And honored.[509]
The Second Part, which gives the adventures of the siege of Zamora, the assassination of King Sancho beneath its walls, and the defiance and duels that were the consequence, is not equal in merit to the First Part. Portions of it, such as some of the circumstances attending the death of the king, are quite incapable of dramatic representation, so gross and revolting are they; but even here, as well as in the more fortunate passages, Guillen has faithfully followed the popular belief concerning the heroic age he represents, just as it had come down to him, and has thus given to his scenes a life and reality that could hardly have been given by any thing else.
Indeed, it is a great charm of this drama, that the popular traditions everywhere break through so picturesquely, imparting to it their peculiar tone and character. Thus, the insult offered to old Laynez in the council; the complaints of Ximena to the king on the death of her father, and the conduct of the Cid to herself; the story of the Leper; the base treason of Bellido Dolfos; the reproaches of Queen Urraca from the walls of the beleaguered city, and the defiance and duels that follow,[510]—all are taken from the old ballads; often in their very words, and generally in their fresh spirit and with their picture-like details. The effect must have been great on a Castilian audience, always sensible to the power of the old popular poetry, and always stirred as with a battle-cry when the achievements of their earlier national heroes were recalled to them.[511]
In his other dramas we find traces of the same principles and the same habits of theatrical composition that we have seen in those we have already noticed. The “Impertinent Curiosity” is taken from the tale which Cervantes originally printed in the First Part of his Don Quixote. The “Count Alarcos,” and the “Count d’ Irlos,” are founded on the fine old ballads that bear these names. And the “Wonders of Babylon” is a religious play, in which the story of Susanna and the Elders fills a space somewhat too large, and in which King Nebuchadnezzar is introduced eating grass, like the beasts of the field.[512] But everywhere there is shown a desire to satisfy the demands of the national taste; and everywhere it is plain Guillen is a follower of Lope de Vega, and is distinguished from his rivals more by the sweetness of his versification than by any more prominent or original attribute.
Another of the early followers of Lope de Vega, and one recognized as such at the time by Cervantes, is Luis Vélez de Guevara. He was born at Ecija in Andalusia, in 1570, but seems to have lived almost entirely at Madrid, where he died in 1644. Twelve years before his death, he is said, on good authority, to have written already four hundred pieces for the theatre; and as neither the public favor nor that of the court seems to have deserted him during the rest of his long life, we may feel assured that he was one of the most successful authors of his time.[513]
His plays, however, were never collected for publication, and few of them have come down to us. One of those that have been preserved is fortunately one of the best, if we are to judge of its relative rank by the sensation it produced on its first appearance, or by the hold it has since maintained on the national regard. Its subject is taken from a well-known passage in the history of Sancho the Brave, when, in 1293, the city of Tarifa, near Gibraltar, was besieged by that king’s rebellious brother, Don John, at the head of a Moorish army, and defended by Alonso Perez, chief of the great house of the Guzmans. “And,” says the old Chronicle, “right well did he defend it. But the Infante Don John had with him a young son of Alonso Perez, and sent and warned him that he must either surrender that city, or else he would put to death this child whom he had with him. And Don Alonso Perez answered, that he held that city for the king, and that he could not give it up; but that as for the death of his child, he would give him a dagger wherewith to slay him; and so saying, he cast down a dagger from the rampart in defiance, and added that it would be better he should kill this son and yet five others, if he had them, than that he should himself basely yield up a city of the king, his lord, for which he had done homage. And the Infante Don John, in great fury, caused that child to be put to death before him. But neither with all this could he take the city.”[514]
Other accounts add to this atrocious story, that, after casting down his dagger, Alonso Perez, smothering his grief, sat down to his noon-day meal with his wife, and that, his people on the walls of the city witnessing the death of the innocent child and bursting forth into cries of horror and indignation, he rushed out, but, having heard what was the cause of the disturbance, returned quietly again to the table, saying only, “I thought, from their outcry, that the Moors had made their way into the city.”[515]
For thus sacrificing his other duties to his loyalty, in a way so well fitted to excite the imagination of the age in which he lived, Guzman received an appropriate addition to his armorial bearings, still seen in the escutcheon of his family, and the surname of “El Bueno,”—the Good, or the Faithful,—a title rarely forgotten in Spanish history, whenever he is mentioned.
This is the subject, and, in fact, the substance, of Guevara’s play, “Mas pesa el Rey que la Sangre,” or King before Kin. A good deal of skill, however, is shown in putting it into a dramatic form. Thus, King Sancho, at the opening, is represented as treating his great vassal, Perez de Guzman, with harshness and injustice, in order that the faithful devotion of the vassal, at the end of the drama, may be brought out with so much the more brilliant effect. And again, the scene in which Guzman goes from the king in anger, but with perfect submission to the royal authority; the scene between the father and the son, in which they mutually sustain each other, by the persuasions of duty and honor, to submit to any thing rather than give up the city; and the closing scene, in which, after the siege has been abandoned, Guzman offers the dead body of his child as a proof of his fidelity and obedience to an unjust sovereign,—are worthy of a place in the best of the earlier English tragedies, and not unlike some passages in Greene and Webster. But it was as an expression of boundless loyalty—that great virtue of the heroic times of Spain—that this drama won universal admiration, and so became of consequence, not only in the history of the national stage, but as an illustration of the national character. Regarded in each of these points of view, it is one of the most striking and solemn exhibitions of the modern theatre.[516]
In most of his other plays, Guevara deviated less from the beaten track than he did in this deep tragedy. “The Diana of the Mountains,” for instance, is a poetical picture of the loyalty, dignity, and passionate force of character of the lower classes of the Spanish people, set forth in the person of a bold and independent peasant, who marries the beauty of his mountain region, but has the misfortune immediately afterwards to find her pursued by the love of a man of rank, from whose designs she is rescued by the frank and manly appeal of her husband to Queen Isabella, the royal mistress of the offender.[517] “The Potter of Ocaña,” too, which, like the last, is an intriguing drama, is quite within the limits of its class;—and so is “Empire after Death,” a tragedy full of a melancholy, idyl-like softness, which well harmonizes with the fate of Inez de Castro, on whose sad story it is founded.