CHAPTER XX.
The Drama. — Madrid and its Theatres. — Damian de Vegas. — Francisco de Tarrega. — Gaspar de Aguilar. — Guillen de Castro. — Luis Vélez de Guevara. — Juan Perez de Montalvan.
The want of a great capital, as a common centre for letters and literary men, was long felt in Spain. Until the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, the country, broken into separate kingdoms and occupied by continual conflicts with a hated enemy, had no leisure for the projects that belong to a period of peace; and even later, when there was tranquillity at home, the foreign wars and engrossing interests of Charles the Fifth in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands led him so much abroad, that there was still little tendency to settle the rival claims of the great cities; and the court resided occasionally in each of them, as it had from the time of Saint Ferdinand. But already it was plain that the preponderance which for a time had been enjoyed by Seville was gone. Castile had prevailed in this, as it had in the greater contest for giving a language to the country; and Madrid, which had been a favorite residence of the Emperor, because he thought its climate dealt gently with his infirmities, began, from 1560, under the arrangements of Philip the Second, to be regarded as the real capital of the whole monarchy.[495]
On no department of Spanish literature did this circumstance produce so considerable an influence as it did on the drama. In 1583, the foundations for the two regular theatres that have continued such ever since were already laid; and from about 1590, Lope de Vega, if not the absolute monarch of the stage that Cervantes describes him to have been, was, at least, its controlling spirit. The natural consequences followed. Under the influence of the nobility, who thronged to the royal residence, and led by the example of one of the most popular writers and men that ever lived, the Spanish theatre rose like an exhalation; and a school of poets—many of whom had hastened from Seville, Valencia, and other parts of the country, and thus extinguished the hopes of an independent drama in the cities they deserted—was collected around him in the new capital, until the dramatic writers of Madrid became suddenly more numerous, and in many respects more remarkable, than any other similar body of poets in modern times.
The period of this transition of the drama is well marked by a single provincial play, the “Comedia Jacobina,” printed at Toledo in 1590, but written, as its author intimates, some years earlier. It was the work of Damian de Vegas, an ecclesiastic of that city, and is on the subject of the blessing of Jacob by Isaac. Its structure is simple, and its action direct and unembarrassed. As it is religious throughout, it belongs, in this respect, to the elder school of the drama; but, on the other hand, as it is divided into three acts, has a prologue and epilogue, a chorus, and much lyrical poetry in various measures, including the terza rima and blank verse, it is not unlike what was attempted about the same time, on the secular stage, by Cervantes and Argensola. Though uninteresting in its plot, and dry and hard in its versification, it is not wholly without poetical merit; but we have no proof that it ever was acted in Madrid, or, indeed, that it was known on the stage beyond the limits of Toledo; a city to which its author was much attached, and where he seems always to have lived.[496]
Whether Francisco de Tarrega, who can be traced from 1591 to 1608, was one of those who early came from Valencia to Madrid as writers for the theatre is uncertain. But we have proof that he was a canon of the cathedral in the first-named city, and yet was well known in the new capital, where his plays were acted and printed.[497] One of them is important, because it shows the modes of representation in his time, as well as the peculiarities of his own drama. It begins with a loa, which in this case is truly a compliment, as its name implies; but it is, at the same time, a witty and quaint ballad in praise of ugly women. Then comes what is called a “Dance at Leganitos,”—a popular resort in the suburbs of Madrid, which here gives its name to a rude farce founded on a contest in the open street between two lackeys.[498]
After the audience have thus been put in good-humor, we have the principal play, called “The Well-disposed Enemy”; a wild, but not uninteresting, heroic drama, of which the scene is laid at the court of Naples, and the plot turns on the jealousy of the Neapolitan king and queen. Some attempt is made to compress the action within probable limits of time and space; but the character of Laura—at first in love with the king and exciting him to poison the queen, and at last coming out in disguise as an armed champion to defend the same queen when she is in danger of being put to death on a false accusation of infidelity—destroys all regularity of movement, and is a blemish that extends through the whole piece. Parts of it, however, are spirited, like the opening,—a scene full of life and nature,—where the court rush in from a bull-fight, that had been suddenly broken up by the personal danger of the king; and parts of it are poetical, like the first interview between Laura and Belisardo, whom she finally marries.[499] But the impression left by the whole is, that, though the path opened by Lope de Vega is the one that is followed, it is followed with footsteps ill-assured and a somewhat uncertain purpose.
Gaspar de Aguilar was, as Lope tells us, the rival of Tarrega.[500] He was secretary to the Viscount Chelva, and afterwards major-domo to the Duke of Gandia, one of the most prominent noblemen at the court of Philip the Third. But an allegorical poem which Aguilar wrote, in honor of his last patron’s marriage, found so little favor, that its unhappy author, discouraged and repulsed, died of mortification. He lived, as Tarrega probably did, both in Valencia and in Madrid, and wrote several minor poems, besides one of some length on the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, which was printed in 1610. The last date we have relating to his unfortunate career is 1623.
