SOURCE: Shaw, D. L. “Three Plays of Unamuno: A Survey of His Dramatic Technique.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 13, no. 2 (April 1977): 253-64.

[In the following essay, Shaw uses three plays by Unamuno—La esfinge, Fedra, and El otro—to trace the development of Unamuno's “narrative concept of drama,” noting that while Unamuno's early work was influenced by Ibsen, his later plays imitated Pirandello; the author concludes that the very qualities that made Unamuno a “distinguished innovator” in fiction undermine his success as a playwright.]

A prominent feature of critical reaction to Unamuno's theatre is the lack of interest which has been shown in his dramatic technique. It is characteristic, for example, that in one of the latest studies on the subject¹ the author devotes only nine pages out of more than three hundred to this aspect, and these consist chiefly of generalizations suggested by the almost twenty-year-old article by Lázaro Carreter.² If it is true, as Valbuena Briones asserts, that Unamuno's “obra dramática se resiente de su desdeñosa actitud de [sic] la técnica … Unamuno no supo o no quiso reconocer este aspecto, y ello constituye su falla”,³ there is perhaps some justification for attempting to examine exactly how this contempt or lack of ability expressed itself in the defective workmanship of individual plays. It seems logical to begin such an examination with an analysis of the technique of Unamuno's earliest play, La esfinge (1898). Subsequently the consideration will be extended to Fedra (1910) and finally to his most successful play El otro (1926).⁴

La esfinge is concerned with the inner spiritual conflict of its hero, Ángel. Its theme is directly relevant both to Unamuno's own position, just after the crisis of 1897, and to those of other members of the Generation of 1898 (especially Azorín and Maeztu) as they turned from their early left-wing attitudes to belief in the primacy of individual self-regeneration. But our interest here is not to develop this relevance. The question to be considered is rather that of how successfuly Unamuno manages to express Ángel's conflict in genuinely dramatic terms. He employs two methods. First, he presents the public aspect of Ángel's position through the introduction of two contrasting groups of secondary figures who represent the options confronting Ángel at this level of the plot. Second, Unamuno develops the domestic aspect of the situation: the growing incompatibility of outlook between Ángel and his wife Eufemia which comes to a head in the second act.

Already we can make certain comments. Unamuno is aiming at unity of effect. The tension of Ángel's domestic life is intended to re-emphasize that of his public life and vice-versa. In fact the interaction of the two sets of incidents is so consistent that we cannot regard them as plot and subplot; they are complementary facets of the same conflict. However, when we examine them more closely for their intrinsic dramatic qualities, we perceive some more negative features. Although Unamuno does not call La esfinge a tragedy, it does pose questions of technique which are particularly relevant to tragedy. Among them is that of balance of dramatic forces. There can be no real tragedy and little convincing “drama de conciencia” when the choices before the hero are not in balance. Now despite Ángel's irresolution in the face of it, the decision facing him at the public level is not expressed in its real terms. Throughout almost the whole of the play the choice which confronts Ángel is expressed as a choice between dedicating himself to the liberty of the people (and at the same time to his own self-aggrandizement) or devoting himself in retreat to resolving his private religious dilemma. Put like this the choice is distorted and the forces governing it are seriously misrepresented. It becomes easy for Ángel to brush aside the ideal of liberty when, set against the context of eternity, it is made to seem a mere abstraction. His championship of it is wilfully confused with selfish pride and ambition fed by his wife's encouragement. Just as unwisely Unamuno surrounds Ángel with a group of political adherents who, with the exception of Joaquín, are depicted as either knaves or fools. The scales are thus unfairly tipped in favour of Ángel's decision to quit politics and revolutionary endeavour, which comes at the end of Act I. Not until Act III, Sc. iv does Unamuno make use of Joaquín to reveal the alternative facing Ángel in its true light. This time it is not a choice between self-glorification in the name of an abstraction and the search for the soul's comfort. Instead it is a choice between feeding the hungry and giving way to personal “sufrimientos de lujo”. It must have been clear to Unamuno that despite his own commitment to personal spiritual self-regeneration he could not face Ángel with the decision in Joaquín's terms without alienating the audience. Unfortunately, once the audience does recognize the issues as they really are, only the pathos surrounding Ángel's death at the hands of the mob saves him from losing their sympathy.

