Blood Wedding E-Book

Federico García Lorca

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classics
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 99

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price García Lorca's passionate, lyrical tale of longing and revenge: a twentieth century masterpiece. Translated from the Spanish and introduced by one of Scotland's finest playwrights, Jo Clifford.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

BLOOD WEDDING

by

Federico García Lorca

translated and introduced by Jo Clifford

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Key Dates

Further Reading

Characters

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)

Lorca was born on 5 June 1898. The year was a hugely significant one in Spanish cultural and political history: it gave its name to a whole generation of writers who used the events of this year as a rallying cry in efforts to convince the Spanish people of their country’s deplorable state and the desperate need for re-evaluation and change. They were called the ‘Generation of ’98’, and they included Azorín, Baroja and Ángel Ganivet.

The historical event that inspired this movement was the disastrous war with the United States which led to the loss of Cuba, Spain’s last remaining colony. This apparently distant event was to have huge repercussions for Lorca. Cuba had been Spain’s principal source of sugar; Lorca’s father was to be astute enough to plant his land with sugar beet, and with the aid of a series of successful land purchases, he was to become one of the richest men in the Fuente Vaqueros district.

A long-term consequence of this was that Lorca himself never needed to earn his own living. There’s no question this wealthy background contributed both to the large volume, and the technical and emotional daring, of his work. As it happened, Blood Wedding in particular was hugely successful; but the financial security of his position left him absolutely free to write as he wanted without regard to the demands of the commercial theatre of his day.

However, the most immediate consequence for the young Lorca was that he spent his childhood as the rich son of the wealthiest landowner of a mainly poor village.

Perhaps the best way for us to imagine the impact on Lorca’s sensibility is to think of our own feelings towards the desperately poor of the Third World – or the homeless that many of us pass each day on the street. The contrast between his wealth and the poverty of so many of those around him left a deep impression on Lorca, which he was to express in later life in his autobiographical essay ‘My Village’.

The plight of one family affected Lorca particularly deeply. One of his friends in the village was a little girl whose father was a chronically ill day labourer and whose mother was the exhausted victim of countless pregnancies. The one day on which Federico was not allowed to visit their home was washing day: the members of this family had only one set of clothes, and they had to stay inside their house while their only clothes were being washed and dried. Lorca wrote:

When I returned home on those occasions, I would look into the wardrobe, full of clean, fragrant clothes, and feel dreadfully anxious, with a dead weight on my heart.

He grew up with a profound sense of indignation at this kind of injustice:

No one dares to ask for what he needs. No one dares . . . to demand bread. And I who say this grew up among these thwarted lives. I protest against this mistreatment of those who work the land.

The young man who wrote this protest at the end of his adolescence maintained a profound anger right to the end of his life. In an interview he gave in 1936, he stated: ‘As long as there is economic injustice in the world, the world will be unable to think clearly.’

He continued the interview with a fable to illustrate the difficulties of creating valid art in a situation of economic injustice:

Two men are walking along a riverbank. One of them is rich, the other poor. One has a full belly and the other fouls the air with his yawns. And the rich man says: ‘What a lovely little boat out on the water! Look at that lily blooming on the bank!’ And the poor man wails: ‘I’m hungry, so hungry!’ Of course. The day when hunger is eradicated there is going to be the greatest spiritual explosion the world has ever seen. I’m talking like a real socialist, aren’t I?

For Lorca, the art of creating theatre was totally bound up with the process of creating a better society:

The idea of art for art’s sake is something that would be cruel if it weren’t, fortunately, so ridiculous. No decent person believes any longer in all that nonsense about pure art, art for art’s sake. At this dramatic moment in time, the artist should laugh and cry with his people. We must put down the bouquet of lilies and bury ourselves up to the waist in mud to help those who are looking for lilies. For myself, I have a genuine need to communicate with others. That’s why I knocked at the door of the theatre and why I now devote all my talents to it.

This passionate anger at the injustice of human society, and equally passionate determination to create art that might remedy it, were fuelled not simply by his childhood experiences. As an adult, he had travelled to New York, and witnessed at first hand the devastating impact of the Wall Street crash:

It’s the spectacle of all the world’s money in all its splendour, its mad abandon and its cruelty… This is where I have got a clear idea of what a huge mass of people fighting to make money is really like. The truth is that it’s an international war with just a thin veneer of courtesy… We ate breakfast on a thirty-second floor with the head of a bank, a charming person with a cold and feline side quite English. People came in there after being paid. They were all counting dollars. Their hands all had the characteristic tremble that holding money gives them… Colin [an acquaintance] had five dollars in his purse and I three. Despite this he said to me: ‘We’re surrounded by millions and yet the only two decent people here are you and I.’

