Content area
Abstract
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).
Full text
The pastoral mode has traditionally been understood to sentimentalize, even mythologize, ideas, objects and phenomena associated with the rural landscape, often contrasting the bucolic and the urban, irrespective of literary or artistic genre. Throughout the centuries, "Arcadia was forever being rediscovered," asserts Ernst R. Curtius, because the stock of pastoral motifs was "bound to no genre and to no poetic form" (187). Thus, they were adaptable by Greek romance, eclogue, drama, and Renaissance chivalric and sentimental romance (187). The influence of pastoral in Western literature is deeply rooted and pervasive. Indeed, from the first century of the Roman Empire down to the time of Goethe, the study of Latin literature began, notes Curtius, with Virgil's first eclogue (190). The present study seeks to situate the works of late nineteenth-century Spanish zarzuela-including those with urban settings and characters-within the pastoral tradition.
Pivotal to all pastoral formulations is an exaltation of that which is ostensibly close to nature. Whether characterized mythically as a Golden Age in which, as Alexander Pope (I, 15) maintained, "the best of men follow'd the employment [of shepherd]"; or located, as by the "moderns," in the promise of contemporary rural life; or conceived, as by many Romantics, as a manifestation of untarnished and exemplary Nature itself, the pastoral world is typically contrasted to a morally compromised urban universe. Pastoral, in its various presentations, resists unequivocal definitions or rigid descriptions. As Annabel Patterson points out, pastoral, like other "strong literary forms," propagates "by miscegenation" (7). What matters, then, is not to define pastoral but to delineate and analyze how it is put to use by "writers, artists, and intellectuals . . . for a range of functions and intentions" (Patterson 7). To the degree that our focus is the pastoral work of specific authors, in a specific period of national or regional literary history, we must, as Paul Alpers argues, account for "the range and variety of pastoral writings as they present themselves historically" (12). Accordingly, the "relation of literary works to their predecessors" is of the utmost importance in our discussion (Alpers 12).
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. That "dichosa edad y siglos dichosos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados," expressing Hesiodic nostalgia, exalts the simple, earthly contentment of man's unfettered communion with Nature, while mournfully situating the golden age in an irrecoverable past, as would Pope and the "ancients." Don Quijote's soliloquy expresses another pastoral topos, derived from Hesiod's Works and Days: the appealing vision (so influential in later formulations of pre-lapserian themes) of the spontaneously-productive natural world in which, as Don Quijote expresses it, "a nadie le era necesario para alcanzar su ordinario sustento tomar otro trabajo que alzar la mano, y alcanzarle de las robustas encinas que liberalmente les estaban convidando con su dulce y sazonado fruto" (I, xi). According to Don Quijote's Golden Age reverie, "entonces los que en ella vivían, ignoraban estas dos palabras de 'tuyo' y 'mío.' Eran . . . todas las cosas en comunes" (I, xi). With this image of effortless abundance Cervantes invokes the egalitarian notion of common property, traced by Raymond Williams from Virgil to Spenser and Chapman (42-43).
The pastoral life as haven, with its Western roots in Horace and Virgil, is likewise a commonplace of Spanish literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Echoes of rural sanctuary punctuate Jovellanos' celebrated Epístola del Paular (1779), written, while he pursued a matter pertaining to his position as justice in Madrid, in a monastery whose "incautos monjes" had recently been swindled. The poem opens with the imagery of sanctuary, as the monastery is described as "este oculto y venerable asilo, / do la virtud austera y penitente / vive ignorada, y del liviano mundo / huída, en santa soledad se esconde" (175). To this depiction of a country retreat where virtue reigns-the monks who presumably manage and maintain this refuge are not referred to-Jovellanos adds verses that portray the monastery as a natural product of the surrounding landscape: "¡Oh monte impenetrable! ¡Oh bosque ombrío! / ¡Oh valle deleitoso! ¡Oh solitaria taciturna mansión!" (186). Although apparently craving a refuge from the pain of a romantic involvement rather than from the city as a whole, Jovellanos nevertheless praises the condition of "el solitario penitente . . . Libre de los cuidados enojosos, que en los palacios y dorados techos nos turban de contino" (184-85).
In contrast to these images of a labor-free country existence or spiritual haven, a pastoral tradition has persisted from the days of Theocritus and Virgil, through the Renaissance and the time of Spenser, that foregrounds country folk at work as well as at play. Theocritus further served as a model for pastoral lyricists who eschewed the notion that rural virtues pertained irrevocably to a lost age. "The pastoral landscape of Theocritus," Raymond Williams reminds us, "had been immediate and close at hand: just outside the walls of the city" (17). It was this conviction, that the lives and work of contemporary rural folk were the fittest subjects for poetic representation, that inspired French and English "moderns" like Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle and Ambrose Philips, emulating Spenser's industrious and loquacious shepherds, to look to their own rural countryside and its inhabitants in the composition of pastoral poetry (cf. Spenser, "April. Ægloga Quarta" 431-33; "September. Ægloga Nona" 452-55).
In nineteenth-century Spain, pastoral themes focusing on "common folk" often emerge in/as costumbrismo-such typologies abounding in the work of both Larra and Mesonero Romanos, for example-even though this latter mode encompasses works that are seemingly antipastoral in their unsentimental perception of countryside. As with Cervantes's novela ejemplar, Coloquio de los perros, anti-pastoral formulations may be seen as related to the pastoral mode in that they make reference to (by rejecting) pastoral's exaltation of rural life. As José Álvarez Junco has observed, rural life and peasant ways fascinated both the costumbristas and the realists ("Rural and Urban" 82-83). Fernán Caballero's La gaviota, as an example, could thus be discussed as a reworking of piscatorial pastoral. Novelists such as Valera, Pereda, Galdós, Alas, Pardo Bazán, and Palacio Valdés envision the urban universe amid the greater landscape of a Spain still largely rural, while hypostasizing this or that aspect of the city/country divide. Playwrights like Tamayo y Baus and López de Ayala dramatize the values and dilemmas of modernity in terms of their characters' relative involvement with or distance from the town or the countryside (Gies, "The Theatre" 439-40).
