CHAPTER XV.
Lope de Vega, continued. — Character of his Miscellaneous Works. — His Dramas. — His Life at Valencia. — His Moral Plays. — His Success at Madrid. — Vast Number of his Dramas. — Their Foundation and their Various Forms. — His Comedias de Capa y Espada, and their Characteristics.
The works of Lope de Vega that we have considered, while tracing his long and brilliant career, are far from being sufficient to explain the degree of popular admiration that, almost from the first, followed him. They show, indeed, much original talent, a still greater power of invention, and a wonderful facility of versification. But they are rarely imbued with the deep and earnest spirit of a genuine poetry; they generally have an air of looseness and want of finish; and almost all of them are without that national physiognomy and character, in which, after all, resides so much of the effective power of genius over any people.
The truth is, that Lope, in what have been called his miscellaneous works, was seldom in the path that leads to final success. He was turned aside by a spirit which, if not that of the whole people, was the spirit of the court and the higher classes of Castilian society. Boscan and Garcilasso, who preceded him by only half a century, had made themselves famous by giving currency to the lighter forms of Italian verse, especially those of the sonnet and the canzone; and Lope, who found these fortunate poets the idols of the period, when his own character was forming, thought that to follow their brilliant course would open to him the best chances for success. His aspirations, however, stretched very far beyond theirs. He felt other and higher powers within him, and entered boldly into rivalship, not only with Sannazaro and Bembo, as they had done, but with Ariosto, Tasso, and Petrarch. Eleven of his longer poems, epic, narrative, and descriptive, are in the stately ottava rima of his great masters; besides which he has left us two long pastorals in the manner of the “Arcadia,” many adventurous attempts in the terza rima, and numberless specimens of all the varieties of Italian lyrics, including, among the rest, nearly seven hundred sonnets.
But in all this there is little that is truly national,—little that is marked with the old Castilian spirit; and if this were all he had done, his fame would by no means stand where we now find it. His prose pastorals and his romances are, indeed, better than his epics; and his didactic poetry, his epistles, and his elegies are occasionally excellent; but it is only when he touches fairly and fully upon the soil of his country,—it is only in his glosas, his letrillas, his ballads, and his light songs and roundelays, that he has the richness and grace which should always have accompanied him. We feel at once, therefore, whenever we meet him in these paths, that he is on ground he should never have deserted, because it is ground on which, with his extraordinary gifts, he could easily have erected permanent monuments to his own fame. But he himself determined otherwise. Not that he entirely approved the innovations of Boscan and Garcilasso; for he tells us distinctly, in his “Philomena,” that their imitations of the Italian had unhappily supplanted the grace and the glory that belonged peculiarly to the old Spanish genius.[279] The theories and fashions of his time, therefore, misled, though they did not delude, a spirit that should have been above them; and the result is, that little of poetry such as marks the old Castilian genius is to be found in the great mass of his works we have thus far been called on to examine. In order to account for his permanent success, as well as marvellous popularity, we must, then, turn to another and wholly distinct department,—that of the drama,—in which he gave himself up to the leading of the national spirit as completely as if he had not elsewhere seemed sedulously to avoid it; and thus obtained a kind and degree of fame he could never otherwise have reached.
It is not possible to determine the year when Lope first began to write for the public stage; but whenever it was, he found the theatre in a rude and humble condition. That he was very early drawn to this form of composition, though not, perhaps, for the purposes of representation, we know on his own authority; for, in his pleasant didactic poem on the New Art of Making Plays, which he published in 1609, but read several years earlier to a society of dilettanti in Madrid, he says expressly,—
The Captain Virues, a famous wit,
Cast dramas in three acts, by happy hit;
For, till his time, upon all fours they crept,
Like helpless babes that never yet had stepped.
Such plays I wrote, eleven and twelve years old;
Four acts—each measured to a sheet’s just fold—
Filled out four sheets; while still, between,
Three entremeses short filled up the scene.[280]
This was as early as 1574. A few years later, or about 1580, when the poet was eighteen years old, he attracted the notice of his early patron, Manrique, the Bishop of Avila, by a pastoral. His studies at Alcalá followed; then his service under the young Duke of Alva, his marriage, and his exile of several years; for all which we must find room before 1588, when we know he served in the Armada. In 1590, however, if not a year earlier, he had returned to Madrid; and it does not seem unreasonable to assume that soon afterwards he began to be known in the capital as a dramatic writer, being then twenty-eight years old.
