CHAPTER XVI.
Lope de Vega, continued. — His Heroic Drama, and its Characteristics. — Great Number on Subjects from Spanish History, and Some on Contemporary Events.
The dramas of Lope de Vega that belong to the next class were called “Comedias Heróicas,” or “Comedias Historiales,”—Heroic or Historical Dramas. The chief differences between these and the last are that they bring on the stage personages in a higher rank of life, such as kings and princes; that they generally have an historical foundation, or, at least, use historical names, as if claiming it; and that their prevailing tone is grave, imposing, and even tragical. They have, however, in general, the same involved, intriguing stories and underplots, the same play of jealousy and an over-sensitive honor, and the same low, comic caricatures to relieve their serious parts, that are found in the dramas of “the Cloak and Sword.” Philip the Second disapproved of this class of plays, thinking they tended to diminish the royal dignity,—a circumstance which shows at once the state of manners at the time, and the influence attributed to the theatre.[325]
Lope wrote a very large number of plays in the forms of the heroic drama, which he substantially invented,—perhaps as many as he wrote in any other class. Every thing historical seemed, indeed, to furnish him with a subject, from the earliest annals of the world down to the events of his own time; but his favorite materials were sought in Greek and Roman records, and especially in the chronicles and ballads of Spain itself.
Of the manner in which he dealt with ancient history, his “Roma Abrasada,” or Rome in Ashes, may be taken as a specimen, though certainly one of the least favorable specimens of the class to which it belongs.[326] The facts on which it is founded are gathered from the commonest sources open to its author,—chiefly from the “General Chronicle of Spain”; but they are not formed into a well-constructed or even ingenious plot,[327] and they relate to the whole twenty years that elapsed between the death of Messalina, in the reign of Claudius, and the death of Nero himself, who is not only the hero, but the gracioso, or droll, of the piece.
The first act, which comes down to the murder of Claudius by Nero and Agrippina, contains the old jest of the Emperor asking why his wife does not come to dinner, after he had put her to death, and adds, for equally popular effect, abundant praises of Spain and of Lucan and Seneca, claiming both of them to be Spaniards, and making the latter an astrologer as well as a moralist. The second act shows Nero beginning his reign with great gentleness, and follows Suetonius and the old Chronicle in making him grieve that he knew how to write, since otherwise he could not have been required to sign an order for a just judicial execution. The subsequent violent change in his conduct is not, however, in any way explained or accounted for. It is simply set before the spectators as a fact, and from this moment begins the headlong career of his guilt.
A curious scene, purely Spanish, is one of the early intimations of this change of character. Nero falls in love with Eta; but not at all in the Roman fashion. He visits her by night at her window, sings a sonnet to her, is interrupted by four men in disguise, kills one of them, and escapes from the pursuit of the officers of justice with difficulty; all, as if he were a wandering knight so fair of the time of Philip the Third.[328] The more historical love for Poppæa follows, with a shocking interview between Nero and his mother, in consequence of which he orders her to be at once put to death. The execution of this order, with the horrid exposure of her person afterwards, ends the act, which, gross as it is, does not sink to the revolting atrocities of the old Chronicle from which it is chiefly taken.
The third act is so arranged as partly to gratify the national vanity and partly to conciliate the influence of the Church, of which Lope, like his contemporaries, always stood in awe. Several devout Christians, therefore, are now introduced, and we have an edifying confession of faith, embracing the history of the world from the creation to the crucifixion, with an account of what the Spanish historians regard as the first of the twelve persecutions. The deaths of Seneca and Lucan follow; and then the conflagration of Rome, which, as it constitutes the show part of the play and is relied on for the stage effect it would produce, is brought in near the end, out of the proper order of the story, and after the building of Nero’s luxurious palace, the “aurea domus,” which was really constructed in the desert the fire had left. The audience, meantime, have been put in good humor by a scene in Spain, where a conspiracy is on foot to overthrow the Emperor’s power; and the drama concludes with the death of Poppæa,—again less gross than the account of it in the Chronicle,—with Nero’s own death, and with the proclamation of Galba as his successor; all of them crowded into a space disproportionately small for incidents so important.