Of the nine or ten plays he published, only two can claim our notice. The first is “The Merchant Lover,” praised by Cervantes, who, like Lope de Vega, mentions Aguilar more than once with respect. It is the story of a rich merchant, who pretends to have lost his fortune in order to see whether either of two ladies to whose favor he aspires loved him for his own sake rather than for that of his money; and he finally marries the one who, on this hard trial, proves herself to be disinterested. It is preceded by a prólogo, or loa, which in this case is a mere jesting tale; and it ends with six stanzas, sung for the amusement of the audience, about a man who, having tried unsuccessfully many vocations, and, among the rest, those of fencing-master, poet, actor, and tapster, threatens, in despair, to enlist for the wars. Neither the beginning nor the end, therefore, has any thing to do with the subject of the play itself, which is written in a spirited style, but sometimes shows bad taste and extravagance, and sometimes runs into conceits.
One character is happily hit,—that of the lady who loses the rich merchant by her selfishness. When he first tells her of his pretended loss of fortune, and seems to bear it with courage and equanimity, she goes out saying,—
Heaven save me from a husband such as this,
Who finds himself so easily consoled!
Why, he would be as gay, if it were me
That he had lost, and not his money!
And again, in the second act, where she finally rejects him, she says, in the same jesting spirit,—
Would you, Sir, see that you are not a man,—
Since all that ever made you one is gone,—
(The figure that remains availing but
To bear the empty name that marked you once),—
Go and proclaim aloud your loss, my friend,
And then inquire of your own memory
What has become of you, and where you are;
And you will learn, at once, that you are not
The man to whom I lately gave my heart.[501]
What, perhaps, is most remarkable about this drama is, that the unity of place is observed, and possibly the unity of time; a circumstance which shows that the freedom of the Spanish stage from such restraints was not yet universally acknowledged.
Quite different from this, however, is “The Unforeseen Fortune”; a play which, if it have only one action, has one whose scene is laid at Saragossa, at Valencia, and along the road between these two cities, while the events it relates fill up several years. The hero, just at the moment he is married by proxy in Valencia, is accidentally injured in the streets of Saragossa, and carried into the house of a stranger, where he falls in love with the fair sister of the owner, and is threatened with instant death by her brother, if he does not marry her. He yields to the threat. They are married and set out for Valencia. On the way, he confesses his unhappy position to his bride, and very coolly proposes to adjust all his difficulties by putting her to death. From this, however, he is turned aside, and they arrive in Valencia, where she serves him, from blind affection, as a voluntary slave; even taking care of a child that is borne to him by his Valencian wife.
Other absurdities follow. At last, she is driven to declare publicly who she is. Her ungrateful husband then attempts to kill her, and thinks he has succeeded. He is arrested for the supposed murder; but at the same instant her brother arrives, and claims his right to single combat with the offender. Nobody will serve as the base seducer’s second. At the last moment, the injured lady herself, supposed till then to be dead, appears in the lists, disguised in complete armour, not to protect her guilty husband, but to vindicate her own honor and prowess. Ferdinand, the king, who presides over the combat, interferes; and the strange show ends by her marriage to a former lover, who has hardly been seen at all on the stage,—a truly “Unforeseen Fortune,”—which gives its name to the ill-constructed drama.
The poetry, though not absolutely good, is better than the action. It is generally in flowing quintillas, or stanzas of five short lines each, but not without long portions in the old ballad-measure. The scene of an entertainment on the sea-shore near Valencia, where all the parties meet for the first time, is good. So are portions of the last act. But, in general, the whole play abounds in conceits and puns, and is poor. It opens with a loa, whose object is to assert the universal empire of man; and it ends with an address to the audience from King Ferdinand, in which he declares that nothing can give him so much pleasure as the settlement of all these troubles of the lovers, except the conquest of Granada. Both are grotesquely inappropriate.[502]
Better known than either of the last authors is another Valencian poet, Guillen de Castro, who, like them, was respected at home, but sought his fortunes in the capital. He was born of a noble family, in 1567, and seems to have been early distinguished, in his native city, as a man of letters; for, in 1591, he was a member of the Nocturnos, one of the most successful of the fantastic associations established in Spain, in imitation of the Academias that had been for some time fashionable in Italy. His literary tendencies were further cultivated at the meetings of this society, where he found among his associates Tarrega, Aguilar, and Artieda.[503]
His life, however, was not wholly devoted to letters. At one time, he was a captain of cavalry; at another, he stood in such favor with Benavente, the munificent viceroy of Naples, that he had a place of consequence intrusted to his government; and at Madrid he was so well received, that the Duke of Ossuna gave him an annuity of nearly a thousand crowns, to which the reigning favorite, the Count Duke Olivares, added a royal pension. But his unequal humor, his discontented spirit, and his hard obstinacy ruined his fortunes, and he was soon obliged to write for a living. Cervantes speaks of him, in 1615, as among the popular authors for the theatre, and in 1620 he assisted Lope at the festival of the canonization of San Isidro, wrote several of the pieces that were exhibited, and gained one of the prizes. Six years later, he was still earning a painful subsistence as a dramatic writer; and in 1631 he died so poor, that he was buried by charity.[504]
Very few of his works have been published, except his plays. Of these we have twenty-seven or twenty-eight, printed between 1614 and 1625. They belong decidedly to the school of Lope, between whom and Guillen de Castro there was a friendship, which can be traced back, by the Dedication of one of Lope’s plays and by several passages in his miscellaneous works, to the period of Lope’s exile to Valencia; while, on the side of Guillen de Castro, a similar testimony is borne to the same kindly regard by a volume of his own plays addressed to Marcela, Lope’s favorite daughter.
