CHAPTER XXV.
Drama after Calderon. — Moreto. — Comedias de Figuron. — Roxas. — Plays by more than one Author. — Cubillo. — Leyba. — Cancer. — Enriquez Gomez. — Sigler. — Zarate. — Barrios. — Diamante. — Hoz. — Matos Fragoso. — Solís. — Candamo. — Zarzuelas. — Zamora. — Cañizares, and others. — Decline of the Spanish Drama.
The most brilliant period of the Spanish drama falls within the reign of Philip the Fourth, which extended from 1621 to 1665, and embraced the last fourteen years of the life of Lope de Vega and the thirty most fortunate years of the life of Calderon. But after this period a change begins to be apparent; for the school of Lope was that of a drama in the freshness and buoyancy of youth, while the school of Calderon belongs to the season of its maturity and gradual decay. Not that this change is strongly marked during Calderon’s life. On the contrary, so long as he lived, and especially during the reign of his great patron, there is little visible decline in the dramatic poetry of Spain; though still, through the crowd of its disciples and amidst the shouts of admiration that followed it on the stage, the symptoms of its coming fate may be discerned.
Of those that divided the favor of the public with their great master, none stood so near to him as Agustin Moreto, of whom we know hardly any thing, except that he lived retired in a religious house at Toledo from 1657, and that he died there in 1669.[685] Three volumes of his plays, however, and a number more never collected into a volume, were printed between 1654 and 1681, though he himself seems to have regarded them, during the greater part of that time, only as specious follies or sins. They are in all the different forms known to the age to which they belong, and, as in the case of Calderon, each form melts imperceptibly into the character of some other. But the theatre was not then so strictly watched as it had been; and the small number of religious plays Moreto has left us are generally connected with known events in history, like “The Most Fortunate Brothers,” which contains the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, both before they were inclosed in the cave and when they awoke from their miraculous repose of two centuries.[686] A few are heroic, such as “The Brave Justiciary of Castile,”—a drama of spirit and power, on the character of Peter the Cruel, though, like most other plays in which he appears, not one in which the truth of history is respected. But, in general, Moreto’s dramas are of the old cavalier class; and when they are not, they take, in order to suit the humor of the time, many of the characteristics of this truly national form.
In one point, however, he made, if not a change in the direction of the drama of his predecessors, yet an advance upon it. He devoted himself more to character-drawing, and often succeeded better in it than they had. His first play of this kind was “The Aunt and the Niece,” printed as early as 1654. The characters are a widow extremely anxious to be married, but foolishly jealous of the charms of her niece, and a vaporing, epicurean officer in the army, who cheats the elder lady with flattery, while he wins the younger. It is curious to observe, however, that the hint for this drama—which is the oldest of the class called figuron, from the prominence of one not very dignified figure in it—is yet to be found in Lope de Vega, to whom, as we have seen, is to be traced, directly or indirectly, almost every form of dramatic composition that finally succeeded on the Spanish stage.[687]
Moreto’s next attempt of the same sort is even better known, “The Handsome Don Diego,”—a phrase that has become a national proverb. It sets forth with great spirit the character of a fop, who believes every lady he looks upon must fall in love with him. The very first sketch of him at his morning toilet, and the exhibition of the sincere contempt he feels for the more sensible lover, who refuses to take such frivolous care of his person, are full of life and truth; and the whole ends, with appropriate justice, by his being deluded into a marriage with a cunning waiting-maid, who is passed off upon him as a rich countess.
Some of Moreto’s plays, as, for instance, his “Trampa Adelante,” obtained the name of gracioso, because the buffoon is made the character upon whom the action turns; and in one case, at least, he wrote a burlesque farce of no value, taking his subject from the achievements of the Cid. But his general tone is that of the old intriguing comedy; and though he is sometimes indebted for his plots to his predecessors, and especially to Lope, yet, in nearly every instance, and perhaps in every one, he surpassed his model, and the drama he wrote superseded on the public stage the one he imitated.[688]
This was the case with the best of all his plays, “Disdain met with Disdain,” for the idea of which he was indebted to Lope, whose “Miracles of Contempt” has long been forgotten as an acting play, while Moreto’s still maintains its place on the Spanish stage, of which it is one of the brightest ornaments.[689] The plot is remarkably simple and well contrived. Diana, heiress to the county of Barcelona, laughs at love and refuses marriage, under whatever form it may be urged upon her. Her father, whose projects are unreasonably thwarted by such conduct, induces the best and gayest of the neighbouring princes to come to his court, and engage in tournaments and other knightly sports, in order to win her favor. She, however, treats them all with an equal coldness, and even with a pettish disdain, until, at last, she is piqued into admiration of the Count of Urgel, by his apparent neglect of her charms,—a neglect which he skilfully places on the ground of a contempt like her own for all love, but which, in fact, only conceals a deep and faithful passion for herself.
