Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

The drama takes place in December 1823, the year in which Goya finished
his Pinturas negras (1820-23). John Dowling indicates the relationship between
these Black paintings and the etching and drama’s title El sueño de la razón when
he remarks that the Pinturas negras “are anticipated by earlier works and
represent the disillusionment and dashed hopes for a new Spain which didn’t
come about because reason was asleep and monsters took over.” 121 At this time in
the drama, the oppressive regime of King Fernando VII endangers the artist’s life,
as he is suspected of relationships with Enlightenment intellectuals, liberals and
freemasons, all of whom were threatened “under the restored rule of the
archreactionary Bourbon Fernando VII” (Hughes 268). The king, upon returning
to the throne after Napoleon’s defeat, “abolished the 1812 Constitution and set in
train an iron policy of repression, censorship, inquisitorial tyranny, and royal
absolutism” (Hughes 273). Buero’s Goya, who is considered a liberal, stubbornly
denies the threat he lives in, yet the drama represents his subconscious fear
through the Pinturas negras on which he is working. Goya’s terror is also
represented in the drama by heart beats, sounds and voices that only Goya and the
audience hear. 122 This so- called “efecto de inmersión” (immersion effect) by
which the playwright seeks to draw the spectator into an actual physical
experience analogous to that of a character on stage, is also used to convey
121 John Dowling, “Buero Vallejo’s interpretation of Goya’s ‘Black Paintings,’” Hispania 56.2
(1973). Goya painted the Pinturas negras on the walls of his last home in Madrid, the “Quinta del
Sordo.” These oil paintings were removed from the walls in 1874, and in the process “a certain
amount of editing and ‘correction’ went on at the hands of the restorer (Hughes 17).
122 Cf. John Dowling, “Buero Vallejo’s interpretation of Goya’s ‘Black Paintings,’” Hispania 56.2
(1973): 449-457.
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