SOURCE: Shaw, D. L. “Three Plays of Unamuno: A Survey of His Dramatic Technique.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 13, no. 2 (April 1977): 253-64.

In the following essay, Shaw uses three plays by Unamuno—La esfinge, Fedra, and El otro—to trace the development of Unamuno's “narrative concept of drama,” noting that while Unamuno's early work was influenced by Ibsen, his later plays imitated Pirandello; the author concludes that the very qualities that made Unamuno a “distinguished innovator” in fiction undermine his success as a playwright.

A prominent feature of critical reaction to Unamuno's theatre is the lack of interest which has been shown in his dramatic technique. It is characteristic, for example, that in one of the latest studies on the subject¹ the author devotes only nine pages out of more than three hundred to this aspect, and these consist chiefly of generalizations suggested by the almost twenty-year-old article...