Numancia and Romanticism: Cervantes and the new art of making theater

Abstract

In contrast to neoclassical authors such as Nasarre, who saw Cervantes as a detractor of the comedia nueva, the German Romanticism presented Cervantes as the pioneer of a new theater, whose fundamental features were contained in the Numancia. The mixture of genres, of the tragic and the comic, the vision of reality as coincidentia oppositorum and the conception of the play as a national tragedy and expression of the Spanish Volksgeist performed by a poetic genius gave this work a privileged place in the romantic canon. Its romantic conception will remain in force until the 70's of the 20^th Century when a new interpretative paradigm appears questioning it.