But it was during the period of his exile that he seems to have really begun his public dramatic career, and prepared himself, in some measure, for his subsequent more general popularity. Much of this interval was passed in Valencia; and in Valencia a theatre had been known for a long time.[281] As early as 1526, the hospital there received an income from it, by a compromise similar to that in virtue of which the hospitals of Madrid long afterwards laid the theatre under contribution for their support.[282] The Captain Virues, who was a friend of Lope de Vega, and is commemorated by him more than once, wrote for this theatre, as did Timoneda, the editor of Lope de Rueda; the works of both the last being printed in Valencia about 1570. These Valencian dramas, however, except in the case of Lope de Rueda, were of moderate amount and value; nor was what was done at Seville by Cueva and his followers, about 1580, or at Madrid by Cervantes, a little later, of more real importance, regarded as the foundations for a national theatre.
Indeed, if we look over all that can be claimed for the Spanish drama from the time of the eclogues of Juan de la Enzina, in 1492, to the appearance of Lope de Rueda, about 1544, and then, again, from his time to that of Lope de Vega, we shall find, not only that the number of dramas was small, but that they had been written in forms so different and so often opposed to each other as to have little consistency or authority, and to offer no sufficient indication of the channel in which the dramatic literature of the country was at last destined to flow. We may even say, that, except Lope de Rueda, no author for the theatre had yet enjoyed a permanent popularity; and he having now been dead more than twenty years, Lope de Vega must be admitted to have had a fair and free field open before him.
Unfortunately we have few of his earlier efforts. He seems, however, to have begun upon the old foundations of the eclogues and moralities, whose religious air and tone commended them to that ecclesiastical toleration without which little could thrive in Spain.[283] An eclogue, which is announced as having been represented, and which seems really to be arranged for exhibition, is found in the third book of the “Arcadia,” the earliest of Lope’s published works, and one that was written before his exile.[284] Several similar attempts occur elsewhere,—so rude and pious, that it seems almost as if they might have belonged to the age of Juan de la Enzina and Gil Vicente; and others of the same character are scattered through other parts of his multitudinous works.[285]
Of his more regular plays, the two oldest, that were subsequently included in his printed collection, are not without similar indications of their origin. Both are pastorals. The first is called “The True Lover,” and was written when Lope was fourteen years old, though it may have been altered and improved before he published it, when he was fifty-eight. It is the story of a shepherd who refuses to marry a shepherdess, though she had put him in peril of his life by accusing him of having murdered her husband, who, as she was quite aware, had died a natural death, but whose supposed murderer could be released from his doom only at her requisition, as next of kin to the pretended victim;—a process by which she hoped to obtain all power over his spirit, and compel him to marry her, as Ximena married the Cid, by royal authority. Lope admits it to be a rude performance; but it is marked by the sweetness of versification which seems to have belonged to him at every period of his career.[286]
The other of his early performances above alluded to is the “Pastoral de Jacinto,” which Montalvan tells us was the first play Lope wrote in three acts, and that it was composed while he was attached to the person of the Bishop of Avila. This must have been about the year 1580; but as the Jacinto was not printed till thirty-seven years afterwards, it may perhaps have undergone large changes before it was offered to the public, whose requisitions had advanced in the interval no less than the condition of the theatre. He says in the Dedication, that it was “written in the years of his youth,” and it is founded on the somewhat artificial story of a shepherd fairly made jealous of himself by the management of another shepherd, who hopes thus to obtain the shepherdess they both love, and who passes himself off, for some time, as another Jacinto, and as the only one to whom the lady is really attached. It has the same flowing versification with the “True Lover,” but it is not superior in merit to that drama, which can hardly have preceded it by more than two or three years.[287]
Moralities, too, written with no little spirit, and with strong internal evidence of having been publicly performed, occur here and there;—sometimes where we should least look for them. Four such are produced in his “Pilgrim in his own Country”; the romance, it may be remembered, which is not without allusions to its author’s exile, and which seems to contain some of his personal experiences at Valencia. One of these allegorical plays, “The Salvation of Man,” is declared to have been performed in front of the venerable cathedral at Saragossa, and is among the more curious specimens of such entertainments, since it is accompanied with explanations of the way in which the churches were used for theatrical purposes, and ends with an account of the exposition of the Host, as an appropriate conclusion for a drama so devout.[288]
