CHAPTER XXII.
Calderon. — His Life and Various Works. — Dramas falsely attributed to him. — His Sacramental Autos. — How represented. — Their Character. — The Divine Orpheus. — Great Popularity of such Exhibitions. — His Full-length Religious Plays. — Purgatory of Saint Patrick. — Devotion to the Cross. — Wonder-working Magician. — Other Similar Plays.
Turning from Lope de Vega and his school, we come now to his great successor and rival, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, who, if he invented no new form of the drama, was yet so eminently a poet in the national temper, and had a success so brilliant, that he must necessarily fill a large space in all inquiries concerning the history of the Spanish theatre.
He was born at Madrid, on the 17th of January, 1600;[570] and one of his friends claims kindred for him with nearly all the old kings of the different Spanish monarchies, and even with most of the crowned heads of his time, throughout Europe.[571] This is absurd. But it is of consequence to know that his family was respectable, and its position in society such as to give him an opportunity for early intellectual culture;—his father being Secretary to the Treasury Board under Philip the Second and Philip the Third, and his mother of a noble family, that came from the Low Countries long before. Perhaps, however, the most curious circumstance connected with his origin is to be found in the fact, that, while the two masters of the Spanish drama, Lope de Vega and Calderon, were both born in Madrid, the families of both are to be sought for, at an earlier period, in the same little picturesque valley of Carriedo, where each possessed an ancestral fief.[572]
When only nine years old, he was placed under the Jesuits, and from them received instructions which, like those Corneille was receiving at the same moment, in the same way, on the other side of the Pyrenees, imparted their coloring to the whole of his life, and especially to its latter years. After leaving the Jesuits, he went to Salamanca, where he studied with distinction the scholastic theology and philosophy then in fashion, and the civil and canon law. But when he left the University in 1619, he was already known as a writer for the theatre; and when he arrived at Madrid, he seems, probably on this account, to have been at once noticed by some of those persons about the court who could best promote his advancement and success.
In 1620, he entered, with the leading spirits of his time, into the first poetical contest opened by the city of Madrid in honor of San Isidro, and received for his efforts the public compliment of Lope de Vega’s praise.[573] In 1622, he appeared at the second and greater contest proposed by the capital, on the canonization of the same saint; and gained—all that could be gained by one individual—a single prize, with still further and more emphatic praises from the presiding spirit of the show.[574] In the same year, too, when Lope published a considerable volume containing an account of all these ceremonies and rejoicings, we find that the youthful Calderon approached him as a friend, with a few not ungraceful lines, which Lope, to show that he admitted the claim, prefixed to his book. But, from that time, we entirely lose sight of Calderon as an author, for ten years, except that in 1630 he figures in Lope de Vega’s “Laurel of Apollo,” among the crowd of poets born in Madrid.[575]
Much of this interval seems to have been filled with service in the armies of his country. At least, he was in the Milanese in 1625, and afterwards, as we are told, went to Flanders, where a disastrous war was still carried on with unrelenting hatred, both national and religious. That he was not a careless observer of men and manners during his campaigns, we see by the plots of some of his plays, and by the lively local descriptions with which they abound, as well as by the characters of his heroes, who often come fresh from these same wars, and talk of their adventures with an air of reality that leaves no doubt that they speak of what had absolutely happened. But we soon find him in the more appropriate career of letters. In 1632, Montalvan tells us that Calderon was already the author of many dramas, which had been acted with applause; that he had gained many public prizes; that he had written a great deal of lyrical verse; and that he had begun a poem on the General Deluge. His reputation as a poet, therefore, at the age of thirty-two, was an enviable one, and was fast rising.[576]
A dramatic author of such promise could not be overlooked in the reign of Philip the Fourth, especially when the death of Lope, in 1635, had left the theatre without a master. In 1636, therefore, Calderon was formally attached to the court, for the purpose of furnishing dramas to be represented in the royal theatres, and in 1637, as a further honor, he was made a knight of the Order of Santiago. His very distinctions, however, threw him back once more into a military life. When he was just entering on his brilliant career as a poet, the rebellion excited by France in Catalonia burst forth with great violence, and all the members of the four great military orders of the kingdom were required, in 1640, to appear in the field and sustain the royal authority. Calderon, like a true knight, presented himself at once to fulfil his duty. But the king was so anxious to enjoy his services in the palace, that he was willing to excuse him from the field, and asked from him yet another drama. In great haste, the poet finished his “Contest of Love and Jealousy,”[577] and then joined the army; serving loyally through the campaign in the body of troops commanded by the Count Duke Olivares in person, and remaining in the field till the rebellion was quelled.
