CHAPTER VIII.
Theatre. — Followers of Lope de Rueda. — Alonso de la Vega. — Cisneros. — Seville. — Malara. — Cueva. — Zepeda. — Valencia. — Virues. — Translations and Imitations of the Ancient Classical Drama. — Villalobos. — Oliva. — Boscan. — Abril. — Bermudez. — Argensola. — State of the Theatre.
Two of the persons attached to Lope de Rueda’s company were, like himself, authors as well as actors. One of them, Alonso de la Vega, died at Valencia as early as 1566, in which year three of his dramas, all in prose, and one of them directly imitated from his master, were published by Timoneda.[40] The other, Antonio Cisneros, lived as late as 1579, but it does not seem certain that any dramatic work of his now exists.[41] Neither of them was equal to Lope de Rueda or Juan de Timoneda; but the four taken together produced an impression on the theatrical taste of their times, which was never afterwards wholly forgotten or lost,—a fact of which the shorter dramatic compositions that have been favorites on the Spanish stage ever since give decisive proof.
But dramatic representations in Spain between 1560 and 1590 were by no means confined to what was done by Lope de Rueda, his friends, and his strolling company of actors. Other efforts were made in various places, and upon other principles; sometimes with more success than theirs, sometimes with less. In Seville, a good deal seems to have been done. It is probable the plays of Malara, a native of that city, were represented there during this period; but they are now all lost.[42] Those of Juan de la Cueva, on the contrary, have been partly preserved, and merit notice for many reasons, but especially because most of them are historical. They were represented—at least, the few that still remain—in 1579, and the years immediately subsequent; but were not printed till 1588, and then only a single volume appeared.[43] Each of them is divided into four jornadas, or acts, and they are written in various measures, including terza rima, blank verse, and sonnets, but chiefly in redondillas and octave stanzas. Several are on national subjects, like “The Children of Lara,” “Bernardo del Carpio,” and “The Siege of Zamora”; others are on subjects from ancient history, such as Ajax, Virginia, and Mutius Scævola; some are on fictitious stories, like “The Old Man in Love,” and “The Decapitated,” which last is founded on a Moorish adventure; and one, at least, is on a great event of times then recent, “The Sack of Rome” by the Constable Bourbon. All, however, are crude in their structure, and unequal in their execution. The Sack of Rome, for instance, is merely a succession of dialogues thrown together in the loosest manner, to set forth the progress of the Imperial arms, from the siege of Rome in May, 1527, to the coronation of Charles the Fifth, at Bologna, in February, 1530; and though the picture of the outrages at Rome is not without an air of truth, there is little truth in other respects; the Spaniards being made to carry off all the glory.[44]
“El Infamador,” or The Calumniator, sets forth, in a different tone, the story of a young lady who refuses the love of a dissolute young man, and is, in consequence, accused by him of murder and other crimes, and condemned to death, but is rescued by preternatural power, while her accuser suffers in her stead. It is almost throughout a revolting picture; the fathers of the hero and heroine being each made to desire the death of his own child, while the whole is rendered absurd by the not unusual mixture of heathen mythology and modern manners. Of poetry, which is occasionally found in Cueva’s other dramas, there is in this play no trace; and so carelessly is it written, that there is no division of the acts into scenes.[45] Indeed, it seems difficult to understand how several of his twelve or fourteen dramas should have been brought into practical shape and represented at all. It is probable they were merely spoken as consecutive dialogues, to bring out their respective stories, without any attempt at theatrical illusion; a conjecture which receives confirmation from the fact, that nearly all of them are announced, on their titles, as having been represented in the garden of a certain Doña Elvira at Seville.[46]
The two plays of Joaquin Romero de Zepeda, of Badajoz, which were printed at Seville in 1582, are somewhat different from those of Cueva. One, “The Metamorfosea,” is in the nature of the old dramatic pastorals, but is divided into three short jornadas, or acts. It is a trial of wits and love, between three shepherds and three shepherdesses, who are constantly at cross purposes with each other, but are at last reconciled and united;—all except one shepherd, who had originally refused to love any body, and one shepherdess, Belisena, who, after being cruel to one of her lovers, and slighted by another, is finally rejected by the rejected of all. The other play, called “La Comedia Salvage,” is taken, in its first two acts, from the well-known dramatic novel of “Celestina”; the last act being filled with atrocities of Zepeda’s own invention. It obtains its name from the Salvages or wild men, who figure in it, as such personages did in the old romances of chivalry and the old English drama, and is as strange and rude as its title implies. Neither of these pieces, however, can have done any thing of consequence for the advancement of the drama at Seville, though each contains passages of flowing and apt verse, and occasional turns of thought that deserve to be called graceful.[47]
During the same period, there was at Valencia, as well as at Seville, a poetical movement in which the drama shared, and in which, perhaps, Lope de Vega, an exile in Valencia for several years, about 1585, took part. At any rate, his friend Cristóval de Virues, of whom he often speaks, and who was born there in 1550, was among those who then gave an impulse to the theatrical taste of his native city. He claims to have first divided Spanish dramas into three jornadas or acts, and Lope de Vega assents to the claim; but they were both mistaken, for we now know that such a division was made by Francisco de Avendaño, not later than 1553, when Virues was but three years old.[48]
Only five of the plays of Virues, all in verse, are extant; and these, though supposed to have been written as early as 1579-1581, were not printed till 1609, when Lope de Vega had already given its full development and character to the popular theatre; so that it is not improbable some of the dramas of Virues, as printed, may have been more or less altered and accommodated to the standard then considered as settled by the genius of his friend. Two of them, the “Cassandra” and the “Marcela,” are on subjects apparently of the Valencian poet’s own invention, and are extremely wild and extravagant; in “El Átila Furioso” above fifty persons come to an untimely end, without reckoning the crew of a galley who perish in the flames for the diversion of the tyrant and his followers; and in the “Semíramis,” the action extends to twenty or thirty years. All four of them are absurd.
