The theatre of the Golden Age of Spain

1. The theatre of the Golden Age of Spain differed from theatre elsewhere in Europe during the same time period in three ways: (a) in its departure from the classical unities, (b) in its mixing of genre elements of tragedy and comedy in the same plays, and (c) in its populism, or appeal across social classes. An additional element that can be inferred, especially from the work of Lope de Vega, is an emphasis on entertainment, not didacticism. This may have been a function of the performance venues for Spanish plays--public squares--as opposed to French and Italian performance venues--aristocratic theatres or royal court. Now Cervantes, Lope's elder contemporary, preferred classical dramatic discipline to what he called Spain's "natural taste" (Cervantes 62) for a more open dramatic style than that articulated by Aristotle and Horace and apotheosized by the French neoclassicist and Italian Golden Age contemporaries of dramatic criticism.

Lope de Vega's work exemplified departure from classical norms, and his dramatic theory justifies his narrative strategy. This does not mean that Lope discarded the example of plays from earlier eras or the Aristotelian theoretical foundation of tragedy. It does mean he subordinated critical and theoretical guidelines to dramatic effect. Like Aristotle, Lope saw the need for action that was appropriate in developing the idea; a plot must be embedded with necessary and probable actions, even in its use of the marvelous. But Lope's focus on dis

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e work of such playwrights as Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, O'Neill, and others. According to Hatlen, drame, which entails modern realism, is connected to both melodrama and tragedy. It is connected to melodrama in its use of suspense, tension, and strong audience-character identification, but with less focus on resolution of external forces than on sociological and philosophical content and probability of action and the fate of the characters. Realistic drama is connected to tragedy, not by a sweeping universality or grandeur, but by psychological complexity of ordinary people, as well as "seriousness of purpose . . . relentless honesty of treatment . . . concern with the meaning of human conduct" (Hatlen 104-5). The point is that melodrama appears to have been a way station between tragedy and realism, helping shape it toward probability, a formal mechanism by which realistic drama could exploit themes of tragedy without succumbing to conventions of tragedy as well. 3. Aristotle cites the origins of tragedy and comedy in dithyrambs and phallic songs (36), which were themselves features of a more fundamental human aptitude for improvisational imitation of rhythms. Whether these are rhythms of immediate human experience or

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