Castilla y León PAU Dramatic Literature cheat sheet
Castilla y León PAU Dramatic Literature · Keep the key ideas within reach.
Theory of Dramatic Literature: Genre, Text and Performance
Aristotle's Poetics divides drama into tragedy (elevated characters, fall from fortune, pity and fear) and comedy (low characters, reversible misfortune, laughter); the six elements are mythos, ethos, dianoia, lexis, melos and opsis.
Tragedy requires hamartia (error of judgment), anagnorisis (recognition) and peripeteia (reversal); catastrophe closes the action and catharsis names the audience effect.
The dramatic text is a 'pre-text' (texto espectacular vs. texto dramático): the written dialogue plus didascalia is completed only in performance, so a play has two authors, playwright and director.
Didascalia (stage directions) may be explicit (bracketed instructions) or implicit (encoded in dialogue); they govern space, gesture and tone and are analysable as language.
Drama is defined by double communication: internal (character to character) and external (company to audience); the audience's presence is a structural condition, not an accident.
The three unities of place, time and action derive from Italian and French neoclassical readings of Aristotle; Spanish Golden Age theatre (Lope's Arte nuevo, 1609) deliberately breaks them.
Genres: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, auto sacramental, entremés, sainete, drama (mixed serious genre), farce, melodrama; each carries expected character types and endings.
Performance signs follow a semiotic split: acoustic (voice, music, sound) versus visual (set, lighting, costume, kinesics, proxemics); each sign is motivated or arbitrary.
Dramatic Text Analysis: Structure, Character, Time, Space and Language
Plot structure: exposition (situation, antecedent), rising action with complicating incident, climax/turning point, falling action, resolution or catastrophe; classical division into protasis, epitasis, catastrophe.
French scene (scène à faire) = a unit bounded by the entrance or exit of a character; counting them maps the play's rhythm and reveals who dominates each segment.
Time operates on three levels: story time (fable duration), discourse/performance time, and referential time (historical period evoked); analyse anachronies (analepsis, prolepsis) and pace.
Space has three layers: dramatic space (offstage world evoked by dialogue), scenic space (visible stage), and theatrical space (building and audience relation).
Character is built by name, self-presentation, others' reports, action, and linguistic register; flat (type) versus round (evolving) characters is a starting distinction, not a verdict.
Language markers: turn length, interruption, aside, monologue, soliloquy, stichomythia (rapid one-line exchange), apostrophe, deixis (here, now, I) anchoring the utterance to the stage.
Rhetorical figures to name precisely in commentary: anaphora, antithesis, oxymoron, hyperbaton, polysyndeton, metaphor, metonymy, irony, litotes.
Conflict taxonomy: character vs. character, vs. society, vs. fate/supernatural, vs. self; the agón or debate scene stages the ideological core of the play.
Set Work: Commentary and Interpretation of an Excerpt
Commentary method: situate the fragment (act, scene, moment), paraphrase its content, then analyse form (structure, versification, language), then interpret and connect to the whole work.
Identify the excerpt's type before writing: dialogue, monologue, aside, soliloquy, letter read aloud, or chorus; the type dictates what can be inferred about interiority.
Quote short, exact phrases and analyse them; paraphrase alone earns little credit. Cite by act and scene, not by page of a particular edition.
Versification data to report when relevant: arte mayor vs. arte menor, consonant vs. assonant rhyme, silva, romance, redondilla, quintilla, décima, lira, and the effect of the chosen form.
Locate the turning point inside the fragment: which line changes the balance of power, reveals a secret, or reverses expectation? That line anchors the interpretation.
Distinguish what a character says from what the play asserts: use 'the character claims' versus 'the play dramatizes'; unreliable self-report is a deliberate device.
Close with the fragment's function in the whole: exposition, complication, climax, or confirmation; state what the audience knows after it that it did not know before.
Avoid plot summary as the body of the answer; summary belongs to the situating paragraph and must stay under one third of the response.
Set Work: Essay on Themes, Characters and Dramatic Technique
Thesis-driven essay: one arguable claim in the introduction, one paragraph per supporting reason, each with a textual quotation, and a conclusion that states the claim's consequence.
Theme must be argued through technique: link honour, power, love, death, freedom or justice to a concrete device (mirror scene, delayed recognition, parallel subplot).
Character analysis requires evolution: state the character's initial position, the pressure applied, the change (or refusal to change), and the dramatic cost.
Technique inventory for essays: dramatic irony, doubling, subplot counterpoint, offstage violence reported by messenger, temporal compression, symbolic props, metatheatre.