The marks of Guillen de Castro’s personal condition, and of the age in which he lived and wrote, are no less distinct in his dramas than the marks of his poetical allegiance. His “Mismatches in Valencia” seems as if its story might have been constructed out of facts within the poet’s own knowledge. It is a series of love intrigues, like those in Lope’s plays, and ends with the dissolution of two marriages by the influence of a lady, who, disguised as a page, lives in the same house with her lover and his wife, but whose machinations are at last exposed, and she herself driven to the usual resort of entering a convent. His “Don Quixote,” on the other hand, is taken from the First Part of Cervantes’s romance, then as fresh as any Valencian tale. The loves of Dorothea and Fernando, and the madness of Cardenio, form the materials for its principal plot; and the dénouement is the transportation of the knight, in a cage, to his own house, by the curate and barber, just as he is carried home by them in the romance;—parts of the story being slightly altered to give it a more dramatic turn, though the language of the original fiction is often retained, and the obligations to it are fully recognized. Both of these dramas are written chiefly in the old redondillas, with a careful versification; but there is little poetical invention in either of them, and the first act of the “Mismatches in Valencia” is disfigured by a game of wits, fashionable, no doubt, in society at the time, but one that gives occasion, in the play, to nothing but a series of poor tricks and puns.[505]
Very unlike them, though no less characteristic of the times, is his “Mercy and Justice”; the shocking story of a prince of Hungary condemned to death by his father for the most atrocious crimes, but rescued from punishment by the multitude, because his loyalty has survived the wreck of all his other principles, and led him to refuse the throne offered to him by rebellion. It is written in a greater variety of measures than either of the dramas just mentioned, and shows more freedom of style and movement; relying chiefly for success on the story, and on that sense of loyalty which, though originally a great virtue in the relations of the Spanish kings and their people, was now become so exaggerated, that it was undermining much of what was most valuable in the national character.[506]
“Santa Bárbara, or the Mountain Miracle and Heaven’s Martyr,” belongs, again, to another division of the popular drama as settled by Lope de Vega. It is one of those plays where human and Divine love, in tones too much resembling each other, are exhibited in their strongest light, and, like the rest of its class, was no doubt a result of the severe legislation in relation to the theatre at that period, and of the influence of the clergy on which that legislation was founded. The scene is laid in Nicomedia, in the third century, when it was still a crime to profess Christianity; and the story is that of Saint Barbara, according to the legend that represents her to have been a contemporary of Origen, who, in fact, appears on the stage as one of the principal personages. At the opening of the drama, the heroine declares that she is already, in her heart, attached to the new sect; and at the end, she is its triumphant martyr, carrying with her, in a public profession of its faith, not only her lover, but all the leading men of her native city.
One of the scenes of this play is particularly in the spirit and faith of the age when it was written; and was afterwards imitated by Calderon in his “Wonder-working Magician.” The lady is represented as confined by her father in a tower, where, in solitude, she gives herself up to Christian meditations. Suddenly the arch-enemy of the human race presents himself before her, in the dress of a fashionable Spanish gallant. He gives an account of his adventures in a fanciful allegory, but does not so effectually conceal the truth that she fails to suspect who he is. In the mean time, her father and her lover enter. To her father the mysterious gallant is quite invisible, but he is plainly seen by the lover, whose jealousy is thus excited to the highest degree; and the first act ends with the confusion and reproaches which such a state of things necessarily brings on, and with the persuasion of the father that the lover may be fit for a mad-house, but would make a very poor husband for his gentle daughter.[507]
The most important of the plays of Guillen de Castro are two which he wrote on the subject of Rodrigo the Cid,—“Las Mocedades del Cid,” The Youth, or Youthful Adventures, of the Cid;—both founded on the old ballads of the country, which, as we know from Santos, as well as in other ways, continued long after the time of Castro to be sung in the streets.[508] The first of these two dramas embraces the earlier portion of the hero’s life. It opens with a solemn scene of his arming as a knight, and with the insult immediately afterwards offered to his aged father at the royal council-board; and then goes on with the trial of the spirit and courage of Rodrigo, and the death of the proud Count Lozano, who had outraged the venerable old man by a blow on the cheek;—all according to the traditions in the old chronicles.
