"Zarzuela" and the Pastoral

• Published in: MLN 2008-03, Vol.123 (2), p.252-273
• Main Author: Harney, Lucy D.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cities; Language history; Librettos; Literary themes; Musical motives; Natural products; Nostalgia; Pastoral nomads; Pastoral poetry; Pastoralism; Poetry; Politics; Spanish language; Theater; Theocritus; Urban areas; Zarzuelas
• ISSN: 0026-7910; 1080-6598; 1080-6598
• DOI: 10.1353/mln.0.0011

Spanish literary history offers many examples of pastoral: the framing locus amoenus of Berceo's Milagros; the Libro de buen amor's mock-pastoral serrana episodes; Fray Luis's Vida retirada; Garcilaso's melancholy swains Salicio and Nemoroso; Antonio de Guevara's witty and mordant contrast of court and village; Laurencia's elogy of country life in Lope's Fuenteovejuna; Jorge de Montemayor's recasting of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (the basis of the plot of Shakespeare's The Two Gentlemen of Verona); Cervantes's Galatea; his Grisóstomo's unrequited love for Marcela, the eloquently reluctant shepherdess (Don Quijote I, xii-xiv); Góngora's dreamy and profound Soledades; his baroque reworking of Ovid in Polifemo y Galatea.1 Don Quijote's' Golden Age meditation, declaimed before uncomprehending goatherds (I, xi), rehearses several pastoral conventions. At what might be considered the opposite end of the socio-political spectrum, we find occasional hints of proletarian pastoral, as in the solidary disgruntlement of the street-vendors in Gigantes y cabezudos, who resist the municipality's repeated attempts to try to collect newly-escalated taxes.7 These several varieties of pastoral at work in the zarzuela repertoire contribute to the sometimes contradictory diversity of late-nineteenth century Spanish theater, a world characterized by David Gies as the "major site of self-examination and self-criticism" in the Spain of that era (The Theatre 441).