Jacinto Benavente

Jacinto Benavente y Martínez was born in Madrid in 1866, the son of a celebrated paediatrician, and remained a creature of the capital and its theatres throughout a very long working life. He came of age when the Spanish stage was dominated by high-flown verse melodrama, and his ambition from the start was to bring it back to observable reality.

Beginning with El nido ajeno (1894) and the satirical society scenes of Gente conocida (1896), Benavente replaced rhetoric with prose dialogue, grand gesture with the play of intelligence, and melodramatic plotting with the quieter tensions of manners and money. His comedies anatomised the Madrid aristocracy and bourgeoisie with a coolly ironic eye. His most famous and frequently staged work, The Bonds of Interest (1907), borrows the masks of the commedia dell’arte to expose the self-interest beneath social virtue. He also turned to the countryside in psychological rural dramas such as Señora ama (1908) and La malquerida (1913), a study of forbidden passion within a family that was filmed in Hollywood in 1921 as The Passion Flower. In all he wrote some 172 works, moving between social satire, sentimental comedy, fantasy and tragedy.

The Nobel Prize, awarded in 1922, honoured him as a continuer of Spain’s great dramatic tradition. A liberal monarchist and a critic of socialism, he became a reluctant supporter of Franco’s regime as the alternative to a republic he distrusted. He kept writing for the stage into his final year, and died in 1954 at the age of eighty-seven. He never married.