Spain's most celebrated dramatist Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) was murdered by Nationalist sympathizers shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This volume of translations by Gwynne Edwards contains five plays, four of which—The Shoemaker's Wonderful Wife, The Love of Don Perlimplín, The Puppet Play of Don Cristóbal, and The Butterfly's Evil Spell—represent the attractive comic strand in Lorca's work and his use of the traditions of farce and puppet play; the fifth, When Five Years Pass, belongs to Lorca's surrealist phase and is one of his most striking and original contributions to the theatre.
