The quest for new values: Carmen Martín Gaite’s Don Duardos (1978)

ABSTRACT

This article examines Carmen Martín Gaite’s adaptation of Gil Vicente’s Tragicomedia de Don Duardos (c. 1522), produced in 1978 by the Centro Nacional de Iniciación del Niño y el Adolescente al Teatro (CNINAT). The CNINAT was a branch of the Dirección General de Teatro y Espectáculos and the Ministerio de Cultura. Despite only four years of activity after it was created during the Spanish Transition, the CNINAT had a considerable impact on cultural policies geared toward children’s education, especially through the performing arts. Founded by stage director José María Morera, the Center became a civic engagement initiative committed to promoting theater as an experiential tool for the new generation coming of age during complex political change in their most vulnerable, formative years. Within this context, Martín Gaite's adaptation of Don Duardos represents a paradigmatic experiment for two reasons. On the one hand, the adaptation emphasizes the novelist’s prolonged commitment to developing and nurturing socially engaged children’s literature. On the other, it exemplifies how it was possible to recast early modern Peninsular theater as a progressive, inclusive cultural legacy that guided young audiences to new values and ideals that gradually took hold during the Transition.

KEYWORDS:

• Carmen Martín Gaite
• Spanish Transition
• cultural politics
• outreach
• feminism

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to my friend and mentor in children’s literature, Berta Muñoz Cáliz (Centro de Documentación Artes Escénicas y Música), and to Rosa Seser Pérez (Arxiu Municipal de Dénia). Thanks to people like them, unique histories of our culture can be rescued from the archives and brought to life. This article is dedicated to my dearest friend and role model Carolina Bergaz-Crews, whose artistic talent has made me believe in the magic of the everyday.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The epigraph is excerpted from an awareness campaign for children’s welfare published in the newspaper Informaciones on 17 December 1979.

2 There were complaints among playwrights, teachers and pedagogues about the high budget allocated to the Center and pedagogical effectiveness of its activities. See note ten for more information about this controversy.

3 The adaptation of Tragicomedia de Don Duardos by Martín Gaite that I examine in this article is based on my edition of the play published in 2018. The editorial work was based on a copy of the original script (1979b) and on a phonogram of the production (1979c), both preserved at the Centro de Documentación de las Artes Escénicas y la Música in Madrid. I have also consulted a notebook with preliminary handwritten notes by the author (1978–1979) at the Archivo Digital Carmen Martín Gaite.

4 This period also coincides with the publication of her fifth and award-winning novel El cuarto de atrás (Martín Gaite [1978] 2003). We could draw a number of parallels between some of the themes of El cuarto and La tragicomedia, such as the fantastic element, the protagonists’ inner journey or the dream motif, among others. I will not go further into this analysis here as it merits a study of its own as a line of inquiry that underscores the recurring themes that influenced the novelist’s oeuvre.

5 Childhood has always played an important role in Martín Gaite’s works on personal, metaphorical and pedagogical levels. Jurado Morales, for example, interprets El cuento de nunca acabar as “un recorrido por la infancia y su conexión con la literatura mediante un análisis de la importancia del cuento oral o escrito en la formación de la persona, pues la autora explora desde las reacciones del niño al oír los primeros cuentos hasta el momento en que éste comienza incluso a escribir alguno” (2003, 285).

6 If we examine the plays written and performed – in this case for adults – during the Transition, there are several works based on adaptations of early modern plays, historical events and personalities of the period. See Pérez (1989) and Berenguer and Pérez (1998).

7 For more on this new trend in children’s literature born from the intellectual dynamism of the Second Republic, see Orquín Lerín (2009).

8 Among the early modern playwrights published by the Colección Ortiz were Lope de Rueda, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Ruiz de Alarcón, Moreto, Vélez de Guevara, Pérez de Montalván, Mira de Amescua, Guillén de Castro, Tirso de Molina and Rojas Zorrilla (Cervera 1980, 196).

9 El Infante Arnaldos by Juan Antonio Castro, based on the medieval ballad “El Conde Arnaldos” and premiered in 1968 by the TMI, exemplifies another effective fusion of the real and the fantastic (Cervera 1980, 425).

10 At the end of the dictatorship, a group of authors with ties to communist ideology (Concha Fernández-Luna, Antonio Ferres, Eva Forest, Jesús López Pacheco, Armando López Salinas, Felicidad Orquín Lerín and Alfonso Sastre) experimented with children’s theater influenced by Brechtian drama. Their plays were published in the Colección Girasol by Anaya (Arnaud 2016, 87). The best-known piece of the collection is Sastre’s Historia de una muñeca abandonada (1964).

