Romantic and Realist Drama in the 19th Century
Romantic and realist drama are often examined together because the PAU asks you to contrast their conventions rather than merely date them. You need Hugo's manifesto, the Spanish Romantic stage, the well-made play, and the realist/naturalist revolution in staging and subject matter.
Romantic drama
- Hugo's Préface de Cromwell (1827) periodizes theatre into primitive, ancient and Christian ages, celebrates the grotesque alongside the sublime, rejects the unities, mixes tragedy and comedy, and demands local colour and history. Hernani (1830) became the battleground of the bataille d'Hernani.
- Spanish Romanticism: Duque de Rivas, Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835), with fate, honour, mixed verse and prose and a catastrophic ending; Zorrilla, Don Juan Tenorio (1844), with supernatural redemption and the love of Doña Inés; Hartzenbusch, Los amantes de Teruel; García Gutiérrez, El trovador.
- Conventions: five jornadas, crowd scenes, secret identities, tombs, storms, rhetorical soliloquy, and the hero as outsider.
Realism and naturalism
- The well-made play (Scribe, Sardou) supplies tight exposition, a complicating secret, the scène à faire and a logical dénouement.
- Realism: Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879) and Ghosts, Strindberg's Miss Julie, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard; the box set, fourth wall, contemporary dress and social problems.
- Naturalism: Zola's experimental novel and theatre, Antoine's Théâtre Libre (1887), the Freie Bühne (1889), heredity and environment, as in Ghosts.
- Spanish realism: Galdós's Realidad (1892) and Electra (1901); the género chico and commercial bourgeois comedy.
Worked example
In A Doll's House, the letterbox, the macaroons and the tarantella are not props but agents: they externalize Nora's secret and Torvald's control. The plot is causal and retrospective, typical of the well-made play, but the ending refuses the scène à faire of reconciliation. In Ghosts, by contrast, heredity and syphilis make the tragedy naturalist rather than merely realist. The distinction is explanatory, not evaluative.
Traps that cost marks
- Treating realism and naturalism as synonyms.
- Saying Romantic drama abandoned verse; it mixed verse and prose.
- Ignoring the commercial well-made play as a source of realist technique.
- Confusing Zorrilla's Don Juan with Tirso's Burlador.