In the following essay, Zimbardo analyzes the symbolic imagery and its relationship to the characters.

Lorca's Blood Wedding enjoys a curiously paradoxical fame. Critics are unanimous in praising it, both as an expression of Lorca's best mode, his "Andalusian vision" and as one of the finest products of that twentieth century movement in drama which tries to find new roots in the elemental soil. Yet the praise itself is damning, for we have been led to think of Lorca's plays as "peasant drama," so Spanish in their symbolism as to be incomprehensible beyond the locale which inspired them. For example, in the judgment of Angel del Rio, Blood Wedding "may very well miss becoming a world classic because of its local color and the fact that its action seems limited and appears to lack real spiritual content... a great deal of its atmosphere can be communicated only...