Francisco Martínez de la Rosa

• Born: March 10, 1787
• Birthplace: Granada, Spain
• Died: February 7, 1862
• Place of death: Madrid, Spain

Other Literary Forms

Francisco Martínez de la Rosa initiated his fruitful literary career with several poetic odes that quickly attracted his contemporaries’ attention. Furthermore, his participation in the Cádiz resistance against the French invasion during the War of 1808-1814 brought this young liberal into the political arena. Throughout his life, he contributed to Spanish affairs with several treatises and fundamental political statutes and documents. This political involvement naturally inclined him toward historical research, which inspired his historical novel, Doña Isabel de Solís, Reyna de Granada (1837-1846), and several historical treatises, among them the monumental El espíritu del siglo (1835-1851). His diverse literary interests also led him in 1829 to publish a translation of Horace Moratín’s Ars poetica (c. 17 b.c.e.; The Art of Poetry, 1567) called Traducción de la Epístola de Horacio a los Pisones sobre arte poética and to write his Poética (1831).

Achievements

Although Francisco Martínez de la Rosa cultivated all literary genres, he regarded his writing merely as a substitute for political action during idle periods in prison or in exile. Nevertheless, he occupies a primary place in the Spanish Romantic drama because his La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310 was the first play with Romantic characteristics to be represented on a Spanish stage. Mariano José de Larra, the period’s sharpest and severest critic of the time, hailed the play as the best seen in Madrid, pointing out both the dramatic and the political achievements of Martínez de la Rosa. Indeed, in April, 1834, this successful first performance was contemporaneous with the publication of the Estatuto Real, the new constitution of the nation written by him, and by his signing of the Quadruple Alliance. Despite these successes, Martínez de la Rosa is remembered today by modern critics only for the historical significance of La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310.

Ironically, Martínez de la Rosa cannot be classified as a convinced Romantic, because in politics and literature alike, he was a moderate. This is a reflection of his transitional position between neoclassical and Romantic poetics. Russell P. Sebold considers Romantic poetics to be a consequence of the transformation of the poetic rules in the eighteenth century from mechanical and closed to organic and open. In those terms, Martínez de la Rosa stands as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary figure, although he was the first Spanish dramatist to write a play that upheld the new spirit of liberty surrounding the Cádiz resistance against Napoleon. La viuda de Padilla, staged in the besieged city, contrasts with the neoclassical tragedies that exploited past national heroes for despotic objectives. Martínez de la Rosa’s tragedy incorporates the Romantic emphasis on freedom and antiabsolutism while nevertheless retaining many Enlightenment values.

Biography

Francisco de Paula Martínez de la Rosa Berdejo Gómez y Arroyo was born in Granada to a bourgeois family on March 10, 1787. He was soon admired for his prodigious intellectual abilities, and by age twelve, he had already entered his hometown’s university. In 1804, he received a Ph.D. in civil law, and in April, 1805, he was awarded the chair of philosophy at the University of Granada. That same year marked his beginnings in the poetic genre with some religious odes that he composed for the festival of Corpus Christi. Among his literary contacts, José Joaquín de Mora, noted later for his Romantic polemic with Juan Nicolás Böhl de Faber, contributed to his acceptance in the Cádiz literary circle of Antonio María Alcalá Galiano, who would become another important Romantic spokesman.

During the war against Napoleon, in 1810, Martínez de la Rosa sailed from Cádiz to London. There he met José María Blanco White, who introduced him to English parliamentary government, which Martínez de la Rosa defended in “La revolución actual de España.” Upon his return to the besieged city of Cádiz, he was elected to the first Spanish Parliament, the Cortes, and premiered his two first plays. Later he stood out as a leader of the liberal group that unsuccessfully tried to persuade Ferdinand VII to accept the new constitution. Jailed in 1814, Martínez de la Rosa wrote poems and a tragedy, Morayma.

With Rafael del Riego’s liberal uprising of 1820, Martínez de la Rosa returned to the political arena. As a Cortes deputy for Granada, he contributed to several key legislative projects. Later he was named head of the government. Because he opposed the dominant revolutionary tendencies of the period from 1820 to 1823, he left Spain in 1823 and lived mainly in Paris until his return in 1831. During this period of exile, he produced the majority of his literary accomplishments; he enjoyed the acclaim of the Paris public for his play Aben Humeya: Ou, La révolte des naures sous Philippe II. While in Paris, he also wrote his principal play, La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310.

