The Granada Plays

Abstract

In both Mariana Pineda and Doña Rosita the Spinster Granada is the setting, but it is not a Granada that Lorca knew first-hand. Lorca evokes an atmosphere of the past, and in these two plays the past serves at once as an historical context for the dramatic action, and as a kind of homage on Lorca’s part to theatre of the past and to past aesthetic sensibilities that still had considerable currency in the Granada, and even the Spain that Lorca knew as a young man. The world of romantic verse drama is recalled in Lorca’s conception of Mariana Pineda; in the melancholy provincialism of Doña Rosita the Spinster the precious aesthetic of late nineteenth-century popularised modernism permeates the atmosphere, while a kind of Chekhovian poetic realism defines the play’s form and style.