Journal #7: Blood Wedding

In order to break the fourth wall, Lorca includes long sections where the characters sing.  Unless I am mistaken about the Spanish culture during the time period (which I very well might be), I would guess that the singing in the play was not a normal occurrence in the society of that time.  The first instance of this is when the Wife and Mother-in-law of Leonardo are trying to sing the baby asleep.  They alternated back and forth between who was singing, and they sung about unconventional things, such as a thirsty horse and a knife.  These things related to the play, but most likely did not relate to the normal life of the people who would be watching the play.  Their style of singing and the topic of their singing was very complicated and would have had to have been well rehearsed to be sung correctly, even though the singing seemed very spur of the moment, as though they randomly broke out into song.  These actions would be nearly impossible to replicate in a normal house setting of the time period, therefore giving the audience the realization that it is just a play.  The singing is a noticeable break from the regular talking and living that the actors act out, therefore giving the audience the realization that because it is out of the ordinary, it must be important.  In the circumstance I described above, Lorca uses the singing to break the fourth wall in order to draw the audience's attention to key factors in the play, which are expressed in the words of the song.