an idealistic dramatist who strongly resembles Unamuno, discusses the “world” of the theater in contrast to that of politics. Pressured by his wife, Soledad, who is jealous of Gloria, the actress who plays the leading feminine roles in her husband’s plays, and by Pablo, a local politician, Agustín decides at the end of the act to enter politics. The setting for this act is Agustín’s home: A picture of the couple’s dead infant son is prominently placed on a desk, while the son’s playhorse occupies a corner of the room. Childless since her son’s death, Soledad is obviously obsessed with the desire to be a mother.

The setting for act 2 is the same as for act 1. An indefinite period of time has passed between acts, enough for Agustín to have failed totally in politics. He is now regarded as a political criminal and is in hiding in his own home. Obsessed with the problem of reality, Agustín rants and raves about the world of politics being a farce, less “real” than the life of the theater he forsook for it. Fact and fiction become utterly confused in his mind, and he regresses to a kind of childhood in which he desires only Soledad (“solitude”). To him, she represents reality. Meanwhile, Sofía, his mother, who has suffered a severe stroke between acts, sits throughout act 2 speaking incoherent phrases that fit into the dialogue of others, creating a hilarious tragicomic mood; the act ends with Sofía’s death.

In the final act, the setting is divided into two rooms: a bedroom (in which the son’s playhorse and picture again appear) on the left and a reception room to the right. Since act 2, Agustín has suffered imprisonment. Now, however, he is again home. His mental confusion has worsened; Soledad is the only reality left to him. His regression to infancy (and a kind of innocence before the effects of “original sin,” a Christian concept that is ever present in Unamuno) is complete. Its corollary is that Soledad has become his mother. The play ends with her singing him a lullaby and calling him “son of mine.”

As is characteristic of Unamuno’s theater, dialogue predominates in Soledad, dialogue full of anguished philosophical concerns with which the Spanish theatergoing public had little sympathy. Departing slightly from his concept of naked theater, Unamuno divided the stage in act 3 and made effective use of concrete props—the playhorse and the son’s picture—throughout the play. Agustín’s passion for probing the true nature of reality is an exaggeration of the author’s own agonized spirit, a deformation of reality rather than its full-bodied incarnation, yet what Unamuno sought was the inner drama or “inner realism” of his personages, their struggles with or agonizing over deep inner conflicts. Both Agustín and Soledad are examples of Unamunian “agonists” (agonistas); they are agonists more than protagonists of external action.

Raquel encadenada

The most extreme case of the woman-mother in all of Unamuno’s works is Raquel in Raquel encadenada (Rachel in chains), written (as was Soledad) in 1921. It was first staged in Barcelona in 1926 under the title Raquel. In this four-act drama set in contemporary times, Raquel is a concert violinist married to Simón, her business manager. Because of his miserliness, Simón denies motherhood to her while using her simply as an instrument for making money.

Having married the miser Simón not for love but out of a desire to have a secure home in which to bear and rear children, Raquel abandons him for a former suitor, Aurelio, whose illegitimate child she had nursed back to health and whose children she will bear. She does this in open defiance of Spanish social conventions.

The play, despite its exaggeration of the maternal instinct in Raquel, has considerable merit. Its appeal lies in its freedom from Unamuno’s typical philosophical-intellectual verbiage, its concentration on a believable (although unusual) situation, and its theme of frustrated motherhood (so easily understood in Spanish society). Unamuno preached loudly that drama must appeal not to the current theatergoing public in Spain but to the people, the pueblo (a term he refused to define but which generally means the great mass of relatively unschooled Spaniards). Yet his drama failed with the pueblo as well as with the critics of his time. He persistently refused to make concessions to the demands or realities of the Spanish theater—to write roles for specific actors or actresses, or to give in to the prevailing taste for visual effects. Indeed, from 1921 on, he dubbed his plays “drumas,” not dramas, in his desire to emphasize, as Zavala states, that he wrote them not for the critics nor for the theatergoing public nor for actors or actresses but for the soul of the individual spectator or reader.

The Other

The mystery of the final reality of the self was of consuming interest to Unamuno. One of his major explorations of this theme is The Other, written while he was in exile in Hendaya, France, in 1926. The play was not staged until 1932, the year in which it was first published. Subtitled “Mystery in Three Acts and an Epilogue,” The Other probes the problem, the mystery, of one’s final identity: A mystery cannot be understood by mere reasoning; only by participating in it can one come to a kind of understanding.

The setting throughout The Other is a room in the home of Cosme and his wife, Laura. While Laura was out of the house, a murder was committed: Either Cosme killed his identical twin Damián, or Damián killed Cosme. The surviving twin now identifies himself as simply the “Other,” refusing to admit which of the twins he is. In fact, he apparently no longer knows. Both Laura and Damiana, Damián’s wife, claim him as their own, apparently indifferent both to his crime and to his real identity. He will accept neither woman, though Laura, Cosme’s wife, finally yields him to Damiana, who is pregnant. At the end of act 3, the “Other” kills himself. In the epilogue, the “mystery” is discussed by Don Juan, the family doctor; Ernesto, Laura’s brother; and “El Ama,” the old family servant who was the twins’ wet nurse. Though the “Ama” has known the twins since their infancy and must, therefore, surely know the identity of the assassin, she professes not to know, poetically philosophizing that no one knows who he or she really is.

The Unamunian theme that one must individualize one’s self, be one’s self, which means being different from others, is clearly here in central position. To be another, to be the “Other,” is to fail to be oneself; the “Other” had no real existence and therefore committed suicide. Secondary to the theme of being one’s true self (though that self cannot finally or fully be known in this life) is the Cain and Abel motif, which preoccupied Unamuno throughout his life. It was one twin’s frustration in having no social identity or “self” separate from that of his twin that drove him to hate his brother and finally to murder him.

Though The Other is one of the two plays by Unamuno most available to readers and most often discussed in criticism (the other one being El hermano Juan), it is not at all his best play, at least not from the point of view of its effectiveness on the stage. Although its philosophical meaning is rich, the situation portrayed in it is in itself quite unreal or unbelievable. It should not, however, be judged too harshly because of its lack of realism; essentially, it was written as an allegory.

El hermano Juan

Although never staged, El hermano Juan: O, El mundo es teatro (brother John: or, the world is a stage), which was written in 1927, is one of Unamuno’s best-known and most easily obtainable plays, primarily because it dramatizes the author’s peculiar conception of the popular Don Juan theme and not because of its merits as theater per se. A long three-act drama set in contemporary Spain, El hermano Juan presents Don Juan as impotent (an anti-Don Juan) and a prisoner of the social image or legend of himself foisted on him by others; he merely plays the role expected of him by his creators, those who imagine him. In a long soliloquy in act 2, John questions even his own existence. In the final act, having become a Franciscan brother, he dies in a convent; his prolonged death scene is one of the best features of the play. Death, in fact, is a powerful theme well presented throughout the work.

Although the Don Juan theme still has enormous vitality in the Spanish-speaking world and especially in Spain, it is not at all surprising that Unamuno’s version of the theme has never been staged: An impotent Don Juan is unappealing. The play’s chief merit lies in its portrayal of life as theater, a frequent theme with Unamuno; Don Juan can do no other than enact on the stage of life the role assigned to him by his creators—by those who through the centuries have imagined him into existence.