After his return, the king testified his increased regard for Calderon by giving him a pension of thirty gold crowns a month, and by employing him in the arrangements for the festivities of the court, when, in 1649, the new queen, Anna Maria of Austria, made her entrance into Madrid. From this period, he uniformly enjoyed a high degree of the royal favor; and, till the death of Philip the Fourth, he had a controlling influence over whatever related to the drama, writing secular plays for the theatres and autos for the Church with uninterrupted applause.
In 1651, he followed the example of Lope de Vega and other men of letters of his time, by entering a religious brotherhood; and the king two years afterwards gave him the place of chaplain in a chapel consecrated to the “New Kings” at Toledo;—a burial-place set apart for royalty, and richly endowed from the time of Henry of Trastamara. But it was found that his duties there kept him too much from the court, to whose entertainment he had become important. In 1663, therefore, he was created chaplain of honor to the king, who thus secured his regular presence at Madrid; though, at the same time, he was permitted to retain his former place, and even had a second added to it. In the same year, he became a Priest of the Congregation of Saint Peter, and soon rose to be its head; an office of some importance, which he held during the last fifteen years of his life, and exercised with great gentleness and dignity.[578]
This accumulation of religious benefices, however, did not lead him to intermit in any degree his dramatic labors. On the contrary, it was rather intended to stimulate him to further exertion; and his fame was now so great, that the cathedrals of Toledo, Granada, and Seville constantly solicited from him religious plays to be performed on the day of the Corpus Christi,—that great festival, for which, during nearly thirty-seven years, he furnished similar entertainments regularly, at the charge of the city of Madrid. For these services, as well as for his services at court, he was richly rewarded, so that he accumulated an ample fortune.
After the death of Philip the Fourth, which happened in 1665, he seems to have enjoyed less of the royal patronage. Charles the Second had a temper totally different from that of his predecessor; and Solís, the historian, speaking of Calderon, with reference to these circumstances, says pointedly, “He died without a Mæcenas.”[579] But still he continued to write as before for the public theatres, for the court, and for the churches; and retained, through his whole life, the extraordinary general popularity of his best years. He died in 1681, on the 25th of May,—the Feast of the Pentecost,—while all Spain was ringing with the performance of his autos, in the composition of one more of which he was himself occupied almost to the last moment of his life.[580]
The next day, he was borne, as his will required, without any show, to his grave in the church of San Salvador, by the Priests of the Congregation over which he had so long presided, and to which he now left the whole of his fortune. A more gorgeous funeral ceremony followed a few days later, to satisfy the claims of the popular admiration; and even at Valencia, Naples, Lisbon, Milan, and Rome, public notice was taken of his death by his countrymen, as of a national calamity.[581] A monument to his memory was soon erected in the church where he was buried; but in 1840 his remains were removed to the more splendid church of the Atocha, where they now rest.[582]
Calderon, we are told, was remarkable for his personal beauty, which he long preserved by the serenity and cheerfulness of his spirit. The engraving published soon after his death shows, at least, a strongly marked and venerable countenance, to which in fancy we may easily add the brilliant eye and gentle voice given to him by his friendly eulogist, while, in its ample and finely turned brow, we are reminded of that with which we are familiar in the portraits of our own great dramatic poet.[583] His character, throughout, seems to have been benevolent and kindly. In his old age, we learn that he used to collect his friends round him on his birthdays, and tell them amusing stories of his childhood;[584] and during the whole of the active part of his life, he enjoyed the regard of many of the distinguished persons of his time, who, like the Count Duke Olivares and the Duke of Veraguas, seem to have been attracted to him quite as much by the gentleness of his nature as by his genius and fame.
