Poor Man's Bread: A Spanish Version of Hauptmann's The Weavers

Abstract

Poor Man's Bread (El pan del pobre) is the work of two little-known Spanish authors, Félix González Liana and José Francos Rodriguez. First performed on 14 December 1894 at the Teatro de Novedades in Madrid, Poor Man's Bread was, according to its authors, inspired by a reading of Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers (1893). Both The Weavers and Poor Man's Bread describe the appalling conditions suffered by industrial workers, the indifference of their bosses to their plight, and their eventual ransacking of the bosses' property. While the German play deals with the lot of the weavers in Hauptmann's native Silesia, its Spanish counterpart is concerned with a metal smelting plant, a fundición, and is set in a small town in the south east of Spain. There are, naturally, many similarities between the two plays, but also a number of important differences which serve to highlight some of the characteristics of the Spanish social drama of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.