Blood Wedding (1932) is the first play of Lorca's tragic trilogy about life in rural Spain. It concerns a man and a woman who are passionately attracted to each other but enter loveless marriages out of a sense of duty to their relatives. At the woman's wedding feast, the lovers elope. The play uses many more poetic and allegorical devices than The House of Bernardo Alba.

Yerma (1934) is the second play of the trilogy. Yerma is a woman who dutifully allows relatives to arrange her wedding. When she discovers her husband does not want children, she is torn between her desire for a baby and her belief in the sanctity of marriage. Her frustration grows uncontrollable, with tragic results.

The Poetical Works of Federico Garcia Lorca (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1991). Students may be interested in reading some of Lorca's more lyrical works about rural Spain, such as the poems originally included in the collections Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song.

Life Is a Dream. The most famous play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a seventeenth-century playwright whose works, together with those of the older Lope de Vega, dominated Spain's Golden Age. Like Lorca, Calderon saw life in terms of a symbolic formula, and he was concerned with the traditional Spanish respect for honor. This play examines the conflict between free will and predestination.

The Spanish Labyrinth: An Account of the Social and Political Background of the Civil War by Gerald Brenan (Cambridge UP, 1974), is a rigorous study of Spanish history from 1874 to 1936. Ian Gibson's The Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca (W.H. Allen, 1979) provides a comprehensive examination of the political and other circumstances surrounding Lorca's death.