At the domestic level the role of Eufemia is plainly designed to serve a double purpose. In the first place, she is the principal obstacle in the way of Ángel's desire to abandon political activism and seek spiritual peace. There is a very real conflict here; indeed we may identify in it the most genuinely dramatic clash of forces in the play as a whole. Both Ángel and Eufemia are deeply frustrated. Each demands of the other the sacrifice which promises personal fulfilment. In the second place Ángel wishes Eufemia to find a different outlet for what he regards as her chief motivation: frustrated maternal feelings. This outlet is to be provided by his own longing for motherly comfort. Eufemia's outlook is complex. It is not clear which comes first in her mind: the cause of the people for its own sake, or the cause of the people because she believes that only by embracing it can her husband fill the void which she and his doctor, Eusebio, recognize within him. When at the end of Act I she refuses to be instrumentalized by Ángel (“¡Eufemia no es una pieza de ajedrez!”) it is doubtful which of these two motives is predominant, or indeed whether Ángel's reading of his wife's character is accurate.

Here is the conflict which Unamuno should have developed in the play. Each of the two characters involved is totally committed. Their motives are equally defensible, but their aims are incompatible. In addition they love and need each other. The pattern of the play would have been that of a struggle between Eufemia and Ángel's spiritual adviser Felipe to influence his decision. That Unamuno wasted the opportunity is demonstrated by one of the most prominent technical defects of the whole play considered as a clash of dramatic forces: the fact that Eufemia and Felipe never meet on stage. Rather than expressing Ángel's spiritual dilemma in this concrete way Unamuno chooses to leave it largely in his mind. The result is that Eufemia remains rather underdeveloped (especially in Act I) and not enough of the conflict is expressed in action. The dramatic forces remain mental rather than being exteriorized in terms of opposition of characters. Both suspense and identification on the part of the audience suffer.

A further purpose served by Eufemia's role is that of introducing into the plot an element of more down-to-earth human emotion and even passion to balance the rather abstract conflict in Ángel's mind. Unamuno provides her with a fresh alternative to that of keeping her husband faithful to his political career or following him into retirement. Instead of doing either, she can leave Ángel and live with Eusebio. But this would involve adultery and the trivialization of Eufemia's character. It is consequently quite unreal and Eufemia rejects it out of hand. Eusebio, the significance of whose role within the economy of the play is difficult to discover, is forthwith eliminated. He is heard of no more until he turns up in Act III when a doctor happens to be needed; but he has nothing of importance to say. When in Act II Eufemia actually makes up her mind to leave Ángel she does so not in order to find fulfilment with someone else; she has simply given up the fight. Her exit, and the fact that the big scene of Act II is not between Ángel and herself, but between the former and his political adherents (who, in the event, fail completely to make him change his mind) throw into relief the main criticism of the middle of the play: in Act II the action hardly advances at all. All that happens is that one of the potentially active forces in the play merely retires, with no effect whatever on the course of events.

After Eufemia's withdrawal the possibility of a direct confrontation between Felipe and a representative of the political side, which the audience has been waiting for since Act I, appears suddenly remote. Yet this is precisely what takes place in the crucial fourth scene of Act III. Here the issues are at last squarely faced, in the context of a revolutionary outbreak actually taking place in the streets outside. But by now the balance of dramatic forces is completely shattered. Ángel is so deeply committed by his earlier decision to Felipe's point of view that he can hardly change his position without incurring further contempt and ridicule. In addition, Felipe's antagonist in the debate is a light-weight compared to Eufemia. Unamuno's decision to remove Ángel's wife at the end of Act II so as to hold her in reserve for an unexpected reappearance at the climax of the play means that in order to mount a discussion at all he has to make do with Joaquín. The latter takes over Eufemia's role at a critical moment and plays his part effectively. He lays the stress firmly on political activity not as self-aggrandizement in the name of doctrinaire ideas, but as practical humanitarian effort. It is too late. Although Ángel is momentarily shaken, when he finally faces the mob it is neither to defy them nor to lead them. Instead he attempts to enunciate, against a background of cannon fire, the abstract proposition that their pursuit of liberty must not preclude his freedom to realize himself spiritually. The pathos of his dying reconciliation with Eufemia after being shot by one of the crowd does not successfully conceal the underlying fact. Ángel has decisively rejected the collective humanitarian ideal in favour of a private spiritual quest which has destroyed his marriage, and the object of which—God—he is not even sure exists.