But it was not often that Lope wrote so ill or so grossly. On modern, and especially on national subjects, he is almost always more fortunate, and sometimes becomes powerful and imposing. Among these, as a characteristic, though not as a remarkably favorable, specimen of his success, is to be placed the “Príncipe Perfeto,”[329] in which he intends to give his idea of a perfect prince under the character of Don John of Portugal, son of Alfonso the Fifth and contemporary with Ferdinand and Isabella, a full-length portrait of whom, by his friend and confidant, is drawn in the opening of the second act, with a minuteness of detail that leaves no doubt as to the qualities for which princes were valued in the age of the Philips, if not those for which they would be valued now.
Elsewhere in the piece, Don John is represented to have fought bravely in the disastrous battle of Toro, and to have voluntarily restored the throne to his father, who had once abdicated in his favor and had afterwards reclaimed the supreme power. Personal courage and strict justice, however, are the attributes most relied on to exhibit him as a perfect prince. Of the former he gives proof by killing a man in self-defence, and entering into a bull-fight under the most perilous circumstances. Of the latter—his love of justice—many instances are brought on the stage, and, among the rest, his protection of Columbus, after the return of that great navigator from America, though aware how much his discoveries had redounded to the honor of a rival country, and how great had been his own error in not obtaining the benefit of them for Portugal. But the most prominent of these instances of justice relates to a private and personal history, and forms the main subject of the drama. It is as follows.
Don Juan de Sosa, the king’s favorite, is twice sent by him to Spain on embassies of consequence, and, while residing there, lives in the family of a gentleman connected with him by blood, to whose daughter, Leonora, he makes love and wins her affections. Each time, when Don Juan returns to Portugal, he forgets his plighted faith and leaves the lady to languish. At last, she comes with her father to Lisbon in the train of the Spanish princess, Isabella, now married to the king’s son. But even there the false knight refuses to recognize his obligations. In her despair, she presents herself to the king, and explains her position in the following conversation, which is a favorable specimen of the easy narrative in which resides so much of the charm of Lope’s drama. As Leonora enters, she exclaims:—
Prince, whom in peace and war men perfect call,
Listen a woman’s cry!
King.
Begin;—I hear.
Leonora.
Fadrique—he of ancient Lara’s house,
And governor of Seville—is my sire.
King.
Pause there, and pardon first the courtesy
That owes a debt to thy name and to his,
Which ignorance alone could fail to pay.
Leonora.
Such condescending gentleness, my lord,
Is worthy of the wisdom and the wit
Which through the world are blazoned and admired.—
But to my tale. Twice came there to Castile
A knight from this thy land, whose name I hide
Till all his frauds are manifest. For thou,
My lord, dost love him in such wise, that, wert
Thou other than thou art, my true complaints
Would fear to seek a justice they in vain
Would strive to find. Each time within our house
He dwelt a guest, and from the very first
He sought my love.
King.
Speak on, and let not shame
Oppress thy words; for to the judge and priest
Alike confession’s voice should boldly come.
Leonora.
I was deceived. He went and left me sad
To mourn his absence; for of them he is
Who leave behind their knightly, nobler parts,
When they themselves are long since fled and gone.
Again he came, his voice more sweetly tuned,
More syren-like, than ever. I heard the voice,
Nor knew its hidden fraud. O, would that Heaven
Had made us, in its highest justice, deaf,
Since tongues so false it gave to men! He lured,
He lured me as the fowler lures the bird
And snares in meshes hid beneath the grass.
I struggled, but in vain; for Love, heaven’s child,
Has power the mightiest fortress to subdue.
He pledged his knightly word,—in writing pledged it,—
Trusting that afterwards, in Portugal,
The debt and all might safely be denied;—
As if the heavens were narrower than the earth,
And justice not supreme. In short, my lord,
He went; and, proud and vain, the banners bore
That my submission marked, not my defeat;
For where love is, there comes no victory.
His spoils he carried to his native land,
As if they had been torn in heathen war
From Africa; such as in Arcila,
In earliest youth, thyself with glory won;
Or such as now, from shores remote, thy ships
Bring home,—dark slaves, to darker slavery.
