The Relationship between Setting and Theme in Blood Wedding Timothy Sexton College

Many modern playwrights seek to connect contemporary issues with ancient themes by updating the stories of mythic stories into a completely modern milieu. With Blood Wedding, Federico Garcia Lorca seeks to explore this idea of connectivity through an alternative avenue in which the lush Andalusian wine country he knew so well is engineered into a starker landscape more suitable for symbolic interpretation of mythic themes exhibited through the incorporation of stylized dramatic devices that includes singing and chanting, poetry recitation and non-realistic set design. Blood Wedding makes manifest the definition of setting as more than just geographical location and a finite time by revealing it to be a more expansive term in which political and sociological and economic dimension are also at play. Andalusia thus becomes a setting in Blood Wedding invested with the literal reality of physical and emotional isolation of its women within the historical context of contemporary 1930s life while at the same situating setting as a conceptual idea in which symbols become essential to understanding the most important themes contributing to the play’s mythic sense of timeless tragedy.

Setting can be a symbolic encapsulation of social...