The charm of the piece consists in the poetical spirit with which this design is wrought out. The character of the gracioso is well drawn and well defined, and, as in most Spanish plays, he is his lord’s confidant, and by his shrewdness materially helps on the action. At the opening, after having heard from his master the position of affairs and the humors of the lady, he gives his advice in the following lines, which embody the entire argument of the drama.
My lord, your case I have discreetly heard,
And find it neither wonderful nor new;—
In short, it is an every-day affair.
Why, look ye, now! In my young boyhood, Sir,—
When the full vintage came and grapes were strewed,
Yea, wasted, on the ground,—I had, be sure,
No appetite at all. But afterwards,
When they were gathered in for winter’s use,
And hung aloft upon the kitchen rafters,
Then nothing looked so tempting half as they;
And, climbing cunningly to reach them there,
I caught a pretty fall and broke my ribs.
Now, this, Sir, is your case,—the very same.[690]
There is an excellent scene, in which the Count, perceiving he has made an impression on the lady’s heart, fairly confesses his love, while she, who is not yet entirely subdued, is able to turn round and treat him with her accustomed disdain; from all which he recovers himself with an address greater than her own, protesting his very confession to have been only a part of the show they were by agreement carrying on. But this confirms the lady’s passion, which at last becomes uncontrollable, and the catastrophe immediately follows. She pleads guilty to a desperate love, and marries him.
Contemporary with Moreto, and nearly as successful as he was among the earlier writers for the stage, was Francisco de Roxas, who flourished during the greater part of Calderon’s life, and may have survived him. He was born in Toledo, and in 1641 was made a knight of the Order of Santiago, but when he died is not known. Two volumes of his plays were published in 1640 and 1645, and in the Prologue to the second he speaks of publishing yet a third, which never appeared; so that we have still only the twenty-four plays contained in these volumes, and a few others that at different times were printed separately.[691] He belongs decidedly to Calderon’s school,—unless, indeed, he began his career too early to be a mere follower; and in poetical merit, if not in dramatic skill, takes one of the next places after Moreto. But he is very careless and unequal. His plays entitled “He who is a King must not be a Father” and “The Aspics of Cleopatra” are as extravagant as almost any thing in the Spanish heroic drama; while, on the other hand, “What Women really are” and “Folly rules here” are among the most effective of the class of intriguing plays.[692]
His best, however, and one that has always kept its place on the stage, is called “None below the King.” The scene is laid in the troublesome times of Alfonso the Eleventh, and is in many respects true to them. Don Garcia, the hero, is a son of Garci Bermudo, who had conspired against the father of the reigning monarch, and, in consequence of this circumstance, Garcia lives concealed as a peasant at Castañar, near Toledo, very rich, but unsuspected by the government. In a period of great anxiety, when the king wishes to take Algeziras from the Moors, and demands, for that purpose, free contributions from his subjects, those of Garcia are so ample as to attract especial attention. The king inquires who is this rich and loyal peasant; and his curiosity being still further excited by the answer, he determines to visit him at Castañar, incognito, accompanied by only two or three favored courtiers. Garcia, however, is privately advised of the honor that awaits him, but, from an error in the description, mistakes the person of one of the attendants for that of the king himself.
On this mistake the plot turns. The courtier whom Garcia wrongly supposes to be the king falls in love with Blanca, Garcia’s wife; and, in attempting to enter her apartments by night, when he believes her husband to be away, is detected by the husband in person. Now, of course, comes the struggle between Spanish loyalty and Spanish honor. Garcia can visit no vengeance on a person whom he believes to be his king; and he has not the slightest suspicion of his wife, whom he knows to be faithfully and fondly attached to him. But the remotest appearance of an intrigue demands a bloody satisfaction. He determines, therefore, at once, on the death of his loving wife. Amidst his misgivings and delays, however, she escapes, and is carried to court, whither he himself is, at the same moment, called to receive the greatest honors that can be conferred on a subject. In the royal presence, he necessarily discovers his mistake regarding the king’s person. From this moment, the case becomes perfectly plain to him, and his course perfectly simple. He passes instantly into the antechamber. With a single blow his victim is laid at his feet; and he returns, sheathing his bloody dagger, and offering, as his only and sufficient defence, an account of all that had happened, and the declaration, which gives its name to the play, that “none below the king” can be permitted to stand between him and the claims of his honor.