In a life thus extending to above fourscore years, nearly the whole of which was devoted to letters, Calderon produced a large number of works. Except, however, a panegyric on the Duke of Medina de Rioseco, who died in 1647, and a single volume of autos, which he printed in 1676, he published hardly any thing of what he wrote;[585] and yet, besides several longer works,[586] he prepared for the academies of which he was a member, and for the poetical festivals and joustings then so common in Spain, a great number of odes, songs, ballads, and other poems, which gave him not a little of his fame with his contemporaries.[587] His brother, indeed, printed some of his full-length dramas between 1640 and 1674;[588] but we are expressly told that Calderon himself never sent any of them to the press;[589] and even in the case of the autos, where he deviated from his established custom, he says he did it unwillingly, and only lest their sacred character should be impaired by imperfect and surreptitious publications.
For forty-five years of his life, however, the press teemed with dramatic works bearing his name on their titles. As early as 1633, they began to appear in the popular collections; but many of them were not his, and the rest were so disfigured by the imperfect manner in which they had been written down during their representations, that he says he could often hardly recognize them himself.[590] His editor and friend, Vera Tassis, gives several lists of plays, amounting in all to a hundred and fifteen, printed by the cupidity of the booksellers as Calderon’s, without having any claim whatsoever to that honor; and he adds, that many others, which Calderon had never seen, were sent from Seville to the Spanish possessions in America.[591]
By means like these, the confusion became at last so great, that the Duke of Veraguas, then the honored head of the family of Columbus, and Captain-general of the kingdom of Valencia, wrote a letter to Calderon in 1680, asking for a list of his dramas, by which, as a friend and admirer, he might venture to make a collection of them for himself. The reply of the poet, complaining bitterly of the conduct of the booksellers which had made such a request necessary, is accompanied by a list of one hundred and eleven full-length dramas and seventy sacramental autos which he claims as his own.[592] This catalogue constitutes the proper basis for a knowledge of Calderon’s dramatic works, down to the present day. All the plays mentioned in it have not, indeed, been found. Nine are not in the editions of Vera Tassis, in 1682, and of Apontes, in 1760; but, on the other hand, a few not in Calderon’s list have been added to theirs upon what has seemed sufficient authority; so that we have now seventy-three sacramental autos, with their introductory loas,[593] and one hundred and eight comedias, on which his reputation as a dramatic poet is hereafter to rest.[594]
In examining this large mass of Calderon’s dramatic works, it will be most convenient to take first, and by themselves, those which are quite distinct from the rest, and which alone he thought worthy of his care in publication,—his autos or dramas for the Corpus Christi day. Nor are they undeserving of this separate notice. There is little in the dramatic literature of any nation more characteristic of the people that produced it than this department of the Spanish theatre; and among the many poets who devoted themselves to it, none had such success as Calderon.
Of the early character and condition of the autos and their connection with the Church we have already spoken, when noticing Juan de la Enzina, Gil Vicente, Lope de Vega, and Valdivielso. They were, from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, among the favorite amusements of the mass of the people; but at the period at which we are now arrived, they had gradually risen to be of great importance. That they were spread through the whole country, even into the small villages, we may see in the Travels of Augustin Roxas,[595] and in the Second Part of Don Quixote, where the mad knight is represented as meeting a car that was carrying the actors for the Festival of the Sacrament from one hamlet to another.[596] This, it will be remembered, was all before 1615. During the next thirty years, and especially during the last portion of Calderon’s life, the number and consequence of the autos were much increased, and they were represented with great luxury and at great expense in the streets of all the larger cities;—so important were they deemed to the influence of the clergy, and so attractive had they become to all classes of society; to the noble and the cultivated no less than to the multitude.
