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The recorded history of the Spanish theatre has been, in large measure, a history of the Madrid stage. Madrid, like London and Paris, was not only the political center of its nation, but also its cultural capital. Performers and playwrights may have served enforced periods of apprenticeship in the provinces (the example of Molière comes to mind), but success in the capital remained a constant goal. Historians of the theatre in Spain have tended to follow the lead of the actors in fixing their attention almost exclusively on Madrid. N. D. Shergold's A History of the Spanish Stage becomes primarily a history of the Madrid stage after his chronicle moves from medieval times to the establishment of the first public theatres in late sixteenth-century Madrid. René Andioc's study of the eighteenth-century Spanish theatre, Sur la querelle du théâtre au temps de Leandro Fernández de Moratín (Theatrical Polemics in the Time of Moratin), is almost entirely about the theatre in Madrid, a fact recognized in the title of the Spanish version, Teatro y sociedad en el Madrid del siglo XVIII (Theatre and Society in Eighteenth-Century Madrid). Many additional examples could be cited from the Golden Age to the present of historians purporting to study the Spanish theatre, but in reality considering only the Madrid theatre. |