In its pastoral aspect, late-nineteenth century zarzuela cross-pollinated with the realist and costumbrista modes of the day. These, as María de los Ángeles Ayala observes, were pervasively embraced throughout the nineteenth century, in all genres and forms, including theater. She points to a second, post-Romantic costumbrista era roughly lasting from 1870 to 1885, as evidenced by numerous books, articles, collections, and journalistic pieces. Frequent themes include those centering on such feminist issues as matrimony, female destiny, and the topical contrast of bourgeois frivolity and rural probity (17-18; also Versteeg 53-57). In addition, Salvador García Castañeda notes the persistence of rural typologies that favor the aldeano and the routine glorification, in the literature and media of the day, of the patria chica, along with a coincident disdain for the rural emigrant, as frequently expressed in the works of Pereda ("La tradición" 11-12; also his "La aldea"). Joaquín Díaz points to a tendency, among ethnographers as well as literary authors, to essentialize not only rural and urban life, but also the contrast between them (28).2
La alegría de la huerta, which premiered in January of 1900 at the Eslava, is one of the most successful zarzuelas of the género chico repertoire. Set in the huerta murciana, the play fuses Federico Chueca's last major theatrical score with a libretto by Antonio Paso and Enrique García Alvarez, in which urban influence disrupts the simple lives of the rural protagonists. The machinations of the pretentious and ambitious "modernist" Heriberto (who dreams of occupying a position of music director in Madrid) confound the simple and honest relations among Alegrías, Carola, and Juan Francisco. Adhering to the pastoral tradition of Theocritus and Virgil, La alegría de la huerta is framed by the alternation of work and festival. Preparations for the annual procession from la Ermita de la Fuensanta through the village streets, propel much of the interplay among the lovers and schemers. The festival itself, as so often in zarzuela, provides the backdrop for the play's final cuadro. The integral nature of work in the characters' lives likewise pervades the script. The first scene opens, according to the stage directions, with a "CORO DE HUERTANAS lavando en la acequia" (Valencia, Cuadro I, scene i). The bashful lover Alegrías later recalls that he has spent years helping Carola, his beloved huertana, with her washing, and that their tacit expressions of affection have been exchanged in this context: "Ella . . . me dice to con los ojos. Alegrías, súbeme el lebrillo; Alegrías, llévame el cántaro . . . Ya sé yo que es algo de comodidad, pero también es cariño, tío Piporro . . ." (Cuadro I, scene vi). The skeptical tío Piporro, offering advice to the young lover, equates love with farming, offering this observation regarding his "peazo de tierra": "¡Esa sí que quiere! Cincuenta años castigándola, hiriéndola, y cincuenta años que responde al castigo, dándome sus frutos. Hasta la tierra de la laera, agradecía de la cerca que le he puesto, la ha vestío de jazmineros que da gloria verlos. Te digo que es la mejor mujer y la más barata; con agua que le des na más, la ties tan contenta" (Cuadro I, scene vi). Equating happiness with toil and emotional fulfillment with vocational competence, Tío Piporro, in his cynical fashion, sustains a world view founded on his sense of the labors by which he defines himself.
A less comical treatment of traditional pastoral themes debuted that same year with La Tempranica. Premiering in September of 1900 at the Teatro de la Zarzuela, La Tempranica coincided with the final dismantling of the last vestiges of Spain's once-vast overseas empire. Set primarily in the Grenadine countryside among the gitanos of that region, the play honors the genre's commitment to costumbrismo, highlighted by Gerónimo Giménez's musical score rich in flamenco intonations, and enhanced (as in La alegría) by the characters' exaggerated rural dialect (penned by actor and librettist Julián Romea). The star-crossed romance between the dark-skinned gitana, María, known affectionately as La Tempranica, and Luis, Count of Santa Fe, reflects the authors' decision to add themes of racial typing and miscegenation to the hypergamous motif characteristic of many zarzuela plots (e.g., Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente).
Luis explains his attraction for María to his hunting companions, maintaining that "la muchacha es negrucha, eso sí, pero bonita y airosa como pocas dentro del tipo de su raza" (Valencia, Cuadro I, scene 5). María is a sincere, unapologetically earthy country girl. The fun-loving antics of the vain señorito and his leisured companions are invidiously contrasted with the hard-working lives and unassuming candor of the gitanos. Antonio Valencia notes this contrast of life-styles in which "se cuaja el desarrollo sentimental de una desilusión amorosa en que pierden los pobres cuyos afectos auténticos se contrapesan con la frivolidad de los adinerados" (555).
Discovering that Luis is married, María rashly sets out to confront the couple at their home in Granada, prepared to claim him as her legitimate spouse. On seeing his wife, however, she is immediately humbled by the aristocratic bearing and, more particularly, the white skin of her rival. "¡Qué blanquita é . . . ¡Yo, yo . . . qué negra zoy a la vera zuya!" (Cuadro III, scene 2). Returning home to marry the gitano Miguel, of her own race and social station, María admits: "eze é de mi iguá . . . , pa eze he nacío." Of Luis she declares, "Ezte é ya pa mí un muerto . . . ¡Ay! . . . Pero déjame zuzpirá por é" (Cuadro III, scene 3). After initial resistance, María arrives at a disheartened comprehension of her own unsuitability as a spouse for the man she loves; she is prevented from being with Luis due to social conventions beyond their control. At the end of the play, María's brother hurls a stone through a window pane of Luis' home and flees. This futile act, seemingly more of frustration than defiance, reminds the audience of the unbridgeable chasm that separates the erstwhile lovers.
It is not surprising that La Tempranica would resonate with Spain's post-war theater-going audience, a class at once disillusioned, bewildered, and demoralized by their country's international collapse, yet desperate to maintain those prerogatives presumably afforded by a glorious imperial heritage. The piece was, in fact, composed precisely at the time when, as Sebastian Balfour points out, competing scenarios of so-called national regeneration, representing various interest groups and cultural communities, had in common a sense of collective crisis and humiliation (26-28). La Tempranica, for all its sincerity in characterizing the gitanos, represents the pastoral sensibility at its most reactionary, reaffirming the impenetrable, even necessary, barrier between rich and poor, light and dark, high and low. At the same time, the play's sympathy with the gitanos, its portrayal of them as pitiable victims, seems to identify the recently defeated Spain with the marginal Andalusian underclass. As the gitanos suffer exploitation and disrespect at the hands of the aristocracy, so Spain perceived itself bullied and humiliated by formidable foreign enemies.