Now, however, comes the dramatic part of the action, which was so happily invented by Guillen de Castro. Ximena, the daughter of Count Lozano, is represented in the drama as already attached to the young knight; and a contest, therefore, arises between her sense of what she owes to the memory of her father and what she may yield to her own affection; a contest that continues through the whole of the play, and constitutes its chief interest. She comes, indeed, at once to the king, full of a passionate grief, that struggles with success, for a moment, against the dictates of her heart, and claims the punishment of her lover according to the ancient laws of the realm. He escapes, however, in consequence of the prodigious victories he gains over the Moors, who, at the moment when these events occurred, were assaulting the city. Subsequently, by the contrivance of false news of the Cid’s death, a confession of her love is extorted from her; and at last her full consent to marry him is obtained, partly by Divine intimations, and partly by the natural progress of her admiration and attachment during a series of exploits achieved in her honor and in defence of her king and country.
This drama of Guillen de Castro has become better known throughout Europe than any other of his works; not only because it is the best of them all, but because Corneille, who was his contemporary, made it the basis of his own brilliant tragedy of “The Cid”; a drama which did more than any other to determine for two centuries the character of the theatre all over the continent of Europe. But though Corneille—not unmindful of the angry discussions carried on about the unities, under the influence of Cardinal Richelieu—has made alterations in the action of his play, which are fortunate and judicious, still he has relied, for its main interest, on that contest between the duties and the affections of the heroine which was first imagined by Guillen de Castro.
Nor has he shown in this exhibition more spirit or power than his Spanish predecessor. Indeed, sometimes he has fallen into considerable errors, which are wholly his own. By compressing the time of the action within twenty-four hours, instead of suffering it to extend through many months, as it does in the original, he is guilty of the absurdity of overcoming Ximena’s natural feelings in relation to the person who had killed her father, while her father’s dead body is still before her eyes. By changing the scene of the quarrel, which in Guillen occurs in presence of the king, he has made it less grave and natural. By a mistake in chronology, he establishes the Spanish court at Seville two centuries before that city was wrested from the Moors. And by a general straitening of the action within the conventional limits which were then beginning to bind down the French stage, he has, it is true, avoided the extravagance of introducing, as Guillen does, so incongruous an episode out of the old ballads as the miracle of Saint Lazarus; but he has hindered the free and easy movement of the incidents, and diminished their general effect.
Guillen, on the contrary, by taking the traditions of his country just as he found them, instantly conciliated the good-will of his audience, and at the same time imparted the freshness of the old ballad spirit to his action, and gave to it throughout a strong national air and coloring. Thus, the scene in the royal council, where the father of the Cid is struck by the haughty Count Lozano, several of the scenes between the Cid and Ximena, and several between both of them and the king, are managed with great dramatic skill and a genuine poetical fervor.
The following passage, where the Cid’s father is waiting for him in the evening twilight at the place appointed for their meeting after the duel, is as characteristic, if not as striking, as any in the drama, and is superior to the corresponding passage in the French play, which occurs in the fifth and sixth scenes of the third act.
The timid ewe bleats not so mournfully,
Its shepherd lost, nor cries the angry lion
With such a fierceness for its stolen young,
As I for Roderic.—My son! my son!
Each shade I pass, amid the closing night,
Seems still to wear thy form and mock my arms!
O, why, why comes he not? I gave the sign,—
I marked the spot,—and yet he is not here!
Has he neglected? Can he disobey?
It may not be! A thousand terrors seize me.
Perhaps some injury or accident
Has made him turn aside his hastening step;—
Perhaps he may be slain, or hurt, or seized.
The very thought freezes my breaking heart.
O holy Heaven, how many ways for fear
Can grief find out!—But hark! What do I hear?
Is it his footstep? Can it be? O, no!
I am not worthy such a happiness!
’T is but the echo of my grief I hear.—
But hark again! Methinks there comes a gallop
On the flinty stones. He springs from off his steed!
Is there such happiness vouchsafed to me?
Is it my son?
The Cid.
My father?
The Father.
May I truly
Trust myself, my child? O, am I, am I, then,
Once more within thine arms? Then let me thus
Compose myself, that I may honor thee
As greatly as thou hast deserved. But why
Hast thou delayed? And yet, since thou art here,
Why should I weary thee with questioning?—
O, bravely hast thou borne thyself, my son;
Hast bravely stood the proof; hast vindicated well
Mine ancient name and strength; and well hast paid
The debt of life which thou receivedst from me.
Come near to me, my son. Touch the white hairs
Whose honor thou hast saved from infamy,
And kiss, in love, the cheek whose stain thy valor
Hath in blood washed out.—My son! my son!
