Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
comendador
who has sworn to safeguard the
king's subjects placed under his authority
has betrayed his trust. Lope, as in other
plays, presents the king as ultimately restor-
ing order and dispensing justice in a setting
that has been disrupted by abuse of power.
The king, to use Lope's own phrase, is “the
best magistrate.” Distinctly different in
theme from
Fuenteovejuna
and
Peribáñez
but
striking in its won way is
El caballero de Olm-
edo
(
The Knight from Olmedo,
1622). Inspired
by medieval folk songs, this play is a highly
poetic tragedy in which the knight of the
title, Don Alonso, pursues his deep love for
a girl who has been betrothed by her father
to a villainous rival, Don Rodrigo. Although
repeatedly warned by the song of a peasant
in the field, sinister dreams, and even the
vision of his own ghost, Don Alonso finally
meets his doom at the hand of Don Rodrigo,
thus fulfilling the saying that love will lead
to death.
The perennial appeal of Lope's plays lies
in the understanding that he must give his
audience what they need and want. In the
1609 essay
El arte nuevo de hacer comedias
(
The New Art of Making Plays
) he declares
that he has set free the
comedia
(drama),
emancipating it from rigid formulas and
boundaries. The people pay to see his
work, he says, and he must give them
what they want, mixing the tragic and the
humorous, the grand and the everyday in
the determination to gratify his audience.
What some have seen as cynicism is also a
professional playwright's pragmatism and
an artist's refusal to be bound by long-
established conventions. Lope is in fact the
creator of a Spanish national drama. Unlike
C
ALDERÓN
DE
LA
B
ARCA
and other play-
wrights, he does not pursue a preoccupa-
tion with special topics and limited themes.
His theater is all encompassing, both in
subject and in form.
Lorca, Federico García
Louis I (Luís I)
(1838-1889)
king of Portugal
Succeeding his brother, P
ETER
V, in 1861,
Louis at first partook of some of the popu-
larity and hopeful spirit raised during that
youthful monarch's brief reign. With the
passage of time, however, a pattern of
political corruption and parliamentary
fraud set in. As in contemporary Spain lib-
erals and conservatives “rotated” in office
reducing the electoral process to a purely
nominal operation and taking turns in run-
ning the country for the enrichment of
their friends and the advantage of a small
socioeconomic elite. For most of his life the
king was merely a bystander in the govern-
ing of Portugal.
Louis I (Luis I)
(1707-1724)
king of Spain
Eldest son of P
HILIP
V, he was unexpectedly
called to the throne early in 1724 when his
father announced that he was weary of his
duties and wished to withdraw to a place of
quiet retirement. Some commentators have
suggested that Philip V was more interested
in pursuing the French crown, which
seemed about to become available.
Louis was totally unprepared for the
responsibilities of kingship, but progressives
in Madrid were hoping to transform this
youthful Bourbon into the kind of reformer
that his father had never become. Barely
Search WWH ::
Custom Search