Bartolomé de Torres Naharro.
The true successors of Juan del Encina were to be found during the reign of Charles V. in the Spanish colony at Rome. The Spanish proverb has it that the Devil stands behind the cross—“tras la cruz está el diablo”—and the Spaniards who lived under the shadow of the papal Court enjoyed a licence which they would have missed under the eye of the Inquisition. One of them, Bartolomé de Torres Naharro, who lived and wrote in the early years of the century, is sometimes counted the father of the Spanish stage. He was the author of a number of comedies, published in Seville in 1520 under the title of Propaladia, which deal with the favourite subjects of comedy, love intrigues, and the tricks of lovers, rufianes—i.e., bullies—soldiers in and out of service, and so forth, types which he had many chances of observing at Rome when all Italy was swarming with Spanish bisoños, the wandering fighting men who were mercenaries when any prince would employ them, and vagabonds at other times. Naharro had considerable vis comica, and a command of telling fluent verse. His personages have life, and if his plays have touches of obscenity, which is not common in Spain, and brutality, which is less rare, his time must be taken into account. But Naharro, though a genuine Spaniard, lived too near the Italians not to be influenced by Machiavelli and Ariosto. His plays mark only a short step forward to the fully developed comedy of Lope. The Propaladia was soon suppressed by the Inquisition, not because it contained heresy, but for a freedom of language in regard to ecclesiastical vices which would have passed unrebuked in the previous century, but had become of very bad example after the Reformation had developed into a formidable attack on the Church. The form of his comedy was not that finally adopted by the Spaniards. It was in five acts, with the introito or prologue.
Lope de Rueda.
A truly popular national drama was hardly likely to arise among courtiers and churchmen. It needed a chief who looked to the common audience as his patron, and who also had it in him to begin the work on lines which literature could afterwards develop, Spain found such a leader in Lope de Rueda (floruit 1544?-1567?). Little is known of his life, but that little is more than is known with certainty of some contemporary men of letters. He was a native of Seville, and originally a goldbeater by trade. It may be that he acquired his taste for the stage by taking part in the performance of religious plays, which were always acted by townsmen or churchmen. The separation of the actor from the amateur, if that is the right word to apply to the burghers and peasants of the Middle Ages who appeared on the stage partly for amusement and partly from piety, on the one hand, and from the mere juggler, minstrel, or acrobat on the other, was going on in France and England. The same process was at work in Spain. By steps of which we can now learn nothing, Lope de Rueda became in the fullest sense a playwright and actor-manager. He strolled all over Spain. Cervantes, who had seen him, has immortalised his simple theatre—the few boards which formed the stage, the blanket which did duty as scenery, and behind which sat the guitar-player who represented the orchestra, the bags containing the sheepskin jackets and false beards forming the wardrobe of the company. The purely literary importance of Lope de Rueda’s work is not great. That part of it which survived is inconsiderable in bulk, and shows no advance on Naharro. He was not an ignorant man. The Italian plays were certainly known to him, and he wrote pure Castilian. But his chief contribution to the form of Spanish dramatic literature was the paso or passage, a brief interlude, generally between “fools” or “clowns” in the Shakespearian sense, frequently introduced between the acts of a regular comedy. The monologue of Lance over his dog, or the scene between Speed and Lance with the love-letter, in the third act of the Two Gentlemen of Verona, would serve as pasos. But Lope de Rueda’s chief claim to honour is that he fairly conquered for the Spanish stage its place in the sun. He hung on no patron, but set his boards up in the market-place, looking to his audience for his reward. When he died, in or about 1567, the theatre was a recognised part of Spanish life. If he had not much enriched dramatic literature, he had provided those who could with a place in which they were free to grow to the extent of their intrinsic power. It is pleasant to know that he had his reward. He seems to have been a prosperous man, and Cervantes speaks with respect of his character. The fact that he was buried in the Cathedral of Córdova is a proof that he was not considered a mere “rogue and vagabond,” but had at least as good a position as an English actor who was the queen’s or the admiral’s “servant.” As Lope de Rueda was nobody’s servant, we may fairly draw the deduction that the Spanish stage had a more independent position than our own.
The followers of Lope de Rueda.
