JACINTO BENAVENTE
Plays, Second Series. By Jacinto Benavente. Translated from the Spanish with an introduction by John Garrett Underhill. Illustrated. 12mo. 309 pages. Charles Scribner's Sons. New York.
IT is a truly Shavian paradox that among contemporary Spanish dramatists should be found the author whose plays are most like the plays of Bernard Shaw. The Spanish playwrights have been influenced only superficially by the intellectual and technical forces that have been shaping the course of the modern drama, and, save for a few emphasizing exceptions, the very plays that are held up as examples of modern Spanish dramatic realism are plays of the classical Spanish plots of blood-and-honour, coated thinly with a very brittle veneer of naturalistic speech and setting. Spain is the last place where one might reasonably expect to discover another Shaw, for Shaw has been the arch-enemy of those same romantic illusions that are the stock-in-trade of Spanish playwrights and the chief protagonist of mental or moral conflict against the physical conflict in which Spanish audiences so delight. And yet Spain's foremost living dramatist is more closely akin to Shaw, both as a thinker and a dramatic craftsman, than any other playwright.
It would, however, be grossly unfair even to infer that Jacinto Benavente is an imitator of Shaw. He is not even a disciple. But there are very obvious similarities in the dialogue and technique of their plays, and the differences in their artistic motives and moral ideals are chiefly due to their different environments and national traditions. It is most convenient, therefore, to compare these two great individualists, although to compare an unknown—and Benavente is all but unknown in America—with a known like Shaw, about whom such debatable opinions are so stoutly maintained, is a critical device fraught with dangers of injustice. It demands at the outset fullest appreciation of Benavente's robust originality, and it makes necessary the clearest possible definition of each basis of comparison.
Spaniards recognize Jacinto Benavente as their greatest modern dramatist. Discerning Spanish critics do not hesitate to rank him
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