Spanish Golden Age theatre

Spanish Golden Age theatre refers to theatre in Spain roughly between 1590 and 1681. Spain emerged as a European power after it was unified by the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile in 1469 and then claimed for Christianity at the Siege of Granada in 1492. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a monumental increase in the production of live theatre as well as the in importance of the arts within Spanish society.

Theatre was an accessible art form for all participants in Renaissance Spain, being both highly sponsored by the aristocratic class and highly attended by the lower classes. The volume and variety of Spanish plays during the Golden Age was unprecedented in the history of world theatre, surpassing even the dramatic production of the English Renaissance by a factor of at least four. This volume has been as much a source of criticism as praise for Spanish Golden Age theatre, for emphasizing quantity before quality. A large number of the plays of this period (10,000 to 30,000) are still considered masterpieces today. This prolific production greatly contributed to the accessibility of theatre in Spain. For modern theatre historians, however, it has contributed to the difficulty of researching theatre from this period. The vast majority of plays have remained virtually untouched, in terms of both production and scholarly analysis, since the seventeenth century. Combined with the error prone printing techniques that plagued the publication of Spanish plays, this has vastly undercut the study of Spanish Golden Age theatre. Although a thorough inclusive analysis remains difficult or even impossible, Spanish Golden Age theatre represents an area of active and productive research for theatre historians.

Noted for its variety, the theatre of Renaissance Spain was the only in Europe to simultaneously include secular and religious dramas. Additionally, state sponsored drama existed harmoniously alongside popular for-profit theatre, with many theatre artists contributing significantly to both. Stylistically, plays ranged from straight plays to operas and from bawdy comedies to epic tragedies. Spain also introduced its own forms and genres of theatre with the development of the Comedia nueva and the zarzuela.

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