| Abstrakt: |
The town of Madrid was first chosen as the permanent seat of the Court in 1561; for a few years, from 1601 to 1606, Valladolid challenged Madrid's supremacy, but in that year Madrid was confirmed as the capital of Spain. The years from 1561 saw, as a result, a rapid growth in Madrid, an explosion of population and of size which was not to have its counterpart again until the 1870s and, more recently, the 1950s and 1960s. Inevitably, the growth of Madrid sucked into the town a great number of peasants and, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, a significant part of the population must have consisted of first- and second-generation town-dwellers, imbued, to judge from the evidence of the plays performed in the commercial theatres, with a nostalgia for the country-side, a nostalgia which was reinforced by and expressed in terms of the old literary topos of the dispraise of life in the city (or at Court) and the praise of country life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
