Theater
In theater, the main cultivators were those of the Madrilenian group. They were put under which the classic and modern rulers taught, and they created a theater which followed the political and moral interests of the time. Three tendencies existed:
- The traditional tendency. During the first half of the 18th century the theater is in decay.
- The neoclassical tendency.
- The popular tendency. The sainetes enjoyed popular support. They were written in verse, related to the pasos and entremeses of the previous centuries. The most important author of sainetes was Ramón de la Cruz.
The theater adopted the new fashions that arrived from France. In the neoclassical theater also the reason and the harmony prevailed as norm. The so-called "rule of the three units" was obeyed, which demanded a single action, a single scene and a coherent chronological time in the development of the dramatic action. The separation between the comical and the tragic was established. The imaginative containment prevailed, eliminating everything which was considered exaggerated or of "bad taste". An educative and moralizing purpose was adopted, which would serve to spread the universal values of culture and the progress.
Although less rationalist than other genres, the tragedy cultivated historical subjects, as is the case of the most known, Raquel, of Vicente García de la Huerta. But without doubt the most representative theater of the moment was that of Leandro Fernandez de Moratín, creator of what has been called "moratinian comedy". As opposed to the tragic genre, the most common then, and which his father Nicolás practiced, and as opposed to the customary and kind sainete of Ramón de la Cruz, Moratín Jr ridiculed the vices and the customs of his time, in a clear attempt to turn the theater into a vehicle to moralize the custom.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Enlightenment Literature
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)
“Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” the ball games and the fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“We live in a time which has created the art of the absurd. It is our art. It contains happenings, Pop art, camp, a theater of the absurd.... Do we have the art because the absurd is the patina of waste...? Or are we face to face with a desperate or most rational effort from the deepest resources of the unconscious of us all to rescue civilization from the pit and plague of its bedding?”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)