The commedia dell'arte and the Circus in the Work of Jacinto Benavente

Abstract

Jacinto Benavente (1866–1954) is one of Spain's forgotten dramatists. In an interview contained in an article published recently in the newspaper Ya to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Benavente's death, the theatre director José Luís Alonso said: ‘se puede decir que, prácticamente, ha caído en el olvido, mientras que otros autores de su tiempo, un claro ejemplo lo tenemos en Valle-Inclán, han conseguido hoy su plenitud’ [one can say that Benavente has been almost completely forgotten, while other authors of his day (Valle-Inclán is a good example) have today come into their own]. Benavente is today hardly ever performed in Spain, unlike his contemporaries Valle-Inclán and García Lorca. His preoccupation with middle and upper-class characters, and his unwillingness to treat social themes in a radical manner go a long way towards explaining this lack of interest in him. Benavente's plays may seem rather trivial and old-fashioned when compared with Valle-Inclán's bitterly satirical es-perpentos or Lorca's powerful folk tragedies, yet during his lifetime he was Spain's most frequently-performed dramatist. His work is varied, including fantasy plays, dramas on rural themes, and plays satirizing polite society. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1922. His best work was written relatively early in his life, and the high point of his dramatic output is generally considered to be Los intereses creados (The Bonds of Interest), first performed in 1907, and based on the commedia dell'arte. This, however, is not the only work by Benavente in which commedia characters appear: in the period up to 1916 the author frequently deals with the commedia dell'arte, and his play El hijo de Polichinela (Polichinela's Son) appeared as late as 1927.