THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA—THE FIRST BEGINNINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS—THE STARTING-POINT OF THE SECULAR PLAY—BARTOLOMé DE TORRES NAHARRO—LOPE DE RUEDA—LOPE DE VEGA’S LIFE—HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA—THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORK—CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE—CALDERON—CALDERON’S SCHOOL.
The national character of the Spanish drama.

The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own, purely national. The classic stage had no influence on it whatever; the contemporary theatre of Italy very little, and only for a brief period in the earlier years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous rules of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor the lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle—though it was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere—had[61] any effect. It would be too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them with profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of Don Quixote, reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three unities; and Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to fix the Spanish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and tragic should never be mingled in one piece, or that great personages should never be brought on except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence. He even boasted that he had written no less than six orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote for the stage, never made his practice even approach his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of which of his plays Lope was speaking when he said that he had observed the unities. It has even been supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good sense of Don Marcelino Menendez[26] has found by far the most acceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,—that Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a quite sincere theoretical admiration for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the commentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own[62] impulses, and the popular will, though not without a certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated the orthodox literary doctrine very much as the ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the unconstitutional orders of kings,—they voted that these injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed—“obedicidas y no cumplidas,” thereby reconciling independence with a respectful attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to say from the first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as fully established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.
The first beginnings of the religious plays.

There was little in the medi?val literature of Spain to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards had mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the Church as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of their neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier years of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French influence at work in Spain.[27] The San Martinho of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who wrote[63] both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral play like many in medi?val French literature. It is on the well-known story of Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks off abruptly with a note that the performers must end with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late, and had no time to finish. The Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja, which, from a reference to the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years about 1520, betrays a French model by its very title. Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The personages are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja’s sweetheart, the Church, and Holy Writ. The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme with French writers of farses and moralities), the sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is nothing here particularly Spanish—nothing which might not be direct translation from the French. The religious play was destined to have a history of its own in Spain; but its earlier stage is marked by little national character. Even the Oveja Perdida (the Lost Sheep), written, or at least revised and recast, by Juan de Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock piece with the strolling players, is a morality on the universal medi?val model. The Lost Sheep is of course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite, and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint Peter, the Archangel Michael, and[64] the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an elaborate introduction, divided between an Introit to Ribera, the Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was played, and an Introit to the people, it does not differ from the San Martinho or the Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja.
The starting-point of the secular play.

It has been customary to treat the Celestina as the foundation, or at least an important part of the foundations, of the Spanish secular drama. This curious story in dialogue is indeed called a “tragi-comedy,” and it most unquestionably proves that its author, or authors, possessed the command of a prose style admirably adapted for the purposes of comedy. But the Spanish is a poetic, not a prose drama. The qualities which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story of Calisto and Melib?a, and the tiresome pedantry of much of the Celestina, its realism, and its vivacious representation of low life and character, are seldom found on the Spanish stage. We shall do better to look for the starting-point of the comedy of Lope de Vega in the Eclogas of Juan del Encina, who has been already mentioned as one of the last lights of the troubadour school.[28] The model here is obviously the little religious play of the stamp of Vicente’s San Martinho, modified by imitation[65] of the classic Eclogue. The personages, generally shepherds, are few, the action of the simplest, and the verse somewhat infantile, though not without charm. Yet the mere fact that we have in them examples of an attempt to make characters and subjects, other than religious, matter of dramatic representation, shows that they were an innovation and a beginning. Juan del Encina, who was attached in some capacity to the Duke of Alva of his time, wrote these Eclogues to be repeated for the amusement of his patrons by their servants. It does not appear that they were played in the market-place, or were very popular. During the first half of the sixteenth century the Church endeavoured to repress the secular play. The struggle was useless, for the bent of the nation was too strong to be resisted. It conquered the Church, which, before the end of the century, found itself unable to prevent the performance of very mundane dramas within the walls of religious houses. Yet for a time the Inquisition was able to repress the growth of a non-religious drama at home. The working of the national passion for the stage, and for something other than pious farsas, is shown in the Josefina[29] of Micael de Carvajal. This long-forgotten work, by an author of whom nearly nothing is really known, was performed apparently for, and by, ecclesiastics at Valencia about 1520. It is on the subject of Joseph and his Brethren, is a religious play, but has divisions, and a machinery obviously adapted from the[66] Latin, if not the Greek model. There are four acts, a herald who delivers a prologue to the first, second, and third, a chorus of maidens at the end of each. The dialogue has life, and there is a not unsuccessful attempt at characterisation in the parts of the brothers and of Potiphar’s wife. At the close comes the villancico, a simple form of song hovering towards being a hymn, which was obligatory at the close of the religious play. The Josefina had no progeny, and is to-day mainly interesting as an indication of the struggle of the national genius to find its true path. We cannot say even that of the few direct imitations of the classic form produced by the Spaniards. Such works as the Nise Lastimosa—the Pitiable Agnes—a strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro, first written in Portuguese by Ferreira, and then adapted into Castilian by Gerónimo Bermudez, a learned churchman, and printed in 1577, are simply literary exercises. They show that the influences which inspired Jodelle, and Garnier in France, were not unfelt in Spain; but there, as in England, the national genius would have none of them. In Bermudez himself the imitation of Seneca was forced. The Nise Lastimosa has a continuation called the Nise Laureada. The first, which ends with the murder of Agnes, is correct; but in the second, which has for subject the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the uncongenial apparatus of messenger and chorus, and plunges into horrors, to which the story certainly lent itself, with the zest of his contemporary Cristobal de Virues, or our own Kyd.

