Valle-Inclan Plays: 1: Divine Words; Bohemian Lights; Silver Face

Description

One of the most significant playwrights and novelists of the early twentieth century This volume of translations contains Divine Words, a play that draws on pagan, Celtic traditions of the playwright's native Galicia and the repressive Catholicism of Spain to present a distorted picture of rustic life at its cruellest and most hypocritical; Bohemian Lights, the play which first expounded Valle-Inclan's theory of the grotesque (esperpento) and Silver Face, the first in the trilogy of Savage Plays, distinguished by a similar sense of anarchy and amorality. "Ramon del Valle Inclan (1866-1936), the most pioneering Spanish dramatist of this century... anticipates most of the key movements in modern drama. He is notoriously unclassifiable but was both an Expressionist and an Absurdist before the event. He created a genre he called 'esperpento' which broadly means grotesque tragi-comedy, and what is fascinating is that he anticipates Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Arrabal without in any way sacrificing his own radical utopianism. He is one of the seminal figures in modern drama: erotic, anarchic and a Galician poet of the grotesque." (Michael Billingon, Guardian)

Ramon del Valle-Inclan, actor, novelist, poet and playwright was born on 28 October 1866 in Pontevedra, Spain. His major plays include: The Italian Farce of the Girl in Love with the King, Divine Words, Bohemian Lights and The Horns of Don Friolera - all published in Spain in 1920 and 1921; and the trilogy known as The Savage Plays: Silver Face (published 1922), Eagle of Honour and Ballad of Wolves (both published in 1907). Valle-Inclan died on 5 January 1936.