Looking back over the play we can see that Unamuno was too close to the situation he was depicting. Behind the obtrusive autobiographical details listed by Zavala⁵ lies the fact that Unamuno had already made his own choice, the choice which was to lead him away from Marxism to agonismo, before writing the play. He was not equal to the task of presenting the alternatives with objectivity. Because the scales are tipped, Ángel's decision is made prematurely. Yet it is the natural crux of the play. The conflicts generating it, involving both Ángel and Eufemia on the one hand, and Eufemia and Felipe on the other, are foreshortened or avoided. That these conflicts follow Ángel's decision as well as preceding it indicates Unamuno's failure to distinguish adequately between narrative and dramatic structure.

Fedra is certainly a better play than La esfinge. Unamuno held it to be a great advance on those he had written before. As recently as 1966 it received a positive re-evaluation from Valbuena Briones. But it remains to be examined as a stage artifact. Unamuno had the benefit of two famous models, those of Euripides and Racine, for the dramatic treatment of the situation. The critic has the consequent advantage of being able to compare his choice of an arrangement of the episodes with those of his predecessors. The traditional story-line had four major events: the declaration by Phaedra of her love, her accusation of Hippolytus, her death and that of Hippolytus as a result of his father's curse. Of these the most difficult to portray dramatically is the accusation. Unamuno's treatment of it in Act II, Scenes iv and v, makes these the key-scenes of the play with repercussions on all the rest of the plot.

These repercussions begin with the opening scene of Act I itself: the dialogue between Fedra and Eustaquia, her nurse. Unamuno has been criticized for resorting to the device of the confidant here, and more especially for doing so consistently at the beginning of each act. The reason, however, is plain. In his modern version of the story Unamuno inevitably abandoned the Unity of Time. There is a significant lapse of time between each of the acts, during which the events mature. This involves a slight element of reexposition at the start of Acts II and III. The audience needs to be made aware of developments in the family situation and in Fedra's outlook (and health) since the preceding curtain scene. There can be no doubt that in line with his express intention of reducing the tragedy to its “primitiva severidad de desnudez clásica” with no concessions to scenography or to “pura diversión” (“Exordio”), Unamuno deliberately chose to employ this classically simple method of exposition at three successive points in the play. It must have seemed to him the most rapid and effective means of marking the progress of the action and at the same time of visually re-emphasizing the stages into which Fedra's evolution is divided. On these grounds it could perhaps be dramatically justified. What is not justified is Unamuno's sacrifice of the role of Eustaquia in the rest of the play.

In Euripides it is the confidant, the Nurse, who declares Phaedra's love to Hippolytus. After this she is reviled by Phaedra and makes her exit, which marks a major articulation in the play: the shift from the story of Phaedra to that of Hippolytus. In Racine the role of Phèdre's confidant, Oenone, changes. Her big scene moves to Act IV where instead of being the agent of Phèdre's declaration she becomes the voice of her accusation, developing in detail the Queen's deliberately laconic and general statement to Thésée in the previous act:

Vous êtes offensé. La fortune jalouse
N'a pas en votre absence épargné votre épouse.

Both in Euripides and Racine, that is, the confidant is not just a passive figure; she has an active part to play in the mechanism of the plot. Unamuno on the other hand is determined to concentrate all the action exclusively into the role of Fedra herself. She it is who declares herself to Hipólito; she also accuses him to Pedro, her husband. There is nothing left for Eustaquia to do. It is not that she is a confidant that matters; it is that she is only a confidant.