No written word of his came back to me.
My honor wept its obsequies, and built its tomb
With Love’s extinguished torches. Soon, the prince,
Thy son, was wed with our Infanta fair,—
God grant it for a blessing to both realms!—
And with her, as ambassador, my sire
To Lisbon came, and I with him. But here—
Even here—his promises that knight denies,
And so disheartens and despises me,
That, if your Grace no remedy can find,
The end of all must be the end of life,—
So heavy is my misery.
King.
That scroll?
Thou hast it?
Leonora.
Surely. It were an error
Not to be repaired, if I had lost it.
King.
It cannot be but I should know the hand,
If he who wrote it in my household serve.
Leonora.
This is the scroll, my lord.
King.
And John de Sosa’s is
The signature! But yet, unless mine eyes
Had seen and recognized his very hand,
I never had believed the tale thou bring’st;—
So highly deem I of his faithfulness.[330]
The dénouement naturally consists in the marriage, which is thus made a record of the king’s perfect justice.
Columbus, as we have seen, appears in this piece. He is introduced with little skill, but the dignity of his pretensions is not forgotten. In another drama, devoted to the discovery of America, and called “The New World of Columbus,” his character is further and more truly developed. The play itself embraces the events of the great Admiral’s life between his first vain effort to obtain countenance in Portugal and his triumphant presentation of the spoils of the New World to Ferdinand and Isabella at Barcelona,—a period amounting to about fourteen years.[331] It is one of Lope’s more wild and extravagant attempts, but not without marks of his peculiar talent, and fully embodies the national feeling in regard to America, as a world rescued from heathenism. Some of its scenes are in Portugal; others on the plain of Granada, at the moment of its fall; others in the caravel of Columbus during the mutiny; and yet others in the West Indies, and before his sovereigns on his return home.
Among the personages, besides such as might be reasonably anticipated from the course of the story, are Gonzalvo de Córdova, sundry Moors, several American Indians, and several spiritual beings, such as Providence, Christianity, and Idolatry; the last of whom struggles with great vehemence against the introduction of the Spaniards and their religion into the New World, and in passages like the following seems in danger of having the best of the argument.
O Providence Divine, permit them not
To do me this most plain unrighteousness!
’T is but base avarice that spurs them on.
Religion is the color and the cloak;
But gold and silver, hid within the earth,
Are all they truly seek and strive to win.[332]
The greater part of the action and the best portions of it pass in the New World; but it is difficult to imagine any thing more extravagant than the whole fable. Dramatic propriety is constantly set at naught. The Indians, before the appearance of Europeans among them, sing about Phœbus and Diana; and while, from the first, they talk nothing but Spanish, they frequently pretend, after the arrival of the Spaniards, to be unable to understand a word of their language. The scene in which Idolatry pleads its cause against Christianity before Divine Providence, the scenes with the Demon, and those touching the conversion of the heathen, might have been presented in the rudest of the old Moralities. Those, on the contrary, in which the natural feelings and jealousies of the simple and ignorant natives are brought out, and those in which Columbus appears,—always dignified and gentle,—are not without merit. Few, however, can be said to be truly good or poetical; and yet a poetical interest is kept up through the worst of them, and the story they involve is followed to the end with a living curiosity.
The common traditions are repeated, that Columbus was born at Nervi, and that he received from a dying pilot at Madeira the charts that led him to his grand adventure; but it is singular, that, in contradiction to all this, Lope, in other parts of the play, should have hazarded the suggestion, that Columbus was moved by Divine inspiration. The friar, in the scene of the mutiny, declares it expressly; and Columbus himself, in his discourse with his brother Bartholomew, when their fortunes seemed all but desperate, plainly alludes to it, when he says,—
A hidden Deity still drives me on,
Bidding me trust the truth of what I feel,
And, if I watch, or if I sleep, impels
The strong will boldly to work out its way.
But what is this that thus possesses me?
What spirit is it drives me onward thus?
Where am I borne? What is the road I take?
What track of destiny is this I tread?
And what the impulse that I blindly follow?