In terms of its more overt pastoral vision, La Tempranica, with its tale of a rural Gypsy girl jilted by an urban señorito, invidiously contrasts the rural and urban worlds to the detriment of the latter, as does La alegría de la huerta. María's stoic decision to make the best life she can with a husband from her own world suggests that the countryside retains its integrity even when slighted or exploited by the city. Given the anti-urban bias of such straightforward pastoral, is it appropriate to speak of zarzuelas set in Madrid (which constitute the vast majority) as pastoral, and in so doing characterize the quintessentially urban chulos of Echegaray, Chueca, Chapí, and Bretón as analogues of conventional pastoral's rural types? The present essay suggests that the urban plays that dominate the género chico repertoire represent an accommodation of the pastoral mode to the urban milieu.
Wherever one may construe a sentimental sympathy for the rural, however ironical or inadvertent, or when authors focus on city/country dichotomies, we may identify something approaching pastoral. Indeed, the very presence or implication of dichotomy may indicate pastoral intention, covert or overt, deliberate or unwitting. Williams (68) refers to "structures of feeling" underpinning certain pastoral formulations, often linking them inextricably with the urban experience (68-86). The pastoral mode, as some critics have emphasized, lends itself to the treatment of antitheses, to "schematizing a vast body of cultural polarities" (Ettin 29; citing and enlarging on Toliver 3). Typological contrasts associated with the rural/urban dichotomy include: divinely-created/man-made, natural/artificial, traditional/innovative, beautiful/ugly, simple/complex, orderly/chaotic, peaceful/agitated, spacious/congested, wholesome/unhealthy, honest/corrupt, virtuous/ vicious, innocent/worldly, egalitarian/exploitative, subsistence-driven/ profit-driven, inclusive/alienating, kin-ordered/class-ordered.
In terms of their sociological accuracy, none of these antonymous constructions holds up in the context of what Julio Caro Baroja refers to as a "linking of functions between the city and the country" (31). He disputes, for example, such conceptions of the godless city as that expressed in James Thomson's pessimistic query, "Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?" (qtd. in Williams 240).3 Urbanism, Caro Baroja maintains, has not historically precluded the functioning of religious communities in Mediterranean cities. In fact, "the same sense of solidarity, based upon traditional principles [as that associated with the country] is found in the religious life of the city" (33). Since the Middle Ages, all Catholic Europe has celebrated "an occasion which sums up the spirit of city life, the festival of Corpus Christi" (33). Urban religious festivals form the backdrop of numerous zarzuelas. Two of the more notable are La verbena de la Paloma, whose title derives from one such local observance, and Gigantes y cabezudos, named for the annual Saragossan procession commemorating the legendary appearance there of the blessed Virgin in A.D. 40. In both of these works, the festival that lends the play its title forms the backdrop of the climactic final cuadro.
Caro Baroja's discussion of urban religion is part of a broader critique of the tendency of pastoral forms to ignore or devalue the small-group dynamics of many urban institutions. He rebuts the notion that kinship structures have had little effect on urban life, documenting the fact that "for several centuries lineal descent was a notable influence in the Mediterranean city" (33). Regarding what he views as the uncritical association of urbanism and iconoclasm, often to the point of virtual synonymy, Caro Baroja contends: "The principles of secularisation, of breaking with tradition, and of a purely contractual organization are found in the antique city. But they are not the only principles there. Yet the commonplace has had enough influence to give that impression" (34).
While Caro Baroja's demonstration of small-group dynamics in the Mediterranean city-including traditional, often religious, observances-blurs the conceptual line between country and city, it is his examination of their economic interdependence that most effectively attenuates the traditional pastoral/urban dichotomies. In an analysis of Peninsular and Mediterranean latifundismo (foreshadowing Williams' critique of England's manor house system), Caro Baroja exposes the economic reality at work behind the oppositional clichés:
The latifundia of the South exist as a function of the city and its commerce. The production of cereals, wines and oils must be industrial. This has nothing to do with the primitive state of man, imposed by the teachings of the gods together with a simplistic ethos, nor with an aristocratic principle of autarky. Equally, the great estate or exploitation of the plains contributes to the development of city "pleasures"-even forcibly. (38)
In this interdependent system, Baroja observes, rural laborers and urban workers are often the same individuals, commuting between the country and city (38). The demographic correlation of rural and urban milieux suggests that a pastoral sensibility may not be incompatible with the urban environment.
While some género chico works-revistas in particular-sometimes incorporate mock-pastoral elements, generally to express folkloric appreciation of the outsider's perspective, zarzuela most commonly favors the fundamentally unironic transplantation of traditional pastoral values to the urban setting.4 To speak of pastoral as a mode that transcends geography, we must acknowledge the historically determined, yet essentially arbitrary association of certain common pastoral topoi with non-urban experience.
Pastoral formulations, at least implicitly, generally evoke nostalgia for lost or better times and places (whether real or imagined), where innocence and prosperity, harmony and virtue, were the rule. Such formulations do not necessarily evoke long-lost golden ages, alive only in collective, mythical memory. For many pastoral writers throughout the centuries, such nostalgia derived from memories of a childhood (generally rural) recalled in later life. However, with the massive urbanization of the nineteenth century, the remembered childhood landscape became increasingly that of a city and its neighborhoods. Urban settings, whether recounting a writer's personal history or epitomizing the shared impressions of a community, may convey a nostalgia analogous to that of country-focused retrospection. Williams observes just such a phenomenon among Sherlock Holmes devotees, for whom Conan Doyle's London represents "a romantic atmosphere," and "a nostalgia as evident and systematic as any rural retrospect: the fog, the gaslight, the hansom cabs, the street urchins . . ." (227). A similar claim can be made for the numerous nostalgic representations in zarzuelas of life among the inhabitants of Lavapiés, or among the washerwomen of the Manzanares. Roger Alier's summary of the typical zarzuela ambiance conveys the particulars of the folksy, village-like space of the big-city neighborhood: ". . . un ambiente de plazuela, de calle, de patio interior con ropa tendida y discusiones de vecindario, de lances amorosos surgidos del piropo y del contacto entre hombres y mujeres de una misma clase social, un poco primitivos en el amor y en la pelea, en los celos y las reconciliaciones . . ." (81).5
A historical precedent for applying pastoral-sounding conceits to non-rural settings may be derived from what Williams calls "the medieval and post-medieval habit of allegory" (21), as exemplified by the sixteenth-century poet George Puttenham's assertion that the purpose of the eclogue as a poetic form was, "under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches, to insinuate and glance at great matters" (qtd. in Williams 21). For Williams, neo-pastoral allegory on the one hand, and pastoral drama on the other, have biased modern critical discourse on the pastoral, to the point of effacing its "original substance" (21). The allegorical model reduces the "primary activities [of pastoral] to forms . . . [in which] 'Pastoral' means . . . the simple matter in which general truths are embodied or implied . . . [so that] even a modern proletarian industrial novel can be pastoral in this sense!" (Williams 21). Although "absurd," the generalization, allows Williams, "has a point" (21). Historical reality, intruding on all literary modes, is particularly, if indirectly, evident in pastoral. This intrusion of historical reality often manifests as "an effective and voluntary congealment at the point of significant historical transition, from a feudal to a bourgeois world" (21).
