Jeffrey Bersett

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Decimonónica

Volume

14

Issue

2

Publisher

Decimonónica

Publication Date

2017

First Page

1

Last Page

18

Abstract

Critics of Rivas’s Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino have developed numerous approaches to the play and its place in the canon of Spanish theatrical production. Two areas of concurrence appear in more or less unanimous fashion, at least in those studies carried out during the last fifty years. First, many of the play’s elements lend it pronounced qualities of the costumbrismo practiced in Spanish culture, in particular that which evolved from the mid-eighteenth century onward. Second, the play serves as one of the most representative works of Spanish Romanticism, specifically that brand of Romanticism described by Donald Shaw above, in which there is a manifestation of the “collapse of previously established absolute values.”1 In the process of arriving at these conclusions, critics such as Casalduero (1962), Pattison (1967), Cardwell (1973), Andioc (1982), Shaw (1986), Catalán Marín (2003), Iarocci (2006), and Surwillo (2010) have examined the play’s innovations and explored widely varying readings of Rivas’s work, including the play’s scandalous ideology, its revolutionary use of language and form, its place in the transatlantic dialogue on colonialism, and its importance as a marker in definitions of racial identity, along with questions of ethnicity as it relates to nobility. Each of these analyses delineates Rivas’s advancement of the Romantic experiment and his representation, for good or bad, of Romanticism’s moment in general. However, no study to date has tied together the threads that run from costumbrismo to Romanticism in Don Álvaro. That is, no critic so far has shown how Rivas utilizes costumbrista material as the basis for developing a decidedly rebellious Romantic worldview in the play.

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