Am I not poor, unknown, a broken man,
Depending on the pilot’s anxious trade?
And shall I venture on the mighty task
To add a distant world to this we know?[333]
The conception of the character in this particular is good, and, being founded, as we know it was, on the personal convictions of Columbus himself, might have been followed out by further developments with poetical effect. But the opportunity is neglected, and, like many other occasions for success, is thrown away by Lope, through haste and carelessness.
Another of the dramas of this class, “El Castigo sin Venganza,” or Punishment, not Revenge, is important from the mode in which its subject is treated, and interesting from the circumstance that its history can be more exactly traced than that of any other of Lope’s plays. It is founded on the dark and hideous story in the annals of Ferrara, during the fifteenth century, which Lord Byron found in Gibbon’s “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” and made the subject of his “Parisina,”[334] but which Lope, following the old chronicles of the duchy, has presented in a somewhat different light, and thrown with no little skill into a dramatic form.
The Duke of Ferrara, in his tragedy, is a person of mark and spirit; a commander of the Papal forces, and a prince of statesmanlike experience and virtues. He marries when already past the middle age of life, and sends his natural son, Frederic, to receive his beautiful bride, a daughter of the Duke of Mantua, and to conduct her to Ferrara. Before he reaches Mantua, however, Frederic meets her accidentally on the way; and his first interview with his step-mother is when he rescues her from drowning. From this moment they become gradually more and more attached to each other, until their attachment ends in guilt; partly through the strong impulses of their own natures, and partly from the coldness and faithlessness of the Duke to his young and passionate wife.
On his return home from a successful campaign, the Duke discovers the intrigue. A struggle ensues between his affection for his son and the stinging sense of his own dishonor. At last he determines to punish; but in such a manner as to hide the grounds of his offence. To effect this, he confines his wife in a darkened room, and so conceals and secures her person, that she can neither move, nor speak, nor be seen. He then sends his offending son to her, under the pretence that beneath the pall that hides her is placed a traitor, whom the son is required to kill in order to protect his father’s life; and when the desperate young man rushes from the room, ignorant who has been his victim, he is instantly cut down by the by-standers, on his father’s outcry, that he has just murdered his step-mother, with whose blood his hands are, in fact, visibly reeking.
Lope finished this play on the 1st of August, 1631, when he was nearly sixty-nine years old; and yet there are few of his dramas, in the class to which it belongs, that are more marked with poetical vigor, and in none is the versification more light and various.[335] The characters, especially those of the father and son, are better defined and better sustained than usual; and the whole was evidently written with care, for there are not infrequently large alterations, as well as many minute verbal corrections, in the original manuscript, which is still extant.
It was not licensed for representation till the 9th of May, 1632,—apparently from the known unwillingness of the court to have persons of rank, like the Duke of Ferrara, brought upon the stage in a light so odious. At any rate, when the tardy permission was granted, it was accompanied with a certificate that the Duke was treated with “the decorum due to his person”; though, even with this assurance, it was acted but once, notwithstanding it made a strong impression at the time, and was brought out by the company of Figueroa, the most successful of the period,—Arias, whose acting Montalvan praises highly, taking the part of the son. In 1634, Lope printed it, with more than common care, at Barcelona, dedicating it to his great patron, the Duke of Sessa, among “the servants of whose house,” he says, he “was inscribed”; and the next year, immediately after his death, it appeared again, without the Dedication, in the twenty-first volume of his plays, prepared anew by himself for the press, but published by his daughter Feliciana.[336]
Like “Punishment, not Vengeance,” several other dramas of its class are imbued with the deepest spirit of tragedy. “The Knights Commanders of Córdova” is an instance in point.[337] It is a parallel to the story of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra in its horrors; but the husband, instead of meeting the fate of Agamemnon, puts to death, not only his guilty wife, but all his servants and every living thing in his household, to satisfy his savage sense of honor. Poetry is not wanting in some of its scenes, but the atrocities of the rest will hardly permit it to be perceived.