Use correct metalanguage (peripeteia, anagnorisis, catarsis, aparte, acotación) and gloss it once; unexplained jargon weakens rather than strengthens the argument.
Compare characters structurally: who is given the last word, who is denied a hearing, whose account is corroborated by a second witness.
A strong paragraph pattern: claim, textual evidence, analysis of the device, link back to the thesis. Avoid biography of the author as explanation of the work.
Conclude by answering the question asked, not by restating the plot; if the question says 'analyse', do not merely describe.
Historical and Literary Context of the Set Work
Spanish Golden Age (siglo XVI-XVII): Lope de Vega's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias (1609) codifies the comedia nueva - three acts (jornadas), polimetry, gracioso, breaking of unities, mixing tragic and comic.
Corral de comedias: open-air courtyard theatre with stage (tablado), balconies, 'cazuela' for women, 'aposentos' for nobles; companies were led by an autor de comedias.
Calderón de la Barca deepens the comedia: philosophical drama (La vida es sueño), auto sacramental, elaborate scenography; his theatre reflects Counter-Reformation ideology.
Lope's Fuenteovejuna (c. 1613) dramatizes collective rebellion against a tyrannical comendador; themes: honour, monarchical justice, the people as protagonist.
Nineteenth-century Spanish theatre: Romantic drama (Duque de Rivas, Zorrilla's Don Juan Tenorio, 1844) with unities broken, mixed verse and prose, and the legendary Don Juan figure.
Twentieth century: Valle-Inclán's esperpento (Luces de bohemia, 1920) deforms reality through mirrors; Lorca's rural tragedies (Bodas de sangre, 1933; Yerma, 1934; La casa de Bernarda Alba, 1936) use verse-prose and symbolic space.
Post-1958 Spanish theatre: Buero Vallejo's tragedy of hope (Historia de una escalera, 1949) and social realism; Alfonso Sastre's 'tragedia compleja'.
Contextual claims must be verifiable and datable; avoid attributing motives to the author and instead link period conventions to observable textual features.
Written Expression, Coherence, Cohesion and Correctness
Answer structure: introduction (thesis and roadmap), body paragraphs with one idea each, conclusion; use explicit connectives (no obstante, en consecuencia, por consiguiente, asimismo).
Register: formal academic Spanish, impersonal or first-person plural; avoid colloquialisms, contractions and chatty hedges; keep terminology consistent throughout.
Cohesion devices: anaphora and cataphora, lexical substitution, ellipsis, connectors of addition, contrast, cause, consequence and reformulation (esto es, en otras palabras).
Punctuation rules that carry marks: commas around vocatives and appositives, semicolon between closely related independent clauses, no comma between subject and verb.
Accents matter: interrogatives in indirect style (no sé qué quiere), demonstratives and 'solo' follow current RAE doctrine; diacritic accents on aún/aun, más/mas, él/el.
Agreement traps: collective nouns (el público asistió... y aplaudió), 'la mayoría de los críticos opina/opinan' (both accepted), and pronoun-gender agreement in 'le/les'.
Word economy: replace 'el hecho de que' with 'que', 'debido al hecho de que' with 'porque'; delete nominalizations where a verb works.
Length control: allocate roughly 10% to introduction, 75% to body, 15% to conclusion; check the required word count before adding a final paragraph.
Terminology and Critical Vocabulary Specific to Drama
Structural terms: acto/jornada, escena, cuadro, mutis (exit), aparte, acotación, didascalia, dramatis personae, elenco.
Plot terms: planteamiento, nudo, desenlace, clímax, peripecia, agnición/anagnórisis, catarsis, hamartía, conflicto, trama y subtrama.
Speech forms: diálogo, monólogo, soliloquio, aparte, monólogo interior, esticomitia, aparte cómico, relación (messenger speech).
Character types: protagonista, antagonista, deuteragonista, confidente, gracioso, figura del donaire, barba, galán, dama, villano, criado.
Space and staging: tablado, corral de comedias, cazuela, aposento, escenografía, utilería, vestuario, iluminación, foro, proscenio.
Performance terms: puesta en escena, director de escena, dramaturgista, versión, adaptación, acotación implícita, tempo dramático, ritmo.
Critical concepts: verosimilitud, convención teatral, distanciamiento (Brecht), metateatro, intertextualidad, polifonía, ironía dramática.
Versification terms: romance, redondilla, quintilla, décima espinela, silva, lira, soneto, octava real, verso blanco, polimetría.