The pride within my soul is humbled now,
And bows before the power that has preserved
From shame the race so many kings have owned
And honored.[509]
The Second Part, which gives the adventures of the siege of Zamora, the assassination of King Sancho beneath its walls, and the defiance and duels that were the consequence, is not equal in merit to the First Part. Portions of it, such as some of the circumstances attending the death of the king, are quite incapable of dramatic representation, so gross and revolting are they; but even here, as well as in the more fortunate passages, Guillen has faithfully followed the popular belief concerning the heroic age he represents, just as it had come down to him, and has thus given to his scenes a life and reality that could hardly have been given by any thing else.
Indeed, it is a great charm of this drama, that the popular traditions everywhere break through so picturesquely, imparting to it their peculiar tone and character. Thus, the insult offered to old Laynez in the council; the complaints of Ximena to the king on the death of her father, and the conduct of the Cid to herself; the story of the Leper; the base treason of Bellido Dolfos; the reproaches of Queen Urraca from the walls of the beleaguered city, and the defiance and duels that follow,[510]—all are taken from the old ballads; often in their very words, and generally in their fresh spirit and with their picture-like details. The effect must have been great on a Castilian audience, always sensible to the power of the old popular poetry, and always stirred as with a battle-cry when the achievements of their earlier national heroes were recalled to them.[511]
In his other dramas we find traces of the same principles and the same habits of theatrical composition that we have seen in those we have already noticed. The “Impertinent Curiosity” is taken from the tale which Cervantes originally printed in the First Part of his Don Quixote. The “Count Alarcos,” and the “Count d’ Irlos,” are founded on the fine old ballads that bear these names. And the “Wonders of Babylon” is a religious play, in which the story of Susanna and the Elders fills a space somewhat too large, and in which King Nebuchadnezzar is introduced eating grass, like the beasts of the field.[512] But everywhere there is shown a desire to satisfy the demands of the national taste; and everywhere it is plain Guillen is a follower of Lope de Vega, and is distinguished from his rivals more by the sweetness of his versification than by any more prominent or original attribute.
Another of the early followers of Lope de Vega, and one recognized as such at the time by Cervantes, is Luis Vélez de Guevara. He was born at Ecija in Andalusia, in 1570, but seems to have lived almost entirely at Madrid, where he died in 1644. Twelve years before his death, he is said, on good authority, to have written already four hundred pieces for the theatre; and as neither the public favor nor that of the court seems to have deserted him during the rest of his long life, we may feel assured that he was one of the most successful authors of his time.[513]
His plays, however, were never collected for publication, and few of them have come down to us. One of those that have been preserved is fortunately one of the best, if we are to judge of its relative rank by the sensation it produced on its first appearance, or by the hold it has since maintained on the national regard. Its subject is taken from a well-known passage in the history of Sancho the Brave, when, in 1293, the city of Tarifa, near Gibraltar, was besieged by that king’s rebellious brother, Don John, at the head of a Moorish army, and defended by Alonso Perez, chief of the great house of the Guzmans. “And,” says the old Chronicle, “right well did he defend it. But the Infante Don John had with him a young son of Alonso Perez, and sent and warned him that he must either surrender that city, or else he would put to death this child whom he had with him. And Don Alonso Perez answered, that he held that city for the king, and that he could not give it up; but that as for the death of his child, he would give him a dagger wherewith to slay him; and so saying, he cast down a dagger from the rampart in defiance, and added that it would be better he should kill this son and yet five others, if he had them, than that he should himself basely yield up a city of the king, his lord, for which he had done homage. And the Infante Don John, in great fury, caused that child to be put to death before him. But neither with all this could he take the city.”[514]
Other accounts add to this atrocious story, that, after casting down his dagger, Alonso Perez, smothering his grief, sat down to his noon-day meal with his wife, and that, his people on the walls of the city witnessing the death of the innocent child and bursting forth into cries of horror and indignation, he rushed out, but, having heard what was the cause of the disturbance, returned quietly again to the table, saying only, “I thought, from their outcry, that the Moors had made their way into the city.”[515]
For thus sacrificing his other duties to his loyalty, in a way so well fitted to excite the imagination of the age in which he lived, Guzman received an appropriate addition to his armorial bearings, still seen in the escutcheon of his family, and the surname of “El Bueno,”—the Good, or the Faithful,—a title rarely forgotten in Spanish history, whenever he is mentioned.
