Executed Granadine Heroine
GARCÍA LORCA, Federico.
Mariana Pineda. Romance popular en tres estampas. Madrid, La Farsa, 1928.
8vo, pp. 70, with illustrated half-title and illustrations in the text by Lorca, advertisement leaf at end; a very good, clean copy, in the original illustrated wrappers by Roberto, small repair to spine; in a folding cloth box.
First edition of Lorca’s first published play, Mariana Pineda, ‘about the Granadine heroine Mariana Pineda, who had been executed in 1831 at the age of twenty-seven by the repressive regime of Ferdinand VII, on the charge of having embroidered a flag for the town’s liberal conspirators.
‘Lorca had become acquainted as a child in Fuente Vaqueros with the story of Mariana Pineda, about whom ballads still circulated and whose sad end was recalled by old people in the village. Gradually Mariana had become an obsession with him, and when, in 1909, the family moved to Granada, the heroine’s nearby statue, in the square that bears her name, had further stimulated the boy’s interest in the reputedly beautiful victim of that tyrannical king’ (Gibson, Federico García Lorca (1989), p. 130).
The play was first performed in Barcelona in 1927 with sets designed by Dalí. An edition published that year in Santiago, Chile is cited by the bibliographers (Laurenti & Siracusa 265), but we have been unable to locate any copies of this.