Unamuno's next decision is even more important. In the traditional story Phaedra's husband is absent during the first part of the action. Here Pedro is present in the house throughout and appears on stage as early as Act I, Sc. ii. His presence upsets Fedra's moral position. In Euripides this position is safeguarded in three ways: Phaedra is a victim of Venus; it is the nurse who actually makes the declaration to Hippolytus, largely against her mistress' will; finally Hippolytus' punishment is partly justified on other grounds.⁶ In Racine Phèdre's moral position is to some degree protected first by the report of Thésée's death and second by the dynastic problem thus created. Hippolytus also offends his father by announcing his love for Aricie, who belongs to an enemy family. Unamuno remorselessly brushes aside even the attenuating factor of Pedro's absence!

It is here that the influence of Ibsen can probably be detected. We remember that he had single-handedly carried through a revolution in stagemorality in the 1880s, an early climax of which was Oswald's call in Ghosts to regard traditional sexual taboos, including incest, as mere outworn superstititions. By presenting Fedra as at one and the same time incestuously in love and a tragic heroine Unamuno was aligning himself with Ibsen's deliberate intention to shock audiences into reconsidering their moral presuppositions. But whereas Ibsen justified his characters' actions or opinions by reference to a wider and more human standard of morality than that adhered to by the middle-class society of his time, Unamuno makes no such claim on behalf of Fedra. She has not been forced to marry Pedro; nothing in his character or behaviour offers her a shadow of excuse; nor is her passion conditioned in any way by the frustrated maternity which is so prominent a theme elsewhere in works by Unamuno. He relies entirely on Fedra's distress of mind, the age-difference with her husband, and scattered references to inherited tendencies and to fate. They are inadequate. With the audience's sympathy half-alienated, Fedra's death loses part of its pathos.

Unamuno's third decision was to structure Act I around the declaration scene (Sc. iv) rather than making it the climax of the act. This underlines a feature already noticeable in La esfinge: Unamuno's failure to give each act its own appropriate dramatic movement and shape. Act I of La esfinge, for instance, ends unwisely with a soliloquy. Worse still, at the end of Act II the arbitrary entrance of Pepe (who has nothing to say) in order to be brutally humiliated, not only further strains the audience's sympathy for Ángel, but converts the pathos of the previous scene into bathos. Similarly in Fedra we notice a distinctly anti-climactic movement in the latter part of Acts I and II.

In Act I the tension accumulated in the declaration scene between Fedra and Hipólito is dissipated in the short scenes which follow. The appearance here of Rosa and Marcelo, neither of whose roles is justified by anything they do or say in the play, makes nonsense of Unamuno's claim to have reduced the action to its bare essentials. Martina in La esfinge had both a dramatic role, in that she caused the final split between Ángel and Eufemia, and a symbolic one as the representative of the “intrahistoric” personality of the common people which Unamuno at that time found so comforting and stable. Rosa has no comparable function. The two scenes in the play in which she is on stage with Fedra show her being used merely as a device to express the change in the latter's outlook. Marcelo's awareness of the real nature of the situation between Fedra and Hipólito contrasts with Pedro's blindness to it. But both their roles so far are intrinsically passive and make little real contribution to the onward movement of the action. Meanwhile time is wasted that could have been put to good use. For the technical difficulty of Act II is that of motivating the silence of Hipólito in the face of his step-mother's accusation. In Euripides the young prince has taken an oath of silence. Racine's strategy is to divert Thésée's attention by bringing in his son's love for Aricie. Unamuno has given himself no such possibility to exploit. When Hipólito realizes what Fedra has told his father, the audience is quite unprepared for his refusal to speak out.

Scenes iii, iv and v of Act II are the crux of the action. They contain the second avowal by Fedra to Hipólito, the accusation, and the parting of Pedro and Hipólito. The three major dramatic forces in the play: father, wife and son, confront each other. Yet the conflict remains strangely muted. The reason is plain. Unamuno was clearly rsolved that there should only be one tragic figure in the play: Fedra. Pedro is pathetic rather than tragic. Hipólito is not allowed any tragic evolution at all. The fact that he does not make an appearance on stage between Fedra's first avowal of her love in Act I, Sc. iv and her second one in Act II is a technical defect of the first magnitude. What Unamuno needed in order to create a sense of tragic inevitability was a force in Hipólito to balance the force of passion in Fedra. What such a force might have been is not revealed until the final curtain scene when, too late, we perceive in Hipólito some degree of tragic potentiality. Torn between loyalty to the truth and loyalty to his father's honour, he has chosen the latter. How much more convincing would his silence have been in Act II if Unamuno had developed this conflict in Hipólito at the end of Act I instead of letting the act coast downhill!

