García Lorca, Federico (1898–1936), Spanish poet and playwright, executed by firing squad at the opening of the Spanish Civil War. As a child he made and played with puppets in his own miniature theatre, and later produced puppet-plays in his native Granada. His first full-length play
El maleficio de la mariposa (
The Butterfly's Curse) was produced by
Martínez Sierra in 1920 at the Teatro Eslava. It was followed by a historical drama,
Mariana Pineda (1927), and several light comedies, among them
La zapatera prodigiosa (
The Shoemaker's Amazing Wife, 1930). His fame rests on his tragic folk trilogy
Bodas de sangre (1933), about a wife's elopement on her wedding night and the husband's revenge;
Yerma (1934), in which a childless wife murders her husband; and
La casa de Bernarda Alba (produced posthumously in 1945 in Buenos Aires), a powerful indictment of a society in which natural impulses are frustrated by Catholic morality. These have been presented all over the world, the first to be seen in an English translation being
Bodas de sangre, as
Bitter Oleander in New York (1935) and as
The Marriage of Blood in London (1939); it has since been widely revived as
Blood Wedding. Yerma was produced in London in 1957 and
The House of Bernarda Alba in New York in 1951; it was not produced professionally in London until 1973. García Lorca's influence on the Spanish theatre has been most important, both through his own plays and productions and through his association with
La Barraca.