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Bartolomé de Torres Naharro.

The true successors of Juan del Encina were to be found during the reign of Charles V. in the Spanish colony at Rome. The Spanish proverb has it that the Devil stands behind the cross—“tras la cruz está el diablo”—and the Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal Court enjoyed a licence which they would have missed under the eye of the Inquisition. One of them, Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, who lived and wrote in the early years of the century, is sometimes counted the father of the Spanish stage. He was the author of a number of comedies, published in Seville in 1520 under the title of Propaladia, which deal with the favourite subjects of comedy, love intrigues, and the tricks of lovers, rufianes—i.e., bullies—soldiers in and out of service, and so forth, types which he had many chances of observing at Rome when all Italy was swarming with Spanish biso?os, the wandering fighting men who were mercenaries when any prince would employ them, and vagabonds at other times. Naharro had considerable vis comica, and a command of telling fluent verse. His personages have life, and if his plays have touches of obscenity, which is not common in Spain, and brutality, which is less rare, his time must be taken into account. But Naharro, though a genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to be influenced by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays mark only a short step forward to the fully developed comedy of Lope. The Propaladia was soon suppressed by the Inquisition, not because it contained heresy, but for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesiastical[68] vices which would have passed unrebuked in the previous century, but had become of very bad example after the Reformation had developed into a formidable attack on the Church. The form of his comedy was not that finally adopted by the Spaniards. It was in five acts, with the introito or prologue.
Lope de Rueda.

A truly popular national drama was hardly likely to arise among courtiers and churchmen. It needed a chief who looked to the common audience as his patron, and who also had it in him to begin the work on lines which literature could afterwards develop, Spain found such a leader in Lope de Rueda (floruit 1544?-1567?). Little is known of his life, but that little is more than is known with certainty of some contemporary men of letters. He was a native of Seville, and originally a goldbeater by trade. It may be that he acquired his taste for the stage by taking part in the performance of religious plays, which were always acted by townsmen or churchmen. The separation of the actor from the amateur, if that is the right word to apply to the burghers and peasants of the Middle Ages who appeared on the stage partly for amusement and partly from piety, on the one hand, and from the mere juggler, minstrel, or acrobat on the other, was going on in France and England. The same process was at work in Spain. By steps of which we can now learn nothing, Lope de Rueda became in the fullest sense a playwright and actor-manager. He strolled all over Spain. Cervantes, who had seen him, has immortalised his simple theatre—the few boards which formed[69] the stage, the blanket which did duty as scenery, and behind which sat the guitar-player who represented the orchestra, the bags containing the sheepskin jackets and false beards forming the wardrobe of the company. The purely literary importance of Lope de Rueda’s work is not great. That part of it which survived is inconsiderable in bulk, and shows no advance on Naharro. He was not an ignorant man. The Italian plays were certainly known to him, and he wrote pure Castilian. But his chief contribution to the form of Spanish dramatic literature was the paso or passage, a brief interlude, generally between “fools” or “clowns” in the Shakespearian sense, frequently introduced between the acts of a regular comedy. The monologue of Lance over his dog, or the scene between Speed and Lance with the love-letter, in the third act of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, would serve as pasos. But Lope de Rueda’s chief claim to honour is that he fairly conquered for the Spanish stage its place in the sun. He hung on no patron, but set his boards up in the market-place, looking to his audience for his reward. When he died, in or about 1567, the theatre was a recognised part of Spanish life. If he had not much enriched dramatic literature, he had provided those who could with a place in which they were free to grow to the extent of their intrinsic power. It is pleasant to know that he had his reward. He seems to have been a prosperous man, and Cervantes speaks with respect of his character. The fact that he was buried in the Cathedral of Córdova is a proof that he was not[70] considered a mere “rogue and vagabond,” but had at least as good a position as an English actor who was the queen’s or the admiral’s “servant.” As Lope de Rueda was nobody’s servant, we may fairly draw the deduction that the Spanish stage had a more independent position than our own.
The followers of Lope de Rueda.

