The Uneasy Interplay of Forces in the Plays of García Lorca

In this essay Andrew Anderson proposes that all Lorca’s plays share certain commonalities: his protagonists invariably find themselves in some kind of predicament or dilemma, and it always turns out that there is no favourable solution to the position in which they find themselves. A number of diverse and, on the face of it, conflicting factors play into creating these dramatic situations: family, society, gender, psychology, as well as more metaphysical elements that suggest aspects of existentialism. Here, the characters and plots of four of Lorca’s best-known plays from the 1930s are analyzed to demonstrate the various ways in which these disparate factors combine to produce what are usually tragic outcomes. Andrew Anderson is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. He has published extensively on the work of García Lorca and the Spanish historical avant-garde, most recently La recepción de las vanguardias extranjeras en España: cubismo, futurismo, dadá. Estudio y ensayo de bibliografía (Seville: Renacimiento, 2018).