Àngel Guimerà

The details of Àngel Guimerà's biography have been a source of controversy, from his real birth date (1845, but deliberately falsified by the playwright) to matters that more directly concerned his private life. In fact, some writers have seen the two areas as related. At least, this was the view of Xavier Fàbregas, who sees in the circumstances of Guimerà's birth (his parents were not married) one of the biographical factors that surely marked his writing, along with the idea of his mixed ancestry (born in Tenerife of a Canary Islands mother and Catalan father, he came to live in Vendrell at the age of eight) and his frustrated love for a girl named Maria Rubió in which it seems that both sets of parents opposed the match.

This tendency to interpret his work starting out from his biography has been a constant and is partly explained by the contradiction between the high-voltage passion of his writing and the extreme discretion of his personal life, from whence comes the inevitable temptation to project psychoanalytical readings on to the author and his work. To all this must be added the rumours that were already circulating in Guimerà's own time, arising from his resolute bachelorhood and his habit keeping company with a group of younger disciples.

With time, some biographers like Caravaca, first, and then Ferran de Pol, have dealt with the latter issue fairly transparently. Ferran de Pol was the more provocative, declaring in no uncertain terms, "Guimerà was not homosexual", addressing head-on the rumour that, as he recognised, was rife in Barcelona intellectual circles. Whatever the case, the obsession of some writers (Miracle in particular) with constructing in all its detail an alleged love story that appears to have been little more than an adolescent flirtation, seems rather odd. Without being led astray away by the slightly prurient gossip, or trying to "save" Guimerà from moth-eaten prejudices, one can usefully point out that his peculiar personality invites one to enter into the nucleus of a conception of love that is a constant in his writing. It is evident that, apart from the differences in many aspects of their work, Guimerà shares with Strindberg a great capacity for presenting psychologically complex passions in all their power.

As for his "mixed parentage", the theme of the misfit, the outsider, is a recurrent motif in his work, as Fàbregas has remarked. One can easily find a clear relationship here with the playwright's own life story.

The Playwright

The early period of Guimerà's playwriting is particularly notable for his resolve to follow a programmatic scheme suggested by his friends, especially Josep Yxart, who was then the most lucid and best-informed critic. In Catalan theatre of the time, the prevailing figure was Frederic Soler, who had consolidated a melodramatically-grounded model of Catalan theatre in which the predominant forms were comedies of manners and rural or historical dramas. The dissatisfaction of many Catalan intellectuals with these plays and the monopoly enjoyed by the author of La dida [The Wet Nurse] pushed them into looking for a alternative that would, as part of the packet, bestow a measure of literary prestige on the local scene, a factor that had been excluded by Soler's overindulged popularism.

Hence, and coinciding with a European-wide reaction against the excesses of the early days of romanticism, an attempt was made to recover, under the heading of tragedy, some forms of refined drama that would breathe new life into the already-established romantic tradition, both through deeper realism in the treatment of the historical reality in which passion-fired conflicts were set (Pietro Cossa, Victorien Sardou, etc.), and by way of recovering something of the last dramas of Schiller, which were notable for the manner in which he synthesised the Shakespearian model of theatre and that of seventeenth-century French classicism. This was seen as a formula for avoiding the melodramatic gruesomeness of a certain brand of romanticism, while also moving away from the rhetorical stiffness of a playwright like Racine and decidedly opting for incorporating history as stage material. The function of the old-style tragedy was thus recovered but this was achieved by introducing the renovation in theatre that had been brought about by the European reception of Shakespeare's plays. This option was the one that intensely interested Yxart, once the difficulties of establishing contemporary realist drama in the setting of mid-nineteenth-century Catalan society were duly understood. Guimerà was the author elected by his contemporaries as the most appropriate playwright to move ahead with the creation of a genre of contemporary Catalan tragedy that would bring prestige to a literature that, with Verdaguer, had already embraced the epic. Continue reading...