The “Elisa Dido” is better, and may be regarded as an effort to elevate the drama. It is divided into five acts, and observes the unities, though Virues can hardly have comprehended what was afterwards considered as their technical meaning. Its plot, invented by himself, and little connected with the stories found in Virgil or the old Spanish chronicles, supposes the Queen of Carthage to have died by her own hand for a faithful attachment to the memory of Sichæus, and to avoid a marriage with Iarbas. It has no division into scenes, and each act is burdened with a chorus. In short, it is an imitation of the ancient Greek masters; and as some of the lyrical portions, as well as parts of the dialogue, are not unworthy the talent of the author of the “Monserrate,” it is, for the age in which it appeared, a remarkable composition. But it lacks a good development of the characters, as well as life and poetical warmth in the action; and being, in fact, an attempt to carry the Spanish drama in a direction exactly opposite to that of its destiny, it did not succeed.[49]
Such an attempt, however, was not unlikely to be made more than once; and this was certainly an age favorable for it. The theatre of the ancients was now known in Spain. The translations already noticed, of Villalobos in 1515, and of Oliva before 1536, had been followed, as early as 1543, by one from Euripides by Boscan;[50] in 1555, by two from Plautus, the work of an unknown author;[51] and in 1570-1577, by the “Plutus” of Aristophanes, the “Medea” of Euripides, and the six comedies of Terence, by Pedro Simon de Abril.[52] The efforts of Timoneda in his “Menennos” and of Virues in his “Elisa Dido” were among the consequences of this state of things, and were succeeded by others, two of which should be noticed.
The first is by Gerónimo Bermudez, a native of Galicia, who is supposed to have been born about 1530, and to have lived as late as 1589. He was a learned Professor of Theology at Salamanca, and published, at Madrid, in 1577, two dramas which he somewhat boldly called “the first Spanish tragedies.”[53] They are both on the subject of Inez de Castro; both are in five acts, and in various verse; and both have choruses in the manner of the ancients. But there is a great difference in their respective merits. The first, “Nise Lastimosa,” or Inez to be Compassionated,—Nise being a poor anagram of Inez,—is hardly more than a skilful translation of the Portuguese tragedy of “Inez de Castro,” by Ferreira, which, with considerable defects in its structure, is yet full of tenderness and poetical beauty. The last, “Nise Laureada,” or Inez Triumphant, takes up the tradition where the first left it, after the violent and cruel death of the princess, and gives an account of the coronation of her ghastly remains above twenty years after their interment, and of the renewed marriage of the prince to them;—the closing scene exhibiting the execution of her murderers with a coarseness, both in the incidents and in the language, as revolting as can well be conceived. Neither probably produced any perceptible effect on the Spanish drama; and yet the “Nise Lastimosa” contains passages of no little poetical merit; such as the beautiful chorus on Love at the end of the first act, the dream of Inez in the third, and the truly Greek dialogue between the princess and the women of Coimbra; for the last two of which, however, Bermudez was directly indebted to Ferreira.[54]
Three tragedies by Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola, the accomplished lyric poet, who will hereafter be amply noticed, produced a much more considerable sensation, when they first appeared, though they were soon afterwards as much neglected as their predecessors. He wrote them when he was hardly more than twenty years old, and they were acted about the year 1585. “Do you not remember,” says the canon in Don Quixote, “that, a few years ago, there were represented in Spain three tragedies composed by a famous poet of these kingdoms, which were such that they delighted and astonished all who heard them; the ignorant as well as the judicious, the multitude as well as the few; and that these three alone brought more profit to the actors than the thirty best plays that have been written since?” “No doubt,” replied the manager of the theatre, with whom the canon was conversing, “no doubt you mean the ‘Isabela,’ the ‘Philis,’ and the ‘Alexandra.’“[55]
This statement of Cervantes is certainly extraordinary, and the more so from being put into the mouth of the wise canon of Toledo. But notwithstanding the flush of immediate success which it implies, all trace of these plays was soon so completely lost, that, for a long period, the name of the famous poet Cervantes had referred to was not known, and it was even suspected that he had intended to compliment himself. At last, between 1760 and 1770, two of them—the “Alexandra” and “Isabela”—were accidentally discovered, and all doubt ceased. They were found to be the work of Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola.[56]
