Federico Garcia Lorca

One of the most famous Spanish playwriters from the 20th century, García Lorca was an icon of his era. Born in 1898, he’s still one of the most known members of the Generation of ’27.

His plays always dealt with death, unrequited or impossible love and full of angst, themes that resounded quite well in his own life; a tormented man that never seemed to found true hapiness and could only exorcise his own demons through writing.

He also wrote a lot of poetry, along the same lines. However, by the end of his life he started to focus more on plays, so his poetic production started to decay.

García Lorca was friends with both Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. However, the relationship between them eroded after Dalí rejected his advances and eventually ended with the release of Un Chien Andalou, that García Lorca took as a personal attack (he was an Andalusian).

His life was tragically cut as soon as the Spanish Civil War broke out. He was detained barely a month later and executed.

Federico Garcia Lorca provides examples of the following tropes:

• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Moon in Blood Wedding.
• Ballad of X: “Ballad of the Sleepwalker”.
• Evil Matriarch: Bernarda Alba in The House of Bernarda Alba.
• Gayngst: Not in his works, but in his life. Spain was a traditionally “manly” country, so he felt misplaced because of it. And then came the Falange…
• Harsher in Hindsight: His poem “The Fable and Round of the Three Friends”:

Then I realized I had been murdered
They looked for me in cafes, cemeteries and churches
but they did not find me.
They never found me?
No. They never found me.

• Ho Yay: Between García Lorca and Dalí. According to the latter, however, it was only one-sided.
• I Will Wait for You: Doña Rosita the Spinster.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: Yerma.
• Never Found the Body: Until today, nobody knows where his body is; most probably we’ll never know. However, everybody knows he’s dead.
• Pretty Boy
• Roma: He tended to use them a lot in his early works, but discarded them after being pigeon-holed as a “Gypsy poet”.
• Runaway Bride: In Blood Wedding, the bride runs away after she marries with another man. Both the groom and her lover die later.
• Spiritual Successor: Blood Wedding had Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba.
• The Trope Without a Title: The Play Without a Title.
• What Could Have Been: He had in mind a “trilogy of the Spanish earth”, but only did the first two (Blood Wedding and Yerma) before he died.