Love

Directness and complication

In Act III of El público [The Public, or The Audience] Julieta – Shakespeare's Juliet – distances herself from her role within a role to exclaim ‘Ya estoy cansada y me levanto a pedir auxilio para arrojar de mi sepulcro a los que teorizan sobre mi corazón y a los que me abren la boca con pequeñas pinzas de mármol’ [I’m tired and I’m getting up from here to ask for help to cast out from my tomb all those who probe my heart with theories and open up my mouth with tiny marble pincers]. She longs for a moment when she might have been ‘Julieta viva, alegrísima, libre del punzante enjambre de lupas. Julieta en el comienzo, Julieta en la orilla de la ciudad’ [lively Juliet, most happy Juliet, free from stinging swarms of magnifying glasses. Juliet at the beginning, Juliet on the city's shore] (Obras completas, II, p. 494). Her despairing, tortured recognition of the loss of the possibility of being that ‘Julieta en el comienzo’ – in a simple place where feelings are direct, unmediated and unquestioned – is founded on a more fundamental recognition, in the same speech, that ‘es el engaño la palabra del amor, el espejo roto, el paso en el agua’ [the word of love is deception, a broken mirror, a footstep on the water] (p. 494). The sympathetic member of the public, thinking back to this rereading of the tragedy of the star-crossed lovers as she walks home from the theatre, might muse – if she knows her Lorca – on how often his words are themselves magnifying glasses trained on the vulnerable text of love.Words appear in the plays and poems (and, obviously, in the lectures and essays) as theorizing instruments, with as many stings in their looks as there are moments of extreme pleasure, virtuosity or apparently pure emotion in their sounds, deployment and implications.

Lorca often wishes to hide this fact by creating compelling illusions to the effect that love is unapproachable as an object of analysis.