After the death of Ferdinand VII, the regent called upon Martínez de la Rosa to head the new government. Nevertheless, the moderate views expressed in his Estatuto Real, which displeased both ends of the political spectrum, and his failure with the Carlist uprising forced him out. Despite this political disappointment, he had been able to witness the Madrid success of the premiere of La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310. In the following years, Martínez de la Rosa actively opposed the reforms of the Count of Toreno and Francisco Mendizábal. In 1839, he was nominated to the presidency of the Spanish Language Royal Academy. His political opposition to the new liberal regent, General Espartero, forced him into a second exile in Paris in 1840, where he continued to work on his El espíritu del siglo.

When Elisabeth II was crowned in 1844 and called for a moderate government, Martínez de la Rosa again played a key political role, as ambassador, cabinet minister, member and president of the Cortes, and president of the council of state. A year before his death in Madrid on February 7, 1862, he published his complete dramatic works in three volumes. His plays certainly won for him more popular acclaim than did his conservative politics.

Analysis

Francisco Martínez de la Rosa’s venture into the theater in 1812 was accompanied by the battle echoes of the French siege of Cádiz. Both the comedyLo que puede un empleo and his patriotic tragedy La viuda de Padilla, reminiscent of the nationalistic works of the Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri, were immediately acclaimed. Although it seems that the comedy was written as a complement to the tragedy, it was premiered earlier than La viuda de Padilla.

La viuda de Padilla

In La viuda de Padilla, a historical drama, Martínez de la Rosa sought to encourage the patriotic spirit of the people of Cádiz by presenting a story of personal courage in another siege, that of sixteenth century Toledo. The protagonist, María Pacheco, was the widow of Francisco Padilla, one of the Castilian leaders during the War of the Communities against the absolutism of Charles I. With historical perspective, as Rafael Seco points out, the play not only reflects the resistance against the French invaders but also foreshadows the troubles that lay ahead for the Liberals with the return of Ferdinand VII’s absolute rule in 1814.

La viuda de Padilla differs from neoclassical tragedy in its treatment of Spain’s past. Instead of presenting a national hero whose behavior ought to reinforce the enlightened despotism of absolute rule, Martínez de la Rosa’s tragedy is a declaration of the rights of humanity against tyranny and oppression. Historically, the play is inaccurate; the real claims of the Castilian followers of Padilla are not advanced, and in fact his widow, María Pacheco, did not remain in Toledo but actually fled to Portugal. Nevertheless, the play projects the moderate views of Martínez de la Rosa that characterize his later works and political beliefs: Violent revolutions are not the answer to the needs of the new system, and the people, the masses, are not to be entrusted with historical decisions. In the last scene, as Charles’s troops override the Toledo defenders, María Pacheco commits suicide. As she is dying, she disdains her people’s pleas for clemency from the victors. Her point of view reflects the maxim “Everything for the people, but without the people.” Martínez de la Rosa was sending the clear message that the heroes of the new bourgeois order could come only from the top of the social hierarchy.

Lo que puede un empleo

Lo que puede un empleo is the first of Martínez de la Rosa’s neoclassical comedies. Although, at the end of his life, he ventured into the cape and sword ( capa y espada) genre with El español en Venecia: O, La cabera encantada, his other comedic attempts closely follow the structural and thematic patterns that Leandro Fernández de Moratín established at the turn of the century. In Lo que puede un empleo, a typical comedy of manners, the anagnorisis, or comic discovery, is centered on a political conflict. The expulsion of the conservative usurper Melitón is linked to the intervention of the liberal Don Luis, who, as the honnête homme, is the agent of the happy ending and new social order. The deceived and corrected father, Don Fabián, recognizes the virtues of his future son-in-law, Don Luis’s son, Teodoro, despite his liberal tendencies.

