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After he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in , his place in the literary canon was firmly established; but the decline of his creativity had already started by then and became more pronounced in the following decades. For a large part of the twentieth century, he was simultaneously the most revered and the most criticized playwright in Spain. He had great success with the Spanish public in commercial theaters and inspired many imitators; but despite his popularity and influence, a large group of respected intellectuals and critics maintained negative views about his plays and his impact on contemporary Spanish theater.
They believed that he was too self-complacent because of his success with the Spanish middle-class public. Since the s, his most important plays and his early works have reappeared in critical editions, and a younger generation of academics is evaluating his role in the renovation of the Spanish stage from new perspectives. Among his patients and friends were well-known actors and writers, including the first Spanish winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, dramatist Jose Echegaray. The family had the opportunity to attend premieres and go to the theaters regularly. Young Jacinto learned how to read at home and was ready to start his primary education at age five.
During his childhood and early teenage years, he built several toy theaters and performed puppet shows for his friends and neighbors and the household maids. Benavente started to go to the theaters with his family at an early age; later on he insisted that he could vividly remember all the plays and musicals he attended between ages four and twelve. He also read plays by both Spanish and foreign authors, especially Shakespeare, whom his father admired greatly.
Because the young man studied French, English, Italian, and some Latin in his high-school years, he was able to read many plays in their original languages. He read Hamlet circa in translation at first, in Spanish and French, but was able to read it in English at age sixteen.
He said in his memoirs published in volume eleven of his Obras completas [Complete Works], that he had always admired Echegaray, who later became unpopular with the young intellectuals of the early twentieth century because they considered him outdated. Benavente was disappointed, since he wanted to be an actor. His father, who wanted him to become an engineer, convinced him that he should attend college. He enrolled in the University of Madrid in but was not interested in academics. He often skipped class, was not a brilliant student, and switched from engineering to law after the first year because he disliked mathematics.
When his father died in , Benavente dropped out of college without hesitation and devoted himself to reading, writing, and traveling abroad between and He later joined a circle of young intellectuals who were highly critical of the status quo. He spent most of his time writing comedies and poems at home and reading the classics: Benavente had a close relationship with his mother, with whom he lived as an adult until her death in It appears that he never had a significant emotional relationship with anyone else.
He prided himself on being a confirmed bachelor. Even in his memoirs, Benavente mostly tells anecdotes of the people he knew and the city where he lived, and only talks in detail about his childhood. There have always been persistent but unconfirmed rumors, mostly in theatrical circles, about his alleged homosexuality.
Homosexuality was taboo in Spanish society at that time and, for a large part of the twentieth century, was penalized as a crime. Only late-twentieth-century studies approach the subject more openly, but they, with few exceptions, reach no definite conclusions.
Since the late s, there have been alternate readings of his work, uncovering homoerotic currents. Benavente was familiar with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century classic plays with cross-dressing roles from England and Spain, and they may have inspired him to portray characters of ambiguous sexual identity in his early works and beyond.
In Cuento de primavera, one of the main characters is Ganimedes Ganymede , a poet and page in the royal court who is described with androgynous characteristics but assumed to be male. After some ambiguous situations involving mistaken identities and cross-dressing, the ending of the play seems to reinforce traditional expecations about heterosexual attraction, but the plot twists are loaded with destabilizing ironies. Teatro fantdstico was a compilation of unproduced short plays published in and again in in a revised, expanded edition.
Besides Cuento de primavera, the edition also included three more plays: El encanto de una hora was produced in Madrid in , shortly after the second edition was published. All of them have one act only, except Cuento de primavera, which is a two-act comedy. The edition omitted Los favoritos and added two more one-act plays: Of the new plays added in , only El criacto de Don Juan was ever produced; it was performed in Madrid in In their view, Benavente anticipates avant-garde trends later developed in Europe by such writers as Gordon Craig.