Largely as a result of this failure to develop Hipólito, the last part of Act II once more loses momentum. As Fedra persists with her false accusation her character falls on the moral scale and, like Ángel in La esfinge, she tends to lose the audience's sympathy. Thereafter the scenes between Pedro and Marcelo, and between Fedra and Rosa, neither advance the action nor contribute to the development of the major characters sufficiently to justify their inclusion. Pedro's idea of pundonor is tantalizingly dangled in front of the audience just long enough to emphasize Hipólito's missing justification. Rosa's reactions merely indicate that Fedra is losing control of the situation. Finally, the latter's curtain-scene soliloquy, forecasting her suicide, brings the act to a sudden close with a decision for which the preceding scene is not an adequate preparation.

In the last act Fedra remains off stage after Scene i so that the possibility of direct conflict is restricted to Hipólito and Pedro. But the announcement that Fedra's letter contains the truth and will reconcile father and son effectively prevents any such conflict from materializing and removes any element of real suspense. Hence the structure of Act III is purely narrative. Here most of all Unamuno's insistence on concentrating the play's dramatic structure entirely around Fedra can be seen to have been a mistake. Conflict in a play like this one can only be properly generated by bringing one passion into opposition with another or with a moral principle. In practice this meant both for Euripides and Racine at least two tragic figures and not just one. Having made the decision to compress all the tragic pathos into one figure Unamuno could arguably still have saved the play by placing each of the story's three dramatic climaxes: the avowal, the accusation and Fedra's death, in its natural position at the end of an act. As it is. the mechanism of the play appears faulty.

El otro has traditionally been seen as indicating Unamuno's shift away from the influence of Ibsen and his gravitation (with all necessary provisos) in a more Pirandellian direction. What is essential about this play is that by making the character on whom all the dramatic interest is centred a figure whose identity is in doubt Unamuno was able to avoid two of the major criticisms which apply to his earlier plays: their tendency to lack true conflict of dramatic forces and hence their tendency to lack sustained suspense. The problem facing Unamuno was to express a conflictive view of personality without resorting to two separate characters. His solution is bold and effective. Reversing normal dramatic practice he makes the main catastrophe occur before the play opens. The hero, tortured by the duality within him, has throttled his other self in the vain hope of achieving a fully-integrated personality. But the price he has to pay is not to know which part of himself survives, and hence to suffer acute feelings of self-alienation.

The establishment of so complex a situation requires a great deal of explanation. In fact, although the play has three acts, it has only two basic parts, the real division being marked by the arrival of Damiana. Thus there is a danger that the whole of Act I and part of Act II may seem hardly more than a massive exposition. However, the existence of the murdered brother's body in the cellar allows the action to begin with an unexpected macabre discovery. It not only rivets the audience's attention on what is happening to a degree which is practically unique in Unamuno's first acts, but also generates a current of suspense which lasts for the rest of the play. As in Pirandello's Enrico IV the protagonist is kept off stage while the audience's curiosity is aroused by the announcement that he is mad. This is made all the more intriguing in that his madness seems to have affected his wife's reason also. The dialogue in the opening lines of Scene i makes repetitive use of three key-words: misterio, espanto and loco to bring home the three salient features of the situation as it emerges: the mysterious corpse in the cellar, the terrible nature of the crime and the apparently homicidal lunacy which has produced it. The second scene reinforces the effect and adds fresh elements: the mirror-symbolism and the implication that Laura, the protagonist's wife, is harbouring some dreadful suspicion. The otro's entrance is thus carefully prepared and highly effective. The brief third scene contains more reference to the misterio and to el día fatal when the otro's madness became manifest, but it also acts as a hinge linking the opening to the confession-scene which follows by virtue of two speeches of the otro. His statements: “Ni yo [me conozco] a mí mismo” and “Mi Laura vive ya como si viviera con un muerto … voy a ver si confesándome con tu hermano me doy nueva vida, resucito” already convey the essence of his psychological position: his division of personality, his consciousness that an integral part of himself is dead, and his longing to recover the plenitude of his own being.