La niña en casa y la madre en la máscara

In La niña en casa y la madre en la máscara, the social order is restored when the usurper, Don Teodoro, who courts both an irresponsible mother, Doña Leoncia, and her innocent daughter, Doña Inés, is unmasked. As Mariano José de Larra claimed in an 1835 critique, however, Martínez de la Rosa appears trapped within the structural patterns of the comedy; consequently, the moral discourse of Don Pedro, and thus the marriage of the pale Don Luis to Doña Inés, seems false. When Larra claimed that spectators should be able to infer the moral of the play from the action itself and not have to rely on a spokesperson, he was pointing out the historical deficiencies of the genre, too close to Moratín’s comic practice. That is the case of La boda y el duelo, a work that thematically and structurally recalls Moratín’s El sí de las niñas (wr. 1801, pr., pb. 1806; When a Girl Says Yes, 1929).

Los celos infundados

Probably the most refreshing of Martínez de la Rosa’s comedies is Los celos infundados: O, El marido en la chimenea, an intrigue comedy. A jealous older husband, Don Anselmo, is corrected through the scheming seduction of his wife’s brother, Don Eugenio, who has just arrived in Cádiz from La Habana with his cousin. The cousin assumes the identity of Don Eugenio and because Don Anselmo has never met either of them, Don Eugenio now impersonates a friend of his cousin so that he can thereby pretend to court Don Anselmo’s wife, Doña Francisca. Although the play is very amusing, Larra again found that verisimilitude was lacking. He conceded that a jealous husband whose wife remained loyal when courted by a stranger might then feel secure about his wife’s faithfulness, but he argued that, contrary to the resolution of the play, the jealous husband would not retain his equanimity after discovering that the so-called stranger was really his brother-in-law.

From the point of view of comedy, Martínez de la Rosa could hardly be called an innovator, except for his insertion of a political message in Lo que puede un empleo. Nevertheless, his plays were successfully staged throughout his career, and he showed his skill as a playwright with his incursion into the cape and sword mode and by the use of verse and prose in these plays.

Morayma

While in prison, Martínez de la Rosa attempted his second tragedy with a national theme, Morayma. In contrast to the Castilian background of La viuda de Padilla, the setting of Morayma is King Boabdil’s Alhambra palace after the rebellion of the Abencerrajes in the fifteenth century. During the uprising, the Abencerrajes’s chief, Albinhamad, Morayma’s husband, has been killed. Because Boabdil may not harm his stepsister, he decides to ban the rest of the Abencerrajes, and thereby separate Morayma from her son. Alí, the chief of the Zegríes and victor over the Abencerrajes, falls in love with Morayma and tries to save her son. After being betrayed, Alí is killed while escaping with Morayma’s son. Morayma dies as a result of her painful loss, and at the end of the play, Boabdil shamelessly flees from the scene of the crime. Boabdil’s depiction in the tragedy recalls the ruthless return to power of Ferdinand VII. Morayma already uses character, thematic, and spatial motifs that would be encountered later in Aben Humeya: O, La rebelión de los moriscos and in the more romantic La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310.

For example, Alí’s efforts to reconcile Boabdil and the Abencerrajes, in act 2, scene 4, are similar to Rugiero’s promises, in La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310, to safeguard the lives of his wife’s family. Furthermore, Rugiero’s death is accompanied by the death of his wife, who cannot overcome the pain of seeing her lover condemned, in the same way in which Morayma dies after Alí’s and her son’s death. Moreover, not only is the thematic motif of the maternal responsibility expressed by Morayma, a topic which appears in later plays (as Robert Geraldi has noted), but also both Muley Carime in Aben Humeya: O, La rebelión de los moriscos and Juan Morosini in La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310 admit an inability to understand their paternal role.

These three all involve a coup d’état, as well as nighttime scenes and lugubrious spaces—underground paths in a castle in the first two, and the Morosini pantheon in the cemetery in La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310. Despite these similarities and the distinctively Romantic historical setting, Morayma can hardly be called a Romantic play, because in Morayma all three stage unities are enforced, although different spaces within the palace are used. This neoclassical flexibility in the unity of space can be found in Ignacio de Luzán’s Poética (1737) as well as in Pierre Corneille’s theater. These similarities found in Martínez de la Rosa’s later historical dramas reinforced the evolution of the neoclassical theatrical patterns into Romantic ones through the more adaptable poetic rules.