This anticipation is especially apparent in El encanto de una hora, with its antirealistic premise and its explicit reaction against a mimetic imitation of ordinary life. In Benavente expanded his literary output and published three books: His early poems from Versos have been consistently considered mediocre, even by the author himself.
He never published another poetry book during his lifetime, although more than one hundred poems, found among his papers, appeared posthumously in the appendix to volume ten of Obras completas. In he finally realized his lifelong dream and joined the Maria Tubeau theater company as an actor. There he met La Bella Geraldine Geraldine the Beautiful , a strikingly attractive English actress and circus artist who was popular with Madrid audiences.
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He later toured several provincial towns in Spain as an impresario of her show. Benavente loved the backstage atmosphere. In the late years of the nineteenth century, Benavente participated actively in the intellectual life of Madrid and joined the writers who were associated with the modernist movement and the so-called Generation of Benavente and Valle-Inclan nevertheless remained friends.
At the turn of the century, Benavente also traveled to France and Italy and acquired more cosmopolitan views, which are reflected in his first successful plays, especially in La noche del sdbacto, which is set in a summer resort for the European elite. While he was establishing himself in the intellectual scene, Benavente tried to convince a family friend, Emilio Mario, who was the respected impresario of Teatro de la Comedia Comedy Theater in Madrid, to perform one of his early plays.
For six or seven years, Benavente brought Mario about a dozen plays until Mario finally accepted one of them, El nido ajeno. It was poorly received by the public, and the majority of the critics wrote negative reviews. There were loud complaints against the alleged immorality of the play.
After the three performances stipulated by law as the minimum at that time, it was replaced by another play. Benavente questions the conventions of the subgenre and denounces the oppressive situation of married women in Spanish society. From then on, his theater is a balancing act: He was fully aware of the limits imposed by the expectations of the theatergoing public and by the structure of commercial theater, and he did not cross that invisible line.
He offered a type of criticism that was easy to agree with and condemned the vices of contemporary society such as excessive ambition or greed. Over time, his theater showed a marked tendency toward moralizing that the author himself regretted.
Benavente combined his early theatrical activities with the practice of journalism. He wrote his first article for La Epoca in Over his long career he wrote hundreds of newspaper articles that were collected later in Obras completas volumes seven, nine, and eleven. He eventually stopped this frantic pace, although he resumed his journalistic activities at the beginning of the twentieth century.
He later confessed in an interview included in volume eleven of Obras completas that he was tired of meeting deadlines. In Benavente was the first editor of the journal Vida literaria Literary Life , which was considered a platform for a new generation of writers.
Benavente left his post the following year, stating that it distracted him from writing plays, a task that he never abandoned, despite the failure of his first play. Gente conocida premiered in , and the public liked the sharp, witty dialogue and the contemporary situations presented.
It was his first success, to be followed by many more. The public enjoyed the exercise of decoding the possible parallels between the plot of the play and real life, and the comedy was successful. Guerrero later played the lead in many plays by Benavente. Benavente himself said that actress and director Rosario Pino was the ideal interpreter of many of his plays.
It is also true that many actresses became popular because of their leading roles in his plays. Lola Membrives and Margarita Xirgu are among this distinguished group. Like Guerrero, they both directed their own theater companies and toured Spain and Latin America with other plays by Benavente in their repertoire, besides the ones that they premiered. Until his death in , he produced at least two or three new plays a year, and often four or five.
Sometimes as many as seven or eight of his plays were performed in a single year, not including reruns. As early as , he had six new plays produced in the same year: Some of the critics who had attacked him so harshly in his first attempts as a playwright praised him enthusiastically a few years later.
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Share your thoughts with other customers. May 11, Rosaux rated it liked it Shelves: Its psychological impact has impressed a range of critics, many of whom enjoyed the complexity of the plot and characterisation. For example, in his introduction to the edition of the play, Paul Manchester notes: The play has been adapted for film and television many times, most recently in Feb 09, Marisolera added it.
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