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  • Medieval "History" and Modern Anxiety in Antonio García Gutiérrez's Tragedy El Rey Monge (1837)
  • Tracie Amend

In the realm of Romantic tragedy on the Spanish stage, the use of history presents a framework through which Spanish spectators could expunge their own anxieties within a medieval context. Rather than attempt to recreate a series of historical events on stage, most Romantic tragedians developed their plots around an invented love story. In other words, "history" helped to create the tragic ambience that served the central plot. Moreover, the use of a historical framework remained an indispensible tool for creating the proper tone and emotional effect of the protagonist's tragic trajectory. The idea of history provided a key tool for many Romantic dramatists, leading to the performance of an imagined past within the context of nineteenth-century Spanish politics.

The impetus to write and produce historical drama in the early nineteenth century is not specific to Spain; rather, it is a tendency that appears throughout Europe during the Romantic movement. In his text Between History and Literature, Lionel Gossman characterizes Romantic historicism in France as a field in which the historian or author was conscious of creating a universal ideology, much in the form of a painted tableau (233). The tableau was not meant to precisely imitate the past; in fact, historians treasured the artistry of the discourse far more than they valued the veracity of the histoire (243). In the Romantic context especially, the playful irrationality of history was embraced and the attempt to create a "rational" historical discourse was often rejected. Thus, the Romantic goal was not the imitation of historical events, but rather [End Page 1] the concept of history in order to create an ambience of verisimilitude. Because Romantic drama often overlooks historical veracity, the purpose of a so-called historical drama is to represent a present emotional state within the mythic perception of history. In other words, the historical ambience of the drama is a technique the dramatist employs in order to capture the public's (and perhaps, the nation's) feelings towards their own lives. This correlation remains a strong motivation for the use of the historical framework in Spain's later Romantic movement of the early and mid-nineteenth century.

It is this powerful quality of the historical tragedy that consisted much of the dramatic work of Antonio García Gutiérrez, the dramatist most well known for his astoundingly successful and emblematic tragedy El trovador (1836). While his other tragedies lacked the impact of El trovador's success, García Gutiérrez continued to employ the trope of the medieval framework in many of his works. His tragedy El page (1837) depicts an erotic triangle between a medieval lady, her adulterous lover, and their unknown love child (the page of the title). In the same year, García Gutiérrez staged the tragedy El rey monge. The historical frame concerns the life of Ramiro II, the monk who briefly ruled Aragon in the twelfth century after the death of his brother Alfonso. In this particular work, García Gutiérrez uses the medieval frame to characterize the monk-king's struggle with power and sanity. Although situated in a distant medieval setting, Ramiro's crisis on stage mirrors the Spanish anxiety towards political upheaval in the 1830s.

While Antonio García Gutiérrez consistently employed medieval settings for his tragedies in the 1830s and 40s, several of his colleagues (most notably Mariano José de Larra, Antonio Gil y Zárate, and Eugenio Hartzenbusch) also used the tragic form to depict medieval stories or events in Spanish history. These medieval settings served to remind the spectators of their shared cultural memory and evoke the images of mythic figures and glorious events from Spain's period as a formidable Castilian power. In many cases, such as Larra's Macías (1835) or García Gutiérrez's El trovador (1836), the historical event behind the action is threatened royal succession. "History" is quickly overwhelmed by the love story and the destructive passion of the protagonist, with the result that Romantic historical drama is much more about the individual's angst than the historical...

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