Aben Humeya: O, La rebelión de los moriscos

Aben Humeya: O, La rebelión de los moriscos recounts the Moriscos’ rebellion against Philip II within a somewhat weak time unity, condensing the historical events of five months into a twenty-four-hour period. On its Spanish premiere in 1836, the play failed to appeal to the public, particularly to Larra, who disliked Martínez de la Rosa’s politically conservative positions of that period. Nevertheless, the play resembles La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310, which two years earlier had been very well received. Both plays use religious holidays and festive moods in contrast with the preparation and staging of a rebellion; in both, the collaboration of outsiders helps the conspirators prepare a plan, while spies intervene to unveil the future plans of both Muley Carime and Rugiero. In both plays, the sound of wind predicts evil and catastrophe.

Both plays also show structural similarities to sentimental comedy. In Martínez de la Rosa’s plays, one finds the conflict of the family feelings of two men overridden by their duties as executors of justice. In Aben Humeya: O, La rebelión de los moriscos, the protagonist is forced to give his father-in-law the poison that punishes him for treason because he has attempted to save Abén Humeya’s wife and family through a pact with the Christians. After the failure of the conspiracy in La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310, Pedro Morosini judges and condemns his son Rugiero during a tragic anagnorisis. If the lachrymose scenes of Don Justo condemning his son Don Torcuato in el delincuente honrado (tragicomedies) have the rex ex machina denouement of the royal pardon, in Martínez de la Rosa’s dramas, the spectator is dismayed by the condemnation and death of the heroes. Formally, both dramas use prose instead of verse, another feature of el delincuente honrado.

If both plays witness the failure of rebellions, it is not simply because Martínez de la Rosa held deep reservations concerning popular movements but also because dramatists of this period were increasingly conscious of the claims of historical accuracy. In any case, Aben Humeya: O, La rebelión de los moriscos, like Morayma, warns against tyranny based on bloody oppression and injustice, as well as insisting that the attempt to replace tyranny through violent means evolves into internal strife and a repetition of the original tyrannical pattern it strived to suppress. La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310, through Marcos Querini’s discourse in act 1, scene 3, recalls the ideological purpose of the neoclassical tragedies and La viuda de Padilla: The people should be directed through changes and not allowed political choice. This ideological declaration certainly reflects Martínez de la Rosa’s moderate views. As Francisco Ruiz Ramón claims, both plays treat the theme of freedom as an elegy rather than from the Romantic point of view of a hymn.

Influence of Neoclassicism

If, ideologically, Martínez de la Rosa’s theater may be described as a reflection of his moderate views, the formal aspects of his plays also support this stance. Because the poetic rules had evolved from authority to reason, nature and art did not exclude but rather complemented each other. Therefore, as early as 1773, this new poetic appeared with its Romantic touches in the work of an apparent neoclassicist, José Cadalso, as Sebold notes.

In his “Apuntes sobre el drama histórico,” which appeared in volume 5 of his Obras literarias (1827-1830), Martínez de la Rosa justifies this neoclassical flexibility, adding to his dramas the dulce et utile precept found in Luzán and Moratín. In La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310, he would therefore present himself as an eclectic descendant of the spectacular Romanticism of the end of the eighteenth century, while in his “Anotaciones sobre el drama histórico” (1830), he clarifies the theory for these changes.

As a neoclassicist interested in didacticism, he defends the action rule so that the spectators may clearly understand the play, while he offers concessions to the spatial rule, an “innovation” already found in Luzán and Morayma. Regarding the time unity, his flexibility overcomes the suffocating twenty-four-hour limit. With respect to language, he recommends the verisimilitude of tone defended by Luzán and Denis Diderot.