The intentionality of the pastoral literary mode is, Laurence Lerner argues, not "to show struggles between courtier and monarch . . . but . . . [rather] to ask how peasant and shepherd regard their lot" (116). The pastoral's contrast of country simplicity with "citified" affectation, although supporting a kind of democratization (in that it undermines hierarchy, affirming the peasant's superiority to the courtier), tends to link rural contentment with "meek submissiveness to authority" (116). This would account for the mode's often conservative-even reactionary-orientation (116-17). Lerner observes that pastoral poetry is an urban form that "declined when urbanisation was reaching an unprecedented intensity" (135). Traditional pastoral is "a rejection of court . . . [that] flourished in the heyday of absolute monarchy," an age in which "all culture is centered on the court" (135). In other words, modern pastoral's frequent preference for urban themes and settings does not necessarily arise from the author's ironic or satiric intention; rather, the core of pastoral, its invidious contrast of earthiness and pretension, simply performs, in new costumes and on different stages, expressions of age-old doubts and anxieties.
The growth of the urban middle class and of the urban reading and theater-going public yields a slate of themes and artifacts aligned with this transition: remembrances of rural poverty and fixity of life converted to escapist images of fondly-remembered village and farm life; the material paraphernalia of an abandoned life style re-imagined as coveted antiques. This yields a pastoral whose themes may not be the shepherd-centered ones of traditional bucolic forms. The use to which such themes are put may be correlated, in addition, with political affiliations. The cultural debates of late nineteenth-century Spain divided the disputants into a right wing that sought to domesticate popular culture (in furtherance of nationalistic agendas) by way of ideological traditionalism, and a left wing that sought to circumvent the pueblo's "apparently radical but paradoxically conservative outlook," by fomenting a cultural program "in which ideology and art went hand in hand" (Cardwell 177). Zarzuela, or any other form, is justifiably characterized as "right" or "left" to the degree it conforms to either of the indicated alignments.
Those allegorical manifestations of pastoral, which Williams characterizes as an absurd extension of pastoral sentiment, point up what Empson sees as one of pastoral's central "tricks of thought": its veneration (and exploitation) of the simplicity of its characters (11). This trick of thought, according to Empson, suggests to the audience that one "can say everything about complex people by a complete consideration of simple people," thus implying "a beautiful relation between rich and poor," since the "simple folk" of much pastoral writing are allowed "to express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody) in learned and fashionable language," thus allowing the writer to treat "the best subject in the best way" (Empson 137 and 11).
Not all pastoral expressions, however, avail themselves of such learned language. Nineteenth-century realism and naturalism, introducing variations on the pastoral sublime, experimented with approximations of dialect, seeking to capture unsophisticated thought through untutored speech. However stylized or caricatured, dialect thus came to enhance-arguably even to signify in itself-the innate wisdom of simple people. The practice of incorporating slang into poetry gained in popularity, becoming a mainstay of characterization of the versifiers on nineteenth-century popular theatrical forms (e.g., English operetta and burletta; French opéra bouffe and vaudeville; the Spanish revistas and zarzuelas).6
Such musical genres were well situated, vis-à-vis their non-musical analogues, to exploit the "clash and identification of the refined, the universal, and the low," which is, for Empson, "the whole point of pastoral" (249). What one loses in refinement by allowing spoken language to have recourse to the "low" ground, is restored through the sophistication of the musical register. Hence zarzuela's ability to afford its characters the humor of dialectally realistic, if exaggerated,
speech, while using the musical text as an analogue of old pastoral's cultivated discourse. With the musical register securing the high ground essential to the multi-level pastoral expression, the slang-rich aguadoras and panaderos, the criadas and zapateros of the género chico, are left to embody that simplicity which for Empson is indispensable to, and often indicative of, a successful pastoral formulation. Such a formulation, according to Empson evokes this sort response from its more cultured audience members: "'I must balance myself for the moment by imagining the feelings of the simple person . . . I must imagine his way of feeling because the refined thing must be judged by the fundamental thing, . . . because the best manners are learnt in the simple life' . . ." (19).
The conceit according to which rural austerity enlightens urban anxiety is an ancestral pastoral feature, fundamental to Virgilian depictions of Arcadia. As Thomas Rosenmeyer explains, the real ancient Arcadia, known for its rustic society and autochthonous inhabitants, was cast by Virgil as a primitive land of "simple folk . . . satisfied with a rough diet, and therefore . . . not prey to the sicknesses that befall more civilized people" (234). Theirs was a life of "simplicity without guile, and contentment without class barriers" (235).
Given nineteenth-century Spain's experience of the tensions arising among rural oligarchies, emergent mercantilism, and the expanding urban middle class, the proliferation of pastoral forms in Spanish art and entertainment during this time is perhaps not surprising. The zarzuelas produced in Spain during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century culminate a long period of increasing interest in themes and stories centered on common folk, adding new dimensions of sentimentalization for rural characters whose urban counterparts had so delighted Spain's eighteenth-century sainete audiences (Harney, "Carnival" 313-19). Zarzuelas adapt the ancient artifice according to which natural man has much, if only by example, to teach civilized man. This theme manifests most explicitly in the recurrent pastoral characterization by which the simple man functions as the voice of wisdom. The wisdom in question could be variously intended or interpreted, given the general tendency to cloak political orientation in metaphor, allegory, or innuendo. As Dru Dougherty has noted, late nineteenth-century Spanish theater, whether elitist or populist in its orientation, conformed to "a melodramatic code that located tension in sentiment rather than in class conflict" (213). A given work could thus please "all sectors of public opinion," and be "as popular with 'illiterates' as with Madrid's learned classes" (213).