Few dramas in the Spanish language are more poetical; fewer still, more national in their tone. The character of Garcia is drawn with great vigor, and with a sharply defined outline. That of his wife is equally well designed, but is full of gentleness and patience. Even the clown is a more than commonly happy specimen of the sort of parody suitable to his position. Some of the descriptions, too, are excellent. There is a charming one of rustic life, such as it was fancied to be under the most favorable circumstances in Spain’s best days; and, at the end of the second act, there is a scene between Garcia and the courtier, at the moment the courtier is stealthily entering his wife’s apartment, in which we have the struggle between Spanish honor and Spanish loyalty given with a picturesqueness and spirit that leave little to be desired. In short, if we set aside the best plays of Lope de Vega and Calderon, it is one of the most effective of the old Spanish dramas.[693]
Roxas was well known in France. Thomas Corneille imitated, and almost translated, one of his plays; and as Scarron, in his “Jodelet,” did the same with “Where there are real Wrongs there is no Jealousy,” the second comedy that has kept its place on the French stage is due to Spain, as the first tragedy and the first comedy had been before it.[694]
Like many writers for the Spanish theatre, Roxas prepared several of his plays in conjunction with others. Franchi, in his eulogy on Lope de Vega, who indulged in this practice as the rest did, complains of it, and says a drama thus compounded is more like a conspiracy than a comedy, and that such performances were, in their different parts, necessarily unequal and dissimilar. But this was not the general opinion of his age; and that the complaint is not always well founded, we know, not only from the example of Beaumont and Fletcher, but from the success that has attended the composition of many dramas in France in the nineteenth century by more than one person. It should not be forgotten, also, that in Spain, where, from the very structure of the national drama, the story was of so much consequence, and where so many of the characters had standing attributes assigned to them, such joint partnerships were more easily carried through with success than they could be on any other stage. At any rate, they were more common there than they have ever been elsewhere.[695]
Alvaro Cubillo, who alludes to Moreto as his contemporary, and who was perhaps known even earlier as a successful dramatist, says, in 1654, that he had already written a hundred plays. But the whole of this great number, except ten published by himself, and two or three others that appeared, if we may judge by his complaints, without his permission, are now lost. Of those he published himself, “The Thunderbolt of Andalusia,” in two parts, taken from the old ballads about the Children of Lara, was much admired in his lifetime; but “The Bracelets of Marcela,” a simple comedy, resting on the first childlike love of a young girl, has since quite supplanted it. One of his plays, “El Señor de Noches Buenas,” was early printed as Antonio de Mendoza’s, but Cubillo at once made good his title to it; and yet, after the death of both, it was inserted anew in Mendoza’s works;—a striking proof of the great carelessness long common in Spain on the subject of authorship.
