Prosper Merimee: Plays on Hispanic Themes Carvajal’s Family, The Gilded Coach, The Opportunity, Ines Mendo

On a remote, fortified homestead in the Andes, a ferocious overlord attempts to rape his daughter and subsequently murders her. In a convent school in Havana, two adolescent girls fall in love with their priest, with fatal consequences. In Spain, a nobleman marries a village girl and an ideal of social equality collides with life’s brutal realities. And in Lima, a beautiful and clever actress bamboozles her lover, the governor of Peru. Prosper Merimee, best remembered for his creation of Carmen, wrote these plays - three of them powerfully tragic and the other a delicious comedy - in his late twenties, at the height of his creative powers. They are brought together in this volume in superbly stageworthy translations, preceded by a thorough introduction to Merimee’s unjustly neglected body of dramatic works.