The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

CHAPTER III.
THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE SPANISH DRAMA.

THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA—THE FIRST BEGINNINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS—THE STARTING-POINT OF THE SECULAR PLAY—BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES NAHARRO—LOPE DE RUEDA—LOPE DE VEGA’S LIFE—HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA—THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORK—CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE—CALDERON—CALDERON’S SCHOOL.

The national character of the Spanish drama.

The dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own, purely national. The classic stage had no influence on it whatever; the contemporary theatre of Italy very little, and only for a brief period in the earlier years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous rules of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor the lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle—though it was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere—had any effect. It would be too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them with profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of Don Quixote, reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three unities; and Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to fix the Spanish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and tragic should never be mingled in one piece, or that great personages should never be brought on except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence. He even boasted that he had written no less than six orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote for the stage, never made his practice even approach his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of which of his plays Lope was speaking when he said that he had observed the unities. It has even been supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good sense of Don Marcelino Menendez[26] has found by far the most acceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,—that Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a quite sincere theoretical admiration for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the commentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own impulses, and the popular will, though not without a certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated the orthodox literary doctrine very much as the ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the unconstitutional orders of kings,—they voted that these injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed—“obedicidas y no cumplidas,” thereby reconciling independence with a respectful attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to say from the first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as fully established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.

The first beginnings of the religious plays.

There was little in the mediæval literature of Spain to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards had mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the Church as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of their neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier years of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French influence at work in Spain.[27] The San Martinho of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who wrote both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral play like many in mediæval French literature. It is on the well-known story of Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks off abruptly with a note that the performers must end with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late, and had no time to finish. The Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja, which, from a reference to the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years about 1520, betrays a French model by its very title. Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The personages are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja’s sweetheart, the Church, and Holy Writ. The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme with French writers of farses and moralities), the sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is nothing here particularly Spanish—nothing which might not be direct translation from the French. The religious play was destined to have a history of its own in Spain; but its earlier stage is marked by little national character. Even the Oveja Perdida (the Lost Sheep), written, or at least revised and recast, by Juan de Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock piece with the strolling players, is a morality on the universal mediæval model. The Lost Sheep is of course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite, and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint Peter, the Archangel Michael, and the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an elaborate introduction, divided between an Introit to Ribera, the Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was played, and an Introit to the people, it does not differ from the San Martinho or the Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja.

The starting-point of the secular play.

It has been customary to treat the Celestina as the foundation, or at least an important part of the foundations, of the Spanish secular drama. This curious story in dialogue is indeed called a “tragi-comedy,” and it most unquestionably proves that its author, or authors, possessed the command of a prose style admirably adapted for the purposes of comedy. But the Spanish is a poetic, not a prose drama. The qualities which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story of Calisto and Melibœa, and the tiresome pedantry of much of the Celestina, its realism, and its vivacious representation of low life and character, are seldom found on the Spanish stage. We shall do better to look for the starting-point of the comedy of Lope de Vega in the Eclogas of Juan del Encina, who has been already mentioned as one of the last lights of the troubadour school.[28] The model here is obviously the little religious play of the stamp of Vicente’s San Martinho, modified by imitation of the classic Eclogue. The personages, generally shepherds, are few, the action of the simplest, and the verse somewhat infantile, though not without charm. Yet the mere fact that we have in them examples of an attempt to make characters and subjects, other than religious, matter of dramatic representation, shows that they were an innovation and a beginning. Juan del Encina, who was attached in some capacity to the Duke of Alva of his time, wrote these Eclogues to be repeated for the amusement of his patrons by their servants. It does not appear that they were played in the market-place, or were very popular. During the first half of the sixteenth century the Church endeavoured to repress the secular play. The struggle was useless, for the bent of the nation was too strong to be resisted. It conquered the Church, which, before the end of the century, found itself unable to prevent the performance of very mundane dramas within the walls of religious houses. Yet for a time the Inquisition was able to repress the growth of a non-religious drama at home. The working of the national passion for the stage, and for something other than pious farsas, is shown in the Josefina[29] of Micael de Carvajal. This long-forgotten work, by an author of whom nearly nothing is really known, was performed apparently for, and by, ecclesiastics at Valencia about 1520. It is on the subject of Joseph and his Brethren, is a religious play, but has divisions, and a machinery obviously adapted from the Latin, if not the Greek model. There are four acts, a herald who delivers a prologue to the first, second, and third, a chorus of maidens at the end of each. The dialogue has life, and there is a not unsuccessful attempt at characterisation in the parts of the brothers and of Potiphar’s wife. At the close comes the villancico, a simple form of song hovering towards being a hymn, which was obligatory at the close of the religious play. The Josefina had no progeny, and is to-day mainly interesting as an indication of the struggle of the national genius to find its true path. We cannot say even that of the few direct imitations of the classic form produced by the Spaniards. Such works as the Nise Lastimosa—the Pitiable Agnes—a strictly Senecan play on the story of Ines de Castro, first written in Portuguese by Ferreira, and then adapted into Castilian by Gerónimo Bermudez, a learned churchman, and printed in 1577, are simply literary exercises. They show that the influences which inspired Jodelle, and Garnier in France, were not unfelt in Spain; but there, as in England, the national genius would have none of them. In Bermudez himself the imitation of Seneca was forced. The Nise Lastimosa has a continuation called the Nise Laureada. The first, which ends with the murder of Agnes, is correct; but in the second, which has for subject the vengeance of the king, he throws aside the uncongenial apparatus of messenger and chorus, and plunges into horrors, to which the story certainly lent itself, with the zest of his contemporary Cristobal de Virues, or our own Kyd.