Book description
These three tragedies were written at the height if Lorca's powers and
display his innovative mix of Spanish popular tradition and modern
dramatic technique. Blood Wedding tells the story of a couple drawn
irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage; Dona Rosita
the Spinster follows the appalling fate of a young woman beguiled into
the expectation of marriage and left stranded for a lifetime whilst
Yerma is possibly Lorca's harshest play following a woman's Herculean
struggle against the curse of infertility. Set in and around his home
territory, Granada, the plays return again and again to the lives of
passionate individuals, particularly women, trapped by the social
conventions of narrow peasant communities. The plays appear here in new
playable translations. Federico Garcia Lorca was born in 1898, in
Andalusia, Spain. A poet and dramatist, and also a gifted painter and
pianist, his early popular ballads earned him the title of 'poet of the
gypsies'. In 1930 he turned his attention to theatre, visiting remote
villages and playing classic and new works for peasant audiences. In
1936, shortly after the outbreak of Civil War, he was murdered by
Nationalist partisans. His body was never found. Gwynne Edwards is a
specialist in Spanish theatre and cinema, until recently Professor of
Spanish at the University of Aberystwyth. His books include: Lorca: The
Theatre Beneath the Sand; Lorca: Living in the Theatre; Dramatists in
Perspective: Spanish Theatre in the Twentieth Century; The Discreet Art
of Luis Bunuel: and Almodovar: Labyrinths of Passion. He has also
translated and adapted more than forty plays from Spanish, French and
Italian, many of which have been staged at major theatres in Britain and
the United States. He has published three collections of Lorca plays
with Methuen Drama, together with student editions of Blood Wedding and
The House of Bernarda Alba, and also collections of seventeenth-century
Spanish and contemporary Spanish-American plays adapted from the
correspondence and prose writings of Dylan Thomas.