Another, called “The Soul’s Voyage,” is set forth as if represented in a public square of Barcelona.[289] It opens with a ballad, which is sung by three persons, and is followed, first, by a prologue full of cumbrous learning, and then by another ballad both sung and danced, as we are told, “with much skill and grace.” After all this note of preparation comes the “Moral Action” itself. The Soul enters dressed in white,—the way in which a disembodied spirit was indicated to the audience. A clown, who, as the droll of the piece, represents the Human Will, and a gallant youth, who represents Memory, enter at the same time; one of them urging the Soul to set out on the voyage of salvation, and the other endeavouring to jest her out of such a pious purpose. At this critical moment, Satan appears as a ship-captain, in a black suit, fringed with flames, and accompanied by Selfishness, Appetite, and other vices, as his sailors, and offers to speed the Soul on her voyage, all singing merrily together,—
Holloa! the good ship of Delight
Spreads her sails for the sea to-day;
Who embarks? who embarks, then, I say?
To-day, the good ship of Content,
With a wind at her choice for her course,
To a land where no troubles are sent,
Where none knows the stings of remorse,
With a wind fair and free takes her flight;—
Who embarks? who embarks, then, I say?[290]
A new world is announced as their destination, and the Will asks whether it is the one lately discovered by Columbus; to which and to other similar questions Satan replies evasively, but declares that he is a greater pilot of the seas than Magellan or Drake, and will insure to all who sail with him a happy and prosperous voyage. Memory opposes the project, but, after some resistance, is put asleep; and Understanding, who follows as a greybeard full of wise counsel, comes too late. The adventurers are already gone. But still he shouts after them, and continues his warnings, till the ship of Penitence arrives, with the Saviour for its pilot, a cross for its mast, and sundry Saints for its sailors. They summon the Soul anew. The Soul is surprised and shocked at her situation; and the piece ends with her embarkation on board the sacred vessel, amidst a feu de joie, and the shouts of the delighted spectators, who, we may suppose, had been much edified by the show.
Another of these strange dramas is founded on the story of the Prodigal Son, and is said to have been represented at Perpignan, then a Spanish fortress, by a party of soldiers; one of the actors being mentioned by name in its long and absurdly learned Prologue.[291] Among the interlocutors are Envy, Youth, Repentance, and Good Advice; and among other extraordinary passages, it contains a flowing paraphrase of Horace’s “Beatus ille,” pronounced by the respectable proprietor of the swine intrusted to the unhappy Prodigal.
The fourth Morality, found in the romance of the Pilgrim, is entitled “The Marriage of the Soul and Divine Love”; and is set forth as having been acted in a public square at Valencia, on occasion of the marriage of Philip the Third with Margaret of Austria, which took place in that city,—an occasion, we are told, when Lope himself appeared in the character of a buffoon,[292] and one to which this drama, though it seems to have been written earlier, was carefully adjusted.[293] The World, Sin, the City of Jerusalem, and Faith, who is dressed in the costume of a captain-general of Spain, all play parts in it. Envy enters, in the first scene, as from the infernal regions, through a mouth casting forth flames; and the last scene represents Love, stretched on the cross, and wedded to a fair damsel who figures as the Soul of Man. Some parts of this drama are very offensive; especially the passage in which Margaret of Austria, with celestial attributes, is represented as arriving in the galley of Faith, and the passage in which Philip’s entrance into Valencia is described literally as it occurred, but substituting the Saviour for the king, and the prophets, the martyrs, and the hierarchy of heaven for the Spanish nobles and clergy who really appeared on the occasion.[294]
Such were, probably, the unsteady attempts with which Lope began his career on the public stage during his exile at Valencia and immediately afterwards. They are certainly wild enough in their structure, and sometimes gross in sentiment, though hardly worse in either respect than the similar allegorical mysteries and farces which, till just about the same period, were performed in France and England, and much superior in their general tone and style. How long he continued to write them, or how many he wrote, we do not know. Few of them appear in the collection of his dramas, which does not begin till 1604, though an allegorical spirit is occasionally visible in some of his plays, which are, in other respects, quite in the temper of the secular theatre. But that he wrote such religious dramas early, and that he wrote great numbers of them, is unquestionable.
