CHAPTER XVII.
Lope de Vega, continued. — Dramas that are founded on the Manners of Common Life. — The Wise Man at Home. — The Damsel Theodora. — Captives in Algiers. — Influence of the Church on the Drama. — Lope’s Plays from Scripture. — The Birth of Christ. — The Creation of the World. — Lope’s Plays on the Lives of Saints. — Saint Isidore of Madrid. — Lope’s Sacramental Autos for the Festival of the Corpus Christi. — Their Prologues. — Their Interludes. — The Autos Themselves.
The historical drama of Lope was but a deviation from the more truly national type of the “Comedia de Capa y Espada,” made by the introduction of historical names for its leading personages, instead of those that belong to fashionable and knightly life. This, however, was not the only deviation he made.[352] He went sometimes quite as far on the other side, and created a variety or subdivision of the theatre, founded on common life, in which the chief personages, like those of “The Watermaid,” and “The Slave of her Lover,” belong to the lower classes of society.[353] Of such dramas he has left only a few, but these few are interesting.
Perhaps the best specimen of them is “The Wise Man at Home,” in which the hero, if he may be so called, is Mendo, the son of a poor charcoal-burner.[354] He has married the only child of a respectable farmer, and is in an easy condition of life, with the road to advancement, at least in a gay course, open before him. But he prefers to remain where he is. He refuses the solicitations of a neighbouring lawyer or clerk, engaged in public affairs, who would have the honest Mendo take upon himself the airs of an hidalgo and caballero. Especially upon what was then the great point in private life,—his relations with his pretty wife,—he shows his uniform good sense, while his more ambitious friend falls into serious embarrassments, and is obliged at last to come to him for counsel and help.
The doctrine of the piece is well explained in the following reply of Mendo to his friend, who had been urging him to lead a more showy life, and raise the external circumstances of his father.
He that was born to live in humble state
Makes but an awkward knight, do what you will.
My father means to die as he has lived,
The same plain collier that he always was;
And I, too, must an honest ploughman die.
’T is but a single step, or up or down;
For men there must be that will plough and dig,
And, when the vase has once been filled, be sure
’T will always savor of what first it held.[355]
The story is less important than it is in many of Lope’s dramas; but the sketches of common life are sometimes spirited, like the one in which Mendo describes his first sight of his future wife busied in household work, and the elaborate scene where his first child is christened.[356] The characters, on the other hand, are better defined and drawn than is common with him; and that of the plain, practically wise Mendo is sustained, from beginning to end, with consistency and skill, as well as with good dramatic effect.[357]
Another of these more domestic pieces is called “The Damsel Theodora,” and shows how gladly and with what ingenuity Lope seized on the stories current in his time and turned them to dramatic account. The tale he now used, which bears the same name with the play, and is extremely simple in its structure, was written by an Aragonese, of whom we know only that his name was Alfonso.[358] The damsel Theodora, in this original fiction, is a slave in Tunis, and belongs to a Hungarian merchant living there, who has lost his whole fortune. At her suggestion, she is offered by her master to the king of Tunis, who is so much struck with her beauty and with the amount of her knowledge, that he purchases her at a price which reëstablishes her master’s condition. The point of the whole consists in the exhibition of this knowledge through discussions with learned men; but the subjects are most of them of the commonest kind, and the merit of the story is quite inconsiderable,—less, for instance, than that of “Friar Bacon,” in English, to which, in several respects, it may be compared.[359]
But Lope knew his audiences, and succeeded in adapting this old tale to their taste. The damsel Theodora, as he arranges her character for the stage, is the daughter of a professor at Toledo, and is educated in all the learning of her father’s schools. She, however, is not raised by it above the influences of the tender passion, and, running away with her lover, is captured by a vessel from the coast of Barbary, and carried as a slave successively to Oran, to Constantinople, and finally to Persia, where she is sold to the Sultan for an immense sum on account of her rare knowledge, displayed in the last act of the play much as it is in the original tale of Alfonso, and sometimes in the same words. But the love intrigue, with a multitude of jealous troubles and adventures, runs through the whole; and as the Sultan is made to understand at last the relations of all the parties, who are strangely assembled before him, he gives the price of the damsel as her dower, and marries her to the lover with whom she originally fled from Toledo. The principal jest, both in the drama and the story, is, that a learned doctor, who is defeated by Theodora in a public trial of wits, is bound by the terms of the contest to be stripped naked, and buys off his ignominy with a sum which goes still further to increase the lady’s fortune and the content of her husband.[360]
