Quite different from this, however, is “The Unforeseen Fortune”; a play which, if it have only one action, has one whose scene is laid at Saragossa, at Valencia, and along the road between these two cities, while the events it relates fill up several years. The hero, just at the moment he is married by proxy in Valencia, is accidentally injured in the streets of Saragossa, and carried into the house of a stranger, where he falls in love with the fair sister of the owner, and is threatened with instant death by her brother, if he does not marry her. He yields to the threat. They are married and set out for Valencia. On the way, he confesses his unhappy position to his bride, and very coolly proposes to adjust all his difficulties by putting her to death. From this, however, he is turned aside, and they arrive in Valencia, where she serves him, from blind affection, as a voluntary slave; even taking care of a child that is borne to him by his Valencian wife.
Other absurdities follow. At last, she is driven to declare publicly who she is. Her ungrateful husband then attempts to kill her, and thinks he has succeeded. He is arrested for the supposed murder; but at the same instant her brother arrives, and claims his right to single combat with the offender. Nobody will serve as the base seducer’s second. At the last moment, the injured lady herself, supposed till then to be dead, appears in the lists, disguised in complete armour, not to protect her guilty husband, but to vindicate her own honor and prowess. Ferdinand, the king, who presides over the combat, interferes; and the strange show ends by her marriage to a former lover, who has hardly been seen at all on the stage,—a truly “Unforeseen Fortune,”—which gives its name to the ill-constructed drama.
The poetry, though not absolutely good, is better than the action. It is generally in flowing quintillas, or stanzas of five short lines each, but not without long portions in the old ballad-measure. The scene of an entertainment on the sea-shore near Valencia, where all the parties meet for the first time, is good. So are portions of the last act. But, in general, the whole play abounds in conceits and puns, and is poor. It opens with a loa, whose object is to assert the universal empire of man; and it ends with an address to the audience from King Ferdinand, in which he declares that nothing can give him so much pleasure as the settlement of all these troubles of the lovers, except the conquest of Granada. Both are grotesquely inappropriate.[502]
Better known than either of the last authors is another Valencian poet, Guillen de Castro, who, like them, was respected at home, but sought his fortunes in the capital. He was born of a noble family, in 1567, and seems to have been early distinguished, in his native city, as a man of letters; for, in 1591, he was a member of the Nocturnos, one of the most successful of the fantastic associations established in Spain, in imitation of the Academias that had been for some time fashionable in Italy. His literary tendencies were further cultivated at the meetings of this society, where he found among his associates Tarrega, Aguilar, and Artieda.[503]
His life, however, was not wholly devoted to letters. At one time, he was a captain of cavalry; at another, he stood in such favor with Benavente, the munificent viceroy of Naples, that he had a place of consequence intrusted to his government; and at Madrid he was so well received, that the Duke of Ossuna gave him an annuity of nearly a thousand crowns, to which the reigning favorite, the Count Duke Olivares, added a royal pension. But his unequal humor, his discontented spirit, and his hard obstinacy ruined his fortunes, and he was soon obliged to write for a living. Cervantes speaks of him, in 1615, as among the popular authors for the theatre, and in 1620 he assisted Lope at the festival of the canonization of San Isidro, wrote several of the pieces that were exhibited, and gained one of the prizes. Six years later, he was still earning a painful subsistence as a dramatic writer; and in 1631 he died so poor, that he was buried by charity.[504]
Very few of his works have been published, except his plays. Of these we have twenty-seven or twenty-eight, printed between 1614 and 1625. They belong decidedly to the school of Lope, between whom and Guillen de Castro there was a friendship, which can be traced back, by the Dedication of one of Lope’s plays and by several passages in his miscellaneous works, to the period of Lope’s exile to Valencia; while, on the side of Guillen de Castro, a similar testimony is borne to the same kindly regard by a volume of his own plays addressed to Marcela, Lope’s favorite daughter.
The marks of Guillen de Castro’s personal condition, and of the age in which he lived and wrote, are no less distinct in his dramas than the marks of his poetical allegiance. His “Mismatches in Valencia” seems as if its story might have been constructed out of facts within the poet’s own knowledge. It is a series of love intrigues, like those in Lope’s plays, and ends with the dissolution of two marriages by the influence of a lady, who, disguised as a page, lives in the same house with her lover and his wife, but whose machinations are at last exposed, and she herself driven to the usual resort of entering a convent. His “Don Quixote,” on the other hand, is taken from the First Part of Cervantes’s romance, then as fresh as any Valencian tale. The loves of Dorothea and Fernando, and the madness of Cardenio, form the materials for its principal plot; and the dénouement is the transportation of the knight, in a cage, to his own house, by the curate and barber, just as he is carried home by them in the romance;—parts of the story being slightly altered to give it a more dramatic turn, though the language of the original fiction is often retained, and the obligations to it are fully recognized. Both of these dramas are written chiefly in the old redondillas, with a careful versification; but there is little poetical invention in either of them, and the first act of the “Mismatches in Valencia” is disfigured by a game of wits, fashionable, no doubt, in society at the time, but one that gives occasion, in the play, to nothing but a series of poor tricks and puns.[505]
Very unlike them, though no less characteristic of the times, is his “Mercy and Justice”; the shocking story of a prince of Hungary condemned to death by his father for the most atrocious crimes, but rescued from punishment by the multitude, because his loyalty has survived the wreck of all his other principles, and led him to refuse the throne offered to him by rebellion. It is written in a greater variety of measures than either of the dramas just mentioned, and shows more freedom of style and movement; relying chiefly for success on the story, and on that sense of loyalty which, though originally a great virtue in the relations of the Spanish kings and their people, was now become so exaggerated, that it was undermining much of what was most valuable in the national character.[506]
“Santa Bárbara, or the Mountain Miracle and Heaven’s Martyr,” belongs, again, to another division of the popular drama as settled by Lope de Vega. It is one of those plays where human and Divine love, in tones too much resembling each other, are exhibited in their strongest light, and, like the rest of its class, was no doubt a result of the severe legislation in relation to the theatre at that period, and of the influence of the clergy on which that legislation was founded. The scene is laid in Nicomedia, in the third century, when it was still a crime to profess Christianity; and the story is that of Saint Barbara, according to the legend that represents her to have been a contemporary of Origen, who, in fact, appears on the stage as one of the principal personages. At the opening of the drama, the heroine declares that she is already, in her heart, attached to the new sect; and at the end, she is its triumphant martyr, carrying with her, in a public profession of its faith, not only her lover, but all the leading men of her native city.
One of the scenes of this play is particularly in the spirit and faith of the age when it was written; and was afterwards imitated by Calderon in his “Wonder-working Magician.” The lady is represented as confined by her father in a tower, where, in solitude, she gives herself up to Christian meditations. Suddenly the arch-enemy of the human race presents himself before her, in the dress of a fashionable Spanish gallant. He gives an account of his adventures in a fanciful allegory, but does not so effectually conceal the truth that she fails to suspect who he is. In the mean time, her father and her lover enter. To her father the mysterious gallant is quite invisible, but he is plainly seen by the lover, whose jealousy is thus excited to the highest degree; and the first act ends with the confusion and reproaches which such a state of things necessarily brings on, and with the persuasion of the father that the lover may be fit for a mad-house, but would make a very poor husband for his gentle daughter.[507]