younger dramatist followed his less affluent but more gifted rival was inspired by the knowledge of his purity in his life and his works. Their careers for awhile progressed along the same lines, but with Cervantes always in the van. They were writing innumerable verses at the same period; but while Lope de Vega, following the custom of the day, lampooned his colleagues, and levelled foul and venemous sonnets at his contemporaries, Cervantes steadily set his face against the practice. He had laid down a rule for his own guidance, from which he never diverged. He can jest a brother poet and banter the foibles of the writers of his day with gentle irony and good humour, but he reserves his censure and his sarcasm for the castigation of evil, vice and folly.
If, as seems more than probable, the relations between Cervantes and Vega were strained, their differences could have had no origin in the attitude of the former. It is true that in Don Quixote the literary artifices and affectations of Lope de Vega are treated with benignant banter, and the bad taste and vulgarity which he indulged in many of his plays came in for some severe and judicious criticism, but in the same place other of his dramas are selected for special praise, and the dramatist is eulogised as “that most happy genius of these kingdoms, who has composed such an infinite number of plays with so much glory, with so much grace, such elegant verse, such choice language, such weighty sentiments—so rich in eloquence and loftiness of style, as that the world is filled with his renown.”
In return for this eulogy, and many other flattering references, Lope de Vega has mentioned Cervantes’ name exactly four times in print, and then only in cold and restrained terms; and in a letter written to his late patron, the Duke of Sessa, he disclosed his animus in the following item of news: “Of poets I speak not. Many are in the bud for next year, but there are none so bad as Cervantes, or so foolish as to praise Don Quixote.” It was inevitable that a man of the disposition of Vega, whom his friend, Alarcon, has described as “the universal envier of the applause given to others,” should have envied the fame and genius of Cervantes, who, as Mr. Watts has written, was “of a temper the sweetest among men of genius, who had come through the fiery ordeal of a life of hardship with a heart unsoured as with honour unblemished.” As poet and novelist, Cervantes outdistanced the younger writer in public estimation, and as the author of Don Quixote, he soared to a height which has been unattained by any other Spanish novelist; in the realm of the drama alone Lope de Vega was paramount.
It has been seen that Cervantes early acquired a taste for theatrical representations, and at the close of the sixteenth century he doubtless turned to this style of composition as offering the only available means of making an income. Between 1585 and 1588 he wrote and produced between twenty and
thirty plays, and claimed, on insufficient grounds, to have introduced several important changes in the material of stage representations. The trick of introducing allegorical characters among the sublunary personages, which Cervantes assumes as one of his improvements, was in practice in the old miracle plays, and his further pretention to having reduced the number of acts from five to three had been done long before by Avendano. Indeed it is possible that Cervantes produced no more than a number of respectable pieces which gained their full mead of popularity; and we know that his rate of payment, which averaged 800 reals per play, was equal to that received by Vega at any period of his career. But of his dramas only two have outlived their day—La Numancia and El Trato de Argel.
La Numancia, a play dealing with the famous siege of Numantia by the Romans, was subsequently acted at Zaragoza, in 1808, to inspire the besieged inhabitants to a last desperate effort, a device which succeeded so well that the French were driven from the battlements in the very moment of victory, and the city was saved. El Trato de Argel, in which Cervantes stages episodes in his captivity in Algeria, is a poorly-constructed, ineffective, and tedious piece of work, which gives one furiously to think that if the plays of our author won favour, it could only have been at a time when competition was weak or non-existent. Matos Fragoso, a dramatist who flourished a century later, alludes to the “famous comedies of the ingenious Cervantes,” but of contemporary criticism we have none; and Cervantes, in his prologue to his Eight Comedies and Eight Interludes, published in 1614, claims for his plays, with characteristic reticence: “They all ran their course without hisses, cries, or disturbances. They were all repeated without receiving tribute of cucumbers or any other missiles.” Of the lost La Confusa (The Perplexed Lady), the dramatist speaks with particular satisfaction as ranking “good among the best of the comedies of the Cloak and Sword, which had been, up to that time, acted.” Well, the Spaniards are a conservative people, and to-day one may witness in that country, performances of stage plays that are listened to without the disconcerting accompaniment of the hurtling cucumbers, but which in an English theatre would be received with all manner of unfriendly disapprobation.