Joaquín Pacheco's Alfredo and the Father-Son Conflict in Spanish Romantic Drama

Two months after the controversial debut of duque de Rivas's Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino in Madrid's Teatro del Príncipe, Joaquín Pacheco would challenge the conventional norms of Spanish society even more than his contemporary had with his drama Alfredo. The Sicilian protagonist Alfredo, arguing that he is the victim of "una llama irresistible," falls desperately in love with his stepmother Berta, believing his father has died while fighting in the crusades. As a result of his obsession with his father's widow, Alfredo turns away from his longtime friends Rujero and Roberto and is driven to kill Berta's brother Jorje when the latter inadvertently witnesses the lovers' union. The miraculous return of Alfredo's father Ricardo, however, thwarts the hero's plans to marry his stepmother and live happily ever after. Berta immediately seeks, and receives, Ricardo's forgiveness, agreeing to leave the palace immediately for the convent in order to perform lifelong penance for her sins. Berta's change of heart angers Alfredo, who believes them to be united forever by their shared sin. Goaded by his new friend El Griego, a palace outsider, Alfredo vows to kill his father. At the final moment, however, Alfredo instead kills himself, proclaiming himself cursed as he dies.

Though Alfredo possesses many of the traits of the hero who appeared regularly on the Madrid stage during Romanticism's apogee in Spain, his plaintive cry and tragic suicide evoked little sympathy among Spanish critics and audiences. El Eco del Comercio, having panned Don Álvaro two months earlier, nonetheless expressed a preference for Rivas's work over Pacheco's, stating, "nosotros en su lugar siempre preferíamos las jornadas del indiano a los actos del fatalista de Sicilia" (27 May 1835). The newspaper also reported a mixed reaction on the part of the spectators, claiming that "los que aplaudían quisieron sofocar con las manos el rumor de los que desaprobaban" (Eco del Comercio 25 May 1835). Likewise, although José de Espronceda, in his review of the drama in El Artista, implored Pacheco to continue his literary career, he also concluded that "desafortunadamente Alfredo no es más que un hermoso pensamiento mal puesto en la escena" (264). Following this lukewarm reception, only two subsequent performances of Alfredo were held, in a half-empty theater, according to the available accounts (Caldera 87; Peers 337).

Reflecting, thirty years after Alfredo's staging, on the drama's unpopularity and its lack of critical attention, Pacheco came to believe that his fatal mistake was having composed Alfredo in prose rather than verse (Literatura 91). He justified his decision by claiming that "la prosa tiene lugar en el género realista, que pretende reproducir el mundo material" (Literatura 92). Despite the drama's supernatural elements, Pacheco believed that in Alfredo "las pasiones [de los protagonistas] son ardientes pero naturales: su lucha con el deber es viva y accidentada: el término es posible, es verosímil, lo cree eminentemente trágico" (Literatura 91). Over a century later, Edgar Allison Peers attributed the drama's failure to an artistic flaw: its failure to provide a plausible motivation for the protagonist's actions. Peers was particularly critical of Alfredo's final decision to kill himself rather than his father, claiming, "no se sabe qué razón, como no sea la de que el público así lo esperaba, Alfredo se da muerte con un puñal" (340). For this reason, Alfredo offers nothing to modern critics other than "una de las más pueriles exageraciones románticas de España" (338). Similarly, David Gies, though stressing the importance of reading the drama for its symbolic rather than its realistic meaning, also observes that "[t]he characters substitute energy for conviction, change emotion precipitously and without dramatic motivation, suffer too many imagined slights and act irrationally" (Theatre 112). In a similar vein, Caldera argues that Pacheco's mistake was to write a "tragedia del destino sin el menor esfuerzo para 'arreglarla a la escena española'" by having the drama take place in...