Jacinto Benavente

He took the Spanish stage off its stilts and made it talk. Madrid, a doctor’s son, law abandoned, Europe wandered. Then a hundred and seventy plays: drawing-room knives, an invented provincial town he could skin at will, rural houses that will not stay quiet, a theatre for children, letters in women’s voices that first made him a stylist. He killed the old verse tragedy with conversation. The Nobel found him on tour in Argentina, too busy for Stockholm. The mask comedy is the one that travelled. He had already filled the house without it.