In 1654, when they were at the height of their success, Aarsens de Somerdyck, an accomplished Dutch traveller, gives us an account of them as he witnessed their exhibition at Madrid.[597] In the forenoon of the festival, he says, a procession occurred such as we have seen was usual in the time of Lope de Vega, where the king and court appeared without distinction of rank, preceded by two fantastic figures of giants, and sometimes by the grotesque form of the Tarasca,—one of which, we are told, in a pleasant story of Santos, passing by night from a place where it had been exhibited the preceding day to one where it was to be exhibited the day following, so alarmed a body of muleteers who accidentally met it, that they roused up the country, as if a real monster were come among them to lay waste the land.[598] These misshapen figures and all this strange procession, with music of hautboys, tambourines, and castanets, with banners, and religious shows, followed the sacrament through the streets for some hours, and then returned to the principal church, and were dismissed.
In the afternoon they assembled again and performed the autos, on that and many successive days, before the houses of the great officers of state, where the audience stood either in the balconies that would command a view of the exhibition, or else in the streets. The giants and the Tarascas were there to make sport for the multitude; the music came, that all might dance who chose; torches were added to give effect to the scene, though the performance was only by daylight; and the king and the royal family enjoyed the exhibition, sitting in state under a magnificent canopy in front of the stage prepared for the occasion.
As soon as the principal personages were seated, the loa was spoken or sung; then came a farcical entremes; afterwards the auto itself; and finally, something by way of conclusion that would contribute to the general amusement, like music or dancing. And this was continued, in different parts of the city, daily for a month, during which the theatres were shut and the regular actors were employed in the streets, in the service of the Church.[599]
Of the entertainments of this sort which Calderon furnished for Madrid, Toledo, and Seville, he has left, as has been said, no less than seventy-three. They are all allegorical, and all, by the music and show with which they abounded, are nearer to operas than any other class of dramas then known in Spain; some of them reminding us, by their religious extravagance, of the treatment of the gods in the plays of Aristophanes, and others, by their spirit and richness, of the poetical masques of Ben Jonson. They are upon a great variety of subjects, and show, by their structure, that elaborate and costly machinery must have been used in their representation.
Including the loa that accompanied each, those of Calderon are nearly or quite as long as the full-length plays which he wrote for the secular theatre. Some of them indicate their subjects by their titles, like “The First and Second Isaac,” “God’s Vineyard,” and “Ruth’s Gleanings.” Others, like “The True God Pan” and “The First Flower of Carmel,” give no such intimations. All are crowded with shadowy personages, such as Sin, Death, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Justice, Mercy, and Charity; and the uniform purpose and end of all is to set forth and glorify the doctrine of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. The great Enemy of man, of course, fills a large space in them,—Quevedo says too large, adding, that, at last, he had grown to be quite a presuming and vainglorious personage, coming on the stage dressed finely, and talking as if the theatre were altogether his own.[600]
There is necessarily a good deal of sameness in the structure of dramas like these; but it is wonderful with what ingenuity Calderon has varied his allegories, sometimes mingling them with the national history, as in the case of the two autos on Saint Ferdinand; oftener with incidents and stories from Scripture, like “The Brazen Serpent” and “The Captivity of the Ark”; and always, where he could, seizing any popular occasion to produce an effect, as he did after the completion of the Escurial and of the Buen Retiro, and after the marriage of the Infanta María Teresa; each of which events contributed materials for a separate auto. Almost all of them have passages of striking lyrical poetry; and a few, of which “Devotion to the Mass” is the chief, make a free use of the old ballads.
One of the most characteristic of the collection, and one that has considerable poetical merit in separate passages, is “The Divine Orpheus.”[601] It opens with the entrance of a huge black car, in the shape of a boat, which is drawn along the street toward the stage where the auto is to be acted, and contains the Prince of Darkness, set forth as a pirate, and Envy, as his steersman; both supposed to be thus navigating through a portion of chaos. They hear, at a distance, sweet music which proceeds from another car, advancing from the opposite quarter in the form of a celestial globe, covered with the signs of the planets and constellations, and containing Orpheus, who represents allegorically the Creator of all things. This is followed by a third car, setting forth the terrestrial globe, within which are the Seven Days of the Week, and Human Nature, all asleep. These cars open, so that the personages they contain can come upon the stage and retire back again, as if behind the scenes, at their pleasure;—the machines themselves constituting, in this as in all such representations, an important part of the scenic arrangements of the exhibition, and, in the popular estimation, not unfrequently the most important part.
