Resumen de “Relentless war”: Theater and censorship in eighteenth-century Spain
The theater in the eighteenth century was often considered to be a dangerous and corrupting enterprise. To believe what was written against playwrights, playwriting, and the theater in Spain is to believe that theater performances were the immediate cause of disease, plagues, natural disasters, social scandals, the decline of morals, the dissolution of family values, and the potential collapse of Western civilization. Preachers and other opponents spoke and wrote hysterically about the “dishonest,” “obscene” and “pernicious” plays that were undermining the stability of Spanish society. Their protests did not go unheeded. Theater was taken seriously by what we now call the Establishment (which included the government, the Catholic Church, and the aristocracy), and attempts to control it, modify it, police it, censor it, or ban it mark the history of what Domínguez Ortiz has called “the battle over the theater” (la batalla del teatro) in eighteenth-century Spain.