ABSTRACT

Can we trace our tragic subject any farther than Little Eyolfl In this chapter I shall suggest that we can, in Spain under its brief Republican government of the 1930s. Lorca wrote three 'rural tragedies' before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba, all of which are quite spectacularly expressive of the issue, 'what shall we do with the Furies?' And if it took such a deep political and social emergency to produce this sudden flowering of tragic theatre, Lorca's achievement may help us guess at the reasons why other twentieth-century writers, for all the sincerity of their efforts, have only succeeded in alluding to tragedy rather than creating it.