Blood Wedding (1932) is the inaugural play in Lorca's tragic trilogy depicting life in rural Spain. It tells the story of a man and a woman who feel a powerful attraction to each other but choose to enter unfulfilling marriages out of familial duty. At the woman's wedding reception, the lovers run away together. This play employs significantly more poetic and allegorical elements compared to The House of Bernarda Alba.

Yerma (1934) is the second installment in the trilogy. Yerma follows the life of a woman who dutifully lets her family arrange her marriage. When she learns that her husband does not want children, she is torn between her longing for a child and her commitment to the sanctity of marriage. Her mounting frustration leads to devastating consequences.

The Poetical Works of Federico Garcia Lorca (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1991). Students might find interest in exploring some of Lorca's more lyrical compositions about rural Spain, such as the poems originally collected in Gypsy Ballads and Poem of the Deep Song.

Life Is a Dream. This is the most renowned play by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, a prominent seventeenth-century playwright whose works, along with those of the older Lope de Vega, dominated Spain's Golden Age. Like Lorca, Calderon viewed life through a symbolic lens and was deeply concerned with traditional Spanish notions of honor. This play delves into the tension 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 an exhaustive study of Spanish history from 1874 to 1936. Ian Gibson's The Assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca (W.H. Allen, 1979) offers an in-depth analysis of the political and other circumstances surrounding Lorca's death.