In Madrid, if he found little to hinder, he also found little to help him, except two rude theatres, or rather court-yards, licensed for the representation of plays, and a dramatic taste formed or forming in the character of the people. But this was enough for a spirit like his. His success was immediate and complete; his popularity overwhelming. Cervantes, as we have seen, declared him to be a “prodigy of nature”; and, though himself seeking both the fame and the profit of a writer for the public stage, generously recognized his great rival as its sole monarch.[295]
Many years, however, elapsed before he published even a single volume of the plays with which he was thus delighting the audiences of Madrid, and settling the final forms of the national drama. This was, no doubt, in part owing to the habit, which seems to have prevailed in Spain from the first appearance of the theatre, of regarding its literature as ill-suited for publication; and in part to the circumstance, that, when plays were produced on the stage, the author usually lost his right in them, if not entirely, yet so far that he could not publish them without the assent of the actors. But whatever may have been the cause, it is certain that a multitude of Lope’s plays had been acted before he published any of them; and that, to this day, not a fourth part of those he wrote has been preserved by the press.[296]
Their very number, however, may have been one obstacle to their publication; for the most moderate and certain accounts on this point have almost a fabulous air about them; so extravagant do they seem. In 1603, he gives us the titles of three hundred and forty-one pieces that he had already written;[297] in 1609, he says their number had risen to four hundred and eighty-three;[298] in 1618, he says it was eight hundred;[299] in 1619, again in round numbers, he states it at nine hundred;[300] and in 1624, at one thousand and seventy.[301] After his death, in 1635, Perez de Montalvan, his intimate friend and executor, who three years before had declared the number to be fifteen hundred, without reckoning the shorter pieces,[302] puts it at eighteen hundred plays and four hundred autos;[303] numbers which are confidently repeated by Antonio in his notice of Lope,[304] and by Franchi, an Italian, who had been much with Lope at Madrid, and who wrote one of the multitudinous eulogies on him after his death.[305] The prodigious facility implied by this is further confirmed by the fact stated by himself in one of his plays, that it was written and acted in five days,[306] and by the anecdotes of Montalvan, that he wrote five full-length dramas at Toledo in fifteen days, and one act of another in a few hours of the early morning, without seeming to make any effort in either case.[307]
Of this enormous mass, a little more than five hundred dramas appear to have been published at different times,—most of them in the twenty-five, or more properly twenty-eight, volumes which were printed in various places between 1604 and 1647, but of which it is now nearly impossible to form a complete collection. In these volumes, so far as any rules of the dramatic art are concerned, it is apparent that Lope took the theatre in the state in which he found it; and instead of attempting to adapt it to any previous theory, or to any existing models, whether ancient or recent, made it his great object to satisfy the popular audiences of his age;[308]—an object which he avows so distinctly in his “Art of Writing Plays,” and in the Preface to the twentieth volume of his Dramas, that there is no doubt it was the prevailing purpose with which he labored for the theatre. For such a purpose, he certainly appeared at a fortunate moment; and, possessing a genius no less fortunate, was enabled to become the founder of the national Spanish theatre, which, since his time, has rested substantially on the basis where he placed and left it.
But this very system—if that may be called a system which was rather an instinct—almost necessarily supposes that he indulged his audiences in a great variety of dramatic forms; and accordingly we find, among his plays, a diversity, alike in spirit, tone, and structure, which was evidently intended to humor the uncertain cravings of the popular taste, and which we know was successful. Whether he himself ever took the trouble to consider what were the different classes into which his dramas might be divided does not appear. Certainly no attempt at any technical arrangement of them is made in the collection he printed, except that, in the first and third volumes, a few entremeses, or farces, generally in prose, are thrown in at the end of each, as a sort of appendix. All the rest of the plays contained in them are in verse, and are called comedias,—a word which is by no means to be translated “comedies,” but “dramas,” since no other name is comprehensive enough to include their manifold varieties,—and all of them are divided into three jornadas, or acts.