The last of Lope’s plays to be noticed among those whose subjects are drawn from common life is a more direct appeal, perhaps, than any other of its class to the popular feeling. It is his “Captives in Algiers,”[361] and has been already alluded to as partly borrowed from a play of Cervantes. In its first scenes, a Morisco of Valencia leaves the land where his race had suffered so cruelly, and, after establishing himself among those of his own faith in Algiers, returns by night as a corsair, and, from his familiar knowledge of the Spanish coast, where he was born, easily succeeds in carrying off a number of Christian captives. The fate of these victims, and that of others whom they find in Algiers, including a lover and his mistress, form the subject of the drama. In the course of it, we have scenes in which Christian Spaniards are publicly sold in the slave-market; Christian children torn from their parents and cajoled out of their faith;[362] and a Christian gentleman made to suffer the most dreadful forms of martyrdom for his religion;—in short, we have set before us whatever could most painfully and powerfully excite the interest and sympathy of an audience in Spain at a moment when such multitudes of Spanish families were mourning the captivity of their children and friends.[363] It ends with an account of a play to be acted by the Christian slaves in one of their vast prison-houses, to celebrate the recent marriage of Philip the Third; from which, as well as from a reference to the magnificent festivities that followed it at Denia, in which Lope, as we know, took part, we may be sure that the “Cautivos de Argel” was written as late as 1598, and probably not much later.[364]
A love-story unites its rather incongruous materials into something like a connected whole; but the part we read with the most interest is that assigned to Cervantes, who appears under his family name of Saavedra, without disguise, though without any mark of respect.[365] Considering that Lope took from him some of the best materials for this very piece, and that the sufferings and heroism of Cervantes at Algiers must necessarily have been present to his thoughts when he composed it, we can hardly do him any injustice by adding, that he ought either to have given Cervantes a more dignified part, and alluded to him with tenderness and consideration, or else have refrained from introducing him at all.
The three forms of Lope’s drama which have thus far been considered, and which are nearly akin to each other,[366] were, no doubt, the spontaneous productions of his own genius; modified, indeed, by what he found already existing, and by the taste and will of the audiences for which he wrote, but still essentially his own. Probably, if he had been left to himself and to the mere influences of the theatre, he would have preferred to write no other dramas than such as would naturally come under one of these divisions. But neither he nor his audiences were permitted to settle the whole of this question. The Church, always powerful in Spain, but never so powerful as during the latter part of the reign of Philip the Second, when Lope was just rising into notice, was offended with the dramas then so much in favor, and not without reason. Their free love-stories, their duels, and, indeed, their ideas generally upon domestic life and personal character, have, unquestionably, any thing but a Christian tone.[367] A controversy, therefore, naturally arose concerning their lawfulness, and this controversy was continued till 1598, when, by a royal decree, the representation of secular plays in Madrid was entirely forbidden, and the common theatres were closed for nearly two years.[368]
Lope was compelled to accommodate himself to this new state of things, and seems to have done it easily and with his accustomed address. He had, as we have seen, early written religious plays, like the old Mysteries and Moralities; and he now undertook to infuse their spirit into the more attractive forms of his secular drama, and thus produce an entertainment which, while it might satisfy the popular audiences of the capital, would avoid the rebukes of the Church. His success was as marked as it had been before; and the new varieties of form in which his genius now disported itself were hardly less striking.
His most obvious resource was the Scriptures, to which, as they had been used more than four centuries for dramatic purposes, on the greater religious festivals of the Spanish Church, the ecclesiastical powers could hardly, with a good grace, now make objection. Lope, therefore, resorted to them freely; sometimes constructing dramas out of them which might be mistaken for the old Mysteries, were it not for their more poetical character, and their sometimes approaching so near to his own intriguing comedies, that, but for the religious parts, they might seem to belong to the merely secular and fashionable theatre that had just been interdicted.
Of the first, or more religious sort, his “Birth of Christ” may be taken as a specimen.[369] It is divided into three acts, and begins in Paradise, immediately after the creation. The first scene introduces Satan, Pride, Beauty, and Envy;—Satan appearing with “dragon’s wings, a bushy wig, and above it a serpent’s head”; and Envy carrying a heart in her hand and wearing snakes in her hair. After some discussion about the creation, Adam and Eve approach in the characters of King and Queen. Innocence, who is the clown and wit of the piece, and Grace, who is dressed in white, come in at the same time, and, while Satan and his friends are hidden in the thicket, hold the following dialogue, which may be regarded as characteristic, not only of this particular drama, but of the whole class to which it belongs:—
Adam.
