Baroque Culture and Society: Theater as Propaganda

The Baroque Culture

Characterized by four features:

• Culture is directed
• Massive
• Urban
• Conservative

Culture Addressed

The culture of the Baroque is an operational tool designed to act on a Baroque dirigisme. It inevitably leads to authoritarianism (monarchical absolutism). Art and literature are under the influence, or even under the rule, of the rulers.

Culture of the Masses

In the seventeenth century, there is a concentration of population in certain areas. The population demands a greater quantity of cultural products to be consumed at leisure. This produced a common culture, aimed at the masses, according to the level corresponding to the middle classes (Kitsch).

Urban Culture

There was peasant unrest in the seventeenth century. The urban populations are of concern to those in power, and policies are normally aimed at their subjection. Therefore, the city is part of Baroque culture.

Conservative Culture

It seeks to disseminate and consolidate the image of the established society in support of a Baroque world. The system organizes its resources to preserve and strengthen the traditional order of society, based on a system of privileges and crowned by an absolute monarchy.

The Baroque Theater in Society

Literature is a literary product that develops social purposes. Spanish theater appears as a manifestation of a social propaganda campaign designed to strengthen and spread a determined society. During the last quarter of the 16th century, premises are put in place. By the end of the sixteenth century, the phenomenon of the appearance of themes of national history produced in Spain: romance epic content, variety of meters, situations, times, places. The comedy that characterized Spanish drama takes the cultural heritage of the Renaissance, but postulates a reference for the present, seeking to impose or maintain the pressure of a system of power, stratification, and hierarchy of groups. It is primarily a political tool.

Spanish Baroque theater has not educated the people, but it has helped to configure them. French and Italian theater is headed for a public school and worship; Spanish theater is headed into the mass, forming public opinion. This theater presents dramatic situations; there are social conflicts in the Spanish theater. It tries to show that, by acting in one way or another, men can achieve or fail to live happily, according to their insertion into the social system. Spanish comedy presents to resolve social conflicts in accordance with the established order.

Comedy gives us a very broad version of their society through characters of every rank, profession, and position: all of Spanish comedy. Linking the individual to their social conditions are summarized in the blood; the role of inheritance is presented as the foundation of all order. In this period, the scene, theater, encourages and focuses on almost all festivals, holiday celebrations, and theatrical diversions. The Baroque seeks a dynamic of depth.