But in every thing else there seems no end to their diversities,—whether we regard their subjects, running from the deepest tragedy to the broadest farce, and from the most solemn mysteries of religion down to the loosest frolics of common life, or their style, which embraces every change of tone and measure known to the poetical language of the country. And all these different masses of Lope’s drama, it should be further noted, run insensibly into each other,—the sacred and the secular; the tragic and the comic; the heroic action and that from vulgar life,—until sometimes it seems as if there were neither separate form nor distinctive attribute to any of them.
This, however, is less the case than it at first appears to be. Lope, no doubt, did not always know or care into what peculiar form the story of his drama was cast; but still there were certain forms and attributes invented by his own genius, or indicated to him by the success of his predecessors or the demands of his time, to which each of his dramas more or less tended. A few, indeed, may be found so nearly on the limits that separate the different classes, that it is difficult to assign them strictly to either; but in all—even in those that are the freest and wildest—the distinctive elements of some class are apparent, while all, by the peculiarly national spirit that animates them, show the source from which they come, and the direction they are destined to follow.
The first class of plays that Lope seems to have invented—the one in which his own genius seemed most to delight, and which still remains more popular in Spain than any other—consists of those called “Comedias de Capa y Espada,” or Dramas with Cloak and Sword. They took their name from the circumstance, that their principal personages belong to the genteel portion of society, accustomed, in Lope’s time, to the picturesque national dress of cloaks and swords,—excluding, on the one hand, those dramas in which royal personages appear, and, on the other, those which are devoted to common life and the humbler classes. Their main and moving principle is gallantry,—such gallantry as existed in the time of their author. The story is almost always involved and intriguing, and almost always accompanied with an underplot and parody on the characters and adventures of the principal parties, formed out of those of the servants and other inferior personages.
Their titles are intended to be attractive, and are not infrequently taken from among the old rhymed proverbs that were always popular, and that sometimes seem to have suggested the subject of the drama itself. They uniformly extend to the length of regular pieces for the theatre, now settled at three jornadas, or acts, each of which, Lope advises, should have its action compressed within the limits of a single day, though he himself is rarely scrupulous enough to follow his own recommendation. They are not properly comedies, for nothing is more frequent in them than duels, murders, and assassinations; and they are not tragedies, for, besides that they end happily, they are generally composed of humorous and sentimental dialogue, and their action is carried on chiefly by lovers full of romance, or by low characters whose wit is mingled with buffoonery. All this, it should be understood, was new on the Spanish stage; or if hints might have been furnished for individual portions of it as far back as Torres Naharro, the combination, at least, was new, as well as the manners, tone, and costume.
Of such plays Lope wrote a very large number; several hundreds, at least. His genius—rich, free, and eminently inventive—was well fitted for their composition, and in many of them he shows great dramatic tact and talent. Among the best are “The Ugly Beauty”;[309] “Money makes the Man”;[310] “The Pruderies of Belisa,”[311] which has the accidental merit of being all but strictly within the rules; “The Slave of her Lover,”[312] in which he has sounded the depths of a woman’s tenderness; and “The Dog in the Manger,” in which he has almost equally well sounded the depths of her selfish vanity.[313] But perhaps there are some others which, even better than these, will show the peculiar character of this class of Lope’s dramas, and his peculiar position in relation to them. To two or three such we will, therefore, now turn.
“El Azero de Madrid,” or The Madrid Steel, is one of them, and is among his earlier works for the stage.[314] It takes its name from the preparations of steel for medicinal purposes, which, in Lope’s time, had just come into fashionable use; but the main story is that of a light-hearted girl who deceives her father, and especially a hypocritical old aunt, by pretending to be ill and taking steel medicaments from a seeming doctor, who is a friend of her lover, and who prescribes walking abroad, and such other free modes of life as may best afford opportunities for her admirer’s attentions.
There can be little doubt that in this play we find some of the materials for the “Médecin Malgré Lui”; and though the full success of Molière’s original wit is not to be questioned, still the happiest portions of his comedy can do no more than come into fair competition with some passages in that of Lope. The character of the heroine, for instance, is drawn with more spirit in the Spanish than it is in the French play; and that of the devotee aunt, who acts as her duenna, and whose hypocrisy is exposed when she herself falls in love, is one which Molière might well have envied, though it was too exclusively Spanish to be brought within the courtly conventions by which he was restrained.
