The beginning of the Civil War in Catalonia cannot be understood without Shakespeare. The British man had been there for a long time. In the 19th century, the way to make him superpop, mainstream, cool was to transform his works into lobotomized parodies, adaptations with "costellada" Catalan, cuttings from the original tree, or textual grafts from lysergic minds. This way, a very wide audience got it in a fun way (calm down, Christopher Nolan's friends-enemies, the Odyssey, everything is done, you know). But comedy is tragedy plus time. And the shadow of Shakespeare-Hamlet turned Catalonia into a stage with a full program of calamitous doubts in 1936-1939.
On July 19, the uprising in Barcelona, there are a thousand moments of hesitation. In the nuclear expansion zone of Plaça Universitat, shrapnel of question marks sprouts. The young journalist Manuel Cruells was there. We see: “En Dencàs was arguing with a Civil Guard officer. We approached him. Dencàs wanted to grab a machine gun, the officer was giving him a rifle. Dencàs showed him his Catalan Parliament deputy's ID, the officer with all correctness and sympathy, stood his ground and denied him the machine gun. Dencàs resigned himself, took the rifle and, like the others, began to shoot, taking cover, against the Hotel Colón”. There is the doubt between a machine gun and a rifle. Between the ideology of Dencàs and the Civil Guard, but not the doubt about what to do and against whom to shoot. Bang-bang.
Josep Dencàs, former Minister of Health, of Governance, deputy, promoter of the detachments of the Youth of Republican Left-Catalan State. Man of the Events of October 1934. Exiled, arrested, imprisoned. And, above all, post-labeled as a fascist… Catalan. So, what was a supposed fascist doing fighting from the first second against the real fascist uprising? What was he doing next to a Spanish Civil Guard officer hesitating only about the weapon, not about the enemy? What was Dencàs doing with dozens of young people from Estat Català (the party he led), shooting against fascism? What were all those independentists, Civil Guards, Assault Guards, Mossos… doing there? Without them, the revolt in Barcelona would not have been stopped. Anarchist mythology is one thing, reality is another. That is why, in those days, 43 independentists from Estat Català died fighting against fascism. Everyone saw it. And as the young writer Joan Sales said in 1936: “What do we gain from having defeated the barbarians if we let ourselves be defeated by barbarism?” And so it was. And so it continues.
Josep Maria Murià Rouret, born in exile, and son of Josep Maria Murià Romaní (militant of Estat Català, soldier at the Ebre and died in Mexican exile), writes in the prologue of the Diccionari biogràfic d’Estat Català: “We must remember that the militants of Estat Català enjoyed the privilege of being the most hated and persecuted not only by Francoism, but even by Spanish Republican and "progressive" "democrats", such as those with whom the Catalans shared Mexican exile and, I suppose, also that of other places. This shows that anti-Catalanism is not exclusive to the Spanish right: so argued Joan Fuster when he insisted that Spanish nationalism is not a right-wing construction, but "a Spanish construction”. Comedy is tragedy plus time. Tragedy is comedy plus time. In these round works we are trapped. The real actors trapped in the eternal 1936-1939. And Shakespeare does not know whether to laugh or cry.