The confession scene itself falls into two halves, with a visit by Ernesto to the cellar in between. In this way the delineation of the otro's division of personality and its consequences is interrupted by a moment of excitement as the presence of the corpse is confirmed. Ernesto's discovery converts the otro's story from what appears to be an insane hallucination into something deadly serious, thus heavily underlining the play's meaning. The first half of the scene is left deliberately ambiguous. The otro's fantastic story of killing someone whom he refers to now as himself, now as his other self, is shown to have produced dreadful consequences, but we are left guessing about what actually happened. The second half of the scene functions in two ways. The murder having been confirmed and the mystery announced, we wait for the solution; but Unamuno is too wise to provide it right away. In this sense the end of the confession scene is really a pause separating the discovery of the corpse from the “explanation” promised by Laura, which is put off until Act II, Scenes i and ii, in order to sharpen the audience's curiosity and suspense. The other function of this half of the scene is to introduce the first element of exterior conflict into the action when Ernesto, representing commonsense and conventional morality, confronts the nurse. She offers the otro intuitive maternal understanding and forgiveness, always for Unamuno a major source of support in the struggle, as Round puts it, “to be totally secure in one's being”.

However well the various devices of the first act mask the fact, the play so far lacks genuine clash of dramatic forces. This clash now emerges in Act II after Laura has filled in the background to her marriage. The otro's division of personality is dramatically expressed as two identical twins both struggling for the same woman. The arrival of Damiana, who now storms into the play demanding her husband, turns the tables on this initial situation as she and Laura struggle with each other and with the nurse for the surviving twin. Damiana's appearance permits Ernesto to provoke the otro into explaining and defending the murder of his brother. The otro emerges in the crucial fourth scene of Act II as the man of insight and hence of spiritual travail who has deliberately destroyed the part of himself (the Abel side of his personality) which yearned for simple, instinctive self-plenitude and spiritual disengagement only to discover the guilt and misery of self-mutilitation.⁷ In the last scene of Act II God is held at least partly responsible for the otro's inescapably tragic position.

Act II thus contains the play's ideological core. In the third act, which is nearly as long as the other two put together, all the conflict which has been built up previously explodes around the otro. In particular, the fierce energy of Damiana's character, which has been held in reserve until now, is suddenly released. As a contrasting prelude, however, the first scene of the act is silent. Its mirror symbolism completes references to mirrors earlier in the play and rounds off the heavy emphasis on the otro's inner conflict which has characterized the central part of the action. The otro now realizes that his murderous impulse has liberated within himself a diabolic self, unknowable, violent and free of volitional control. His gesture of throttling himself prefigures his suicide and expresses the hopelessness of his position. The symbolic key which the otro had given Ernesto in Act I signifies, as Smith has shown,⁸ the opposite of the mirror, that is, unity of personality: a key normally fits only one lock.

In the two deliberately symmetrical scenes which follow the struggle between Laura and Damiana for possession of the otro reaches its climax. Here Unamuno, having worked out the possibilities of the opening situation, exploits this fresh development which at the same time allows him to explore at the place traditionally reserved for the third act complication the sexual aspect of desdoblamiento. The main technical feature at this point is the careful alignment of the characters of the two women with the forces active inside the otro's personality. Laura is associated with its Abel side; passive and amoral, her instinct is to find an excuse for his behaviour, not to understand it. Her weapon is straight feminine appeal. Damiana, on the other hand, (“mujer terrible, mujer de sangre”) is associated with the active, voluntaristic side of the otro's character and with its diabolic aspect. Her attractions are strength and fixity of purpose. The otro recognizes them as wish-fulfilment projections of his own divided self: “¡Las dos sois la otra! Y no os distinguís en nada; … Lo mismo da la de Caín que la de Abel”. What ultimately unites them is sheer sexual acquisitiveness. It drives them not to console and try to conceal the otro's sufferings but to exacerbate them by stimulating jealousy. The root of jealousy is insecurity, which in Unamuno turns at once into ontological insecurity and consequent self-hatred. Only mother-love, symbolized by the nurse, offers security.

