Taking Centre Stage: Shakespearean Appropriations on Spanish Television in Franco’s Spain

Abstract

[EN] During Franco’s dictatorship in Spain (1939–1975), Shakespeare’s plays were regularly staged to serve the propaganda interests of the regime in order to promote a national theatre. Similarly, the state television appropriated his plays to exalt a national television. “Estudio 1”, the theatre series created in 1965 by Televisión Española (TVE), the state-owned and only television broadcaster during Francoism, was one of the hallmarks of the national television for almost 20 years by featuring filmed theatrical performances by several Spanish and international playwrights. Broadcast weekly in peak-viewing time, it was highly regarded by the spectators and became one of the landmarks of the history of TVE. Right from the start, the series showed its bardolatry by regularly programming TV adaptations of his plays. This work offers a historical tracing of the ideological and socio-political use to which TVE put Shakespeare’s plays and reflects upon the relationship between ethics and politics when dealing with Shakespearean appropriations. By exploring two Spanish TV adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar (1965) and Romeo and Juliet (1972), I argue that the appropriation of Shakespeare’s works by the Francoist regime was harmful in some respects. Shakespeare’s cultural authority was appropriated by TVE as part of the propaganda machine of the regime since they needed to fill the void left by the Spanish left-wing intelligentsia, which has abandoned the country. Consequently, this type of cultural appropriation caused harm to individual members of the Spanish theatrical system, as their works were deprived of their native audience, and to Spanish culture, since Spaniards were deprived of part of their theatrical legacy.