But, unhappily, they quite failed to satisfy the expectations that had been excited by the good-natured praise of Cervantes. They are in various verse, fluent and pure, and were intended to be imitations of the Greek style of tragedy, called forth, perhaps, by the recent attempts of Bermudez. Each, however, is divided into three acts; and the choruses, originally prepared for them, are omitted. The Alexandra is the worse of the two. Its scene is laid in Egypt; and the story, which is fictitious, is full of loathsome horrors. Every one of its personages, except perhaps a messenger, perishes in the course of the action; children’s heads are cut off and thrown at their parents on the stage; and the false queen, after being invited to wash her hands in the blood of the person to whom she was unworthily attached, bites off her own tongue and spits it at her monstrous husband. Treason and rebellion form the lights in a picture composed mainly of such atrocities.
The Isabela is better; but still is not to be praised. The story relates to one of the early Moorish kings of Saragossa, who exiles the Christians from his kingdom in a vain attempt to obtain possession of Isabela, a Christian maiden with whom he is desperately in love, but who is herself already attached to a noble Moor whom she has converted, and with whom, at last, she suffers a triumphant martyrdom. The incidents are numerous, and sometimes well imagined; but no dramatic skill is shown in their management and combination, and there is little easy or living dialogue to give them effect. Like the Alexandra, it is full of horrors. The nine most prominent personages it represents come to an untimely end, and the bodies, or at least the heads, of most of them are exhibited on the stage, though some reluctance is shown at the conclusion about committing a supernumerary suicide before the audience. Fame opens the piece with a prologue, in which complaints are made of the low state of the theatre; and the ghost of Isabela, who is hardly dead, comes back at the end, with an epilogue very flat and quite needless.
With all this, however, a few passages of poetical eloquence, rather than of absolute poetry, are scattered through the long and tedious speeches of which the piece is principally composed; and once or twice there is a touch of passion truly tragic, as in the discussion between Isabela and her family on the threatened exile and ruin of their whole race, and in that between Adulce, her lover, and Aja, the king’s sister, who disinterestedly loves Adulce, notwithstanding she knows his passion for her fair Christian rival. But still it seems incomprehensible how such a piece should have produced the popular dramatic effect attributed to it, unless we suppose that the Spaniards had from the first a passion for theatrical exhibitions, which, down to this period, had been so imperfectly gratified, that any thing dramatic, produced under favorable circumstances, was run after and admired.
The dramas of Argensola, by their date, though not by their character and spirit, bring us at once within the period which opens with the great and prevalent names of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. They, therefore, mark the extreme limits of the history of the early Spanish theatre; and if we now look back and consider its condition and character during the long period we have just gone over, we shall easily come to three conclusions of some consequence.[57]
The first is, that the attempts to form and develop a national drama in Spain have been few and rare. During the two centuries following the first notice of it, about 1250, we cannot learn distinctly that any thing was undertaken but rude exhibitions in pantomime; though it is not unlikely dialogues may sometimes have been added, such as we find in the more imperfect religious pageants produced at the same period in England and France. During the next century, which brings us down to the time of Lope de Rueda, we have nothing better than “Mingo Revulgo,” which is rather a spirited political satire than a drama, Enzina’s and Vicente’s dramatic eclogues, and Naharro’s more dramatic “Propaladia,” with a few translations from the ancients which were little noticed or known. And during the half-century which Lope de Rueda opened with an attempt to create a popular drama, we have obtained only a few farces from himself and his followers, the little that was done at Seville and Valencia, and the countervailing tragedies of Bermudez and Argensola, who intended, no doubt, to follow what they considered the safer and more respectable traces of the ancient Greek masters. Three centuries and a half, therefore, or four centuries, furnished less dramatic literature to Spain, than the last half-century of the same portion of time had furnished to France and Italy; and near the end of the whole period, or about 1585, it is apparent that the national genius was not more turned towards the drama than it was at the same period in England, where Greene and Peele were just preparing the way for Marlowe and Shakspeare.
