Quevedo or Love and Ashes

"Quevedo" is the only play not staged by the writer and the literary scientist, academician Jaan Undusk, the text that shared the 1st place in the 2003 play writing contest. Undusk is great in "growing some flesh on the bones" of historic figures and to shape them into characters with a deep inner being and complex psychology towards who we feel passionate love as well as detest and hatred, cutting irony as well as playful, poetic art of work.

Presented with one interval.
Running Time:

2:55

Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas is a great Spanish poet who was born to a Castile nobility family in 1580. He was six years old when he lost his father and eight when Spain, the past most powerful world country, lost its entire fleet – "The Spanish Armada" – in the sea battle with the English. This marked the decline of Spain that no king or government was able to restrain. Quevedo who stayed in court and in exile in turns, wrote satirical poets on the Spanish decline reasons tirelessly, a great part of which never got permission to publish and circulated in manuscript.

In 1639 Quevedo is captured as "enemy of the government" by secret order from the Count-Duke Olivares, the Prime Minister of the Spanish Kingdom. Four years later Olivares is removed from office and Quevedo is released but the damp prison cellar has devastated the poet's health. When there is insolvable opposition between two clever an powerful men – despite the recognition that they can reach their common goal only in cooperation – then somewhere – too close – there is a woman...