José Echegaray’s Play With Everybody in the Cast

Part of: The Deep Reader

In The Great Galeoto, a writer says his leading character is everybody. The dilemma of getting everybody onstage becomes the drama he is trying to write.

Ernesto has started a play he cannot cast. Its leading character, he explains to his benefactor Julián, is “todo el mundo,” everybody. Julián suggests an ordinary dramatic solution. Let a few representative characters stand for the crowd, as the masters of the theater have done. Ernesto objects because the crowd’s power depends on its members doing so little. One person makes a remark and goes home. Someone else smiles. A third contributes a look. Give one of them all three actions and the audience will have a villain, ready to assume responsibility for a wrong that in Ernesto’s account has hundreds of makers.

This exchange opens José Echegaray’s The Great Galeoto, a play about a married woman, the young man her husband has taken into the household, and the people who decide what that arrangement secretly means. Teodora enters and tells Ernesto that her friends were asking after him. When she mentions Pepito talking about everybody, Julián jokes that he belongs in the play. The audience has just been told to watch for words spoken in passing. The people onstage can still afford to find them funny.

The household collects witnesses

The play lets the accusation come together from observations that could all be true. Ernesto has walked with Teodora. He has attended the theater with her. A young man with literary ambitions has time for company in a way that a businessman often does not. When Mercedes repeats what people have inferred from these habits in Act I, she even says she had scarcely believed the talk. It would be wrong of people to leap to the worst, she allows. The trouble, as she tells Teodora, is that the couple gave them the occasion.

The qualification is a cheap form of insurance. If the accusation turns out to be false, Mercedes has said it was rash. If it gains ground, she anticipated it. In either event Teodora has to hear a walk or a seat at the theater redescribed as evidence about her marriage. In an aside, she says she is already being made to act a part. Mercedes claims the permission of intimacy, and that brief turn away from her allows the audience to hear what Teodora has just learned about the terms on which she can speak among her friends.

Julián seems to have a better answer. He was happy to treat Ernesto as a son and to have Teodora treat him as a brother. Taking him into the family fulfilled an obligation, and the public has no standing to redraft it. Then Echegaray puts Julián alone with his brother Severo. In Hannah Lynch’s English prose translation, Severo admits he gave voice to the insinuations. Julián confesses that he has already asked himself whether the story could be true. The scene turns on the distance between the arguments he uses to defend his family and the questions he goes on asking in private. He can stop an accusation at the door. By the time he tries, it has found a speaker in him as well.

This is how the play gives the crowd parts without filling the stage with extras. It gets a new part in each conversation. The person warning Teodora, the relation urging Julián to take offense, and the husband trying to reason through his jealousy have substantial roles as themselves. For as long as each of them carries a piece of the rumor, they also give it a body. An actor can play the fear or affection of the individual in front of us while the same speech does the work of the absent multitude. A drama with one expert manipulator at the center would lose this double duty.

The book on the desk

Before the prologue ends, Ernesto comes to the title through the story of Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno, Canto V. The lovers read a romance in which a kiss brings Lancelot and Guinevere together. When the scene prompts them to kiss, Francesca credits the book and its author as the go-betweens. Her word for the intermediary, Galeotto, gives Echegaray his title. A reader may wonder why a play so preoccupied with the reputation of an innocent friendship should borrow its name from a scene about a real adulterous kiss.

Spoilers for the final scene of The Great Galeoto follow.

The distance between the situations is productive. Francesca can point to the page at which the reading acquired a consequence.

In Echegaray nobody can point to the single sentence that performed the same office. The public begins by reporting a romance it believes to be present. By the closing scene, Ernesto can tell those who drive Teodora out that they have sent her into his arms. The reported story has acquired a visible counterpart, although the route from the rumor to what the watchers can now see passes through their conduct toward the pair.

Ernesto calls Teodora innocent, then claims her as his. She is silent as he raises and supports her. Echegaray gives him finely differentiated kinds of speech within one confrontation. He can demand that the people who suspect her recognize her innocence, then face them down as the man who will take her away. The first claim is open to an independent woman who once went to the theater with a friend. The ending visibly supplies support of a different kind. An audience eager to see the household defied may spend less time with Teodora’s silence than with the declaration that makes it possible for the pair to leave.

The 1904 Nobel citation praised Echegaray for renewing the traditions of Spanish drama. He shared the prize with Frédéric Mistral, whose citation identified a different achievement. In this play the inherited materials include a household whose honor can be discussed by strangers, a husband who has to consider how a gentleman behaves under public scrutiny, and a final confrontation that turns doubts into gestures. Echegaray gives those materials new work by making the idea of honor operate from voice to voice. The spectators can watch each transmission take place and hear how little malice any one speech requires.

There is a moment at the theater when an acquaintance may mention a walk, a seat, or a handsome younger man and feel no more responsible for the evening than any other ticket holder. Echegaray gives that person a share of the stage.

Sources and further reading

José Echegaray, El gran galeoto, Prologue and Acts I–III, Spanish verse text, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.

José Echegaray, The Great Galeoto and Folly or Saintliness, trans. Hannah Lynch, 1895 English prose edition. Read the Prologue through Mercedes’s warning in Act I to hear how the various parts of the crowd acquire voices. The Spanish original lets you hear the same conduct under the constraints of rhyme and meter.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Canto V.

Nobel Prize, the Literature awards and citations, 1904 entry.