The school of Lope de Rueda, as they may be called with some exaggeration, must be allowed to pass under his name. The most memorable of them was Juan de Timoneda, already named as the author, or adapter, of the Oveja Perdida. He was a bookseller of Valencia, who died at a great age, but at some uncertain date, in the reign of Philip II. Juan de Timoneda published all that were published of the plays of Lope de Rueda, and in his capacity of bookseller-publisher was no doubt helpful to literature. But as a man of letters he was mainly an adapter, and his plays are echoes of Naharro and Rueda, or were conveyed from Ariosto. The sap was now rising, and the tree began to bear fruit in more than one branch. Spain as it then was, and as it long remained, was rather a confederation of states than a state. There was no capital in the proper sense of the word. Charles V. had never rested, and had spent much of his life out of Spain. Philip II. did indeed fix his Court at Madrid, or in the neighbourhood, but it was not until the close of his life that the society of a capital began to form about him. In the earlier years of his reign the capitals of the ancient kingdoms were still centres of social, intellectual, and artistic activity, nor did they fall wholly to the level of provincial[71] towns while any energy remained in Spain. Thus as the taste for the stage and for dramatic literature grew, it was to be expected that its effects would be seen in independent production in different parts of the Peninsula. The dramatists of Seville and Valencia. The writers who carried on the work of Lope de Rueda, and who prepared the way for Lope de Vega, were not “wits of the Court,” or about the Court. They were to be found at Seville and Valencia. Juan de la Cueva, the author of the Egemplar Poético, was a native of the capital of Andalusia. To him belongs the honour of first drawing on the native romances for subjects, as in his Cerco de Zamora—‘Siege of Zamora’—a passage of the Cid legend, and of first indicating, if not exactly outlining, the genuine Comedia de Capa y Espada in El Infamador—‘The Calumniator.’ In Valencia Cristobal de Virues (1550- ——?) wrote plays less national in subject but more in manner. He did once join the well-meaning but mistaken band which was endeavouring to bind the Spanish stage in the chains of the Senecan tragedy; but, as a rule, he wrote wild romantic plays, abounding in slaughter, under classic names. This was an effort which could not well lead anywhere to good, but at least it testifies to the vitality of the interest felt in the stage; and Valencia has this claim to a share in the development of the Spanish drama, that for a short time it sheltered, encouraged, and may have helped to determine, the course of the Ph?nix of wits, the Wonder of Nature, the fertile among all the most fertile, the once renowned, the then unjustly[72] depreciated, but the ever-memorable Lope de Vega.

If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his originality, the abundance of his work, the effect he produced on the literature of his country, and his fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the name by which he was and is best known to his countrymen, must stand at the head of all Spain’s men of letters.[30]

If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the critic or historian of literature should have read all his author, then I at least must confess my incapacity to speak of this famous writer. Yet, encouraged by a firm conviction that there never lived nor does live, or at any future period will live, anybody who has achieved or will achieve this feat, being, moreover, persuaded, for reasons to be given, that it is not necessary to be achieved, I venture to go on.
Lope de Vega’s life.