Here, Lady Queen, upon this couch of grass and flowers
Sit down.
Innocence.
Well, that’s good, i’ faith;
He calls her Lady Queen.
Grace.
And don’t you see
She is his wife; flesh of his flesh indeed,
And of his bone the bone?
Innocence.
That’s just as if
You said, She, through his being, being hath.—
What dainty compliments they pay each other!
Grace.
Two persons are they, yet one flesh they are.
Innocence.
And may their union last a thousand years,
And in sweet peace continue evermore!
Grace.
The king his father and his mother leaves
For his fair queen.
Innocence.
And leaves not overmuch,
Since no man yet has been with parents born.
But, in good faith, good master Adam,
All fine as you go on, pranked out by Grace,
I feel no little trouble at your course,
Like that of other princes made of clay.
But I admit it was a famous trick,
In your most sovereign Lord, out of the mud
A microcosm nice to make, and do it
In one day.
Grace.
He that the greater world could build
By his commanding power alone, to him
It was not much these lesser works on earth
To do. And see you not the two great lamps
Which overhead he hung so fair?
Innocence.
And how
The earth he sowed with flowers, the heavens with stars?[370]
Immediately after the fall, and therefore, according to the common Scriptural computation, about four thousand years before she was born, the Madonna appears, and personally drives Satan down to perdition, while, at the same time, an Angel expels Adam and Eve from Paradise. The Divine Prince and the Celestial Emperor, as the Saviour and the Supreme Divinity are respectively called, then come upon the vacant stage, and, in a conference full of theological subtilties, arrange the system of man’s redemption, which, at the Divine command, Gabriel,
Accompanied with armies all of stars
To fill the air with glorious light,[371]
descending to Galilee, announces as about to be accomplished by the birth of the Messiah. This ends the first act.
The second opens with the rejoicings of the Serpent, Sin, and Death,—confident that the World is now fairly given up to them. But their rejoicings are short. Clarionets are sounded, and Divine Grace appears on the upper portion of the stage, and at once expels the sinful rout from their boasted possessions; explaining afterwards to the World, who now comes on as one of the personages of the scene, that the Holy Family are immediately to bring salvation to men.
The World replies with rapture:—
O holy Grace, already I behold them;
And, though the freezing night forbids, will haste
To border round my hoar frost all with flowers;
To force the tender buds to spring again
From out their shrunken branches; and to loose
The gentle streamlets from the hill-tops cold,
That they may pour their liquid crystal down;
While the old founts, at my command, shall flow
With milk, and ash-trees honey pure distil
To quench our joyful thirst.[372]
The next scene is in Bethlehem, where Joseph and Mary appear begging for entrance at an inn, but, owing to the crowd, they are sent to a stable just outside the city, in whose contiguous fields shepherds and shepherdesses are seen suffering from the frosty night, but jesting and singing rude songs about it. In the midst of their troubles and merriment, an angel appears in a cloud announcing the birth of the Saviour; and the second act is then concluded by the resolution of all to go and find him, and carry him their glad salutations.
The last act is chiefly taken up with discussions of the same subjects by the same shepherds and shepherdesses, and an account of the visit to the mother and child; some parts of which are not without poetical merit. It ends with the appearance of the three Kings, preceded by dances of Gypsies and Negroes, and with the worship and offerings brought by all to the newborn Saviour.