La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310

La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310 takes place in 1310, during the dreadful time of the feared Venetian Tribunal and the failure of the famous conspiracy against the political control of a few families. One of the conspirators is Rugiero, an adopted Venetian of obscure origins, secretly married to Laura Morosini, the daughter of Juan Morosini and the niece of Pedro Morosini, the president of the hated Venetian Tribunal. In act 1, at the palace of the Ambassador of Genoa, Rugiero plots with the other conspirators to overthrow the Venetian oligarchy. In act 2, at night, in the Morosini pantheon, Pedro Morosini receives the account of his spies. Interrupted by Laura’s and Rugiero’s entry, he reveals the conspirators’ plans to her as well as to the hidden enemies. Captured by the spies, Rugiero is taken away, and Laura faints. The lack of verisimilitude of this act is compensated for by the very romantic setting of the pantheon. In act 3, inside the Morosini palace, Laura confesses her secret marriage to her father. In this moving scene of paternal understanding, she convinces him to try to save Rugiero. When Juan confronts his brother, in a typical sentimental comedy dilemma, Pedro pledges his allegiance to the judicial prerogatives he serves. Act 4 recounts the failure of the conspiracy in several animated popular scenes. Martínez de la Rosa changed the date to Mardi Gras and therefore renders the act into a very appropriate Romantic tableau later used in José Zorrilla y Moral’s Don Juan Tenorio (pr., pb. 1844; English translation, 1944). The last act takes place in the lugubrious Hall of the Tribunal, which leads to the jails and torture rooms. As in a sentimental comedy, friendship turns into heroism when Julián Rossi refuses to declare against his former condottiero, Rugiero. Then Juan Mafei, another conspirator, is condemned in a hearing that recalls Christ’s sentencing. When the tribunal is unable to make the now insane Laura testify, Rugiero is brought in, and Pedro Morosini discovers that he is in fact judging his own son. The former had been captured at sea and separated from his parents when he was a baby. This dramatic anagnorisis causes Pedro Morosini to faint, while the judges condemn Rugiero to death. In the lachrymose finale, Laura dies when she sees the scaffold, and Rugiero is taken away.

The play contains many manneristic Romantic motifs found in later Spanish dramas: torture, a carnival, a conspiracy, disguised suggestions of incest, onstage violence, mention of pirates, and so on. Besides these obvious motifs, marriage, as in Ángel de Saavedra’s Don Álvaro: O, La fuerza del sino (pr., pb. 1835; Don Álvaro: Or, The Force of Destiny, 1964) is a source for parental opposition. Passionate love is abruptly ended by death, as in Antonio García Gutiérrez’s El trovador (pr. 1836), Juan Eugenio de Hartzenbusch’s Los amantes de Teruel (pr. 1836; The Lovers of Teruel, 1938), and Don Álvaro. The three protagonists in Martínez de la Rosa’s, Saavedra’s, and Gutiérrez’s plays have obscure origins and therefore conform to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage who is destroyed by society; all three find their destinies determined by fate.

La conjuración de Venecia año de 1310 thus exemplifies the evolution of eighteenth century poetics into Romanticism. It combines the sentimental comedy structure and spectacular elements of the early Romantic examples à la Cadalso with the more nineteenth century manneristic Romantic elements that one finds in plays written after 1834. Although it remains Martínez de la Rosa’s best-known work, his other historical plays are also of interest for the light they shed on the transformation of Spanish drama in the early nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Cook, John A. Neoclassic Drama in Spain: Theory and Practice. 1959. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1974. An analysis of neoclassical drama in Spain. Bibliography.

Geraldi, Robert. “Francisco Martínez de la Rosa: Literary Atrophy or Creative Sagacity?” Hispanófila 77 (1983): 11-19. Geraldi examines Martínez de la Rosa’s works in regard to their progressiveness.

Kosove, Joan Lynne Pataky. The “Comedia Lacrimosa” and Spanish Romantic Drama 1773-1865. London: Tamesis, 1977. A look at the relationship between sentimental comedy and Spanish Romantic drama.

Mayberry, Robert, and Nancy Mayberry. Francisco Martínez de la Rosa. Boston: Twayne, 1988. A general study of the life and work of Martínez de la Rosa. Bibliography and index.

Ojeda Escudero, Pedro. El justo medio: Neoclasicismo y romanticismo en la obra dramática de Martínez de la Rosa. Burgos, Spain: Universidad de Burgos, 1997. An examination of the neoclassicism and Romanticism found in the dramatic works of Martínez de la Rosa. Bibliography. In Spanish.

Pérez Magallón, Jesús. El teatro neoclásico. Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2001. Covers the neoclassical movement in Spanish theater. Bibliography. In Spanish.