Victor Dixon

El alcalde de Zalamea, 'la Nueua' : Date and Composition

The enormous wealth of documentation discovered and published by John Varey—though more awaits publication—has only partially been utilized by students of Golden-Age drama. Too little attention has been paid, for instance, to two articles written for this journal by John and Norman Shergold, for many years his equally energetic associate. In ‘Some Early Calderón Dates’ and ‘Some Palace Performances of Seventeenth-century Plays’ they gave details (much more completely and accurately than had G. Cruzada Villaamil and H. A. Rennert in previous studies) of particulares given at court, mostly between 1632 and 1637, drawn principally from the Cuentas del Secretario de la Cámara (legajo 6.764 at the Archivo del Palacio Nacional).1 The first of those articles included (p. 275) a datum not previously recorded: ‘Alcalde de Zalamea, El. There is a performance of a play by this title by Antonio de Prado, 12 May 1636, payment 5 Sept 1636’. With proper academic caution they added that ‘this, of course, could be the work attributed to Lope de Vega’; but the overwhelming probability, as I have long maintained2 and shall argue here, is that the Alcalde in question was

Memories of Plays and a Playwright: Antonio Buero Vallejo

Abstract The author tells the story of his involvement with the playwright. It began with four productions of plays by Buero, between 1966 and 1973, at the University of Manchester, correspondence about them, and a first encounter in Chester in 1968. But as the dramatists works became a major topic of the academics teaching and research, their relationship developed, via further meetings in Madrid and frequent exchanges of letters and cards (several extracts from which are reproduced), into a close and productive friendship, that was to last until—and after—Bueros death in April 2000.

Music in the later dramatic works of Antonio Buero Vallejo

In a companion piece to the present study I have documented Buero Vallejo’s love of music throughout his life, and have argued that it had an increasing influence on his writing for the stage in the nineteen works he wrote between 1946 and 1969, in what have been seen as the first and second stages of his development as a playwright.1 Music is employed in all but three of these, and it plays an especially crucial role in La señal que se espera, Una extraña armonía, El concierto de San Ovidio and of course his opera libretto Mito. In some of those early works, I showed, Buero requires music to be performed as part of the action, or otherwise explains its use in a naturalistic way; in others it is to be heard ‘en el aire’, by the audience but not by the characters (or at most by one or two), whereas in a number of plays it is employed in both these ways. Its functions are similarly diverse, and often overlap: to assist in the evocation of a period or place; to create or enhance an atmosphere or mood; to lend both emphasis and continuity, as a leitmotiv connected with particular persons or episodes; to provoke, perhaps, ‘inter-textual’ associations with the source of the music concerned; and above all to symbolize or reinforce emotions, ideas and themes. Not always but very often, it seeks to evoke—mysteriously, not to say mystically—a sense of the sublime: to express, alongside Buero’s bleak view of the state of our world today, his uncertain faith in the future of mankind, his unsatisfied longing for answers to the questions posed by philosophy and religion, the hope which in his view lay at the centre of every true tragedy and should persist at its conclusion. At the same time Buero was also consciously intending to restore to drama one of the fundamental elements of Classical tragedy, and believed, although convinced of the centrality of language to serious theatre, that ‘sólo a través de la emoción musical, siempre muy fuerte y muy concreta, pero al mismo tiempo muy