In the next place, the apparatus of the stage, including scenery and dresses, was very imperfect. During the greater part of the period we have gone over, dramatic exhibitions in Spain were either religious pantomimes shown off in the churches to the people, or private entertainments given at court and in the houses of the nobility. Lope de Rueda brought them out into the public squares, and adapted them to the comprehension, the taste, and the humors of the multitude. But he had no theatre anywhere, and his genial farces were represented on temporary scaffolds, by his own company of strolling players, who stayed but a few days at a time in even the largest cities, and were sought, when there, chiefly by the lower classes of the people.
The first notice, therefore, we have of any thing approaching to a regular establishment—and this is far removed from what that phrase generally implies—is in 1568, when an arrangement or compromise between the Church and the theatre was begun, traces of which have subsisted at Madrid and elsewhere down to our own times. Recollecting, no doubt, the origin of dramatic representations in Spain for religious edification, the government ordered, in form, that no actors should make an exhibition in Madrid, except in some place to be appointed by two religious brotherhoods designated in the decree, and for a rent to be paid to them;—an order in which, after 1583, the general hospital of the city was included.[58] Under this order, as it was originally made, we find plays acted from 1568; but only in the open area of a court-yard, without roof, seats, or other apparatus, except such as is humorously described by Cervantes to have been packed, with all the dresses of the company, in a few large sacks.
In this state things continued several years. None but strolling companies of actors were known, and they remained but a few days at a time even in Madrid. No fixed place was prepared for their reception; but sometimes they were sent by the pious brotherhoods to one court-yard, and sometimes to another. They acted in the day-time, on Sundays and other holidays, and then only if the weather permitted a performance in the open air;—the women separated from the men,[59] and the entire audience so small, that the profit yielded by the exhibitions to the religious societies and the hospital rose only to eight or ten dollars each time.[60] At last, in 1579 and 1583, two court-yards were permanently fitted up for them, belonging to houses in the streets of the “Príncipe” and “Cruz.” But though a rude stage and benches were provided in each, a roof was still wanting; the spectators all sat in the open air, or at the windows of the house whose court-yard was used for the representation; and the actors performed under a slight and poor awning, without any thing that deserved to be called scenery. The theatres, therefore, at Madrid, as late as 1586, could not be said to be in a condition materially to further any efforts that might be made to produce a respectable national drama.
In the last place, the pieces that had been written had not the decided, common character on which a national drama could be fairly founded, even if their number had been greater. Juan de la Enzina’s eclogues, which were the first dramatic compositions represented in Spain by actors who were neither priests nor cavaliers, were really what they were called, though somewhat modified in their bucolic character by religious and political feelings and events;—two or three of Naharro’s plays, and several of those of Cueva, give more absolute intimations of the intriguing and historical character of the stage, though the effect of the first at home was delayed, from their being for a long time published only in Italy;—the translations from the ancients by Villalobos, Oliva, Abril, and others, seem hardly to have been intended for representation, and certainly not for popular effect;—and Bermudez, with one of his pieces stolen from the Portuguese and the other full of horrors of his own, was, it is plain, little thought of at his first appearance, and soon quite neglected.
There were, therefore, before 1586, only two persons to whom it was possible to look for the establishment of a popular and permanent drama. The first of them was Argensola, whose three tragedies enjoyed a degree of success before unknown; but they were so little in the national spirit, that they were early overlooked, and soon completely forgotten. The other was Lope de Rueda, who, himself an actor, wrote such farces as he found would amuse the common audiences he served, and thus created a school in which other actors, like Alonso de la Vega and Cisneros, wrote the same kind of farces, chiefly in prose, and intended so completely for temporary effect, that hardly one of them has come down to our own times. Of course, the few and rare efforts made before 1586 to produce a drama in Spain had been made upon such various or contradictory principles, that they could not be combined so as to constitute the safe foundation for a national theatre.
But though the proper foundation was not yet laid, all was tending to it and preparing for it. The stage, rude as it was, had still the great advantage of being confined to two spots, which, it is worth notice, have continued to be the sites of the two principal theatres of Madrid ever since. The number of authors, though small, was yet sufficient to create so general a taste for theatrical representations, that Lopez Pinciano, a learned man, and one of a temper little likely to be pleased with a rude drama, said, “When I see that Cisneros or Galvez is going to act, I run all risks to hear him; and when I am in the theatre, winter does not freeze me, nor summer make me hot.”[61] And finally, the public, who resorted to the imperfect entertainments offered them, if they had not determined what kind of drama should become national, had yet decided that a national drama should be formed, and that it should be founded on the national character and manners.