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How did Spanish Romantic drama continue traditions from Lope de Vega’s theater?
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Spanish literature
St. Luke, illuminated page from the Beatus Apocalypse, Mozarabic, 975; in the Gerona Cathedral, Spain.
Spanish Romantic drama is often viewed not merely as an imported movement but as a return to the nation’s own literary roots, specifically the traditions of the Siglo de Oro (Golden Age) drama.12
Romantic playwrights continued the legacy of Lope de Vega and his contemporaries by adopting several key formal traits that had defined the earlier national style:12
- Mingling of genres: Like Lope, Romantic dramatists rejected the strict separation of comedy and tragedy, favoring a mixed, essentially tragicomic approach.132
- Rejection of the unities: They abandoned the rigid Neoclassical rules regarding the unities of time, place, and action, which Lope had famously discarded in his treatise Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo.1342
- Metrical variety: Romantic plays utilized diverse metrics to reflect changing moods and situations, mirroring the lyrical flexibility found in Golden Age theater.132
- Thematic continuity: Many themes from the Golden Age reappeared in Romantic garb, with writers like José Zorrilla y Moral achieving great success by producing popular rewrites of classic plays and legends.12