None of Cubillo’s plays has high poetical merit, though several of them are pleasant, easy, and natural. The best is “The Perfect Wife,” in which the gentle and faithful character of the heroine is drawn with skill, and with a true conception of what is lovely in woman’s nature. Two of his religious plays, on the other hand, are more than commonly extravagant and absurd; one of them—“Saint Michael”—containing, in the first act, the story of Cain and Abel; in the second, that of Jonah; and in the third, that of the Visigoth king, Bamba, with a sort of separate conclusion in the form of a vision of the times of Charles the Fifth and his three successors.[696]
But the Spanish stage, as we advance in Calderon’s life, becomes more and more crowded with dramatic authors, all eager in their struggles for popular favor. One of them was Antonio de Leyba, whose “Mutius Scævola” is an absurdly constructed and wild historical play; while, on the contrary, his “Honor the First Thing” and “The Lady President” are pleasant comedies, enlivened with short stories and apologues, which he wrote with great naturalness and point.[697] Another dramatist was Cancer y Velasco, whose poems are better known than his plays, and whose “Muerte de Baldovinos” runs more into caricature and broad farce than was commonly tolerated in the court theatre.[698] And yet others were Antonio Enriquez Gomez, son of a Portuguese Jew, who inserted in his “Moral Evenings with the Muses”[699] four plays, all of little value, except “The Duties of Honor”;—Antonio Sigler de Huerta, who wrote “No Good to Ourselves without Harm to Somebody Else”;—and Zabaleta, who, though he made a satirical and harsh attack upon the theatre, could not refuse himself the indulgence of writing for it.[700]
If we now turn from these to a few whose success was more strongly marked, none presents himself earlier than Fernando de Zarate, a poet who was occasionally misled by the fashion and bad taste of his time, and occasionally resisted and rebuked it. Thus, in his best play, “What Jealousy drives Men to do,” there is no trace of Gongorism, while this eminently Spanish folly is very obvious in his otherwise good drama, “He that talks Most does Least,” and even in his “Presumptuous and Beautiful,” which has continued to be acted down to our own days.[701]
Another of the writers for the theatre at this time was Miguel de Barrios, one of those unhappy children of Israel, who, under the terrors of the Inquisition, concealed their religion and suffered some of the worst penalties of unbelief from the jealous intolerance which everywhere watched them. His family was Portuguese, but he himself was born in Spain, and served long in the Spanish armies. At last, however, when he was in Flanders, the temptations to a peaceful conscience were too strong for him. He escaped to Amsterdam, and died there in the open profession of the faith of his fathers about the year 1699. His plays were printed as early as 1665, but the only one worth notice is “The Spaniard in Oran”; longer than it should be, but not without merit.[702]
Diamante was among those who wrote dramas especially accommodated to the popular taste, while Calderon was still at the height of his reputation. Their number is considerable. Two volumes were collected by him and published in 1670 and 1674, and yet others still remain in scattered pamphlets and in manuscript.[703] They are in all the forms, and in all the varieties of tone, then in favor. Some of them, like “Santa Teresa,” are religious. Others are historical, like “Mary Stuart.” Others are taken from the old national traditions, like “The Siege of Zamora,” which is on the same subject with the second part of Guillen de Castro’s “Cid,” but much less poetical. Others are zarzuelas, or dramas chiefly sung, of which the best specimen by Diamante is his “Alpheus and Arethusa,” prepared with an amusing loa in honor of the Constable of Castile. There are more in the style of the capa y espada than in any other. But none of them has any marked merit. The one that has attracted most attention, out of Spain, is “The Son honoring his Father”; a play on the quarrel of the Cid with Count Lozano, which, from a mistake of Voltaire, was long thought to have been the model of Corneille’s “Cid,” while in fact the reverse is true; since Diamante’s play was produced above twenty years after the great French tragedy, and is deeply indebted to it.[704] Like most of the dramatists of his time, Diamante was a follower of Calderon, and inclined to the more romantic side of his character and school; and, like so many Spanish poets of all times, he finished his career in religious seclusion. Of the precise period of his death no notice has been found, but it was probably near the end of the century.
Passing over such writers of plays as Monroy, Monteser, Cuellar, and not a few others, who flourished in the latter half of the seventeenth century, we come to a pleasant comedy entitled “The Punishment of Avarice,” written by Juan de la Hoz, a native of Madrid, who was made a knight of Santiago in 1653, and Regidor of Burgos in 1657, after which he rose to good offices about the court, and was living there as late as 1689. How many plays he wrote, we are not told; but the only one now remembered is “The Punishment of Avarice.” It is founded on the third tale of María de Zayas, which bears the same name, and from which its general outline and all the principal incidents are taken.[705] But the miser’s character is much more fully and poetically drawn in the drama than it is in the story. Indeed, the play is one of the best specimens of character-drawing on the Spanish stage, and may, in many respects, bear a comparison with the “Aulularia” of Plautus, and the “Avare” of Molière.
The sketch of the miser by one of his acquaintance in the first act, ending with “He it was who first weakened water,” is excellent; and, even to the last scene, where he goes to a conjurer to recover his lost money, the character is consistently maintained and well developed.[706] He is a miser throughout; and, what is more, he is a Spanish miser. The moral is better in the prose tale, as the intrigante, who cheats him into a marriage with herself, is there made a victim of her crimes no less than he is; while in the drama she profits by them, and comes off with success at last,—a strange perversion of the original story, which it is not easy to explain. But in poetical merit there is no comparison between the two.