Such dramas do not seem to have been favorites with Lope, and perhaps were not favorites with his audiences. At least, few of them appear among his printed works;—the one just noticed, and another, called “The Creation of the World and Man’s First Sin,” being the most prominent and curious;[373] and one on the atonement, entitled “The Pledge Redeemed,” being the most wild and gross. But to the proper stories of the Scriptures he somewhat oftener resorted, and with characteristic talent. Thus, we have full-length plays on the history of Tobias and the seven-times-wedded maid;[374] on the fair Esther and Ahasuerus;[375] and on the somewhat unsuitable subject of the Ravishment of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, as it is told in the book of Genesis.[376] In all these, and in the rest of the class to which they belong, Spanish manners and ideas, rather than Jewish, give their coloring to the scene; and the story, though substantially taken from the Hebrew records, is thus rendered much more attractive, for the purposes of its representation at Madrid, than it would have been in its original simplicity; as, for instance, in the case of the “Esther,” where a comic underplot between a coquettish shepherdess and her lover is much relied upon for the popular effect of the whole.[377]
Still, even these dramas were not able to satisfy audiences accustomed to the more national spirit of plays founded on fashionable life and intriguing adventures. A wider range, therefore, was taken. Striking religious events of all kinds—especially those found in the lives of holy men—were resorted to, and ingenious stories were constructed out of the miracles and sufferings of saints, which were often as interesting as the intrigues of Spanish gallants, or the achievements of the old Spanish heroes, and were sometimes hardly less free and wild. Saint Jerome, under the name of the “Cardinal of Bethlehem,” is brought upon the stage in one of them, first as a gay gallant, and afterwards as a saint scourged by angels, and triumphing, in open show, over Satan.[378] In another, San Diego of Alcalá rises, from being the attendant of a poor hermit, to be a general with military command, and, after committing most soldier-like atrocities in the Fortunate Islands, returns and dies at home in the odor of sanctity.[379] And in yet others, historical subjects of a religious character are taken, like the story of the holy Bamba torn from the plough, in the seventh century, and by miraculous command made king of Spain;[380] or like the life of the Mohammedan prince of Morocco, who, in 1593, was converted to Christianity and publicly baptized in presence of Philip the Second, with the heir of the throne for his godfather.[381]
All these, and many more like them, were represented with the consent of the ecclesiastical powers,—sometimes even in convents and other religious houses, but oftener in public, and always under auspices no less obviously religious.[382] The favorite materials for such dramas, however, were found, at last, almost exclusively in the lives of popular saints; and the number of plays filled with such histories and miracles was so great, soon after the year 1600, that they came to be considered as a class by themselves, under the name of “Comedias de Santos,” or Saints’ Plays. Lope wrote many of them. Besides those already mentioned, we have from his pen dramatic compositions on the lives of Saint Francis, San Pedro de Nolasco, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Julian, Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, Santa Teresa, three on San Isidro de Madrid, and not a few others. Many of them, like Saint Nicholas of Tolentino,[383] are very strange and extravagant; but perhaps none will give a more true idea of the entire class than the first one he wrote, on the subject of the favored saint of his own city, San Isidro de Madrid.[384]
It seems to have all the varieties of interest and character that belong to the secular divisions of the Spanish drama. Scenes of stirring interest occur in it among warriors just returned to Madrid from a successful foray against the Moors; gay scenes, with rustic dancing and frolics, at the marriage of Isidro and the birth of his son; and scenes of broad farce with the sacristan, who complains, that, owing to Isidro’s power with Heaven, he no longer gets fees for burials, and that he believes Death is gone to live elsewhere. But through the whole runs the loving and devout character of the Saint himself, and gives it a sort of poetical unity. The angels come down to plough for him, that he may no longer incur reproach by neglecting his labors in order to attend mass; and at the touch of his goad, a spring of pure water, still looked upon with reverence, rises in a burning waste to refresh his unjust master. Popular songs and poetry, meanwhile,[385] with a parody of the old Moorish ballad of “Gentle River, Gentle River,”[386] and allusions to the holy image of Almudena, and the church of Saint Andrew, give life to the dialogue, as it goes on;—all familiar as household words at Madrid, and striking chords which, when this drama was first represented, still vibrated in every heart. At the end, the body of the Saint, after his death, is exposed before the well-known altar of his favorite church; and there, according to the old traditions, his former master and the queen come to worship him, and, with pious sacrilege, endeavour to bear away from his person relics for their own protection; but are punished on the spot by a miracle, which thus serves at once as the final and crowning testimony to the divine merits of the Saint, and as an appropriate dénouement for the piece.
No doubt, such a drama, extending over forty or fifty years of time, with its motley crowd of personages,—among whom are angels and demons, Envy, Falsehood, and the River Manzanares,—would now be accounted grotesque and irreverent, rather than any thing else. But in the time of Lope, the audiences not only brought a willing faith to such representations, but received gladly an exhibition of the miracles which connected the saint they worshipped and his beneficent virtues with their own times and their personal well-being.[387] If to this we add the restraints on the theatre, and Lope’s extraordinary facility, grace, and ingenuity, which never failed to consult and gratify the popular taste, we shall have all the elements necessary to explain the great number of religious dramas he composed, whether of the nature of Mysteries, Scripture stories, or lives of saints. They belonged to his age and country as much as he himself did.