Such codes and tendencies illuminate the speeches of La alegría de la huerta's Tío Piporro, cited above. In his extended contrast of love and agriculture, he assumes the role of sage advisor for his lovesick friend Alegrías. The naive Alegrías misses entirely the point of his worldly friend's metaphor: "Bueno; pero todo eso, ¿a qué viene?" (Valencia, Cuadro I, scene vi). Unperturbed, the philosopher farmer explains: "A que confías demasiao en las mujeres; a que te crees que sembrar cariño es lo mismo que sembrar trigo . . . , y créeme, cuando se siembra algo en una mujer, hay que escardar tos los días, porque siempre hay yerbas malas" (Cuadro I, scene vi).
The figure of the simple sage, in La alegría de la huerta, is remarkable for its similarity to and departure from a comparable characterization in the urban-set El santo de la Isidra (1898). In the latter piece (with Carlos Arniches's libretto and music by Tomás López Torregrosa), it is the voluble shoemaker Eulogio who assumes the function of sage advice-giver for a timid and lovelorn younger friend (Venancio, the baker's assistant who loves Isidra). Like Tío Piporro, Eulogio derives his philosophy of courtship and love from his trade. However, in contrast to Tío Piporro's skeptical position on women and romance, Eulogio concludes enthusiastically in favor of love: "Bueno, tú has encontrao [el zapato] que te gusta, pues entra a cogerlo, cuéstete lo que te cueste, y cásate pronto . . ." (Cuadro I, scene x).
This divergence of philosophy stems not from a complete difference in overall message in the two works (both end happily with the uniting of the young lovers), but rather from contrasting uses of the simplicity motif. As Eulogio explains to Ignacia, mother of Isidra, his desire to help Venancio find happiness in love is propelled by gratitude and pseudo-paternal affection: "El año pasao, cuando tuve pulmonía y me encontré sin amparo y más solo que un sombrero hongo, él fue la única persona que se me arrimó al lecho del dolor de costao y me dijo: '¡No se apure usté, abuelo, que aquí estoy yo . . . !'" (Cuadro I, scene 8). The garrulous Eulogio, then, expresses both passion (in his motivation) and rationality (through his advice); he represents the heart and the mind.
In La alegría de la huerta, however, these psycho-dramatic functions are divided between two characters. It is a younger friend, an agemate of Alegrías, who assumes the role of match-maker motivated by gratitude. In a somewhat inebriated exchange with Tío Piporro, Troncho accounts for his indebtedness to Alegrías in the terms of male bonding and reciprocity: ". . . yo quiero a Alegrías a segar. Cuando yo iba por las noches a darle ronda a la que hoy es mi mujer, él me acompañaba y su guitarra era la primera que sonaba al pie de la reja, y sus copas las primeras que se bebían; y yo, que sé el ahogo que siente por Carola, no puedo consentir que se la lleve otro hombre . . ." (Cuadro I, scene 3). With Troncho fulfilling the demands of the heart, Tío Piporro is left to invoke his wisdom and experience as Alegrías' sage counselor.
While Eulogio's simple, folkloric logic is ultimately vindicated, thus conferring on this character the status of one who has something valuable to teach his friends and neighbors (and, by implication, the audience as well), the outcome of La alegría de la huerta involves a further twist on the motif of simple-man-as-sage. Isidra's eventual decision to reject a more prosperous suitor for her true love, Alegrías, renders Tío Piporro's cynical predictions regarding her character inaccurate, a mistake he goodnaturedly owns: "Si ésta sale güena, es la primera vez que me equivoco" (Cuadro III, scene 9). The intention is not to ridicule Tío Piporro, for he is portrayed sympathetically throughout, and is in fact the one who fetches Alegrías at Isidra's request. Nor is his skeptical philosophy entirely debunked, since his agricultural metaphor, while not borne out in Isidra's particular case, nevertheless seems reasonable compared with modernist Heriberto's ludicrous and pretentious digression comparing women to music (Cuadro I, scene ix). The effect of these decisions in characterization is to suggest a sort of hierarchy of simplicity.
On one level, the message is that, although a common farmer, Tío Piporro is clearly wiser, in terms of common sense, than the posturing urbanite, Heriberto. On a deeper level, the truth of human nature is revealed by the younger, more passionate, even simpler characters of Troncho, Alegrías, and Isidra. The subtle delineations do more than merely bolster the "love-conquers-all" motif. The play's tone of gentle condescension seems, in fact, to discourage the pursuit of rational philosophy among simple folk, recommending instead that they follow their hearts. Thus, while El santo reconciles the processes of heart and mind in the sagely Eulogio, La alegría seems to presuppose a mutual exclusivity of passion and reason.
Perhaps the divergent representations of these two simple sages, as well as Tío Piporro's somewhat ambiguous characterization as wise-yetfallible, correspond to contradictory impulses of the middle class with respect to social strata perceived as inferior. To the degree that the "folk" on stage are seen to function as Everyman-embodying universal values-their colorful philosophizing is entertaining, even instructive. However, when such characters may be suspected of reflecting real social counterparts to some degree, their exercise of rational inquiry becomes potentially unsettling. In this case, the subordination of reason to romance perhaps furnishes a convenient containment strategy. Whatever the author's motive, the posture derives maximum effect from this reiteration of the most basic tenet of pastoral: the simpler the folk depicted, the better.