Juan de Matos Fragoso, a Portuguese, who lived in Madrid at the same time with Diamante and Hoz, and died in 1692, enjoyed quite as much reputation with the public as they did, though he often writes in the very bad taste of the age. But he never printed more than one volume of his dramas, so that they are now to be sought chiefly in separate pamphlets, and in collections made for other purposes than the claims of the individual authors found in them. Those of his dramas which are most known are his “Mistaken Experiment,” founded on the “Impertinent Curiosity” of the first part of Don Quixote; his “Fortune through Contempt,” a better-managed dramatic fiction; and his “Wise Man in Retirement and Peasant by his own Fireside,” which is commonly accounted the best of his works.
“The Captive Redeemer,” however, in which he was assisted by another well-known author of his time, Sebastian de Villaviciosa, is on many accounts more picturesque and attractive. It is, he says, a true story. It is certainly a heart-rending one, founded on an incident not uncommon during the barbarous wars carried on between the Christians in Spain and the Moors in Africa,—relics of the fierce hatreds of a thousand years.[707] A Spanish lady is carried into captivity by a marauding party, who land on the coast for plunder and instantly escape with their prey. Her lover, in despair, follows her, and the drama consists of their adventures till both are found and released. Mingled with this sad story, there is a sort of underplot, which gives its name to the piece, and is very characteristic of the state of the theatre and the demands of the public, or at least of the Church. A large bronze statue of the Saviour is discovered to be in the hands of the infidels. The captive Christians immediately offer the money, sent as the price of their own freedom, to rescue it from such sacrilege; and, at last, the Moors agree to give it up for its weight in gold; but when the value of the thirty pieces of silver, originally paid for the person of the Saviour himself, has been counted into one scale, it is found to outweigh the massive statue in the other, and enough is still left to purchase the freedom of the captives, who, in offering their ransoms, had, in fact, as they supposed, offered their own lives. With this triumphant miracle the piece ends. Like the other dramas of Fragoso, it is written in a great variety of measures, which are managed with skill and are full of sweetness.[708]
The last of the good writers for the Spanish stage with its old attributes is Antonio de Solís, the historian of Mexico. He was born on the 18th of July, 1610, in Alcalá de Henares, and completed his studies at the University of Salamanca, where, when only seventeen years old, he wrote a drama. Five years later he had given to the theatre his “Gitanilla” or “The Pretty Gypsy Girl,” founded on the story of Cervantes, or rather on a play of Montalvan borrowed from that story;—a graceful fiction, which has been constantly reproduced in one shape or another, ever since it first appeared from the hand of the great master. “One Fool makes a Hundred”—a pleasant figuron play of Solís, which was soon afterwards acted before the court—has less merit, and is somewhat indebted to the “Don Diego” of Moreto. But, on the other hand, his “Love à la Mode,” which is all his own, is among the good plays of the Spanish stage, and furnished materials for one of the best of Thomas Corneille’s.
In 1642, Solís prepared, for a festival at Pamplona, a dramatic entertainment on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the tone of the Spanish national theatre is fantastically confounded with the genius of the old Grecian mythology, even more than was common in similar cases; but the whole ends, quite contrary to all poetical tradition, by the rescue of Eurydice from the infernal regions, with an intimation that a second part would follow, whose conclusion would be tragical;—a promise which, like so many others of the same sort in Spanish literature, was never fulfilled.
As his reputation increased, Solís was made one of the royal secretaries, and, while acting in this capacity, wrote an allegorical drama, partly resembling a morality of the elder period, and partly a modern masque, in honor of the birth of one of the princes, which was acted in the palace of the Buen Retiro. The title of this wild, but not unpoetical, opera is “Triumphs of Love and Fortune”; and Diana and Endymion, Psyche and Venus, Happiness and Adversity, are among its dramatic personages; though a tone of honor and gallantry is as consistently maintained in it, as if its scene were laid at Madrid, and its characters taken from the audience that witnessed the performance. It is the more curious, however, from the circumstance, that the loa, the entremeses, and the saynete, with which it was originally accompanied, are still attached to it, all written by Solís himself.[709]
In this way he continued, during the greater part of his life, one of the favored writers for the private theatre of the king and the public theatres of the capital; the dramas he produced being almost uniformly marked by a skilful complication of their plots, which were not always original, and by a purity of style and harmony of versification which were quite his own. But at last, like many other Spanish poets, he began to think such occupations sinful; and, after much deliberation, he resolved on a life of religious retirement, and submitted to the tonsure. From this time he renounced the theatre. He even refused to write autos sacramentales, when he was applied to, in the hope that he might be willing to become a successor to the fame and fortunes of his great master; and, giving up his mind to devout meditation and historical studies, seems to have lived contentedly, though in seclusion and poverty, till his death, which happened in 1686. A volume of his minor poems, published afterwards, which are in all the forms then fashionable, has little value, except in a few short dramatic entertainments, several of which are characteristic and amusing.[710]
Later than Solís, but still partly his contemporary, was Francisco Banzes Candamo. He was a gentleman of ancient family, and was born in 1662, in Asturias,—that true soil of the old Spanish cavaliers. His education was careful, if not wise; and he was early sent to court, where he received, first a pension, and afterwards several important offices in the financial administration, whose duties, it is said, he fulfilled with good faith and efficiency. But at last the favor of the court deserted him; and he died in 1704, under circumstances of so much wretchedness, that he was buried at the charge of a religious society in the place to which he had been sent in disgrace.