11 From February 1979 to December 1980, the CNINAT published ten issues of its Bulletin Oficial. Their main purpose was to report on the Center’s activities and its finances. Nonetheless, both its outreach programming and its budget were questioned and publicly denounced on several occasions. See Matilla (1979) and Cantera Arroyo (1979). In these two articles, both authors published harsh criticisms about the internal politics of the CNINAT in Pipirijaina, a specialized journal dedicated to children’s theater founded during the Transition.

12 In addition to Don Duardos, Martín Gaite produced two other theatrical adaptations in the years to follow: El burlador de Sevilla, attributed to Tirso de Molina (1988), and El marinero by Fernando Pessoa (1990b).

13 In 1942, coinciding with the first Spanish production of the Tragicomedia in the twentieth century, Dámaso Alonso published the first critical edition of Vicente’s play.

14 During the democratic period, Gil Vicente’s Tragicomedia was staged in 1994 by the Teatro Íntimo de Juan Antonio Quintana. Asunción Mieres Royo staged an adaptation in 2004 titled Don Duardos y Flérida for the Aula de Teatro UEX. Two years later, in 2006, Ana Zamora directed the Tragicomedia for the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico.

15 In 1946, Martín Gaite was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Coimbra. The fascination she felt for Portugal and the ties between the Portuguese and Galician languages inspired her to consider a study of Galician-Portuguese songbooks of the thirteenth century as a possible subject for her doctoral dissertation (Martín Gaite 1993b, 17).

16 Here I refer, for example, to essays such as “El sendero de los sueños” (1993e) and “De tertulia con Don Quijote” (1993d), both published in Agua pasada (Martín Gaite 1999a).

17 In El cuarto, the protagonist recalls the transcendental experience she underwent when going to the theater every time her family traveled to Madrid for a short trip ([1978] 2003, 79–80).

18 Although Martín Gaite was mainly known as a novelist and essayist, she wrote two plays La hermana pequeña (1960), unpublished until 1999, and A palo seco ([1985] 1994a), a monologue that premiered in 1987.

19 In the 1990s, Martín Gaite translated Charles Perrault’s stories and collaborated in a multi-authored volume of Cuentos de hadas victorianos (1993) and in an edition and translation of La princesa y los trasgos (1995) by George MacDonald. She wrote several prologues for Cuentos españoles de antaño (1991), Celia, lo que dice (1992), and Peter Pan y Wendy (1994) and co-wrote the script with José Luis Borau for the television series Celia (1992–1993).

20 El castillo could not be translated into English because foreign publishers did not consider it morally appropriate for children as the protagonist leaves her controlling husband and flees with the man she truly loves (Soliño 2002, 94).

21 Vicente’s Tragicomedia premiered between 1521 and 1525 at the court of Joan III and was published in the Copilaçam printed in Portugal in 1561–1562.

22 Although poetry is undoubtedly the genre least practiced by Martín Gaite, we cannot forget that she wrote poems during her university years in Salamanca and her first stay in Madrid (Jurado Morales 2003, 124).

23 In her adaptation of El burlador that the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico commissioned in 1988, Martín Gaite endows the character of Doña Ana, the Comendador’s daughter, with a greater stage visibility. In her version, she also enhanced Tisbea’s iconic monologue about her chastity and her cunning in eluding her suitors by having an apocryphal female interlocutor who listens to her (Martín Gaite 1993c, 75–76).

24 Something similar occurs in Caperucita, where Miss Lunatic/Miss Bartholdi, an embodiment of the Statue of Liberty, acts as a fairy godmother for the protagonist, Sarah Allen, as she overcomes her fears and attains her freedom. This coming-of-age story is like Don Duardos’s, as he experiences similar psychological development throughout the plot. Don Duardos turns out to be another ambiguous hero in Martín Gaite’s narrative, whom she always treats with great sympathy and respect.

25 During 1979 and 1980, the play toured schools and various provinces in Spain stopping in cities such as Ciudad Real, Alicante, Madrid, Móstoles, Alcobendas, Pozuelo, El Escorial, Burgos and Albacete.

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Esther Fernández

Esther Fernández is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures at Rice University where she specializes in Iberian literary, visual and cultural studies. She is the author of Eros en escena: Erotismo en el teatro del Siglo de Oro (2009) and of multiple articles and essay collections focusing on theater and performance practices analyzed from a transhistorical perspective. Her new monograph, titled To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain (2021), engages with notions of wonder by examining performance objects in ceremonial, theatrical and social contexts. Email: [email protected]