This is the subject, and, in fact, the substance, of Guevara’s play, “Mas pesa el Rey que la Sangre,” or King before Kin. A good deal of skill, however, is shown in putting it into a dramatic form. Thus, King Sancho, at the opening, is represented as treating his great vassal, Perez de Guzman, with harshness and injustice, in order that the faithful devotion of the vassal, at the end of the drama, may be brought out with so much the more brilliant effect. And again, the scene in which Guzman goes from the king in anger, but with perfect submission to the royal authority; the scene between the father and the son, in which they mutually sustain each other, by the persuasions of duty and honor, to submit to any thing rather than give up the city; and the closing scene, in which, after the siege has been abandoned, Guzman offers the dead body of his child as a proof of his fidelity and obedience to an unjust sovereign,—are worthy of a place in the best of the earlier English tragedies, and not unlike some passages in Greene and Webster. But it was as an expression of boundless loyalty—that great virtue of the heroic times of Spain—that this drama won universal admiration, and so became of consequence, not only in the history of the national stage, but as an illustration of the national character. Regarded in each of these points of view, it is one of the most striking and solemn exhibitions of the modern theatre.[516]
In most of his other plays, Guevara deviated less from the beaten track than he did in this deep tragedy. “The Diana of the Mountains,” for instance, is a poetical picture of the loyalty, dignity, and passionate force of character of the lower classes of the Spanish people, set forth in the person of a bold and independent peasant, who marries the beauty of his mountain region, but has the misfortune immediately afterwards to find her pursued by the love of a man of rank, from whose designs she is rescued by the frank and manly appeal of her husband to Queen Isabella, the royal mistress of the offender.[517] “The Potter of Ocaña,” too, which, like the last, is an intriguing drama, is quite within the limits of its class;—and so is “Empire after Death,” a tragedy full of a melancholy, idyl-like softness, which well harmonizes with the fate of Inez de Castro, on whose sad story it is founded.
In Guevara’s religious dramas we have, as usual, the disturbing element of love adventures, mingled with what ought to be most spiritual and most separate from the dross of human passion. Thus, in his “Three Divine Prodigies” we have the whole history of Saint Paul, who yet first appears on the stage as a lover of Mary Magdalen; and in his “Satan’s Court” we have a similar history of Jonah, who is announced as a son of the widow of Sarepta, and lives at the court of Nineveh, during the reign of Ninus and Semiramis, in the midst of atrocities which it seems impossible could have been hinted at before any respectable audience in Christendom.
Once, indeed, Guevara stepped beyond the wide privileges granted to the Spanish theatre; but his offence was not against the rules of the drama, but against the authority of the Inquisition. In “The Lawsuit of the Devil against the Curate of Madrilejos,” which he wrote with Roxas and Mira de Mescua, he gives an account of the case of a poor mad girl who was treated as a witch, and escaped death only by confessing that she was full of demons, who are driven out of her on the stage, before the audience, by conjurations and exorcisms. The story has every appearance of being founded in fact, and is curious on account of the strange details it involves. But the whole subject of witchcraft, its exhibition and punishment, belonged exclusively to the Holy Office. The drama of Guevara was, therefore, forbidden to be represented or read, and soon disappeared quietly from public notice. Such cases, however, are rare in the history of the Spanish theatre, at any period of its existence.[518]
The most strict, perhaps, of the followers of Lope de Vega was his biographer and eulogist, Juan Perez de Montalvan. He was a son of the king’s bookseller at Madrid, and was born in 1602.[519] At the age of seventeen he was already a licentiate in theology and a successful writer for the public stage, and at eighteen he contended with the principal poets of the time at the festival of San Isidro at Madrid, and gained, with Lope’s assent, one of the prizes that were there offered.[520] Soon after this, he took the degree of Doctor in Divinity, and, like his friend and master, joined a fraternity of priests in Madrid, and received an office in the Inquisition. In 1626, a princely merchant of Peru, with whom he was in no way connected, and who had never even seen him, sent him, from the opposite side of the world, a pension as his private chaplain to pray for him in Madrid; all out of admiration for his genius and writings.[521]
In 1627, he published a small work on “The Life and Purgatory of Saint Patrick”; a subject popular in his Church, and on which he now wrote, probably, to satisfy the demands of his ecclesiastical position. But his nature breaks forth, as it were, in spite of himself, and he has added to the common legends of Saint Patrick a wild tale, wholly of his own invention, and yet so interwoven with his principal subject as to seem to be a part of it, and even to make equal claims on the faith of the reader.[522]
In 1632, he says he had composed thirty-six dramas and twelve sacramental autos;[523] and in 1636, soon after Lope’s death, he published the extravagant panegyric on him which has been already noticed. This was probably the last work he gave to the press; for, not long after it appeared, he became hopelessly deranged, from the excess of his labors, and died on the 25th of June, 1638, when only thirty-six years old. One of his friends showed the same pious care for his memory which he had shown for that of his master; and, gathering together short poems and other eulogies on him by above a hundred and fifty of the known and unknown authors of his time, published them under the title of “Panegyrical Tears on the Death of Doctor Juan Perez de Montalvan”;—a poor collection, in which, though we meet the names of Antonio de Solís, Gaspar de Avila, Tirso de Molina, Calderon, and others of note, we find very few lines worthy either of their authors or of their subject.[524]
Montalvan’s life was short, but it was brilliant. He early attached himself to Lope de Vega with sincere affection, and continued to the last the most devoted of his admirers; deserving in many ways the title given him by Valdivielso,—“the first-born of Lope de Vega’s genius.” Lope, on his side, was sensible to the homage thus frankly offered him; and not only assisted and encouraged his youthful follower, but received him almost as a member of his household and family. It has even been said, that the “Orfeo”—a poem on the subject of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Montalvan published in August, 1624, in rivalship with one under the same title published by Jauregui in the June preceding—was, in fact, the work of Lope himself, who was willing thus to give his disciple an advantage over a formidable competitor. But this is probably only the scandal of the next succeeding generation. The poem itself, which fills about two hundred and thirty octave stanzas, though as easy and spirited as if it were from Lope’s hand, bears the marks rather of a young writer than of an old one; besides which the verses prefixed to it by Lope, and especially his extravagant praise of it when afterwards speaking of his own drama on the same subject, render the suggestion that he wrote the work a grave imputation on his character.[525] But however this may be, Montalvan and Lope were, as we know from different passages in their works, constantly together; and the faithful admiration of the disciple was well returned by the kindness and patronage of the master.
