The Jew, by Bernardo Santareno and The Sleep of Reason, by Antonio Buero Vallejo: two different creative strategies for censorship

It is plausible that the Portuguese playwright Bernardo Santareno and his Spanish counterpart Antonio Buero Vallejo represent two different - or even opposite - attitudes regarding the censorship of the Portuguese and Spanish regimes in the 1960s. Two texts are analyzed in this article: Santareno’s O Judeu and Buero Vallejo‘s El sueño de la razón, which have been chosen because of the contrast between analogies and divergences that arise when evaluating the historical period represented in the two dramas.

From the methodological point of view, I will approach the textual aspect of the two dramas in order to highlight the analogies and, above all, the semantic-syntactic differences between them, later I will try to highlight the cultural political context that might have conditioned the different aesthetic options of the two writers.