Baroque Theater Characters and Dramatic Types

Baroque Theater: Character Types

The Baroque stage presents a set of stock characters with distinct social roles and dramatic functions. Below are the principal types and their characteristics.

• Galán: The male counterpart of the lady; equally beautiful, noble, generous, and loyal. In other works he is the hero and often appears in hagiographies of the saint.
• Powerful: Usually embodied by the king and sometimes by a noble or a prince. If young, he shares the physical characteristics of the galán: proud and violent; he may also abuse his power. If elderly, he is characterized by prudence. When he is the king, his mission is to administer justice.
• Old Man: Wise, brave, and a defender of honor; he is almost always the father of the lady. Sometimes the defenders of honor are the brothers of the lady, who are also suitors.
• Funny: A figure who provokes the audience's laughter. He is subordinate to a noble character and acts as the counterpart to the suitor.
• Maid: The counterpart of the funny character; sometimes she exhibits the same traits as he does.

Types of Dramas

Baroque theater presented two principal types of drama: serious in nature and comic in nature.

Long Plays (Serious and Comic)

Serious dramas:

• Tragedies: Present pitiful disasters that emotionally involve the audience.
• Tragicomedies (comedy series): Cover various topics, usually related to honor. Comic elements, performed by the funny characters, are often organized as rather isolated sequences within the piece.
• Auto-sacramental: Religious works whose aim is the exaltation of the Eucharist. They are characterized by the use of allegory and a set of religious conventions.

Comic Drama

• Plays of swashbuckling: Starring knights who pursue amorous adventures that defy time and space before the public, seeking to surprise with their implausibility.
• Plays of the figurehead: Use the swashbuckling plot structure but insert a central grotesque comic figure.
• Comedy of distance: Comedies with action located in distant places and/or times. Their protagonists are noble.
• Comedy-burlesque: Often connected to Carnival and frequently depicted during the day of San Juan in court festivities. Its humor lies in the reversal of decency: delight in disgrace, grotesque revenge, and verbal wit.

Short Works

The Baroque theatrical style was so prolific that short dramatic pieces frequently appeared interspersed within extended works. Among the brief dramatic works of Baroque theater are:

• Starters: Humorous one-act works. In some, a burlesque tone dominates the action; in others, erotic matter or the presence of bizarre characters is emphasized.
• Loas: Used as introductions to a performance and intended to win public favor and silence. The character in a loa used to be funny, but there were also sacramental loas that introduced theological matters, and laudatory loas that exalted real characters.
• Dance: Constituted through performance; its main elements were music—especially singing—and dancing.