“The Star of Seville,” on the other hand, though much more truly tragic, is liable to no such objection.[338] In some respects it resembles Corneille’s “Cid.” At the command of his king and from the loftiest loyalty, a knight of Seville kills his friend, a brother of the lady whom he is about to marry. The king afterwards endeavours to hold him harmless for the crime; but the royal judges refuse to interrupt the course of the law in his favor, and the brave knight is saved from death only by the plenary confession of his guilty sovereign. It is one of the very small number of Lope’s pieces that have no comic and distracting underplot. Not a few of its scenes are admirable; especially that in which the king urges the knight to kill his friend; that in which the lovely and innocent creature whom the knight is about to marry receives, in the midst of the frank and delightful expressions of her happiness, the dead body of her brother, who has been slain by her lover; and that in which the Alcaldes solemnly refuse to wrest the law in obedience to the royal commands. The conclusion is better than that in the tragedy of Corneille. The lady abandons the world and retires to a convent.
Of the great number of Lope’s heroic dramas on national subjects, a few should be noticed, in order to indicate the direction he gave to this division of his theatre. One, for instance, is on the story of Bamba, taken from the plough to be made king of Spain;[339] and another, “The Last Goth,” is on the popular traditions of the loss of Spain by Roderic;[340]—the first being among the earliest of his published plays,[341] and the last not printed till twelve years after his death, but both written in one spirit and upon the same system. On the attractive subject of Bernardo del Carpio he has several dramas. One is called “The Youthful Adventures of Bernardo,” and relates his exploits down to the time when he discovered the secret of his birth. Another, called “Bernardo in France,” gives us the story of that part of his life for which the ballads and chronicles afford only slight hints. And a third, “Marriage in Death,” involves the misconduct of King Alfonso, and the heart-rending scene in which the dead body of Bernardo’s father is delivered to the hero, who has sacrificed every thing to filial piety, and now finds himself crushed and ruined by it.[342] The seven Infantes of Lara are not passed over, as we see both in the play that bears their name, and in the more striking one on the story of Mudarra, “El Bastardo Mudarra.”[343] Indeed, it seems as if no picturesque point in the national annals were overlooked by Lope;[344] and that, after bringing on the stage the great events in Spanish history and tradition consecutively down to his own times, he looks round on all sides for subjects, at home and abroad, taking one from the usurpation of Boris Gudunow at Moscow, in 1606,[345] another from the conquest of Arauco, in 1560,[346] and another from the great league that ended with the battle of Lepanto, in 1571; in which last, to avoid the awkwardness of a sea-fight on the stage, he is guilty of introducing the greater awkwardness of an allegorical figure of Spain describing the battle to the audience in Madrid, at the very moment when it is supposed to be going on near the shores of Greece.[347]
The whole class of these heroic and historical dramas, it should be remembered, makes little claim to historical accuracy. A love-story, filled as usual with hairbreadth escapes, jealous quarrels, and questions of honor, runs through nearly every one of them; and though, in some cases, we may trust to the facts set before us, as we must in “The Valiant Cespedes,” where the poet gravely declares that all except the love adventures are strictly true,[348] still, in no case can it be pretended, that the manners of an earlier age, or of foreign nations, are respected, or that the general coloring of the representation is to be regarded as faithful. Thus, in one play we see Nero hurrying about the streets of Rome, like a Spanish gallant, with a guitar on his arm, and making love to his mistress at her grated window.[349] In another, Belisarius, in the days of his glory, is selected to act the part of Pyramus in an interlude before the Emperor Justinian, much as if he belonged to Nick Bottom’s company, and afterwards has his eyes put out, on a charge of making love to the Empress.[350] And in yet a third, Cyrus the Great, after he is seated on his throne, marries a shepherdess.[351] But there is no end to such absurdities in Lope’s plays; and the explanation of them all is, that they were not felt to be such at the time. Truth and faithfulness in regard to the facts, manners, and costume of a drama were not supposed to be more important, in the age of Lope, than an observation of the unities;—not more important than they were supposed to be a century later, in France, in the unending romances of Calprenède and Scudéry;—not more important than they are deemed in an Italian opera now:—so profound is the thought of the greatest of all the masters of the historical drama, that “the best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”