Blood Wedding

Federico Garcia Lorca, Gwynne Edwards, Gwynne Edwards

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780713685169
• eBook ISBN: 9781350175266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

Blood Wedding is set in a village community in Lorca's Andalusia, and tells the story of a couple drawn irresistibly together in the face of an arranged marriage. This tragic and poetic play is the work on which his international reputation was founded.

Like many of Lorca's passionate and intensely lyrical plays that focus on peasant life and the forces of nature, Blood Wedding combines innovatory dramatic technique with Spanish popular tradition.

Methuen Drama Student Editions are expertly annotated texts of a wide range of plays from the modern and classic repertoires. As well as the complete text of the play itself, the volume contains a chronology of the playwright's life and work; an introduction giving the background to the play; a discussion of the various interpretations; notes on individual words and phrases in the text; and questions for further study.

Blood Wedding

Translated by Gwynne Edwards

Act One

Scene One

Room painted yellow.

BRIDEGROOM (entering). Mother.

MOTHER. What?

BRIDEGROOM. I'm going.

MOTHER. Where to?

BRIDEGROOM. To the vineyard. (He starts to go out.)

MOTHER. Wait.

BRIDEGROOM. Do you want something?

MOTHER. Son, your food.

BRIDEGROOM. Leave it. I'll eat grapes. Give me the knife.

MOTHER. What for?

BRIDEGROOM (laughing). To cut them.

MOTHER (muttering and looking for it). The knife, the knife . . . Damn all of them and the scoundrel who invented them.

BRIDEGROOM. Let's change the subject.

MOTHER. And shotguns . . and pistols . . . even the tiniest knife . . . and mattocks and pitchforks . . .

BRIDEGROOM. Alright.

MOTHER. Everything that can cut a man's body. A beautiful man, tasting the fullness of life, who goes out to the vineyards or tends to his olives, because they are his, inherited . . .

BRIDEGROOM (lowering his head). Be quiet.

MOTHER. . . . and that man doesn't come back. Or if he does come back it's to put a palm-leaf on him or a plateful of coarse salt to stop him swelling. I don't know how you dare carry a knife on your body, nor how I can leave the serpent inside the chest.

BRIDEGROOM. Is that it?

MOTHER. If I lived to be a hundred, I wouldn't speak of anything else. First your father. He had the scent of carnation for me, and I enjoyed him for three short years. Then your brother. Is it fair? Is it possible that a thing as small as a pistol or a knife can put an end to a man who's a bull? I'll never be quiet. The months pass and hopelessness pecks at my eyes . . . even at the roots of my hair.

BRIDEGROOM (forcefully). Are you going to stop?

MOTHER. No. I won't stop. Can someone bring your father back to me? And your brother? And then there's the gaol. What is the gaol? They eat there, they smoke there, they play instruments there. My dead ones full of weeds, silent, turned to dust; two men who were two geraniums . . . The murderers, in gaol, as large as life, looking at the mountains . . .

BRIDEGROOM. Do you want me to kill them?

MOTHER. No . . . If I speak it's because . . . How am I not going to speak seeing you go out of that door? I don't like you carrying a knife. It's just that . . . I wish you wouldn't go out to the fields.

BRIDEGROOM (laughing). Come on!

MOTHER. I'd like you to be a woman. You wouldn't be going to the stream now and the two of us would embroider edgings and little woollen dogs.

BRIDEGROOM (he puts his arm around his mother and laughs). Mother, what if I were to take you with me to the vineyards?

MOTHER. What would an old woman do in the vineyards? Would you put me under the vine-shoots?

BRIDEGROOM (lifting her in his arms). You old woman, you old, old woman, you old, old, old woman.

MOTHER. Your father, now he used to take me there.
That's good stock. Good blood. Your grandfather left a son on every street corner. That's what I like. Men to be men; wheat wheat.

BRIDEGROOM. What about me, mother?

MOTHER. You? What?

BRIDEGROOM. Do I need to tell you again?

MOTHER (serious). Ah!

BRIDEGROOM. Do you think it's a bad idea?

MOTHER. No.

BRIDEGROOM. Well then?

MOTHER. I'm not sure. It's so sudden like this. It's taken me by surprise. I know that the girl's good. She is, isn't she? Well-behaved. Hard-working. She makes her bread and she sews her skirts. But even so, when I mention her name, it's as if they were pounding my head with a stone.

BRIDEGROOM. Don't be silly.

MOTHER. It's more than silly. I'll be left alone. Only you are left to me now and I'm sorry to see you going.

BRIDEGROOM. But you'll come with us.

MOTHER. No. I can't leave your father and your brother here. I have to go to them every morning, and if I leave, one of the Felixes could die, one of the family of murderers, and they'd bury him next to mine. I won't stand for that. Never that! Because I'll dig them up with my nails and all on my own I'll smash them to bits against the wall.

BRIDEGROOM (strongly). Back to that again!

MOTHER. I'm sorry. (Pause.) How long have you known her?

BRIDEGROOM. Three years. And now I've bought the vineyard.

MOTHER. Three years. She had another young man, didn't she?

BRIDEGROOM. I don't know. I don't think so. Girls have to be careful who they marry.

MOTHER. Yes. I didn't look at anyone else. I looked at your father, and when they killed him I stared at the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Federico García Lorca: 1898–1936
• Plot
• Commentary
• Further Reading
• Blood Wedding
• Notes
• Questions for Further Study
• eCopyright