But Lope adventured with success in another form of the drama, not only more grotesque than that of the full-length religious plays, but intended yet more directly for popular edification,—the “Autos Sacramentales,” or Sacramental Acts,—a sort of religious plays performed in the streets during the season when the gorgeous ceremonies of the “Corpus Christi” filled them with rejoicing crowds.[388] No form of the Spanish drama is older, and none had so long a reign, or maintained during its continuance so strong a hold on the general favor. Its representations, as we have already seen, may be found among the earliest intimations of the national literature; and, as we shall learn hereafter, they were with difficulty suppressed by the royal authority after the middle of the eighteenth century. In the age of Lope, and in that immediately following, they were at the height of their success, and had become an important part of the religious ceremonies arranged for the solemn sacramental festival to which they were devoted, not only in Madrid, but throughout Spain; all the theatres being closed for a month to give place to them and to do them honor.[389]
Yet to our apprehensions, notwithstanding their religious claims, they seem almost wholly gross and irreverent. Indeed, the very circumstances under which they were represented would seem to prove that they were not regarded as really solemn. A sort of rude mumming, which certainly had nothing grave about it, preceded them, as they advanced through the thronged streets, where the windows and balconies of all the better sort of houses were hung with silks and tapestries to do honor to the occasion. First in this extraordinary procession came the figure of a misshapen marine monster, called the Tarasca, half serpent in form, borne by men concealed in its cumbrous bulk, and surmounted by another figure representing the Woman of Babylon,—the whole so managed as to fill with wonder and terror the poor country people that crowded round it, some of whose hats and caps were generally snatched away by the grinning beast, and regarded as the lawful plunder of his conductors.[390]
Then followed a company of fair children, with garlands on their heads, singing hymns and litanies of the Church; and sometimes companies of men and women with castanets, dancing the national dances. Two or more huge Moorish or negro giants, commonly called the Gigantones, made of pasteboard, came next, jumping about grotesquely, to the great alarm of some of the less experienced part of the crowd, and to the great amusement of the rest. Then, with much pomp and fine music, appeared the priests, bearing the Host under a splendid canopy; and after them a long and devout procession, where was seen, in Madrid, the king, with a taper in his hand, like the meanest of his subjects, together with the great officers of state and foreign ambassadors, who all crowded in to swell the splendor of the scene.[391] Last of all came showy cars, filled with actors from the public theatres, who were to figure on the occasion, and add to its attractions, if not to its solemnity;—personages who constituted so important a part of the day’s festivity, that the whole was often called, in popular phrase, The Festival of the Cars,—“La Fiesta de los Carros.”[392]
This procession—not, indeed, magnificent in the towns and hamlets of the provinces, as it was in the capital, but always as imposing as the resources of the place where it occurred could make it—stopped from time to time under awnings in front of the house of some distinguished person,—perhaps that of the President of the Council of Castile at Madrid; perhaps that of the alcalde of a village,—and there waited reverently till certain religious offices could be performed by the ecclesiastics; the multitude, all the while, kneeling, as if in church. As soon as these duties were over, or at a later hour of the day, the actors from the cars appeared on a neighbouring stage, in the open air, and performed, according to their limited service, the sacramental auto prepared for the occasion, and always alluding to it directly. Of such autos, we know, on good authority, that Lope wrote about four hundred,[393] though no more than twelve or thirteen of the whole number are now extant, and these, we are told, were published only that the towns and villages of the interior might enjoy the same devout pleasures that were enjoyed by the court and capital;—so universal was the fanaticism for this strange form of amusement, and so deeply was it seated in the popular character.[394]
At an earlier period, and perhaps as late as the time of Lope’s first appearance, this part of the festival consisted of a very simple exhibition, accompanied with rustic songs, eclogues, and dancing, such as we find it in a large collection of manuscript autos, of which two that have been published are slight and rude in their structure and dialogue, and seem to date from a period as early as that of Lope;[395] but during his lifetime, and chiefly under his influence, it became a formal and well-defined popular entertainment, divided into three parts, each of which was quite distinct in its character from the others, and all of them dramatic.
