The yes of the girls

Cover of the Prince edition The yes of the girls (Madrid, Imprenta de Villafranca 1806).

El sí de las niñas, a play by Leandro Fernández de Moratín, premiered on January 24, 1806 in Madrid, Spain, and performed until Lent of that same year. It is a prose comedy divided into three acts that was banned by the Inquisition.

Premiere and reactions

Leandro Fernández de Moratín wrote El sí de las niñas in 1801. It was the first play he wrote after La comedia nueva, since both El barón like La mojigata, released later than that one, were written at the end of the 1980s. Moratín took several years to release it. He gave the scene the previous productions of his, and only later he decided to publish, in 1805, The yes of the girls . During the month of January 1806 he rehearsed the comedy with the Teatro de la Cruz company. On January 24, 1806 the premiere takes place. El sí de las niñas was not only a resounding success with the public: it was the most widely accepted work of its time and almost certainly the greatest theatrical event of the entire century. The play was staged for twenty-six consecutive days and attracted more than 37,000 spectators, a figure equivalent to a quarter of the adult population of Madrid. The editorial was added to the success on the tables. To the four editions of 1806 we must add that of 1805, which, apparently, was not the only one of that year.

The unprecedented success of El sí de las niñas meant, paradoxically, the author's abandonment of the scene. The only texts that Moratín would give to the scene would be two adaptations of works by the French Molière: The School of Husbands and The Beaten Doctor. The girls' yes, however, continued to raise hatred and enthusiasm for its message clearly inspired by the Enlightenment and a call for authority to act in accordance with rationalist dictates. In 1815, with the restoration of King Fernando VII, the Spanish Inquisition found sufficient reasons to prohibit this comedy and La mojigata. The prohibition was renewed in 1823, so that for nearly twenty years the Spanish were deprived of seeing Moratín's masterpiece on stage. When the prohibition was lifted and the work could be premiered again, in 1838, it did so even with cuts due to censorship.

Summary

Doña Francisca, a 16-year-old girl when the work began in a convent, is betrothed to Don Diego, 59, at the wish of his mother, Doña Irene. The fiancée is actually in love with the soldier Don Carlos. Rita, Francisca's maid, helps them so that they can be together and Don Carlos annuls the marriage of Francisca and Don Diego, to which the young woman feels obliged to obey her reverend mother. At the end of this great work for the search for true love, everything is resolved.

Features

The main characteristics of this work are the same as those postulated for the theater of the Enlightenment: perfect unity of time, since the time of the action coincides exactly with the time of the representation, and the unrepresented time passes in the intervals. No less important is the unity of place: all the action takes place in the passage room of an inn in Alcalá de Henares.

In The yes of the girls, Moratín definitively leaves the verse. The new comedy crystallizes in a piece that delves into the encounters of the previous one.

The character of the work is didactic as befits the theater of Neoclassicism, it poses a daily problem and gives off a teaching in accordance with the dictates of reason, since its purpose is to criticize the authority exercised by parents over their daughters regarding the marriage, forcing them to take the best financial match for their husband. This work advances the equality of women in society, thus encouraging them to rectify the customs and traditions of her time.

Marriages of convenience between young women and mature men were not to the liking of Enlightenment thinkers (to which Moratín adheres) for two important reasons:

• A moral type, since in them love was lacking as a link that enhances the true cohesion of the couple.

• The other affected population growth, because these marriages used to have little or no offspring because of the husband's age. This is seen in the play when Irene, who married older men, says she had 22 children and only one lived.

It must be borne in mind that Moratín was never a revolutionary, but rather a reformist who thought that an unfair situation should give way to a fair one through measured changes, and never through acts of subversion against authority. For this reason, the two young lovers, Don Carlos and Doña Paquita, are always willing to fulfill the wishes of their elders; Only Don Diego, with his authority, will be the one who applies the most reasonable solution to the conflict raised by rejecting the option of marrying Doña Paquita (because of the great difference in age with the young woman) and accepting in marriage She is with Don Carlos (favoring a marriage for love instead of one for interest). Casalduero says that Don Diego imposes the pattern of reason on life. For H. Higashitani, what Moratín wanted to say with this work is that those who act for right reason, dominating the boiling passion, end up achieving happiness.

Background

André Vézinet found similarities in The Yes of the Girls with Molière's one-act play, L'école des femmes, but José Francisco Gatti discovered its true source in L'école des mères (1732) by Marivaux, a work that Ramón de la Cruz had already recast in his El viejo burlado o Lo que son criados (1770); Moratín knew the original directly, but his work is still entirely original; What's more, he had already written another work on the same theme, The Old Man and the Girl .

Characters

The play has few characters since the action occurs in the same place and in a very short time, these are:

• Don Carlos He's Don Diego's nephew. Contrast his courage in the battle and his shyness to his Uncle Don Diego. He is a passionate and courageous young man who is forced to submit his love to subsidiary duty. Paquita refers to him as Don Félix, as he thus stood before her when they met.
• Paquita or Doña Francisca He is not able to demonstrate feelings for his education and this will lead her to risk the love he feels for Don Carlos.
• Don Diego, 59 years old and Uncle Don Carlos, is the character that triggers the action because he is committed to Doña Paquita, much younger than him. He can be considered the real protagonist of the work and representative of reason.
• Doña IreneDoña Paquita's mother represents a character that reflects the authority of the parents of the time over their children, demanding her daughter to marry the wealthy Don Diego despite not knowing him in person.
• Rita She's the maid of Doña Francisca. It helps to carry out the relationship between don Carlos and Paquita.
• Simon He's Don Diego's servant.
• Calamocha He's Don Carlos's servant. She's pyroposing Rita.

Representations

Premiered on January 24, 1806 at the Teatro de la Cruz in Madrid, with an interpretation by Josefa Virge (Doña Francisca), Andrés Prieto (Don Diego) and Maria Ribera (Dona Irene)

In the XX century, in the professional field, the performance of 1948 directed by Cayetano Luca de Tena and interpreted by Aurora Bautista, Julia Delgado Caro, Pilar Sala, José Rivero and Enrique Guitart; and the one from 1969, directed by Miguel Narros and interpreted by Guillermo Marín, Ana Belén, Luchy Soto and Mari Carmen Prendes. Both were at the Spanish Theater in Madrid

Values

All the characters in the play form an "ensemble" or harmonious whole, in which none of them stands out from the others. The characters in this comedy have a universal dimension. In this sense, Casalduero says that "Moratín's characters are strictly human measures, of a humanity that is not individualized, but generalized." But Mrs. Irene is the one who most visibly embodies the defects that Moratín intends to criticize; She is an ignorant, talkative, exaggerated, selfish woman and this leads her to arrange the marriage of her daughter without ever thinking about her happiness. On the contrary, Don Diego and his niece are governed by kindness and good faith in their actions.