SOURCE: “Tragedy and Politics in Jueces en la noche,” in Neophilologus, Vol. LXXVII, No. 4, October, 1993, pp. 587–600.

In the following essay, Macklin traces how the private and political intersect to create the tragedy in Buero Vallejo's Jueces en la noche.

Jueces en la noche (1979)¹ may not be one of Buero Vallejo's best plays, but it is the one which most directly engages with the issues of the day, namely, the political dangers besetting the Spanish state in the immediate post-Franco era.² On one level, then, it is an overtly political play, dealing with the transition from the old to the new order and with the difficult accommodations which established politicians have to make in order to survive. This fundamental theme is set in the context of the rise of the Left, the continued power of the Right and, above all, the threat of terrorist violence to the stability of...