Irrespective of variations among zarzuelas in their particular expression of the praise of simplicity, the fundamental characterization of these simple folk is strikingly formulaic, despite the great variety of settings, ranging from the huerta murciana to the barrios bajos of Madrid. Alberto Romero Ferrer notes an equivalence of rural, specifically Andalusian, folk with members of the urban, specifically Madrilenian, underclass in his recent study of casticismo in género chico: ". . . nos estamos refiriendo al madrileñismo y al andalucismo ambientales como paradigmas representativos de ese mismo todo que se prentendía redescubrir, en estos momentos a través de la escena, y que nos proponían una idílica visión literaria del mundo rural y de las clases populares llegadas a la corte" (64). This idyllic vision of the folk, he explains, is played out in "la diversidad de escenarios y motivos supuestamente populares y castizos afincados en el agro español y en los barrios bajos" (70). The rural and urban spheres, so often set in opposition throughout the history of pastoral writing, are here equated, "como los hábitats menos expuestos a los contagios de la civilización moderna, y por tanto más evidenciadores de una también supuesta identidad basada en el reclamo de lo autóctono . . ." (70-71). Romero Ferrer precisely identifies the mechanism of transference that allows the urban settings of género chico texts to accommodate stories charged with pastoral sentiment. The pastoral imperative, which requires that a less "civilized" region be set in contrast to one which is more so (and, hence, more artificial), is realized by the casting of the barrios bajos in the role formerly occupied by the country, with the wealthier urban areas defining that source of "contamination" previously attributed to the city as a whole.
For the génerochiquistas, then, the centuries-old pastoral tradition of exalting Nature reduces neatly to a metaphor for the veneration of human nature, which is at its best, we are instructed, when most unspoiled by, most innocent of, "civilized" society. "It is easy," observes Williams, "in an apparently warm-hearted way, to observe for the benefit of others the crudity and limitations but also the picturesqueness, the rough humour, the smocked innocence of 'the bucolic'" (203). In similar terms, Empson describes the pastoral convention whereby "the simple man becomes a clumsy fool who yet has better 'sense' than his betters and can say things more fundamentally; he is 'in contact with nature' . . ." (13-14). Thus, a man (or woman) in the pastoral context is defined as being close to nature because he is simple, by which we understand not that he lives in the country, but merely that he is unsophisticated. By this license, the swains of the countryside are transmuted, on the stages of género chico, into the chulos and chulas, the panaderos and zapateros, the criadas and vendedoras of Madrid's most "down-home" neighborhoods.
Among the works of the late zarzuela repertoire, perhaps the most thorough and complex development of pastoral motifs emerges in Chueca's Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente (1897; libretto by Miguel Ramos Carrión). Of particular interest in the play is its interweaving of rural and urban pastoral themes. Like La alegría de la huerta, Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente celebrates the alternation of work and festival. The title denotes the hawker's cry, signaling the end of the overture and recurring throughout the play, of the aguadoras vending their refreshments at the Jardines de Recoletos. The play's second and final cuadro, encompassing most of the action, takes place among the kiosks of the aguadoras. Here the principal action of the play, Pepa's drugging of Serafín, is facilitated by her menial occupation. Although no festival is actually staged, as in so many other zarzuelas, it is toward the verbena de San Lorenzo that Manuela and Pepa are headed at the play's conclusion, the two chulos having used the duped señorito's money to redeem the girls' Manila shawls from the pawnbroker. Now properly attired, the four exit singing: "Andando, vamos pronto / a la verbena / pa que digan: ahí viene / la gente buena" (Cuadro II, p. 81).
This pasillo veraniego conflates the idealized values of the rural world with the rough-and-ready code of Madrid's underclass. Rural values are personified by Doña Simona, a country matron who has reluctantly brought her headstrong and pretentious daughter to Madrid from their modest rural home of Valdepatata. Although a country cousin from back home, of whom her mother heartily approves, adores the daughter, she succumbs to the amorous attentions of a charming but dissolute young señorito, Serafín, who incarnates urban decadence. The daughter, Atanasia (who insists on being called just Asia), affects the airs of a poet. Her ill-conceived career objective has financially ruined her and her mother. Asia's mannered and frivolous poetry parodies modernism, one of the génerochiquistas' favorite targets. Consider, for example, this excerpt from her ode to a water jug, entitled "Al botijo": "Cuando mi boca en ti, bello cacharro, / busca ardorosa el abundante chorro / y con mis manos cálidas te agarro, / Siempre encuentro propicio a mi socorro / el caudal que refresca en tu barro / y que brota sutil por tu piporro" (Cuadro I, p. 41). As with the case of the posturing composer Heriberto in La alegría de la huerta, artistic modernism here serves to symbolize urban vanity and artificiality, qualities most effectively laid bare through clumsilyexecuted, provincial imitations.
Reminiscent of La alegría's Heriberto, with his clumsy, self-interested matchmaking, is the linking, in Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente, of urbanism with social dysfunction. It is not urbanism in general that is pilloried, but rather the smug inanity of the urban elite and the futile snobbery of social-climbers. The play implicitly contrasts three pairs of lovers. On the one hand, the affected poetess, Asia, and her profligate Serafín bring turmoil and humiliation upon themselves and their families: she, through her pretensions; he, through rakish concupiscence. On the other hand, the two aguadoras, Pepa and Manuela, having recently exchanged chulos, manage, after narrowly avoiding a cat-fight, to settle their differences amicably. Their jealousies allayed, the two couples head off for an evening of wholesome entertainment at the verbena. Thus the spirited, fundamentally good-hearted community of chulos and chulas is portrayed as ironically more civilized than the boobish and effete society of the wealthy and privileged.
Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente intensifies this contrast of values with an innovative twist on the conventional pastoral device situating wisdom in simplicity. Doña Simona plays the role of simple sage, as her worst suspicions regarding Serafín are confirmed and she is vindicated in her desire to return to the country "para vivir en paz y en gracia de Dios" (Cuadro I, p. 35). She is not, however, the play's only oracle of simple wisdom. The country matron collaborates with Pepa, the quintessentially urban aguadora, who, acting on her own best judgement, ignores her chulo's recommendation to drug the unsuspecting Doña Simona's beverage with "un poco de opio" (Cuadro II, 49) in return for Serafín's monetary compensation, drugging instead Serafín (Cuadro II, 65).
Pepa and Doña Simona co-perform the function of simple sage. This is illustrated musically as they offer critical observations in parallel fashion, each from her separate placement on stage, during Serafín's attempted seduction of Asia (Ditto and Harney 76-77). Following is an excerpt from the waltz in which the señorito makes his move:
SERAFíN: ¡Si no me quieres, bien mío, va a haber un desastre!
SIMONA: (¡Qué pillastre!)
ASIA: Ya sabes tú que por ti yo a morir estoy pronta.
PEPA: (¡Ay, qué tonta!)
ASIA: ¡Quieto!
SERAFíN: ¡Anda!
SIMONA: (¡Pillo!)
PEPA: (¡Randa!)