On their arrival at the stage, the Divine Orpheus, with lyric poetry and music, begins the work of creation, using always language borrowed from Scripture; and at the suitable moment, as he advances, each Day presents itself, roused from its ancient sleep and clothed with symbols indicating the nature of the work that has been accomplished; after which, Human Nature is, in the same way, summoned forth, and appears in the form of a beautiful woman, who is the Eurydice of the fable. Pleasure dwells with her in Paradise; and, in her exuberant happiness, she sings a hymn in honor of her Creator, founded on the hundred and thirty-sixth Psalm, the poetical effect of which is destroyed by an unbecoming scene of allegorical gallantry that immediately follows between the Divine Orpheus himself and Human Nature.
The temptation and fall succeed; and then the graceful Days, which had before always accompanied Human Nature and scattered gladness in her path, disappear one by one, and leave her to her trials and her sins. She is overwhelmed with remorse, and, endeavouring to escape from the consequences of her guilt, is conveyed by the bark of Lethe to the realms of the Prince of Darkness, who, from his first appearance on the scene, has been laboring, with his coadjutor, Envy, for this very triumph. But his triumph is short. The Divine Orpheus, who has, for some time, represented the character of our Saviour, comes upon the stage, weeping over the fall, and sings a song of love and grief to the accompaniment of a harp made partly in the form of a cross; after which, rousing himself in his omnipotence, he enters the realms of darkness, amidst thunders and earthquakes; overcomes all opposition; rescues Human Nature from perdition; places her, with the seven redeemed Days of the Week, on a fourth car, in the form of a ship, so ornamented as to represent the Christian Church and the mystery of the Eucharist; and then, as the gorgeous machine sweeps away, the exhibition ends with the shouts of the actors in the drama, accompanied by the answering shouts of the spectators on their knees wishing the good ship a good voyage and a happy arrival at her destined port.
That these Sacramental Acts produced a great effect, there can be no doubt. Allegory of all kinds, which, from the earliest periods, had been attractive to the Spanish people, still continued so to an extraordinary degree; and the imposing show of the autos, their music, and the fact that they were represented in seasons of solemn leisure, at the expense of the government, and with the sanction of the Church, gave them claims on the popular favor which were enjoyed by no other form of popular amusement. They were written and acted everywhere throughout the country, and by all classes of people, because they were everywhere demanded. How humble were some of their exhibitions in the villages and hamlets may be seen in Roxas, who gives an account of an auto of Cain and Abel, in which two actors performed all the parts;[602] and from Lope de Vega[603] and Cervantes,[604] who speak of their being written by barbers and acted by shepherds. On the other hand, we know that in Madrid no expense was spared to add to their solemnity and effect, and that everywhere they had the countenance and support of the public authorities. Nor has their influence even yet entirely ceased. In 1765, Charles the Third forbade their public representation; but the popular will and the habits of five centuries could not be immediately broken down by a royal decree. Autos, therefore, or dramatic religious farces resembling them, are still heard in some of the remote villages of the country; while, in the former dependencies of Spain, exhibitions of the same class and nature, if not precisely of the same form, have never been interfered with.[605]
Of full-length religious plays and plays of saints Calderon wrote, in all, thirteen or fourteen. This was, no doubt, necessary to his success; for at one time during his career, such plays were much demanded. The death of Queen Isabella, in 1644, and of Balthasar, the heir-apparent, in 1646, caused a suspension of public representations on the theatres, and revived the question of their lawfulness. New rules were prescribed about the number of actors and their costumes, and an attempt was made even to drive from the theatre all plays involving the passion of love, and especially all the plays of Lope de Vega. This irritable state of things continued till 1649. But nothing of consequence followed. The regulations that were made were not executed in the spirit in which they were conceived. Many plays were announced and acted as religious which had no claim whatever to the title; and others, religious in their external framework, were filled up with an intriguing love-plot, as free as any thing in the secular drama had been. Indeed, there can be no doubt that the attempts thus made to constrain the theatre were successfully opposed or evaded, especially by private representations in the houses of the nobility;[606] and that, when these attempts were given up, the drama, with all its old attributes and attractions, broke forth with a greater extravagance of popularity than ever;[607]—a fact apparent from the crowd of dramatists that became famous, and from the circumstance that so many of the clergy, like Tarraga, Mira de Mescua, Montalvan, Tirso de Molina, and Calderon, to say nothing of Lope de Vega, who was particularly exact in his duties as a priest, were all successful writers for the stage.[608]
