Essay Questions

How does Lorca uses Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet?

Lorca uses it as a symbol that criticizes itself, being an old and shabby symbol that stands for ideal love. It also works to reinforce that prejudice that love—true love at least—has to be between a man and a woman, showing that it is the archetype and all others have, in essence, the same structure. Lorca breaks that convention with: first, Juliet is performed by a delicate boy of fifteen years old, when the public finds out that he is not a woman they go wild and violent—criticizing the narrow-minded ones who follow the unquestioned premises of love. (“Have Romeo and Juliet to be necessarily a man and a woman in order to produce a vivid and emotional scene in the tomb?”). Second, Lorca also criticize the intellectuals who always go back to Romeo and Juliet in order to look for true love, and, therefore, are left in despair because they think that love only can be found in fiction and that anything that separates from that it is a useless substitute of love—it could be a critic of Romanticism. “JULIET: I am tired. And I get up to fetch some help to kick out of my tomb to the ones who theorize of my heart.”

What could be Lorca’s opinion of the public?

In this play, Lorca, incarnated in the Director, deals with several types of public: the horses (representing the materialistic and fragile bourgeoisie), the students (the intellectuals) and the bearded men (probably Lorca himself or open men). The author deals with them accordingly, kicking out of the theater the first ones, and discussing with the others. However, Lorca is skeptic of his public, suggesting that generally they are afraid of certain topics and that they don’t go to the theater to be shown important things or discuss morality, but to be entertained. For this reason Lorca might have introduced in the play The Outdoor Theater—for everybody, for the masses and, in particular, for the lazy bourgeoisie—and the Theater Under de Sand, more real and raw, but there are others interpretations as well about this “distinction” of theaters (conscious vs unconscious mind for instance).

How does Lorca treat masculinity in his play?

Lorca breaks the convections of his time by portraying a wide range of men in “The Public”. One of them says “Couldn’t I try my cloud pyjamas?” He went as far as to, through one of his characters, claiming what it was manhood all about: “Yes, I am a man. A man, so manly, that I faint when the hunters wake up. […] A giant, so giant, that I can sew a rose in the nail of a newborn child.” This attributes which he relates to manhood—sensitivity, weakness, femininity—were quite controversial and different from the ones that were openly accepted.