SERAFíN Y ASIA: ¡Dulce ilusión!
SERAFíN: ¡Anda!
ASIA: ¡Quieto!
SIMONA: (¡Tipo!)
PEPA: (¡Feo!)
PEPA Y SIMONA: (¡Vaya un bribón!)
(Cuadro II, 66-67)
Nor does the comedic tone so typical of many zarzuelas compromise the genre's participation in the pastoral mode. Zarzuela's lacing of pastoral with humor in fact correlates with a certain mordant characterology defined by Empson in terms of the pastoral's covert bourgeois agenda. Referring to the pastoral writings of T. F. Powys, Empson suggests that, "such men as his characters keep their souls alive by ironical humour, a subtle mode of thought which among other things makes you willing to be ruled by your betters; and this makes the bourgeois feel safe in Wapping" (7).
The notion that the poor are or should be happy in their place-echoing Espronceda's "La cautiva" where ". . . en pobre cama / duerme el pastor venturoso, / en su lecho suntüoso / se agita insomne el señor" (63)-emerges, in fact as the explicit theme of Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente. When Asia's mother and Pepa are able to expose Serafín as a predatory rake, Asia acknowledges the futility of her pretensions, gives up her modernist drivel, and decides to return to the family farm to marry her ruddy cousin, just as María in La Tempranica will return to marry the gitanto, Miguel.
Allowing for the génerochiquistas extension of the pastoral to urban spaces and inhabitants, it can be observed that, for the most part, zarzuelas celebrate decent, colorful folk, following in the tradition of Theocritus, Virgil, and those moderns who located the blessings of rusticity not in a past golden age but in the rural present. In addition to the "simple sage" device utilized in many of the works examined here, various other pastoral models and themes animate some of the most popular zarzuelas. The romantic intrigue of La Revoltosa, for example, and Julián's piteous declarations of lover's angst in La verbena de la Paloma, evoke, with their ambience of leisured adolescent preoccupations, the courtly pastoral settings and imagery of Boccaccio, Sannazzaro, and Tasso. 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). It is, then, perhaps not surprising that the génerochiquista's versions of pastoral should be employed to multifarious effect, given the inherently protean and adaptable nature of this ancient literary mode.
Texas State University, San Marcos
1 For the literary and philosophical background, and enduring influence of Montemayor's work, see Avalle-Arce, Chapter 2 and 4 (35-139). He also provides an illuminating discussion of Cervantes' treatment of pastoral themes in Chapter 8 (229-63).
2 Díaz notes that this essentializing perspective overlooks the divided demography of each milieu, many of whose denizens are ambivalent regarding the environment in which they find themselves (28). This ambivalence is to be expected in the context of a social reality in which a few urban centers, especially the emerging large cities, dominate "an overwhelmingly rural society" (Álvarez Junco, "History, Politics" 71).
3 Williams, Country 240: he cites from The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (1834-1882), not to be confused with James Thomson (1700-1748), whose The Seasons is cited elsewhere by Williams (68-71, 141-42).
4 The so-called mock pastoral, explored by Cervantes in his Rinconete y Cortadillo, is paradoxically fostered by picaresque and folkloric depictions of the city's colorful bas fonds. Empson suggests that such depictions of the city's underclass inevitably encourage the compelling conception of the outcast as moral arbiter. Defining realistic pastoral as "the sort touched by mock-pastoral," William Empson notes that this mode lends itself to expressing "a sense of social injustice" (16). The outsider, "too poor for [society's] benefits," is therefore "independent," and thus "can be a critic of society" (16). Particularly if "forced . . . into crime, he is the judge of the society that judges him" (16). This image of the social rebel as poet/philosopher appears, often purged of any irony, among the Spanish romantics, as with Espronceda's pirate, who proudly proclaims, "Que es mi barco mi tesoro, / que es mi dios la libertad, / mi ley, la fuerza y el viento, / mi única patria, la mar" ("Canción del pirata," ll. 65-66). Prominent examples in the género chico repertoire of what might be termed lower-class philosophy are la Menegilda's matter-of-fact defense of her embezzlement as a routine recourse of the desperate, in Chueca's and Pérez y González's La Gran Vía (Cuadro 2, scene 2), and the clever equation of pickpocketing with legitimate performances of prestidigitation as performed by los tres Ratas (Cuadro 1, scene 6) of the same work (Harney, "Costumbrismo" 50-52).
5 It should be mentioned that there are other veins of urban pastoral besides those that focus on city dwellers. Literary and artistic examples abound that view the unpeopled urban landscape (skylines in particular) with an idealization akin to the appreciation of Nature without its farmers, shepherds, and servants. Parallel to the rise of anti-industrialism, anti-modernity, and anti-urbanism, there arose, notes Lily Litvak, an "aesthetic of the modern city" (69). Such writers as Baudelaire and Zola emphasized the special and complex beauties of the cityscape, with its jagged skyline, its intricate architecture, its labyrinthine streets. Litvak cites Wordsworth's "Upon Westminster Bridge," with its imagery of "ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples," as an influential forerunner of late-nineteenth-century urban aesthetic (69). This positive perception of the city was destined, however, to be largely eclipsed by more pessimistic visions of what came to be viewed as the sinister and destructive influence of great cities like Madrid (Litvak 69).
6 The debate over dialectal representation in pastoral poetry is too complex to admit of thorough discussion here. Raymond Williams points outs that deliberately varied orthography, as an attempt to convey dialectal diversity, can be traced back at least as far as the Elizabethans, including Shakespeare (225-26). Williams cites, as an example of the aesthetic tension between sophisticated expression and colloquialism, Charles Lamb's disapproval of another author's "provincial phrases" (Lamb 44). In poetry, argues Lamb, "slang of every kind is to be avoided" (44). For Lamb, "a rustic Cockneyism" is as objectionable "as ours of London"; one should instead endeavor to "transplant Arcadia to Helpstone" (Lamb 44; qtd. in Williams 141). In the Spanish tradition, examples of conventionalized rural dialect emerged that may be correlated with increasing class consciousness. An early example is the fifteenth-century Mingo Revulgo, as well as the theater of Juan del Encina and others, which reveal a stylized, rustic dialect based on the peasant speech of the regions of Salamanca and named sayagués, for the region of Sayago in the province of Zamora. This became the conventionalized speech of rustic characters in the theater of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and continued into the eighteenth century (Salomon 131-58).
