The Question of Allegory

“The Question of Allegory” studies the first two plays Lorca staged in commercial theaters, The Butterfly’s Evil Spell (1920) and Mariana Pineda (1927). The Butterfly’s Evil Spell was a full-fledged scandal due to the negative reaction of both critics and spectators to its symbolist patterns of characterization. With Mariana Pineda, Lorca dramatized the final days of a liberal heroine executed in 1831 for conspiring against the absolutist regime of Ferdinand VII. When it premiered in Barcelona, in 1927, critics saw the heroine Mariana as a figure of resistance to the contemporary dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera, while Lorca tried to discourage political interpretations of this play by publicly aligning himself with Ortega y Gasset’s theory of autotelic art.