The Bonds of Interest

Jacinto Benavente, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1922, was the leading Spanish dramatist of the early twentieth century, known for witty social comedies that drew on the traditions of the commedia dell'arte. The Bonds of Interest, his most celebrated play, uses masked characters and theatrical artifice to expose the cynical mechanisms of self-interest underlying polite society.

Benavente's work emerged in the aftermath of Spain's traumatic defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898, a national crisis that prompted intense cultural self-examination. His urbane, technically accomplished plays offered Spanish theater a cosmopolitan alternative to the bombastic melodrama that had dominated the nineteenth-century stage.