The whole drama is full of life and gayety, and has a truth and reality about it rare on any stage. Its opening is both a proof of this and a characteristic specimen of its author’s mode of placing his audience at once, by a decisive movement, in the midst of the scene and the personages he means to represent. Lisardo, the hero, and Riselo, his friend, appear watching the door of a fashionable church in Madrid, at the conclusion of the service, to see a lady with whom Lisardo is in love. They are wearied with waiting, while the crowds pass out, and Riselo at last declares he will wait for his friend’s fancy no longer. At this moment appears Belisa, the lady in question, attended by her aunt, Theodora, who wears an affectedly religious dress and is lecturing her:—
Theodora.
Show more of gentleness and modesty;—
Of gentleness in walking quietly,
Of modesty in looking only down
Upon the earth you tread.
Belisa.
’T is what I do.
Theodora.
What? When you’re looking straight towards that man?
Belisa.
Did you not bid me look upon the earth?
And what is he but just a bit of it?
Theodora.
I said the earth whereon you tread, my niece.
Belisa.
But that whereon I tread is hidden quite
With my own petticoat and walking-dress.
Theodora.
Words such as these become no well-bred maid.
But, by your mother’s blessed memory,
I’ll put an end to all your pretty tricks;—
What? You look back at him again?
Belisa.
Who? I?
Theodora.
Yes, you;—and make him secret signs besides.
Belisa.
Not I. ’T is only that you troubled me
With teasing questions and perverse replies,
So that I stumbled and looked round to see
Who would prevent my fall.
Riselo.
(to Lisardo). She falls again.
Be quick and help her.
Lisardo.
(to Belisa). Pardon me, lady,
And forgive my glove.
Theodora.
Who ever saw the like?
Belisa.
I thank you, Sir; you saved me from a fall.
Lisardo.
An angel, lady, might have fallen so;
Or stars that shine with heaven’s own blessed light.
Theodora.
I, too, can fall; but ’t is upon your trick.
Good gentleman, farewell to you!
Lisardo.
Madam,
Your servant. (Heaven save us from such spleen!)
Theodora.
A pretty fall you made of it; and now, I hope,
You’ll be content, since they assisted you.
Belisa.
And you no less content, since now you have
The means to tease me for a week to come.
Theodora.
But why again do you turn back your head?
Belisa.
Why, sure you think it wise and wary
To notice well the place I stumbled at,
Lest I should stumble there when next I pass.
Theodora.
Mischief befall you! But I know your ways!
You’ll not deny this time you looked upon the youth?
Belisa.
Deny it? No!
Theodora.
You dare confess it, then?
Belisa.
Be sure I dare. You saw him help me,—
And would you have me fail to thank him for it?
Theodora.
Go to! Come home! come home!
Belisa.
Now we shall have
A pretty scolding cooked up out of this.[315]
Other passages are equally spirited and no less Castilian. The scene, at the beginning of the second act, between Octavio, another lover of the lady, and his servant, who jests at his master’s passion, as well as the scene with the mock doctor, that follows, are both admirable in their way, and must have produced a great effect on the audiences of Madrid, who felt how true they were to the manners of the time.
But all Lope’s dramas were not written for the public theatres of the capital. He was the courtly, no less than the national, poet of his age; and as we have already noticed a play full of the spirit of his youth, and of the popular character, to which it was addressed, we will now turn to one no less buoyant and free, which was written in his old age and prepared expressly for a royal entertainment. It is the “Saint John’s Eve,” and shows that his manner was the same, whether he was to be judged by the unruly crowds gathered in one of the court-yards of the capital, or by a few persons selected from whatever was most exclusive and elevated in the kingdom.
