The most important of the plays of Guillen de Castro are two which he wrote on the subject of Rodrigo the Cid,—“Las Mocedades del Cid,” The Youth, or Youthful Adventures, of the Cid;—both founded on the old ballads of the country, which, as we know from Santos, as well as in other ways, continued long after the time of Castro to be sung in the streets.[508] The first of these two dramas embraces the earlier portion of the hero’s life. It opens with a solemn scene of his arming as a knight, and with the insult immediately afterwards offered to his aged father at the royal council-board; and then goes on with the trial of the spirit and courage of Rodrigo, and the death of the proud Count Lozano, who had outraged the venerable old man by a blow on the cheek;—all according to the traditions in the old chronicles.
Now, however, comes the dramatic part of the action, which was so happily invented by Guillen de Castro. Ximena, the daughter of Count Lozano, is represented in the drama as already attached to the young knight; and a contest, therefore, arises between her sense of what she owes to the memory of her father and what she may yield to her own affection; a contest that continues through the whole of the play, and constitutes its chief interest. She comes, indeed, at once to the king, full of a passionate grief, that struggles with success, for a moment, against the dictates of her heart, and claims the punishment of her lover according to the ancient laws of the realm. He escapes, however, in consequence of the prodigious victories he gains over the Moors, who, at the moment when these events occurred, were assaulting the city. Subsequently, by the contrivance of false news of the Cid’s death, a confession of her love is extorted from her; and at last her full consent to marry him is obtained, partly by Divine intimations, and partly by the natural progress of her admiration and attachment during a series of exploits achieved in her honor and in defence of her king and country.
This drama of Guillen de Castro has become better known throughout Europe than any other of his works; not only because it is the best of them all, but because Corneille, who was his contemporary, made it the basis of his own brilliant tragedy of “The Cid”; a drama which did more than any other to determine for two centuries the character of the theatre all over the continent of Europe. But though Corneille—not unmindful of the angry discussions carried on about the unities, under the influence of Cardinal Richelieu—has made alterations in the action of his play, which are fortunate and judicious, still he has relied, for its main interest, on that contest between the duties and the affections of the heroine which was first imagined by Guillen de Castro.
Nor has he shown in this exhibition more spirit or power than his Spanish predecessor. Indeed, sometimes he has fallen into considerable errors, which are wholly his own. By compressing the time of the action within twenty-four hours, instead of suffering it to extend through many months, as it does in the original, he is guilty of the absurdity of overcoming Ximena’s natural feelings in relation to the person who had killed her father, while her father’s dead body is still before her eyes. By changing the scene of the quarrel, which in Guillen occurs in presence of the king, he has made it less grave and natural. By a mistake in chronology, he establishes the Spanish court at Seville two centuries before that city was wrested from the Moors. And by a general straitening of the action within the conventional limits which were then beginning to bind down the French stage, he has, it is true, avoided the extravagance of introducing, as Guillen does, so incongruous an episode out of the old ballads as the miracle of Saint Lazarus; but he has hindered the free and easy movement of the incidents, and diminished their general effect.
Guillen, on the contrary, by taking the traditions of his country just as he found them, instantly conciliated the good-will of his audience, and at the same time imparted the freshness of the old ballad spirit to his action, and gave to it throughout a strong national air and coloring. Thus, the scene in the royal council, where the father of the Cid is struck by the haughty Count Lozano, several of the scenes between the Cid and Ximena, and several between both of them and the king, are managed with great dramatic skill and a genuine poetical fervor.
The following passage, where the Cid’s father is waiting for him in the evening twilight at the place appointed for their meeting after the duel, is as characteristic, if not as striking, as any in the drama, and is superior to the corresponding passage in the French play, which occurs in the fifth and sixth scenes of the third act.
The timid ewe bleats not so mournfully,
Its shepherd lost, nor cries the angry lion
With such a fierceness for its stolen young,
As I for Roderic.—My son! my son!