His plays, or rather two volumes of them, were printed in 1722; but in relation to his other poems, a large mass of which he left to the Duke of Alva, we only know, that, long after their author’s death, a bundle of them was sold for a few pence, and that an inconsiderable collection of such of them as could be picked up from different sources was printed in a small volume in 1729.[711] Of his plays, those which he most valued are on historical subjects,[712] such as “The Recovery of Buda” and “For his King and his Lady.” He wrote for the theatre, however, in other forms, and several of his dramas are curious, from the circumstance that they are tricked out with the loas and entremeses which served originally to render them more attractive to the multitude. Nearly all his plots are ingenious, and, though involved, are more regular in their structure than was common at the time. But his style is swollen and presumptuous, and there is, notwithstanding their ingenuity, a want of life and movement in most of his plays that prevented them from being effective on the stage.
Candamo, however, should be noted as having given a decisive impulse to a form of the drama which was known before his time, and which served at last to introduce the genuine opera; I mean the zarzuela, which took its name from that of one of the royal residences near Madrid, where they were represented with great splendor for the amusement of Philip the Fourth, by command of his brother Ferdinand.[713] They are, in fact, plays of various kinds,—shorter or longer; entremeses or full-length comedies;—but all in the national tone, and yet all accompanied with music.
The first attempt to introduce dramatic performances with music was made, as we have seen, about 1630, by Lope de Vega, whose eclogue “Selva sin Amor,” wholly sung, was played before the court, with a showy apparatus of scenery prepared by Cosmo Lotti, an Italian architect, and “was a thing,” says the poet, “new in Spain.” Short pieces followed soon afterward, entremeses, that were sung in place of the ballads between the acts of the plays, and of which Benavente was the most successful composer before 1645, when his works were first published. But the earliest of the full-length plays that was ever sung was Calderon’s “Púrpura de la Rosa,” which was produced before the court in 1659, on occasion of the marriage of Louis the Fourteenth with the Infanta Maria Theresa,—a compliment to the distinguished personages of France who had come to Spain in honor of that great solemnity, and whom it was thought no more than gallant to amuse with something like the operas of Quinault and Lulli, which were then the most admired entertainments of the court of France.
From this time, as was natural, there was a tendency to introduce singing on the Spanish stage, both in full-length comedies and in farces of all kinds;—a tendency which is apparent in Matos Fragoso, in Solís, and in most of the other writers contemporary with the latter part of Calderon’s career. At last, under the management of Diamante and Candamo, a separate form of the drama grew up, the subjects for which were generally taken from ancient mythology, like those of the “Circe” and “Arethusa”; and when they were not so taken, as in Diamante’s “Birth of Christ,” they were still treated in a manner much like that observed in the treatment of their fabulous predecessors.
From this form of the drama to that of the proper Italian opera was but a step, and one the more easily taken, as, from the period when the Bourbon family succeeded the Austrian on the throne, the national characteristics heretofore demanded in whatever appeared on the Spanish stage had ceased to enjoy the favor of the court and the higher classes. As early as 1705, therefore, something like an Italian opera was established at Madrid, where, with occasional intervals of suspension and neglect, it has ever since maintained a doubtful existence, and where, of course, the old zarzuelas and their kindred musical farces have been more and more discountenanced, until, in their original forms, at least, they have ceased to be heard.[714]
Another of the poets who lived at this time and wrote dramas that mark the decline of the Spanish theatre is Antonio de Zamora, who seems originally to have been an actor; who was afterwards in the office of the Indies and in the royal household; and whose dramatic career begins before the year 1700, though he did not die till after 1730, and probably had his principal success in the reign of Philip the Fifth, before whom his plays were occasionally performed in the Buen Retiro, as late as 1744.