Lope Felix de Vega Carpio came of a family which originally belonged to the “mountain,” the hill country of northern and north-western Spain, which never submitted to the Moor. His father was “hidalgo de ejucatoria,”—that is, noble by creation,—but his mother was of an old family, and both came from the valley of Carriedo in Asturias. He was[73] born at Madrid on 25th November 1562. His life is known with exceptional fulness, partly because many passages of his works are avowedly biographical, partly because a number of his letters, addressed to his patron in later years, the Duke of Sessa, have been preserved. It would be better for Lope’s reputation if he had been more reticent, or his patron more careless. As it is, we know not only that he passed a stormy youth, but that in his later years he was an unchaste priest. His father died when he was very young, and he was left to the care of an uncle, the Inquisitor Don Miguel de Carpio. The Jesuits had the honour of educating him, among the many famous men trained in their schools. It is recorded by his biographers, and we can believe it, that he was very precocious. At five he could read Latin, and had already begun to write verses. After running away in a boyish escapade, he was attached as page to Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of ávila, who sent him to the University of Alcalá de Henares, the native town of Cervantes. From the account given of his youth in the excellently written dialogue story Dorotea, he appears to have been a mercenary lover, even according to the not very delicate standard of his time. His adventures were unsavoury, and not worth repeating. It is enough that, both before he took orders and in later life when he was tonsured and had taken the full vows, he presented a combination, not unknown at any time or in any race, but especially common on both sides in the seventeenth century, of intensity of faith with the most complete moral laxity.[74] He alternated between penance and relapses. After leaving Alcalá he was for a time attached to the Duke of Alva, the grandson of the renowned governor of the Low Countries. For him he wrote the pastoral Arcadia, which deals with the duke’s amours. He married, but marriage produced no effect on his habits. He was exiled to Valencia for two years, in consequence of obscure troubles arising, he says, from “jealousy.” Shortly after his return to Madrid his wife died, but he continued to give cause for “jealousy,” and other troubles sent him off to join the Armada. From that campaign of failure and suffering he had the good fortune to return in safety, and he bore it so well that he wrote at least a great part of a long continuation of Ariosto, called The Beauty of Angelica, during the voyage. After his return to Madrid in 1590 he was again married, and again marriage made little difference. In 1609 he became a priest. During his later years he was attached, not apparently as a servant but as a patronised friend, to Don Pedro Fernandez de Córdova, first Marquess Priego, and then Duke of Sessa,—a very dissolute gentleman of literary tastes, belonging to the famous house which had produced the Great Captain, Gonsalvo de Córdova. He died at the age of seventy-three in 1635.
His influence on the drama.

A poet who could venture on so great an enterprise as a continuation of Ariosto amid all the distractions of the Armada cannot have wanted for confidence in himself, nor was he likely to have an idle pen. The productiveness of Lope was[75] indeed enormous. He may be said to have tried every literary form of his time, from the epic on the Italian model down to the romance. In bulk, the life-work of an industrious journalist might be about equal to his surviving writings. And Lope was no mere journalist. His execution of everything he touched has a certain interest. If space allowed, there would be something to say of his religious poem on San Isidro and his sonnets, serious and burlesque. But space does not allow, and we must consider him here chiefly in his great and dominant character of dramatist, remembering always that he was a man of many-sided ability, and that the average cleverness of his non-dramatic work goes far to justify the admiration of his countrymen in his time, and the place they have never ceased to give him as, with the one exception of Cervantes, the chief of their literature. The number of his plays has remained a wonder and a legend. Eighteen hundred comedias and four hundred autos sacramentales is the figure given on fair authority as his total life-work for the stage. He himself confesses to two hundred and nineteen pieces as early as 1603, and in 1624 to one thousand and seventy. An eyewitness has recorded that he once wrote five plays in fifteen days; and that on another occasion, having undertaken to collaborate with two friends in a comedy, he finished his share of the work before breakfast, though it was one act out of three, and wrote some other verse into the bargain. Nor are these stories, incredible as they sound, altogether beyond belief.

