Shakespeare's Juliet and Her Representations in Spanish Theatrical Culture (1600s-1890s)

Resumo

This doctoral thesis entitled Shakespeare’s Juliet and Her Representations in Spanish Theatrical Culture (1600s – 1890s) examines the early phase of the reception of the tragic story of the star-crossed lovers of Verona on the Spanish stage. This study begins in the seventeenth century with Lope de Vega’s Castelvines y Monteses (1606 – 1612), a tragicomedy that constitutes the earliest theatrical rendition of the Italian sources of the tale. The dissertation ends in the last decade of the nineteenth century, exploring the final performances of Víctor Balaguer’s Las esposallas de la morta (1878), the first Catalan adaptation of Romeo and Juliet and the last written for the nineteenth-century Spanish stage. There are three specific aims that this doctoral thesis proposes. The first is to examine in detail the medieval Italian sources of the tragic legend of Romeo and Juliet, devoting special attention to the portrayal of the earliest representations of Juliet in each of these Italian novelle. The second specific aim is to provide a detailed discussion of the historical, political and cultural factors that played a fundamental role in the theatrical reception of Romeo and Juliet in Spain, since its earliest manifestations in the seventeenth century until the final decades of the nineteenth century. The third specific – and most important – aim is to examine the different representations of Juliet written for the Spanish stage since the 1600s until the 1890s. A diachronic examination and a comparative approach have been adopted, so as to offer a complete and detailed picture of the evolution that the story of the lovers of Verona experimented on the Spanish stage throughout three centuries, paying special attention to the influences introduced from other European theatrical milieux. There are two main conclusions derived from this doctoral thesis. The first is the paramount role played by Italy in the early phase of the dissemination of the story of the lovers of Verona on the Spanish stage. In fact, the Italian tradition was considerably more influential than Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the process of reception. The most important contribution of this thesis is that it has demonstrated the centrality that the character of Juliet occupies in the majority of stage adaptations of Romeo and Juliet written in Spain between 1600 and 1899, as most Spanish adaptors chose to turn Juliet into the absolute protagonist of the play.