Lorca's The Public

The mystery of Lorca's 'lost unpublished drama The Public is here disclosed by Rafael Martinez Nadal, the poet's close friend and the owner of what would seem to be the first draft of the play.

Nadal provides the exact details of the manuscript, a scene-by-scene synopsis of the play, and a detailed analysis. Thus, a new and unified view of Lorca's work becomes possible. The play is at once the most difficult and most comprehensive of Lorca's writings, employing themes, images, and techniques that pervade the poetic and dramatic work. Nadal shows that the surrealist quality of the scenes grew out of Lorca's efforts to bring his most intimate problems to the stage, using techniques ahead of Genet and Becket. But the play is more than the first full-length surrealist drama and the first in which homosexual love is openly discussed and defended. It is Lorca's desperate cry for love on all levels and his lament for the solitude of the individual.

In Part II, Nadal illustrates Lorca' leading ideas by close reference to his entire body of work and to letters. The Public, he says is not unique, but a link in a chain in which heterosexual and homosexual love together express love's power, Lorca's commanding theme.