Five Plays: Comedies And Tragicomedies: The Billy-Club Puppets; the Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife;the Love of Don Perlimplin And Belisa in the Garden; ... the Spinster; the Butterfly's Evil Spel

Two additional comedies, published here in book form in English for the first time, are The Billy-Club Puppets _ a guignol-type farce with delicate wit; and The ButterflyÕs Evil Spell , an "insect comedy" about a beetle-poet who aspires to be a butterfly. Federico Garc’a LorcaÕs position as one of the few geniuses of the modern theatre was firmly established in the English-speaking world with his Three Tragedies . Here, with an introduction by the dramatistÕs brother, Francisco Garc’a Lorca, are five of his Òcomedies,Ó in the authorized translations, extensively revised to reflect recent Lorca scholarship and to convey the sparkle, freshness, and magic of the original Spanish. The ShoemakerÕs Prodigious Wife tells of a young beauty married to an old man, a theme that often concerned Lorca. The resolution for the earnest shoemaker, who leaves home and comes back disguised as a puppeteer, is lighthearted, but there is underlying pathos. The Love of Don Perlimplin is again about a girl who weds someone much older, this time a bookish, 18th-century gentleman, who seeks an original but sardonic way out of the situation. According to Lorca himself, ÒDona Rosita is the outer gentleness and inner scorching of a girl in Granada who, little by little, turns into that grotesque and moving thing _ an old maid in Spain.Ó