Of the religious plays of Calderon, one of the most remarkable is “The Purgatory of Saint Patrick.” It is founded on the little volume by Montalvan, already referred to, in which the old traditions of an entrance into Purgatory from a cave in an island off the coast of Ireland, or in Ireland itself, are united to the fictitious history of Ludovico Enio, a Spaniard, who, except that he is converted by Saint Patrick and “makes a good ending,” is no better than another Don Juan.[609] The strange play in which these are principal figures opens with a shipwreck. Saint Patrick and the godless Enio drift ashore and find themselves in Ireland,—the sinner being saved from drowning by the vigorous exertions of the saint. The king of the country, who immediately appears on the stage, is an atheist, furious against Christianity; and after an exhibition, which is not without poetry, of the horrors of savage heathendom, Saint Patrick is sent as a slave into the interior of the island, to work for this brutal master. The first act ends with his arrival at his destination, where, in the open fields, after a fervent prayer, he is comforted by an angel, and warned of the will of Heaven, that he should convert his oppressors.
Before the second act opens, three years elapse, during which Saint Patrick has visited Rome and been regularly commissioned for his great work in Ireland, where he now appears, ready to undertake it. He immediately performs miracles of all kinds, and, among the rest, raises the dead before the audience; but still the old heathen king refuses to be converted, unless the very Purgatory, Hell, and Paradise preached to him are made sure to the senses of some well-known witness. This, therefore, is Divinely vouchsafed to the intercession of Saint Patrick. A communication with the unseen world is opened through a dark and frightful cave. Enio, the godless Spaniard, already converted by an alarming vision, enters it and witnesses its dread secrets; after which he returns, and effects the conversion of the king and court by a long description of what he had seen,—a description which is the only catastrophe to the play.
Besides its religious story, the Purgatory of Saint Patrick has a love-plot, such as might become the most secular drama, and a gracioso as rude and free-spoken as the rudest of his class.[610] But the whole was intended to produce what was then regarded as a religious effect; and there is no reason to suppose that it failed of its purpose. There is, however, much in it that would be grotesque and unseemly under any system of faith; some wearying metaphysics; and two speeches of Enio’s, each above three hundred lines long,—the first an account of his shameful life before his conversion, and the last a narrative of all he had witnessed in the cave, absurdly citing for its truth fourteen or fifteen obscure monkish authorities, all of which belong to a period subsequent to his own.[611] Such as it is, however, the Purgatory of Saint Patrick is commonly ranked among the best religious plays of the Spanish theatre in the seventeenth century.
It is, indeed, on many accounts, less offensive than the more famous drama, “Devotion to the Cross,” which is founded on the adventures of a man who, though his life is a tissue of gross and atrocious crimes, is yet made an object of the especial favor of God, because he shows a uniform external reverence for whatever has the form of a cross; and who, dying in a ruffian brawl, as a robber, is yet, in consequence of this devotion to the cross, miraculously restored to life, that he may confess his sins, be absolved, and then be transported directly to heaven. The whole seems to be absolutely an invention of Calderon, and, from the fervent poetical tone of some of its devotional passages, it has always been a favorite in Spain, and, what is yet more remarkable, has found admirers in Protestant Christendom.[612]
“The Wonder-working Magician,” founded on the story of Saint Cyprian,—the same legend on which Milman has founded his “Martyr of Antioch,”—is, however, more attractive than either of the dramas just mentioned, and, like “El Joseph de las Mugeres,” reminds us of Goethe’s “Faust.” It opens—after one of those pleasing descriptions of natural scenery in which Calderon loves to indulge—with an account by Cyprian, still unconverted, of his retirement, on a day devoted to the service of Jupiter, from the bustle and confusion of the city of Antioch, in order to spend the time in inquiries concerning the existence of One Supreme Deity. As he seems likely to arrive at conclusions not far from the truth, Satan, to whom such a result would be particularly unwelcome, breaks in upon his studies, and, in the dress of a fine gentleman, announces himself to be a man of learning, who has accidentally lost his way. In imitation of a fashion not rare among scholars at European universities, in the poet’s time, this personage offers to hold a dispute with Cyprian on any subject whatever. Cyprian naturally chooses the one that then troubled his thoughts; and after a long, logical discussion, according to the discipline of the schools, obtains a clear victory,—though not without feeling enough of his adversary’s power and genius to express a sincere admiration for both. The evil spirit, however, though defeated, is not discouraged, and goes away, determined to try the power of temptation.