The occasion for which it was prepared and the arrangements for its exhibition mark, at once, the luxury of the royal theatres in the reign of Philip the Fourth, and the consideration enjoyed by their favored poet.[316] The drama itself was ordered expressly by the Count Duke Olivares, for a magnificent entertainment which he wished to give his sovereign in one of the gardens of Madrid, on Saint John’s eve, in June, 1631. No expense was spared by the profligate favorite to please his indulgent master. The Marquis Juan Bautista Crescencio—the same artist to whom we owe the sombre Pantheon of the Escurial—arranged the architectural constructions, which consisted of luxurious bowers for the king and his courtiers, and a gorgeous theatre in front of them, where, amidst a blaze of torch-light, the two most famous companies of actors of the time performed successively two plays: one written by the united talent of Francisco de Quevedo and Antonio de Mendoça; and the other, the crowning grace of the festival, by Lope de Vega.
The subject of the play of Lope is happily taken from the frolics of the very night on which it was represented;—a night frequently alluded to in the old Spanish stories and ballads, as one devoted, both by Moors and Christians, to gayer superstitions, and adventures more various, than belonged to any other of the old national holidays.[317] What was represented, therefore, had a peculiar interest, from its appropriateness both as to time and place.
Leonora, the heroine, first comes on the stage, and confesses her attachment to Don Juan de Hurtado, a gentleman who has recently returned rich from the Indies. She gives a lively sketch of the way in which he had made love to her in all the forms of national admiration, at church by day, and before her grated balcony in the evenings. Don Luis, her brother, ignorant of all this, gladly becomes acquainted with the lover, whom he interests in a match of his own with Doña Blanca, sister of Bernardo, who is the cherished friend of Don Juan. Eager to oblige the brother of the lady he loves, Don Juan seeks Bernardo, and, in the course of their conversation, ingeniously describes to him a visit he has just made to see all the arrangements for the evening’s entertainment now in progress before the court, including this identical play of Lope; thus whimsically claiming from the audience a belief that the action they are witnessing on the stage in the garden is, at the very same moment, going on in real life in the streets of Madrid, just behind their backs;—a passage which, involving, as it does, compliments to the king and the Count Duke, to Quevedo and Mendoça, must have been one of the most brilliant in its effect that can be imagined. But when Don Juan comes to explain his mission about the lady Blanca, although he finds a most willing consent on the part of her brother, Bernardo, he is thunderstruck at the suggestion, that this brother, his most intimate friend, wishes to make the alliance double and marry Leonora himself.
Now, of course, begin the involutions and difficulties. Don Juan’s sense of what he owes to his friend forbids him from setting up his own claim to Leonora, and he at once decides that nothing remains for him but flight. At the same time, it is discovered that the Lady Blanca is already attached to another person, a noble cavalier, named Don Pedro, and will, therefore, never marry Don Luis, if she can avoid it. The course of true love, therefore, runs smooth in neither case. But both the ladies avow their determination to remain steadfastly faithful to their lovers, though Leonora, from some fancied symptoms of coldness in Don Juan, arising out of his over-nice sense of honor, is in despair at the thought that he may, after all, prove false to her.
So ends the first act. The second opens with the lady Blanca’s account of her own lover, his condition, and the way in which he had made his love known to her in a public garden;—all most faithful to the national costume. But just as she is ready to escape and be privately married to him, her brother, Don Bernardo, comes in and proposes to her to make her first visit to Leonora, in order to promote his own suit. Meantime, the poor Leonora, quite desperate, rushes into the street with her attendant, and meets her lover’s servant, the clown and harlequin of the piece, who tells her that his master, unable any longer to endure his sufferings, is just about escaping from Madrid. The master, Don Juan, follows in hot haste, booted for his journey. The lady faints. When she revives, they come to an understanding, and determine to be married on the instant; so that we have now two private marriages, beset with difficulties, on the carpet at once. But the streets are full of frolicsome crowds, who are indulged in a sort of carnival freedom during this popular festival. Don Juan’s rattling servant gets into a quarrel with some gay young men, who are impertinent to his master, and to the terrified Leonora. Swords are drawn, and Don Juan is arrested by the officers of justice and carried off,—the lady, in her fright, taking refuge in a house, which accidentally turns out to be that of Don Pedro. But Don Pedro is abroad, seeking for his own lady, Doña Blanca. When he returns, however, making his way with difficulty through the rioting populace, he promises, as in Castilian honor bound, to protect the helpless and unknown Leonora, whom he finds in his balcony timidly watching the movements of the crowd in the street, among whom she is hoping to catch a glimpse of her own lover.
