Contextualising the text – Yerma

Throughout his adult life-time, Garcia Lorca spoke frequently and with gigantic pleasure nigh the profound importance he attributed to his early childhood in the miniscule villages in the countryside near Granada, and upstartr, in the provincial capital itself. Lorcas father, Federico Garcia Rodriguez was a sozzled landowner with several substantial holdings in the rich alluvial downright called La Vega de Granada.Having been widowed in his eldest marriage and left without children, wear down Federicos second marriage (of which his family disapproved because of the inferior social and economic background of his bride) was to a school teacher from Granada, Vincenta Lorca Romero. The mere fact that she had a profession and a job is an indication of her independence and strength of character. The influence of her personality was to be of the ut intimately importance for Federico Garcia Lorca, her eldest son, born in June of 1898.The experience of the first ten years in that fer tile region of slow rivers and poplar groves, with the snow-capped Sierra Nevada in the distance, seems to ingest provided Lorca with an inexhaustible well-spring of inspiration and nip for Spains rural people and their world. The rural folk he was surrounded by became a great influence in his work as we ar shown in his second rural play Yerma. Act 2, scene 1 shows us a parallel to what Lorca would have witnessed often during his childhood. In his late teens he began to write poems that he would recite in local cafes.As a child he was cognize to carry on conversations with breathtaking objects, bestowing upon each object a personality and oration with them as if they were reenforcement things and might speak back at any moment. His writing locomote began with a book of essays in 1918, followed by a play in 1920 and book of rhyme in 1921. In 1919 he left to turn over law at the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he met and became friends with film director Luis Bunuel and pa inter Salvador Dali, among new(prenominal) Spanish notables of his generation.With the exception of summer vacations spent in Granada, Garcia Lorca would stay in the Residencia until 1928, by which time he had become Spains most highly respected younger poet. In the period of his greatest fame, Lorca drifted into a depressive, disillusi cardinald earth of mind. He described himself to a friend as suffering one of the saddest and most unpleasant moments of my life. He abandoned the gypsy ballad poetry that was making him famous. He even stopped reading his poetry to friends.He was rescued from this melancholy mood by his mentor, Fernando de los Rios, who took him from Madrid through France and England to untested York City. In his plays, the pivotal characters are women. Women are the ones who suffer from desire and give through conflict to tragic or comic resolution. Most of the scenes let place in womens spaces, the domestic interiors which they rule and from which men are estranged (or, as in The sign of Bernarda Alba, completely prohibited). The female characters reveal themselves most easily and deeply in conversations with other women.The poetry which erupts at moments of stimulated intensity usually comes from the mouths of female characters. Especially in the lead great tragedies which are known as his trilogy of rural life, Lorca chooses women to exemplify the human life which is crushed by Spanish customs and social life. He went to Cuba in 1929-30 and returned to Spain in 1931. That year Spain became a Republic, which gave hope to many Garcia Lorca included that Spains stock of living would be improved, its illiteracy reduced and its culture more astray disseminated.He became a director of a student theatre federation, La Barraca, which toured small villages and in the faces of harassment by Fascist partisans presented the Spanish classics to the peasants. The company produced the three rural tragedies on which Garcia Lorcas theatrical reputation rests. Yerma (1934), the second of the three tragedies, is the story of a woman who is unable to conceive although she desperately longs to have a child.The first and third tragedies are Blood Wedding (1933) and The House Bernada Alba, which was never performed during Garcia Lorcas lifetime. At the start of the Spanish Civil War, he went to Granada, which he regarded as relatively safe. Although he had no political affiliations, he was known to be a friend of left-wing intellectuals and an advocate of liberty. Apparently this was lavish of an indictment for the Falangists who arrested him on the orders of the Nationalist Civil Governor on venerable 16, 1936. He was held for two days, tortured and shot.Garcia Lorca was homosexual, and he suffered greatly because of the strict, conservative temperament of Spain at that time. His writings were outlawed in Granadas Plaza del Carmen. Even speaking his name was forbidden. The young poet quickly became a martyr, an internati onal symbol of the politically oppressed, but his plays were not revived until the 1940s, and certain bans on his work remained in place until as late as 1971. Today, Garcia Lorca is considered the greatest Spanish poet and playwright of the 20th Century.