For this purpose he brings upon the stage Lelius, son of the governor of Antioch, and Florus,—both friends of Cyprian,—who come to fight a duel, near the place of his present retirement, concerning a fair lady named Justina, against whose gentle innocence the Spirit of all Evil is particularly incensed. Cyprian interferes; the parties refer their quarrel to him; he visits Justina, who is secretly a Christian, and supposes herself to be the daughter of a Christian priest; but, unhappily, Cyprian, instead of executing his commission, falls desperately in love with her; while, in order to make out the running parody on the principal action, common in Spanish plays, the two lackeys of Cyprian are both found to be in love with Justina’s maid.
Now, of course, begins the complication of a truly Spanish intrigue, for which all that precedes it is only a preparation. That same night, Lelius and Floras, the two original rivals for the love of Justina, who favors neither of them, come separately before her window to offer her a serenade, and while there, Satan deceives them both into a confident belief that the lady is disgracefully attached to some other person; for he himself, in the guise of a gallant, descends from her balcony, before their eyes, by a rope-ladder, and, having reached the bottom, sinks into the ground between the two. As they did not see each other till after his disappearance, though both had seen him, each takes the other to be this favored rival, and a duel ensues on the spot. Cyprian again opportunely interferes, but, having understood nothing of the vision or the rope-ladder, is astonished to find that both renounce Justina, as no longer worthy their regard. And thus ends the first act.
In the other two acts, Satan is still a busy, bustling personage. He appears in different forms; first, as if just escaped from shipwreck; and afterwards, as a fashionable gallant; but uniformly for mischief. The Christians, meantime, through his influence, are persecuted. Cyprian’s love grows desperate; and he sells his soul to the Spirit of Evil for the possession of Justina. The temptation of the fair Christian maiden is then carried on in all possible ways; especially in a beautiful lyrical allegory, where all things about her—the birds, the flowers, the balmy air—are made to solicit her to love with gentle and winning voices. But in every way the temptation fails. Satan’s utmost power is defied and defeated by the mere spirit of innocence. Cyprian, too, yields, and becomes a Christian, and with Justina is immediately brought before the governor, already exasperated by discovering that his own son is a lover of the fair convert. Both are ordered to instant execution; the buffoon servants make many poor jests on the occasion; and the piece ends by the appearance on a dragon of Satan himself, who is compelled to confess the power of the Supreme Deity, which, in the first scenes, he had denied, and to proclaim, amidst thunder and earthquakes, that Cyprian and Justina are already enjoying the happiness won by their glorious martyrdom.[613]
Few pieces contain more that is characteristic of the old Spanish stage than this one; and fewer still show so plainly how the civil restraints laid on the theatre were evaded, and the Church was conciliated, while the popular audiences lost nothing of the forbidden amusement to which they had been long accustomed from the secular drama.[614] Of such plays Calderon wrote fifteen, if we include in the number his “Aurora in Copacabana,” which is on the conquest and conversion of the Indians in Peru; and his “Origin, Loss, and Recovery of the Virgin of the Reliquary,”—a strange collection of legends, extending over above four centuries, full of the spirit of the old ballads, and relating to an image of the Madonna still devoutly worshipped in the great cathedral at Toledo.