Time, Irony, and Negation in Lorca's Last Three Plays

Abstract

DONA Rosita La soltera (1935) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936) are sometimes considered by critics to have leapt forth in their modernity from the ashes of Lorca's antique-mythic phase, whose last flowering was the powerfully archetypal Yerma (1934), and yet Lorca's last three plays are woven on an esthetic thread of profound, if subtle, continuity.' Because they so clearly promote an esthetic appropriate to modern ironic drama, these plays mark a departure from Lorca's earlier conception of theater. Negation, both as principle and as a technique of irony, forms an increasingly powerful counterweight to the elaborate visual effects and irrepressible lyricism which had tended to dominate earlier plays. Roberto Sanchez has already compared the greater intensity and concentration of dramatic elements in Yerma to the more diffused lyricism of Bodas de sangre, noting that esta buisqueda por cierta simplicidad, cierta concentraci6n de