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They could be accepted without hesitation if the writing of Lope de Vega were all imitative and bad. But that is far from being the case. Over and above the fact that he sometimes—as in the Dorotea, for example—wrote an admirable style, he was the creator of a literary form. Lope de Vega was the real creator of the Spanish comedia, a word which must not be understood to mean only comedy, but stage-play of every kind. Others prepared the way, and some collaborated in the ending of the work, but the merit is none the less his. Without Lope there could have been no Calderon, who found the form ready made to his hands. That a writer of so much productiveness, and so little concentration, would have many faults will be easily understood. Finish was not to be expected from him, nor profundity. There would inevitably be much that was hasty and careless, much repetition, much taking of familiar situations, much use of stock characters, and a great deal of what the French call the à peu pris—the “that is good enough”—instead of the absolutely best, which is not to be attained except by thought and the labour of the file. He must have been prepared to do whatever would please an uncritical audience, as indeed Lope candidly avowed that he was. In short, he might be expected to have all the weaknesses of the class which Carlyle defined as “the shallow vehement,” and they would be the more conspicuous because he lived in a time of learning, but of no great criticism, because he was a beginner, and not least because he belonged to a people who have always been indifferent[77] to finish of workmanship. But with all this, for which a narrow criticism of the stamp of Boileau’s would have condemned him utterly, Lope had the one thing necessary, which is creative faculty. The quality of his plays will be best shown later on, when we treat of the Spanish stage as a whole. For the present it is enough to deal with the more mechanical side of his workmanship. Before his time Spanish play-writers had hesitated between the classic division into five acts and a tentative division into four. One early and forgotten writer, Avenda?o, took three. Lope, not without the co-operation of others, but mainly by his example, established this last as the recognised number of jornadas—acts—for a Spanish play. The choice was made for a definite reason. In the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias—a verse epistle written to a friend who had asked him to justify his works before the critics who held by the classic rules—Lope laid it down that the first act should introduce the characters and knit the intrigue; the second lead to the crisis, the scène à faire of French dramatic critics; and the third wind all up. He formulated the great secret of the playwright’s craft, which is that the audience must always know what is going to happen, but never exactly how it is going to be brought about. They must never be left in a puzzling doubt as to the meaning of what is going on, and yet must always be kept in a pleasing uncertainty as to what is about to happen next. This supposed a very real unity of action, compatible with plot and underplot, but not with two independent plots. For the unities[78] of time and place he cared as much, and as little, as our own Elizabethans.
The conditions of the work.

Not even Lope’s fertility and activity could have been equal to the production of two thousand two hundred plays, of which all, or even a majority, were executed in conformity with his own standard. Such a piece of construction as the Dama Melindrosa cannot have been one of the five plays written in fifteen days. There is a great deal in Lope’s literary baggage which is mere scribbling, meant to please an audience for an afternoon. Though the Spaniards loved the theatre much, they were not numerous enough in the towns to supply many audiences, and they clamoured for new things. To meet this demand, every Spanish dramatist who wished to stand well with the managers was compelled to produce a great deal of what may be called journalism for the theatre, the mere rapid throwing together of acceptable matter, which might be love-adventures or the news of the day, historical stories or religious legend, in stock forms. The stage was not only all the literature of the mass of the people, but all the newspapers, and all the “music-hall” side of their amusements too. In all cases the comedy was accompanied by interludes of the nature of music-hall “turns,” loas, pasos, or entremeses—brief scenes of a comic kind, songs, and, above all, dances. The patio or court—that is, the pit—filled by the poorest, most numerous, and most formidable part of the audience, who stood, and who were addressed in compliment as the Senate or the musketeers, and were known in actors’ slang as the[79] chusma—i.e., the galley-slaves—would not endure to be deprived of their dances. So the most truly famous comedy would hardly have escaped the cucumbers with which the “grave Senate” expressed its disapproval, if it had been presented without “crutches” in the form of the dance, the song, or the farcical interlude. Thus it inevitably followed that the playwright was often called upon to supply what was in fact padding to fill up the intervals between the popular shows. And this Lope supplied, besides writing the entremeses, mojigangas, saynetes—all forms of brief farce. Such work could not well be literary. His reputation, and indeed the reputation of the Spanish drama, has suffered because matter of this kind was not allowed to die with the day for which it was written. During his later years, and the better part of the life of his successor, Calderon, the drama held its place at Court. Plays were frequently first given before the Court (which at that time, and at all festivals, meant substantially every lady and gentleman in Madrid), before reaching the public theatre. This audience demanded a higher level of work, and the best comedias were probably written for it. Yet the drama made its way to the palace, and was not originally directed to the king and courtiers. It came as Lope de Vega had shaped it, and so remained in all essentials. The metrical form was fixed by him: the silvas or liras—lyric verse in hendecasyllabic and seven-foot lines—for the passionate passages, the sonnet for soliloquies, the romance for narrative and dialogue, the redondillas or roundelays[80] of assonant and consonant verse, are all enumerated by him in the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias. And what he did for the secular play he did for the religious. The Voyage of the Soul, given in his prose story, El Peregrino en Su Patria, is an Auto Sacramental as complete as any of Calderon’s. Whatever the Spanish drama has to give us was either found undeveloped by Lope de Vega, and perfected in shape by him, or was his invention. Other men put their mark on their versions of his models, or showed qualities which he wanted, but nobody modified the Spanish drama as he had built it in any essential. He was, as far as any single man could be, the creator of the dramatic literature of his country; and even though Tirso de Molina was greater in this or that respect, Alarcon had a finer skill in drawing a character, Calderon a deeper poetic genius,—though he might have cause to envy this man’s art or that man’s scope—yet he must remain the chief of one of the very few brilliant and thoroughly national dramatic literatures of the world.
Contemporaries and followers of Lope.