In the last act we learn that Don Juan has at once, by bribes, easily rid himself of the officers of justice, and is again in the noisy and gay streets seeking for Leonora. He falls in with Don Pedro, whom he has never seen before; but Don Pedro, taking him, from his inquiries, to be the brother from whom Leonora is anxious to be concealed, carefully avoids betraying her to him. Unhappily, the Lady Blanca now arrives, having been prevented from coming earlier by the confusion in the streets; and he hurries her into his house for concealment till the marriage ceremony can be performed. But she hurries out again no less quickly, having found another lady already concealed there;—a circumstance which she takes to be direct proof of her lover’s falsehood. Leonora follows her, and begins an explanation; but in the midst of it, the two brothers, who had been seeking these same missing sisters, come suddenly in; a scene of great confusion and mutual reproaches ensues; and then the curtain falls with a recognition of all the mistakes and attachments, and the full happiness of the two ladies and their two lovers. At the end, the poet, in his own person, declares, that, if his art permits him to extend his action over twenty-four hours, he has, in the present case, kept within its rules, since he has occupied less than ten.
As a specimen of plays founded on Spanish manners, few are happier than the “Saint John’s Eve.” The love-scenes, all honor and passion; the scenes between the cavaliers and the populace, at once rude and gay; and the scenes with the free-spoken servant who plays the wit are almost all excellent, and instinct with the national character. It was received with the greatest applause, and constituted the finale of the Count Duke’s magnificent entertainment, which, with its music and dances, interludes and refreshments, occupied the whole night, from nine o’clock in the evening till daylight the next morning.
Another of the plays of Lope, and one that belongs to the division of the Capa y Espada, but approaches that of the heroic drama, is his “Fool for Others and Wise for Herself.”[318] It is of a lighter and livelier temper throughout than most of its class. Diana, educated in the simple estate of a shepherdess, and wholly ignorant that she is the daughter and heir of the Duke of Urbino, is suddenly called, by the death of her father, to fill his place. She is surrounded by intriguing enemies, but triumphs over them by affecting a rustic simplicity in whatever she says and does, while, at the same time, she is managing all around her, and carrying on a love intrigue with the Duke Alexander Farnese, which ends in her marriage with him.
The jest of the piece lies in the wit she is able to conceal under her seeming rusticity. For instance, at the very opening, after she has been secretly informed of the true state of things, and has determined what course to pursue, the ambassadors from Urbino come in and tell her, with a solemnity suited to the occasion,—
Lady, our sovereign lord, the Duke, is dead!
To which she replies,—
What’s that to me? But if ’t is surely so,
Why then, Sirs, ’t is for you to bury him.
I’m not the parish curate.[319]
This tone is maintained to the end, whenever the heroine appears; and it gives Lope an opportunity to bring forth a great deal of the fluent, light wit of which he had such ample store.
Little like all we have yet noticed, but still belonging to the same class, is “The Reward of Speaking Well,”[320] a charming play, in which the accounts of the hero’s birth and early condition are so absolutely a description of his own, that it can hardly be doubted that Lope intended to draw the character in some degree from himself. Don Juan, who is the hero, is standing with some idle gallants near a church in Seville, to see the ladies come out; and, while there, defends, though he does not know her, one of them who is lightly spoken of. A quarrel ensues. He wounds his adversary, is pursued, and chances to take refuge in the house of the very lady whose honor he had so gallantly maintained a few moments before. She from gratitude secretes him, and the play ends with a wedding, though not until there has been a perfect confusion of plots and counterplots, intrigues and concealments, such as so often go to make up the three acts of Lope’s dramas.
Many other plays might be added to these, showing, by the diversity of their tone and character, how diverse were the gifts of the extraordinary man who invented them and filled them with various and easy verse. Among them are “Por la Puente Juana,”[321] “El Anzuelo de Fenisa,”[322] “El Ruyseñor de Sevilla,”[323] and “Porfiar hasta Morir”;[324] which last is on the story of Macias el Enamorado, always a favorite with the old Spanish, and Provençal poets. But it is neither needful nor possible to go farther. Enough has been said to show the general character of their class, and we therefore now turn to another.