"The New Play and A Girl's Yes," by Moratin, translated by Robert M. Fedorchek

The New Play and A Girl's Yes, by Moratin, translated by Robert M. Fedorchek. Madrid-born Leandro Fernández de Moratín (1760-1828) wrote five plays: The Old Man and the Girl [El viejo y la niña], The Baron [El barón], The New Play [La comedia nueva], The Female Hypocrite [La mojigata], and A Girl’s Yes [El sí de las niñas]. Two of them would change the theater in Spain. At the close of the eighteenth century, in 1792, Moratín upended the status quo of melodrama with The New Play, a satire that takes aim at hacks cranking out works bereft of literary merit. Using as his vehicle a play within a play, he zeroes in on a pompous pedant, decries the rowdiness of the theater-going public, and ridicules a one-time lottery clerk and page who believes it’s possible to write plays with neither preparation nor learning of any sort. And at the outset of the nineteenth century, in 1806, he censures the abuses of parental authority and absolute control over girls who are subject to a neglectful educ