This predominance of the Luca fa presto of literature may have been a misfortune, though when the conditions are remembered, and the innate indifference of the Spaniard to artistic finish is allowed for, an inevitable one. We must accept it and its consequences. One of them is this, that after Lope de Vega there could be no room for historical development on the Spanish stage. Calderon was a different man writing the same drama. There is no such difference between these two as between Shakespeare and[81] Ben Jonson; and nowhere in Spanish dramatic literature is there anything answering to the contrast between the Elizabethan and the Restoration stages. The division often made between the school of Lope and the school of Calderon is very arbitrary. It is largely a matter of date. The earlier men are classed with the first, and the later with the second. To find a distinction between them it is necessary to insist on mere matters of detail, or on such purely personal differences of genius and character as must always be found where there is life among a large body of men. The rule of a literary as of a political despot may cramp as well as support. It is possible that if they had not been overshadowed by the Marvel of Nature his contemporaries might have developed with more freedom. None of them may seem to have suffered more from the consecration of hasty writing than Gabriel Tellez (1570?-1648), known in literature as the Maestro Tirso de Molina, a churchman, who died as head of a religious house at Soria. Tirso de Molina may be said to live on the universal stage of the world as the first creator of Don Juan.[31] One of his plays, The Vengeance of Tamar, contains a scene of very high tragic power—that in which the outraged sister waits veiled outside the tent prepared by Absalom for the slaughter of his brother. She has a long double-edged dialogue with the offender, full of warnings of doom intelligible to the audience, but misunderstood by him, and when[82] he has gone to his fate her soliloquy is a fine example of the legitimate dramatic use of the chorus. There is a certain quiet in this scene, a reserve, and an appeal not to the mere passion for seeing something going on, but to the emotions of pity and terror, which is rare indeed on the amusing, but too often noisy and shallow, Spanish stage. Calderon, using the freedom of a Spanish dramatist, conveyed the whole act into his Hairs of Absalom. One is inclined to think that the playwright who first rough-hewed the universally true character of Don Juan might, if he had felt called upon to finish as well as to imagine and sketch, have also given us the finished type of the debauchee whom the pursuit of his own pleasure has made a violator and brute, all the more odious because there is on him an outward show of gallantry and high-breeding. Tirso’s Marta la Piadosa—‘The Pious Martha’—has been most absurdly compared to Tartuffe. It is the story of a lively young lady who affects a passion for good works and a vow of charity in order to escape a disagreeable marriage, and is in other respects the usual comedia de capa y espada. Yet there is a power of characterisation in it, a liveliness and a genial humanity, which need little to be the most accomplished comedy. But it misses of what it might have reached, and we may say that it failed because his audience, and the taste of his time, called upon Tirso for nothing better than hasty work. In Guillen de Castro (1569-1631), again, the friend of Lope at Valencia, we find the same contrast between a vigorous original force of imagination, with great powers of presentment, and a sudden drop[83] into what no doubt pleased the “musketeers,” but is now only worth looking at because it did. His Youth of the Cid, which up to a certain point supplied Corneille with more than a model, falls to puerile miracle and ends incoherently. Juan Ruiz de Alarcon reached very high comedy. His Verdad Sospechosa—‘The Doubted Truth’—has had a great progeny on the stage of the world. All the romancing liars—they who lie not for sordid ends but by imagination, and from a love of shining, or getting out of the immediate difficulty—who follow one another on all theatres, may claim descent from his hero. But Alarcon was not popular, and he also could be hasty. The list of names might easily be swollen in a country which counted its known dramatic writers at certain periods by sixties and seventies, but nothing would be gained for the understanding of the school by the repetition.[32]

Although he cannot be said to have developed or even modified the form of dramatic literature in Spain, Calderon was too considerable a man to be allowed to pass with a school.[33]
Calderon.