Two volumes of his dramas were collected and published, with a solemn dedication and consecration of them to their author’s memory, on the ground of rendering unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s. They are only sixteen in number, each longer than had been common on the Spanish stage in its best days, and, in general, very heavy. Those that are on religious subjects sink into farce, with the exception of “Judas Iscariot,” which is too full of wild horrors to permit it to be amusing. The best of the whole number is, probably, the one entitled “All Debts must be paid at Last,” which is an alteration of Tirso de Molina’s “Don Juan,” skilfully made;—a remarkable drama, in which the tread of the marble statue is heard with more solemn effect than it is in any other of the many plays on the same subject.
But notwithstanding the merit of this and two or three others, it must be admitted that Zamora’s plays—of which above forty are extant, and of which many were acted at the court with applause—are very wearisome. They are crowded with long directions to the actors, and imply the use of much imperfect machinery;—both of them unwelcome symptoms of a declining dramatic literature. Still, Zamora writes with facility, and shows, that, under favorable circumstances, he might have trodden with more success in the footsteps of Calderon, whom he plainly took for his model. But he came too late, and, while striving to imitate the old masters, fell into their faults and extravagances, without giving token of the fresh spirit and marvellous invention in which their peculiar power resides.[715]
Others followed the same direction with even less success, like Pedro Francisco Lanini, Antonio Martinez, Pedro de Rosete, and Francisco de Villegas;[716] but the person who continued longest in the paths opened by Lope and Calderon was Joseph de Cañizares, a poet of Madrid, born in 1676, who began to write for the stage when he was only fourteen years old,—who was known as one of its more favored authors for above forty years, pushing his success far into the eighteenth century,—and who died in 1750. His plays are in all the old forms.[717] A few of those on historical subjects are not without interest, such as “The Tales of the Great Captain,” “Charles the Fifth at Tunis,” and “The Suit of Fernando Cortés.” The best of his efforts in this class is, however, “El Picarillo en España,” on the adventures of a sort of Falconbridge, Frederic de Bracamonte, who, in the reign of John the Second, discovered the Canaries, and held them for some time, as if he were their king. But Cañizares, on the whole, had most success in plays founded on character-drawing, introduced a little before his time by Moreto and Roxas, and commonly called, as we have noticed, “Comedias de Figuron.” His happiest specimens in this class are “The Famous Kitchen-Wench,” taken from the story of Cervantes, “The Mountaineer at Court,” and “Dómine Lucas,” where he drew from the life about him, and selected his subjects from the poor, presumptuous, decayed nobility, with which the court of Madrid was then infested.[718]
Still, with this partial success as a poet, and with a popularity that made him of consequence to the actors, Cañizares shows more distinctly than any of his predecessors or contemporaries the marks of a declining drama. As we turn over the seventy or eighty plays he has left us, we are constantly reminded of the towers and temples of the South of Europe, which, during the Middle Ages, were built from fragments of the nobler edifices that had preceded them, proving at once the magnificence of the age in which the original structures were reared, and the decay of that of which such relics and fragments were the chief glory. The plots, intrigues, and situations in the dramas of Cañizares are generally taken from Lope, Calderon, Moreto, Matos Fragoso, and his other distinguished predecessors, to whom, not without the warrant of many examples on the Spanish stage, he resorted as to rich and ancient monuments, which could still yield to the demands of his age materials such as the age itself could no longer furnish from its own resources.[719]
It would be easy to add the names of not a few other writers for the Spanish stage who were contemporary with Cañizares, and, like him, shared in the common decline of the national drama, or contributed to it. Such were Juan de Vera y Villarroel, Inez de la Cruz, Melchior Fernandez de Leon, Antonio Tellez de Azevedo, and others yet less distinguished while they lived, and long ago forgotten. But writers like these had no real influence on the character of the theatre to which they attached themselves. This, in its proper outlines, always remained as it was left by Lope de Vega and Calderon, who, by a remarkable concurrence of circumstances, maintained, as far as it was in secular hands, an almost unquestioned control over it, while they lived, and, at their death, left a character impressed upon it which it never lost, till it ceased to exist altogether.[720]