The school of Lope de Rueda, as they may be called with some exaggeration, must be allowed to pass under his name. The most memorable of them was Juan de Timoneda, already named as the author, or adapter, of the Oveja Perdida. He was a bookseller of Valencia, who died at a great age, but at some uncertain date, in the reign of Philip II. Juan de Timoneda published all that were published of the plays of Lope de Rueda, and in his capacity of bookseller-publisher was no doubt helpful to literature. But as a man of letters he was mainly an adapter, and his plays are echoes of Naharro and Rueda, or were conveyed from Ariosto. The sap was now rising, and the tree began to bear fruit in more than one branch. Spain as it then was, and as it long remained, was rather a confederation of states than a state. There was no capital in the proper sense of the word. Charles V. had never rested, and had spent much of his life out of Spain. Philip II. did indeed fix his Court at Madrid, or in the neighbourhood, but it was not until the close of his life that the society of a capital began to form about him. In the earlier years of his reign the capitals of the ancient kingdoms were still centres of social, intellectual, and artistic activity, nor did they fall wholly to the level of provincial towns while any energy remained in Spain. Thus as the taste for the stage and for dramatic literature grew, it was to be expected that its effects would be seen in independent production in different parts of the Peninsula. |The dramatists of Seville and Valencia.| The writers who carried on the work of Lope de Rueda, and who prepared the way for Lope de Vega, were not “wits of the Court,” or about the Court. They were to be found at Seville and Valencia. Juan de la Cueva, the author of the Egemplar Poético, was a native of the capital of Andalusia. To him belongs the honour of first drawing on the native romances for subjects, as in his Cerco de Zamora—‘Siege of Zamora’—a passage of the Cid legend, and of first indicating, if not exactly outlining, the genuine Comedia de Capa y Espada in El Infamador—‘The Calumniator.’ In Valencia Cristobal de Virues (1550- ——?) wrote plays less national in subject but more in manner. He did once join the well-meaning but mistaken band which was endeavouring to bind the Spanish stage in the chains of the Senecan tragedy; but, as a rule, he wrote wild romantic plays, abounding in slaughter, under classic names. This was an effort which could not well lead anywhere to good, but at least it testifies to the vitality of the interest felt in the stage; and Valencia has this claim to a share in the development of the Spanish drama, that for a short time it sheltered, encouraged, and may have helped to determine, the course of the Phœnix of wits, the Wonder of Nature, the fertile among all the most fertile, the once renowned, the then unjustly depreciated, but the ever-memorable Lope de Vega.
If a writer is to be judged by his native force, his originality, the abundance of his work, the effect he produced on the literature of his country, and his fame in his own time, then Lope, to give him the name by which he was and is best known to his countrymen, must stand at the head of all Spain’s men of letters.[30]
If it is a rule admitting of no exception that the critic or historian of literature should have read all his author, then I at least must confess my incapacity to speak of this famous writer. Yet, encouraged by a firm conviction that there never lived nor does live, or at any future period will live, anybody who has achieved or will achieve this feat, being, moreover, persuaded, for reasons to be given, that it is not necessary to be achieved, I venture to go on.
Lope de Vega’s life.
Lope Felix de Vega Carpio came of a family which originally belonged to the “mountain,” the hill country of northern and north-western Spain, which never submitted to the Moor. His father was “hidalgo de ejucatoria,”—that is, noble by creation,—but his mother was of an old family, and both came from the valley of Carriedo in Asturias. He was born at Madrid on 25th November 1562. His life is known with exceptional fulness, partly because many passages of his works are avowedly biographical, partly because a number of his letters, addressed to his patron in later years, the Duke of Sessa, have been preserved. It would be better for Lope’s reputation if he had been more reticent, or his patron more careless. As it is, we know not only that he passed a stormy youth, but that in his later years he was an unchaste priest. His father died when he was very young, and he was left to the care of an uncle, the Inquisitor Don Miguel de Carpio. The Jesuits had the honour of educating him, among the many famous men trained in their schools. It is recorded by his biographers, and we can believe it, that he was very precocious. At five he could read Latin, and had already begun to write verses. After running away in a boyish escapade, he was attached as page to Gerónimo Manrique, Bishop of Ávila, who sent him to the University of Alcalá de Henares, the native town of Cervantes. From the account given of his youth in the excellently written dialogue story Dorotea, he appears to have been a mercenary lover, even according to the not very delicate standard of his time. His adventures were unsavoury, and not worth repeating. It is enough that, both before he took orders and in later life when he was tonsured and had taken the full vows, he presented a combination, not unknown at any time or in any race, but especially common on both sides in the seventeenth century, of intensity of faith with the most complete moral laxity. He alternated between penance and relapses. After leaving Alcalá he was for a time attached to the Duke of Alva, the grandson of the renowned governor of the Low Countries. For him he wrote the pastoral Arcadia, which deals with the duke’s amours. He married, but marriage produced no effect on his habits. He was exiled to Valencia for two years, in consequence of obscure troubles arising, he says, from “jealousy.” Shortly after his return to Madrid his wife died, but he continued to give cause for “jealousy,” and other troubles sent him off to join the Armada. From that campaign of failure and suffering he had the good fortune to return in safety, and he bore it so well that he wrote at least a great part of a long continuation of Ariosto, called The Beauty of Angelica, during the voyage. After his return to Madrid in 1590 he was again married, and again marriage made little difference. In 1609 he became a priest. During his later years he was attached, not apparently as a servant but as a patronised friend, to Don Pedro Fernandez de Córdova, first Marquess Priego, and then Duke of Sessa,—a very dissolute gentleman of literary tastes, belonging to the famous house which had produced the Great Captain, Gonsalvo de Córdova. He died at the age of seventy-three in 1635.