Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies (UCL)
Research Seminar Series, 2013-2014 – Term 1
SELCS Common Room, FC307, 5pm
Wednesday 6 November 2013
Dr Michael Thompson – Durham University
‘“Cosas que hoy carecen de sentido”: Echegaray and Benavente as seen by Francoist censors’
The first two Spanish winners of the Nobel Prize for literature exercised a powerful and remarkably
durable hold over the Spanish theatre industry. From Echegaray’s first successes in the 1870s and
the rise of Benavente in the 1890s, their work was decisive in defining and fixing mainstream
theatrical taste right up to the 1960s, constituting a conservative ‘dictatorship’ that overshadowed
attempts at renewal by several generations of dramatists and directors. Drawing on censorship files
and newspaper cuttings from 1939 to the 1950s, I shall show the extent to which the hegemony
enjoyed by the work of these two illustrious gentlemen was reinforced after the civil war, and
examine the ambivalent attitudes shown towards it by Franco’s censors and other supporters of the
regime. Along the way, I shall salute a futile attempt by one Falangist censor to ban Echegaray’s
most famous play.