The pattern established in Act III, Scenes ii and iii, is completed in Scenes v and vi in which the two women, after struggling separately for possession of the otro, confront one another openly. Their bitter contention not only marks the dramatic climax of the play but also rounds off its meaning. To the otro's remorse for his self-mutiliation is added the realization of its futility since he has only exchanged one form of conflict with himself for another, symbolized by the rivalry of the two women. Worse still, the fact that Damiana, the more savage of the two, is pregnant and may bear identical twin children reveals that the whole tragedy may be repeated in the next generation and so on eternally. Hostile fate, God's other self, has the last word. Overwhelmed, the otro kills himself.

The rest of the play is undisguised commentary. Three positions, represented by the three women, respond to the demand by the men (who stand for rational common-sense and scientific analysis) for a solution. Laura, true to her passive, unresisting nature, admits defeat. Hers is the romantic attitude of despair in the face of life's possibilities of undeserved suffering. Damiana, in contrast, accepts life with its “eterna guerra fraternal” as an absolute in itself regardless of the suffering entailed. Hers is the instinctive, vitalist position underlying Unamuno's agonismo. The nurse, for her part, asserts that the mystery of life's apparently purposeless conflict and anguish is inscrutable. The only valid response to man's unhappy destiny is love, charity and compassion combined with the recognition that mystery is preferable to tragic certainty.

These closing scenes attest once more Unamuno's characteristic inability or unwillingness to end either individual acts or his plays themselves on a note of dramatic climax. But they must not be allowed to obscure the fact that in El otro the arrangement of episodes and the distribution of dramatic forces are, for once, technically adequate. The main development of the otro's character is situated towards the end of Act II between the murder-mystery allure of the first part of the play and the genuine conflict of personalities which animates Act III. The action as a whole conveys the impression of inevitability and sense of pathos which despite the “rather contrived air about it” discerned by Smith⁹ invest the play with authentic tragic intensity.

In the plays just examined the most important defects can be identified in two major areas. One is connected with Unamuno's determination to make his plays express interior conflict going on the the minds of single individuals instead of conflict between individuals and the external pressures acting upon them. Thus the dramatic forces in his plays tend to be out of balance. Too much exposition is required by the complexity of the central character's situation, and not enough of the tension generated is expressed in terms of action. Similarly the dominance of the central figure tends to leave the other characters under-developed or with roles which scarcely justify their appearance in the play. The second area is that of general dramatic design. All the plays glanced at here are in some way out of shape, with premature decisions or climaxes which are badly situated. The consequence is failure to create and maintain suspense, poor curtain-scenes, anti-climax and a tendency for individual acts not to be conceived with an autonomous dramatic movement built into them. To summarize these criticisms in one phrase we should have to refer to Unamuno's narrative concept of drama. Unhappily, the qualities which made him a distinguished innovator in fiction played him false on the stage.

Notes

1. Andrés Franco, El teatro de Unamuno (Madrid 1971).

2. F. Lázaro Carreter, “El teatro de Unamuno”, CCMU VII (1956), 5-29.

3. A. Valbuena Briones, “El teatro clásico en Unamuno” in Spanish Thought and Letters in the Twentieth Century, ed. E. Inman Fox and G. Bleiberg (Nashville 1966), p. 540.

4. Cf. Franco, op. cit., p. 24.

5. I. M. Zavala, Unamuno y su teatro de conciencia (Salamanca 1963), pp. 16-19.

6. Cf. Phillip Vellacott's introduction to Euripides' Alcestis and Other Plays (Harmondsworth 1953), p. 18: “Hippolitus' attitude was as dangerous an offense against Nature as Phaedra's desire was against morality.”

7. Indispensible for the meaning of the play are Paul Ilie's brilliant article “Unamuno, Gorki and the Cain Myth”, H R XXIX (1961), 310-23, and Gilbert Smith's “Unamuno, Ortega and the Otro”, REH VI (1972), 373-85. I have also found great enlightenment in N. Round, Abel Sánchez. A Critical Guide (London 1974). Despite their alluring titles, recent articles by I. Molina and E. Francolí in RoN XIV (1972) 23-26 and 244-51 hardly do more than attest El otro's impact on Buero Vallejo.

8. Smith, op. cit., p. 377.

9. Smith, op. cit., p. 374.