Montalvan’s chief success was on the stage, where his popularity was so considerable, that the booksellers found it for their interest to print under his name many plays that were none of his.[526] He himself prepared for publication two complete volumes of his dramatic works, which appeared in 1638 and 1639, and were reprinted in 1652; but besides this, he had earlier inserted several plays in one of his works of fiction, and printed many more in other ways, making in all about sixty; the whole of which seem to have been published, as far as they were published by himself, during the last seven years of his life.[527]
If we take the first volume of his collection, which is more likely to have received his careful revision than the last, and examine it, as an illustration of his theories and style, we shall easily understand the character of his drama. Six of the plays contained in it, or one half of the whole number, are of the class of capa y espada, and rely for their interest on some exhibition of jealousy, or some intrigue involving the point of honor. They are generally, like the one entitled “Fulfilment of Duty,” not skilfully put together, though never uninteresting; and they all contain passages of poetical feeling, injured in their effect by other passages, in which taste seems to be set at defiance,—a remark particularly applicable to the play called “What’s done can’t be helped.” Four of the remaining six are historical. One of them is on the suppression of the Templars, which Raynouard, referring to Montalvan, took as a subject for one of the few successful French tragedies of the first half of the nineteenth century. Another is on Sejanus, not as he is represented in Tacitus, but as he appears in the “General Chronicle of Spain.” And yet another is on Don John of Austria, which has no dénouement, except a sketch of Don John’s life given by himself, and making out above three hundred lines. A single play of the twelve is an extravagant specimen of the dramas written to satisfy the requisitions of the Church, and is founded on the legends relating to San Pedro de Alcántara.[528]
The last drama in the volume, and the only one that has enjoyed a permanent popularity and been acted and printed ever since it first appeared, is the one called “The Lovers of Teruel.” It is founded on a tradition, that, early in the thirteenth century, in the city of Teruel, in Aragon, there lived two lovers, whose union was prevented by the lady’s family, on the ground that the fortune of the cavalier was not so considerable as they ought to claim for her. They, however, gave him a certain number of years to achieve the position they required of any one who aspired to her hand. He accepted the offer, and became a soldier. His exploits were brilliant, but were long unnoticed. At last he succeeded, and came home in 1217, with fame and fortune. But he arrived too late. The lady had been reluctantly married to his rival, the very night he reached Teruel. Desperate with grief and disappointment, he followed her to the bridal chamber and fell dead at her feet. The next day the lady was found, apparently asleep, on his bier in the church, when the officiating priests came to perform the funeral service. Both had died broken-hearted, and both were buried in the same grave.[529]
A considerable excitement in relation to this story having arisen in the youth of Montalvan, he seized the tradition on which it was founded, and wrought it into a drama. His lovers are placed in the time of Charles the Fifth, in order to connect them with that stirring period of Spanish history. The first act begins with several scenes, in which the difficulties and dangers of their situation are made apparent, and Isabella, the heroine, expresses an attachment which, after some anxiety and misgiving, becomes a passion so devoted that it seems of itself to intimate their coming sorrows. Her father, however, when he learns the truth, consents to their union; but on condition that, within three years, the young man shall place himself in a position worthy the claims of such a bride. Both of the lovers willingly submit, and the act ends with hopes for their happiness.
Nearly the whole of the limited period elapses before we begin the second act, where we find the hero just landing in Africa for the well-known assault on the Goleta at Tunis. He has achieved much, but remains unnoticed and almost broken-hearted with long discouragement. At this moment, he saves the Emperor’s life; but the next, he is forgotten again in the rushing crowd. Still he perseveres, sternly and heroically; and, led on by a passion stronger than death, is the first to mount the walls of Tunis and enter the city. This time, his merit is recognized. Even his forgotten achievements are recollected; and he receives at once the accumulated reward of all his services and sacrifices.