Pedro Calderon de la Barca Barreda Henao y Ria?o, Knight of the Order of Santiago, Priest, Honorary Chaplain of his Majesty, and our Lords the[84] New Kings of the Cathedral of Toledo—to give him all his names and titles—was a native of Madrid, “though from another place he took his name, an house of ancient fame.” The splendour of his pedigree was perhaps exaggerated by the partiality of friends. It is a point on which the Spaniard has all the reverence of the Scotsman. Yet he was undoubtedly a noble, and “came from the mountain,” as indeed did all Spain’s greatest men in letters and art. His long life, which lasted from 1600 to 1681, unlike Lope’s, was honourable, but is otherwise little known. We are told that he served as a soldier in his youth, but in a time of truce when not much service was to be seen. From one of the few certain passages in his life it appears that he was not slow to draw his sword on sufficient provocation. He had once to take sanctuary after chasing an actor through the streets of Madrid sword in hand. The man had stabbed Calderon’s brother in the back, and the excuse was held to be good. For the rest, the poet’s life was peaceful and prosperous. He was educated by the Jesuits and at Salamanca, was known as a writer when he was twenty, and after the death of Lope de Vega, he became the acknowledged chief of Spanish dramatists. Philip IV. greatly favoured and employed him. Calderon was, in fact, as much the king’s poet as Velasquez was his painter. By the favour of the king he also was admitted into the Order of Santiago, which might bring with it a commandery and a revenue. In the revolt of Catalonia in 1640, when the king went to the army, Calderon[85] joined the other knights who rendered their military service under the royal banner. At the age of fifty-one he took orders. This was not always a proof of a sincere vocation, for Swift’s saying, that it was easier to provide for ten men in the Church than one out of it, was even truer of Spain than of England. But Calderon’s sincerity need not be doubted. He appears to have given up writing directly for the theatre after taking orders, but continued to produce plays for the Court which were repeated in public. During the latter half of his life he preferred to devote himself to the autos sacramentales, which he had an exclusive right to supply to the town of Madrid. No dramatic author of the time seems to have been so indifferent to the fate of his plays. A few were printed by his brother, but he himself published none, though he was continually vexed by piracies, and by learning that rubbish had been presented in his name to provincial audiences. In his old age he drew up a list of his genuine plays at the request of the Duke of Veragua, the representative of Columbus. From the letter sent with the list we learn that there were two noted pests of the Madrid theatre, one known as Great, and the other as Little, Memory. The first could remember a whole play (one supposes it must have been taliter qualiter) after hearing it once, the other after hearing it two or three times, and the two gained a dishonourable livelihood by poaching for piratical managers. As many dramas reached the press by their exertions, the wretched state of the text is easily accounted for. When Great or Little Memory[86] was at a loss he put in his own trash. Even in Calderon’s genial and peaceful old age this outrage moved him to bitterness. Yet he never edited his plays. His executor, Don Juan de Vera Tasis, who published the first edition after his death, was unfortunately a partisan of the detestable estilo culto, and is suspected of having inserted some very bad examples of this vicious affectation. Between the indifference of the poet and the insufficiency of the editor the text has suffered greatly. Calderon’s high estimate, not perhaps so much of his own autos as of the sanctity of work written for a religious purpose, is shown by the fact that he did publish some of them, lest they should suffer the same misuse as his plays.

The reputation of Calderon has suffered from the opposite evil to that which has injured Lope’s. The Ph?nix of Geniuses has been punished in modern times for the wild overpraise of his own, by some neglect. German criticism has treated him as a mere amuser. Calderon, on the other hand, has been the victim of the incontinence in praise of the Schlegels, who were determined to make another, and a better, Shakespeare if they could not find one. Many readers who had formed an idea of him at second hand have probably suffered a severe shock on becoming acquainted with his work.[34]

[87]
His limitations.

No reader should expect to find a world poet in Calderon, who was a Spaniard of the Spaniards. No more intensely national poet ever wrote, and it is for that he must be read and appreciated. Moreover, he is a Spaniard of the seventeenth century, when the monarchical sentiment was at its height, and when all life was permeated by a religion in which the creed had, in Mr Swinburne’s phrase, replaced the decalogue. His conception of honour (we shall come back to the point of honour as a motive for Spanish plays) is that of his time—thoroughly oriental. It was not the sentiment which nerves a man against fear of consequences, and enables him to resist the temptation to do what is dishonourable, or, better still, makes him incapable of feeling it, but the fixed determination not to allow the world the least excuse for saying that somebody has done something to you which renders you undignified or ridiculous. As has been already said, he added nothing to the formal part of Spanish dramatic literature, not even to the auto. He was too much affected by the Góngorism of his early manhood, for even the most partial of editors cannot throw all, or even the most, of the errors in that style found in his plays on Don Juan de Vera Tasis.
His qualities.