7 José López Silva and Carlos Fernández Shaw, La Revoltosa (1897); Ricardo de la Vega, La verbena de la Paloma (1894); Miguel Echegaray, Gigantes y cabezudos (1898).
WORKS CITED
Alier, Roger. La zarzuela. Barcelona: Ediciones Robinbook, 2002.
Alpers, Paul. What is Pastoral? Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1996.
Álvarez Junco, José. "Rural and Urban Popular Culture." Graham and Labanyi 82-90.
_____. "History, Politics, and Culture, 1875-1936." Gies, Cambridge Companion 67-85.
Arniches, Carlos. El santo de la Isidra. Libretto. Music by Tomás López Torregrosa. Valencia 413-52.
Avalle Arce, Juan Bautista. La novela pastoril española. 2nd ed. Madrid: Istmo, 1974.
Ayala Aracil, María de los Ángeles. "Las colecciones costumbristas en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: entre la nostalgia y la crítica." Insula: Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas 637 (2000): 16-18.
Balfour, Sebastian. "The Loss of Empire, Regenerationism, and the Forging of a Myth of National Identity." Graham and Labanyi 25-31.
Cardwell, Richard A. "Poetry and Culture, 1868-1936." Gies, Cambridge Companion 175-86.
Caro Baroja, Julio. "The City and the Country: Reflexions on Some Ancient Commonplaces." Mediterranean Countrymen. Essays in the Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean. Ed. Julian Pitt-Rivers. Paris: Mouton, 1963. 27-40.
Cervantes, Miguel de. "Coloquio de los perros." Novelas Ejemplares. Ed. Juan Baustista Avalle-Arce. 3 vols. Madrid: Castalia, 1982. 3: 241-322.
_____. Don Quijote. Ed. Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Juventud, 1968.
_____. "Rinconete y Cortadillo." Novelas Ejemplares. Ed. Avalle-Arce. 3 vols. Madrid: Castalia, 1982. 1: 73-158.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1953.
De la Vega, Ricardo. La verbena de la paloma. Libretto. Music by Tomás Bretón. Madrid: Ediciones Daimon, 1983.
Díaz, Joaquín. "Costumbrismo y etnografía." Insula: Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas 637 (2000): 27-28.
Ditto, Charles and Lucy D. Harney. "Musical Function in Selected Spanish and Cuban Zarzuelas." Gestos: Revista de teoría y práctica de teatro hispánico 44 (November 2007): 69-84.
Dougherty, Dru. "Theater and Culture, 1868-1936." Gies, Cambridge Companion 211-21.
Echegaray, Miguel. Gigantes y cabezudos. Music by Manuel Fernández Caballero. Valencia 413-52.
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. New York: New Directions Paperbooks, 1974.
Espronceda, José de. Obras poéticas. Ed. Leonardo Romero Tobar. Barcelona: Planeta, 1986.
Ettin, Andrew V. Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1984.
García Castañeda, Salvador. "La aldea y los aldeanos en los versos de Pereda." Salina: Revista de Lletres 11 (1997): 85-92.
_____."La tradición costumbrista en Cantabria: La mar, la ciudad, el campo." Insula: Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas 637 (2000): 11-13.
Gies, David T. The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.
_____, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
_____, ed. The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
_____. "The Theatre in Spain 1850-1900." Gies, Cambridge History 436-47.
Graham, Helen and Jo Labanyi, eds. Spanish Cultural Studies. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Harney, Lucy D. "Carnival and Critical Reception in the Sainete Tradition." MLN (Hispanic Issue) 117.2 (2002): 310-30.
_____. "Costumbrismo and the Ideology of Género Chico." Ojáncano: Revista de literatura Española 22 (2002): 33-58.
Hesiod. The Works and the Days, Theogony, and The Shield of Herakles. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1959.
Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de. Poesías. Ed. José Caso González. Oviedo: Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, 1961.
Lamb, Charles. The Letters of Charles Lamb. Ed. Alfred Ainger. 2 vols. London: MacMillan and Co., 1913.
Lerner, Laurence. The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry. New York: Schocken Books, 1972.
Litvak, Lily. A Dream of Arcadia. Austin: U of Texas P, 1975.
López Silva, José and Carlos Fernández Shaw. La Revoltosa. Libretto. Music by Ruperto Chapí. 1897. Madrid: Ediciones Daimon, 1985.
Paso, Antonio and Enrique García Álvarez. La alegría de la huerta. Libretto. Music by Federico Chueca. Valencia 413-452.
Patterson, Annabel. Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1987.
Pérez-Bustamante Mourier, Ana-Sofía, and Alberto Romero Ferrer, eds. Casticismo y literatura en España. Cuadernos Draco, 1. Cádiz: U de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1992.
Pérez y González, Felipe. La Gran Vía. Libretto. Music by Federico Chueca and Joaquín Valverde. Madrid: Ediciones Daimon, 1986.
Pope, Alexander. "Discourse on Pastoral Poetry." The Poetical Works of Pope and Collins. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Co., 1878.
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie. Ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1936.
Ramos Carrión, Miguel. Agua, azucarillos y aguardiente. Libretto. Music by Federico Chueca. Madrid: Ediciones Daimon, 1985.
Romea, Julián. La Tempranica. Libretto. Music by Gerónimo Giménez. Valencia 552-83.
Romero Ferrer, Alberto. "Pervivencia y recursos del casticismo en la dramaturgia finisecular: el Género Chico." Pérez-Bustamante Mourier and Romero Ferrer 61-95.
Rosenmeyer, Thomas G. The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
Salomon, Noël. Recherches sur le thème paysan dan la comedia au temps de Lope de Vega. Bordeaux: Institut d'Études Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines de l'Université de Bordeaux, 1965.
Spenser, Edmund. The Shepheardes Calender. The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, eds. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press, 1912. 415-69.
Thomson, James. The city of dreadful night, and other poems. Ed. Bertram Dobell. London: Bertram Dobell, 1899.
Toliver, Harold E. Pastoral Forms and Attitudes. Berkeley: U of California P, 1971.
Valencia, Antonio. ed. El género chico: Antología de textos completos. Madrid: Taurus, 1962.
Versteeg, Margot. De fusiladores y morcilleros. El discurso cómico del género chico (1870-1910). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.
Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Mar 2008