Manuel Tamayo y Baus

Manuel Tamayo y Baus (1884)

Manuel Tamayo y Baus (born September 15, 1829 in Madrid , † June 20, 1898 ibid) was a Spanish playwright who became an important exponent of realistic-naturalistic drama in 19th-century Spanish literature with plays such as Lances de Honor .

Life

Tamayo y Baus came from a family that was closely connected to the theater , particularly through his mother, the well-known actress Joaquína Baus . This appeared in 1841 in an adaptation taken from French as " Genoveva von Brabant ", which her son had written at the age of twelve. Due to the influence of his uncle, the playwright and education minister Antonio Gil y Zárate , he became a member of the government and was thus financially independent.

In 1847 his first published plays Juana de Arco , based on Friedrich Schiller's The Maiden of Orléans , and Una Aventura de Richelieu , based on La Jeunesse de Richelieu by Alexandre-Vincent Pineux Duval , appeared. In Angela (1852) he processed Schiller's Kabale und Liebe , moving the plot to Spain and taking over the original scenes, but revising them with his words.

Tamayo y Baus had his first major success in 1853 with Virginia , a dramatic essay in the style of Vittorio Alfieri , which was particularly noted for its ingenuity and noble language. In 1854 he first lost his office in the new liberal government, but was soon given another post in the government by the minister Cándido Nocedal , who admired the talent of the young playwright. Together with Aureliano Fernández-Guerra , he wrote La Ricahembra in 1854 , a historical drama reminiscent of the work of Lope de Vega .

The stage work La Locura de Amor about Johanna the Insane , the passionate, lovesick daughter of Isabella I of Castile , published in 1855 , established his reputation as Spain's leading playwright of his time. While Hija y Madre (1855) became a failure, La Bola de Nieve (1856) is a notable example of his extraordinary work style. In 1858 he was elected a member of the Real Academia Española and later became its permanent secretary.

In the following years, however, his own works took a back seat, as he increasingly dealt with the adaptation of numerous French-language stage works. These include La Positivo (1862) based on Adrien-Augustin-Léon Laya's Duc Job , which in the Spanish version became a skilful example of theatrical art and contained some elements of great value.

In 1863 he wrote his own play again for the first time after seven years with Lances de Honor . In it he processed the immoralism of dueling and thereby triggered a heated discussion on this topic in public. This work, written in prose , is inspired by a medieval piety that has not been felt in Spanish theater since the 17th century. This “rebirth” of an old theme led numerous theater critics to consider Lances de Honor to be his best work. The subsequent works Del dicho al hecho (1864), based on La Pierre de touche by Jules Sandeau and Émile Augier , and Diplomatie de Ménage (1866) after Caroline Berton are further examples of adaptations of French-language pieces.

His stage work Un Drama Nuevo , published in 1867 , in which he processed William Shakespeare's Hamlet , also earned him widespread attention. In the course of the "glorious" revolution of General Juan Prim in 1868 he lost his job as librarian at the San Isidro Library. He then skilfully revised Théodore Barrière's La Feu au Couvent in No hay mal que por bien no venga (1868) . In 1870 he published his last own play, Los Hombres de bien .

In 1884 the Conservative Minister Alejandro Pidal y Mon appointed him director of the Spanish National Library . During his tenure in 1896, after thirty years of construction, the new library headquarters on Paseo de Recoletos was completed, which served as a library, museum and archive.

Tamayo y Baus, who also published under the pseudonyms Segundo Blanco, Gil Carmona, Conde de Cabra, Manuel Estébanez, Manuel Martínez Pedrosa and Fulano Tal, spent the last years of his life with the revision of Virginia , which appeared posthumously in Obras (1899).

Web links

• Literature by and about Manuel Tamayo y Baus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Manuel Tamayo y construction in the nndb (English)