Yet with his limitations Calderon was a considerable poet, and a very skilful master of the machinery of the Spanish comedy. When not misled into Góngorism he wrote magnificently, and there are lyric choral passages in the autos which Mr Ticknor rightly praised as worthy of Ben Jonson’s[88] masques. Indeed not a little of his work is identical in purpose with the masque, though different in form. As a Court poet he was called upon to write for the entertainment of the king and the courtiers, and to supply theatrical shows at royal marriages, births of princes, and so forth. There was no intrinsic novelty here, for Calderon did but give the high-bred Spaniard of the Court a finer poetic version of the dances, songs, and bright short pieces under various, names, which delighted the humbler Spaniard in the patios. The intensely national sentiment which he expresses may strike us at times as a little empty, but is high and shining, and lends itself to a certain stately treatment which he could give. The romantic sentiment was strong in Calderon, and even in the most purely Spanish trappings that is not remote from us. A poet who dealt not inadequately with great passions could hardly help sometimes piercing through the merely national to the universal, though it must be acknowledged that his characters rarely utter the individual human saying, and that he was far too fond of long casuistical amplifications, which are almost always frigidly pedantic, and not rarely bombastical. The most quoted passage in all his work, the lines which close the second act of La Vida es Sue?o, gain by being taken apart from their context:
“Que es la vida? Un frenesi:
Que es la vida? Una ilusion,
Una sombra, una ficcion
Y el mayor bien es peque?o
Que toda la vida es sue?o
Y los sue?os sue?o son.”
“We are such stuff[89]
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

It is a fine poetic reflection, well fitted to stand beside the yet more beautiful lines of the Tempest, but it is not wise to approach the play in the hope that all of it will be found at the same level.

As in the case of Lope, though not to the same extent, the critic who is severely limited in space must be content to speak in general terms of much of Calderon’s work. It would be interesting to take El Mágico Prodigioso (‘The Wonder-working Magician’), El Mayor Monstruo los Zelos (‘Jealousy the greatest Monster’), and La Puente de Mantible (‘The Bridge of Mantible’), and show what has been added in any of them—or a score of others which it were as easy to name—to the unchanging framework of the Spanish play. In the Mágico Prodigioso, for instance, perhaps the most generally known of Calderon’s greater dramas, which has been ineptly enough compared to Faust, we have, in addition to the usual machinery of dama, galan, and gracioso, a story of temptation by the devil. Looked at closely, it is a tale told for edification, and for the purpose of showing what a fool the devil essentially is. He is argued off his legs by Cyprian the hero at the first bout, beaten completely by stock arguments to be found in text-books. His one resource is to promise Cyprian the possession of Justina, and he signally fails to keep his word. The false Justina he has created to satisfy the hero turns to a skeleton at once, and Cyprian becomes a Christian because he discovers that the devil is unable to give him possession[90] of a woman, and is less powerful than God, which he knew by the fiend’s own confession at the beginning. It is an edifying story to all who accept the premisses and the parade of scholastic argument, and are prepared to allow for the time, the nation, and the surroundings.
The school of Calderon.

Calderon wound up and rounded off the historical development of the Spanish drama so completely that little need be said of his school, which indeed only means contemporaries who wrote Lope’s drama with Calderon’s style. Yet Moreto was a strong man, and to him also belongs the honour of having put on the stage an enduring type, the Lindo Don Diego, who was the ancestor of our own Sir Fopling Flutter, of Lord Foppington, and of many another theatrical dandy. Francisco de Roxas, too, has left a point-of-honour play, not unworthy of his master, Del Rey Abajo, Ninguno—‘From the King downwards, Nobody.’ One feature common to all the later writers for the old Spanish stage may be noticed. It was their growing tendency to re-use the situations and plots of their predecessors. Moreto was a notable proficient in this, and Calderon himself did as much. It seems as if a theatre which dealt almost wholly with intrigue and situation had exhausted all possible combinations and could only repeat. When men began to go back in this fashion the end was at hand. Calderon, less fortunate than Velasquez, outlived the king who was their common patron, and saw with his own eyes the decadence of Spain. Beyond him there was only echo, and then dotage prolonged into the eighteenth century.