And when he writes so angrily of the ‘thwarted lives’ of those whose existence is dominated by money, it is clear Lorca is thinking not simply of the plight of the rural poor, but also of the bourgeoisie to which he himself, and many of us, now belong.

He is concerned not simply with the suffering that a wealthy middle class inflicts on those beneath them on the social scale; he is equally concerned with the suffering they inflict upon themselves. The ‘thwarted lives’ he saw in his village are not simply those of the poor.

Lorca perceived this very clearly: for the comparative wealth possessed by the families involved in the wedding contract in Blood Wedding brings them no happiness. All the main characters in the play seem trapped by the conventions and the demands of the society they inhabit.

Blood Wedding: What Happens in the Play

Act One Scene One The bridegroom asks his mother for a knife. He is going to his vineyard, and he wants to cut grapes. This frightens her, and brings up her grief at the loss of her husband and other son. They were killed by knives in a feud with another family of the village, the Felix. The young man wants his mother to leave her grief be; he wants her to consent to his proposed marriage. She agrees to buy the betrothal gifts, and make the visit to the bride-to-be’s family as custom demands. After her son’s departure, a neighbour enters. The mother discovers from her that the girl used to have a relationship with a young man, which got broken off, and that the young man, Leonardo, belonged to the clan of the Felix. The scene ends on a note of foreboding.

Act One Scene Two A young mother sings a lullaby to her baby. We learn the baby’s father is Leonardo; that his marriage is an unhappy one; and that there are rumours that he is riding over to see his former lover. The scene ends with the lullaby, which has now also been tainted with foreboding.

Act One Scene Three The mother and her son have come to visit the bride-to-be and her father. The father welcomes the proposed marriage, because he sees it as furthering his commercial interests. The bride-to-be is, however, in two minds about her proposed marriage. And at the very end of the act, it becomes clear that Leonardo is riding over to see her.

Act Two Scene One The bride-to-be is getting dressed for her wedding. We learn she is herself the daughter of an unhappy marriage. Leonardo has ridden ahead of the other guests to arrive first; the bride-to-be breaks all the conventions by seeing him. We learn that they still desire each other; that their proposed marriage was broken off because he was considered too poor; and that the bride-to-be is getting married now to try to still the passion that continues to consume her. The songs of the guests to celebrate the coming wedding strike a deeply ironic note.

Act Two Scene Two It is some hours later, and the maid is happily preparing the wedding meal for when everyone returns from the church. The father remains complacent about the wedding, and the prospect of grandchildren to work his land; the mother wrestles with her forebodings; the bride-to-be remains mired in her inner conflict.

The bridegroom does his poor best to be correct. It gradually becomes clear that Leonardo and the bride-to-be have eloped together. The bridegroom and his mother gather the guests together to set off to pursue them and get revenge.

Act Three Scene One We are in a wood at night. Three woodcutters, who gradually seem to us to represent elemental forces of nature, tell of the couple’s flight and the noose tightening around them. The moon enters, personified by another woodcutter: a sinister figure, hungry for the couple’s blood. Death enters, personified by an old beggarwoman. The moon will shed his eerie light on the fleeing couple to ensure they are seen and caught by their pursuers. The bridegroom stumbles over Death. She promises to guide him to his prey. The pursued couple enter, still in the grip of a passion they know to be self-destructive, but which they also know they cannot deny. Soon after they leave, we hear two piercing screams; Death opens her cloak like a black bird with outspread wings. The curtain descends in deep silence.

Final Scene Young girls are spinning thread. Leonardo’s wife and mother enter in deep mourning. Then the bridegroom’s mother, and her neighbour from the first act. We understand that the bridegroom and Leonardo have killed each other. The bride enters to expose herself to the mother’s rage. She hopes she will kill her, but the older woman discovers she cannot. The play ends on a note of suffering without respite or hope.

Lorca and Theatre

Lorca once said that you could judge the health of a nation’s culture by looking at the state of its theatre. And for him theatre was a natural extension of poetry: a poetry that leaps off the printed page, escapes from between the pages of books ‘and becomes human. It shouts and speaks. It cries and despairs.’

For Lorca there was nothing precious about poetry; it was simply part of living. He once wrote: ‘Poetry is something that just walks along the street.’

Because for him it was a part of living, to be deprived of it was a kind of torment; and to deprive people of the chance of experiencing it was a kind of crime. In an interview he gave to an English journalist he spoke of his anger at the lack of theatre that was the norm in Spain outside the capital: ‘Theatre is almost dead outside Madrid, and the people suffer accordingly, as they would if they had lost eyes or ears or sense of taste.’