First of all, in its more completed state, came the loa. This was always of the nature of a prologue; but sometimes, in form, it was a dialogue spoken by two or more actors. One of the best of Lope’s is of this kind. It is filled with the troubles of a peasant who has come to Madrid in order to see these very shows, and has lost his wife in the crowd; but, just as he has quite consoled himself and satisfied his conscience by determining to have her cried once or twice, and then to give her up as a lucky loss and take another, she comes in and describes with much spirit the wonders of the procession she had seen, precisely as her audience themselves had just seen it; thus making, in the form of a prologue, a most amusing and appropriate introduction for the drama that was to follow.[396] Another of Lope’s loas is a discussion between a gay gallant and a peasant, who talks, in his rustic dialect, on the subject of the doctrine of transubstantiation.[397] Another is given in the character of a Morisco, and is a monologue, in the dialect of the speaker, on the advantages and disadvantages of his turning Christian in earnest, after having for some time made his living fraudulently by begging in the assumed character of a Christian pilgrim.[398] All of them are amusing, though burlesque; but some of them are any thing rather than religious.
After the loa came an entremes. All that remain to us of Lope’s entremeses are mere farces, like the interludes used every day in the secular theatres. In one instance he makes an entremes a satire upon lawyers, in which a member of the craft, as in the old French “Maistre Pathelin,” is cheated and robbed by a seemingly simple peasant, who first renders him extremely ridiculous, and then escapes by disguising himself as a blind ballad-singer, and dancing and singing in honor of the festival,—a conclusion which seems to be peculiarly irreverent for this particular occasion.[399] In another instance, he ridicules the poets of his time by bringing on the stage a lady who pretends she has just come from the Indies, with a fortune, in order to marry a poet, and succeeds in her purpose; but both find themselves deceived, for the lady has no income but such as is gained by a pair of castanets, and her husband turns out to be a ballad-maker. Both, however, have good sense enough to be content with each other, and to agree to go through the world together singing and dancing ballads, of which, by way of finale to the entremes, they at once give the crowd a specimen.[400] Yet another of Lope’s successful attempts in this way is an interlude containing within itself the representation of a play on the story of Helen, which reminds us of the similar entertainment of Pyramus and Thisbe in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; but it breaks off in the middle,—the actor who plays Paris running off in earnest with the actress who plays Helen, and the piece ending with a burlesque scene of confusions and reconciliations.[401] And finally, another is a parody of the procession itself, with its giants, cars, and all; treating the whole with the gayest ridicule.[402]
Thus far, all has been avowedly comic in the dramatic exhibitions of these religious festivals. But the autos or sacramental acts themselves, with which the whole concluded, and to which all that preceded was only introductory, claim to be more grave in their general tone, though in some cases, like the prologues and interludes, parts of them are too whimsical and extravagant to be any thing but amusing. “The Bridge of the World” is one of this class.[403] It represents the Prince of Darkness placing the giant Leviathan on the bridge of the world, to defend its passage against all comers who do not confess his supremacy. Adam and Eve, who, we are told in the directions to the players, appear “dressed very gallantly after the French fashion,” are naturally the first that present themselves.[404] They subscribe to the hard condition, and pass over in sight of the audience. In the same manner, as the dialogue informs us, the patriarchs, with Moses, David, and Solomon, go over; but at last the Knight of the Cross, “the Celestial Amadis of Greece,” as he is called, appears in person, overthrows the pretensions of the Prince of Darkness, and leads the Soul of Man in triumph across the fatal passage. The whole is obviously a parody of the old story of the Giant defending the Bridge of Mantible;[405] and when to this are added parodies of the ballad of “Count Claros” applied to Adam,[406] and of other old ballads applied to the Saviour,[407] the confusion of allegory and farce, of religion and folly, seems to be complete.