But when the last act opens, we see that he is destined to a fatal disappointment. Isabella, who has been artfully persuaded of his death, is preparing, with sinister forebodings, to fulfil her promise to her father and marry another. The ceremony takes place,—the guests are about to depart,—and her lover stands before her. A heart-rending explanation ensues, and she leaves him, as she thinks, for the last time. But he follows her to her apartment; and in the agony of his grief falls dead, while he yet expostulates and struggles with himself no less than with her. A moment afterwards her husband enters. She explains to him the scene he witnesses, and, unable any longer to sustain the cruel conflict, faints and dies broken-hearted on the body of her lover.
Like nearly all the other pieces of the same class, there is much in the “Lovers of Teruel” to offend us. The inevitable part of the comic servant is peculiarly unwelcome; and so are the long speeches, and the occasionally inflated style. But notwithstanding its blemishes, we feel that it is written in the true spirit of tragedy. As the story was believed to be authentic when it was first acted, it produced the more deep effect; and whether true or not, being a tale of the simple sorrows of two young and loving hearts, whose dark fate is the result of no crime on their part, it can never be read or acted without exciting a sincere interest. Parts of it have a more familiar and domestic character than we are accustomed to find on the Spanish stage, particularly the scene where Isabella sits with her women at her wearisome embroidery, during her lover’s absence; the scene of her discouragement and misgiving just before her marriage; and portions of the scene of horror with which the drama closes.
The two lovers are drawn with no little skill. Our interest in them never falters; and their characters are so set forth and developed, that the dreadful catastrophe is no surprise. It comes rather like the foreseen and irresistible fate of the old Greek tragedy, whose dark shadow is cast over the whole action from its opening.
When Montalvan took historical subjects, he endeavoured, oftener than his contemporaries, to observe historical truth. In two dramas on the life of Don Cárlos, he has introduced that prince substantially in the colors he must at last wear, as an ungoverned madman, dangerous to his family and to the state; and if, in obedience to the persuasions of his time, the poet has represented Philip the Second as more noble and generous than we can regard him to have been, he has not failed to seize and exhibit in a striking manner the severe wariness and wisdom that were such prominent attributes in that monarch’s character.[530] Don John of Austria, too, and Henry the Fourth of France, are happily depicted and fairly sustained in the plays in which they respectively appear as leading personages.[531]
Montalvan’s autos, of which only two or three remain to us, are not to be spoken of in the same manner. His “Polyphemus,” for instance, in which the Saviour and a Christian Church are introduced on one side of the stage, while the principal Cyclops himself comes in as an allegorical representation of Judaism on the other, is as wild and extravagant as any thing in the Spanish drama. A similar remark may be made on the “Escanderbech,” founded on the history of the half-barbarous, half-chivalrous Iskander Beg, and his conversion to Christianity in the middle of the fifteenth century. We find it, in fact, difficult, at the present day, to believe that pieces like the first of these, in which Polyphemus plays on a guitar, and an island in the earliest ages of Greek tradition sinks into the sea amidst a discharge of squibs and rockets, can have been represented anywhere.[532]
But Montalvan followed Lope in every thing, and, like the rest of the dramatic writers of his age, was safe from such censure as he would now receive, because he wrote to satisfy the demands of the popular audiences of Madrid.[533] He made the novela, or tale, the chief basis of interest for his drama, and relied mainly on the passion of jealousy to give it life and movement.[534] Bowing to the authority of the court, he avoided, we are told, representing rebellion on the stage, lest he should seem to encourage it; and was even unwilling to introduce men of rank in degrading situations, for fear disloyalty should be implied or imputed. He would gladly, it is added, have restrained his action to twenty-four hours, and limited each of the three divisions of his full-length dramas to three hundred lines, never leaving the stage empty in either of them. But such rules were not prescribed to him by the popular will, and he wrote too freely and too fast to be more anxious about observing his own theories than his master was.[535]
His “Most Constant Wife,” one of his plays which is particularly pleasing, from the firm, yet tender, character of the heroine, was written, he tells us, in four weeks, prepared by the actors in eight days, and represented again and again, until the great religious festival of the spring closed the theatres.[536] His “Double Vengeance,” with all its horrors, was acted twenty-one days successively.[537] His “No Life like Honor”—one of his more sober efforts—appeared many times on both the principal theatres of Madrid at the same moment;—a distinction to which, it is said, no other play had then arrived in Spain, and in which none succeeded it till long afterwards.[538] And, in general, during the period when his dramas were produced, which was the old age of Lope de Vega, no author was heard on the stage with more pleasure than Montalvan, except his great master.
He had, indeed, his trials and troubles, as all have whose success depends on popular favor. Quevedo, the most unsparing satirist of his time, attacked the less fortunate parts of one of his works of fiction with a spirit and bitterness all his own; and, on another occasion, when one of Montalvan’s plays had been hissed, wrote him a letter which professed to be consolatory, but which is really as little so as can well be imagined.[539] But, notwithstanding such occasional discouragements, his course was, on the whole, fortunate, and he is still to be remembered among the ornaments of the old national drama of his country.