrument for the edification of a country, and the
barometer that measures its greatness or decline. A sensitive theater,
well oriented in all its branches, from tragedy to vaudeville, can alter
a people’s sensibility in just a few years, while a decadent theater where
hooves have taken the place of wings can cheapen and lull to sleep an
entire nation.


When Lorca attacks the norms of theatrical realism and the expectations of middle-class audiences, he is questioning certain aspects of bourgeois morality: its supposed indifference to suffering, its hostility to deviant forms of behavior, its fear of death and of the forces of nature, its mistrust of fantasy, of dream, and of the artistic imagination. Blood Wedding restored tragic poetry to the Spanish stage.
There are two areas in particular in which Lorca’s theater differs radically from that of his predecessors: his idea of poetic drama and the musical nature of his works. Lorca remarked : “Theater is poetry that rises from the book and becomes human enough to talk and shout, weep and despair.” In Lorca’s work, drama and poetry seem inseparable. His poetry often has the dramatic quality that he admired in traditional Spanish songs and narrative ballads, and his drama has the metaphorical density, the attention to rhythm, the ring of “memorable speech” one normally associates with poetry. In this play, images, metaphors, and symbols form a coherent whole, a poetic system whose full meaning is difficult to paraphrase. Blood Wedding was unprecedented in Spanish theater. Few playwrights had appealed so forcefully to the poetic imagination of so many people, from such a wide cross section of society, in Spain and abroad.
Lorca once remarked that prose and verse have their own distinct functions:

Well-wrought, free prose can soar to expressive heights, freeing us from
the confinement and rigidity of meter. Let us welcome verse at
moments when the excitement and disposition of the theme demand it,
only then. You can see that, in Blood Wedding, verse does not appear
with any intensity or at any length until the wedding scene. Then, with
the scene in the forest and in the last scene in the work, it takes
complete command of the stage.

The second distinctive characteristic of Lorca’s theater is music. Both in his poems and in his plays, Lorca tries to reconcile literature and music. Lorca’s vision of theater draws upon ballet and other forms of dance, and as a director he devoted much attention to the stylization of movement. Nowhere is musical form more apparent than in Blood Wedding, where the characters’ speech is “orchestrated” in a highly stylized, rhythmic manner that sometimes borders on liturgical chant.
No less important than the rhythmical style are two other musical elements: the songs and dances performed by the characters, and the background music. The spinners’ songs in Blood Wedding are reminiscent of Spanish folk tunes. They are also meant to suggest the choruses of Greek tragedy, commenting on the action and revealing something of the psychology of the characters. Lorca also used music as a way of weaning his audiences from expectations of realism. He said: “The use of music allows me to make the scene less realistic, and do away with the audience’s impression that what is going on is “really happening,” permitting me to raise things to the level of poetry.”
For Lorca, tragedy entails certain formal elements, such as the chorus; but above all, it involves creating an illusion of fate or destiny—the suggestion that men and women are at the mercy of elemental forces which shape their lives in ways they barely comprehend. This feeling of inevitability is coupled with mystery. In his view, no tragedy can be fully explained. For him, the very essence of poetry and tragedy lies in mystery.
The central theme of all of Lorca’s work is desire—all of his characters want something; but the object of desire is invisible, shadowy. His plays suggest, not merely that society frustrates our intimate desires and instincts, but that those desires and instincts can never be clearly identified. Lorca’s characters are unhappy and tragic, not because society keeps them from attaining their object or reaching their destination, but because they cannot fully understand what it is that they want.
Beyond its appeal for justice, for freedom, and for sexual equality, Lorca’s theater is a passionate defense of poetry and of the imagination. His characters’ search for meaning parallels that of the reader.