Others of the autos are more uniformly grave. “The Harvest” is a spiritualized version of the parable in Saint Matthew on the Field that was sowed with Good Seed and with Tares,[408] and is carried through with some degree of solemnity; but the unhappy tares, that are threatened with being cut down and cast into the fire, are nothing less than Judaism, Idolatry, Heresy, and all Sectarianism, who are hardly saved from their fate by the mercy of the Lord of the Harvest and his fair spouse, the Church. However, notwithstanding a few such absurdities and awkwardnesses in the allegory, and some very misplaced compliments to the reigning Spanish family, this is one of the best of the class to which it belongs, and one of the most solemn. Another of those open to less reproach than usual is called “The Return from Egypt,”[409] which, with its shepherds and gypsies, has quite the grace of an eclogue, and, with its ballads and popular songs, has some of the charms that belong to Lope’s secular dramas. These two, with “The Wolf turned Shepherd,”[410]—which is an allegory on the subject of the Devil taking upon himself the character of the true shepherd of the flock,—constitute as fair, or perhaps, rather, as favorable, specimens of the genuine Spanish auto as can be found in the elder school. All of them rest on the grossest of the prevailing notions in religion; all of them appeal, in every way they can, whether light or serious, to the popular feelings and prejudices; many of them are imbued with the spirit of the old national poetry; and these, taken together, are the foundation on which their success rested,—a success which, if we consider the religious object of the festival, was undoubtedly of extraordinary extent and extraordinary duration.
But the entremeses or interludes that were used to enliven the dramatic part of this rude, but gorgeous ceremonial, were by no means confined to it. They were, as has been intimated, acted daily in the public theatres, where, from the time when the full-length dramas were introduced, they had been inserted between their different divisions or acts, to afford a lighter amusement to the audience. Lope wrote a great number of them; how many is not known. From their slight character, however, hardly more than thirty have been preserved. But we have enough to show that in this, as in the other departments of his drama, popular effect was chiefly sought, and that, as everywhere else, the flexibility of his genius is manifested in the variety of forms in which it exhibits its resources. Generally speaking, those we possess are written in prose, are very short, and have no plot; being merely farcical dialogues drawn from common or vulgar life.
The “Melisendra,” however, one of the first he published, is an exception to this remark. It is composed almost entirely in verse, is divided into acts, and has a loa or prologue;—in short, it is a parody in the form of a regular play, founded on the story of Gayferos and Melisendra in the old ballads.[411] The “Padre Engañado,” which Holcroft brought upon the English stage under the name of “The Father Outwitted,” is another exception, and is a lively farce of eight or ten pages, on the ridiculous troubles of a father who gives his own daughter in disguise to the very lover from whom he supposed he had carefully shut her up.[412] But most of them, like “The Indian,” “The Cradle,” and “The Robbers Cheated,” would occupy hardly more than fifteen minutes each in their representation,—slight dialogues of the broadest farce, continued as long as the time between the acts would conveniently permit, and then abruptly terminated to give place to the principal drama.[413] A vigorous spirit, and a popular, rude humor are rarely wanting in them.
But Lope, whenever he wrote for the theatre, seems to have remembered its old foundations, and to have shown a tendency to rest upon them as much as possible of his own drama. This is apparent in the very entremeses we have just noticed. They are to be traced back to Lope de Rueda, whose short farces were of the same nature, and were used, after the introduction of dramas of three acts, in the same way.[414] It is apparent, too, as we have seen, in his moral and allegorical plays, in his sacramental acts, and in his dramas taken from the Scripture and the lives of the saints; all founded on the earlier Mysteries and Moralities. And now we find the same tendency again in yet one more class, that of his eclogues and pastorals,—a form of the drama which may be recognized at least as early as the time of Juan de la Enzina.[415] Of these Lope wrote a considerable number, that are still extant,—twenty or more,—not a few of which bear distinct marks of their origin in that singular mixture of a bucolic and a religious tone that is seen in the first beginnings of a public theatre in Spain.
Some of the eclogues of Lope, we know, were performed; as, for instance, “The Wood and no Love in it,”—Selva sin Amor,—which was represented with costly pomp and much ingenious apparatus before the king and the royal family.[416] Others, like seven or eight in his “Pastores de Belen,” and one published under the name of “Tomé de Burguillos,”—all of which claim to have been arranged for Christmas and different religious festivals,—so much resemble such as we know were really performed on these occasions, that we can hardly doubt, that, like those just mentioned, they also were represented.[417] While yet others, like the first he ever published, called the “Amorosa,” and his last, addressed to Philis, together with one on the death of his wife, and one on the death of his son, were probably intended only to be read.[418] But all may have been acted, if we are to judge from the habits of the age, when, as we know, eclogues never destined for the stage were represented, as much as if they had been expressly written for it.[419] At any rate, all Lope’s compositions of this kind show how gladly and freely his genius overflowed into the remotest of the many forms of the drama that were recognized or permitted in his time.