Nearly the whole of the limited period elapses before we begin the second act, where we find the hero just landing in Africa for the well-known assault on the Goleta at Tunis. He has achieved much, but remains unnoticed and almost broken-hearted with long discouragement. At this moment, he saves the Emperor’s life; but the next, he is forgotten again in the rushing crowd. Still he perseveres, sternly and heroically; and, led on by a passion stronger than death, is the first to mount the walls of Tunis and enter the city. This time, his merit is recognized. Even his forgotten achievements are recollected; and he receives at once the accumulated reward of all his services and sacrifices.
But when the last act opens, we see that he is destined to a fatal disappointment. Isabella, who has been artfully persuaded of his death, is preparing, with sinister forebodings, to fulfil her promise to her father and marry another. The ceremony takes place,—the guests are about to depart,—and her lover stands before her. A heart-rending explanation ensues, and she leaves him, as she thinks, for the last time. But he follows her to her apartment; and in the agony of his grief falls dead, while he yet expostulates and struggles with himself no less than with her. A moment afterwards her husband enters. She explains to him the scene he witnesses, and, unable any longer to sustain the cruel conflict, faints and dies broken-hearted on the body of her lover.
Like nearly all the other pieces of the same class, there is much in the “Lovers of Teruel” to offend us. The inevitable part of the comic servant is peculiarly unwelcome; and so are the long speeches, and the occasionally inflated style. But notwithstanding its blemishes, we feel that it is written in the true spirit of tragedy. As the story was believed to be authentic when it was first acted, it produced the more deep effect; and whether true or not, being a tale of the simple sorrows of two young and loving hearts, whose dark fate is the result of no crime on their part, it can never be read or acted without exciting a sincere interest. Parts of it have a more familiar and domestic character than we are accustomed to find on the Spanish stage, particularly the scene where Isabella sits with her women at her wearisome embroidery, during her lover’s absence; the scene of her discouragement and misgiving just before her marriage; and portions of the scene of horror with which the drama closes.
The two lovers are drawn with no little skill. Our interest in them never falters; and their characters are so set forth and developed, that the dreadful catastrophe is no surprise. It comes rather like the foreseen and irresistible fate of the old Greek tragedy, whose dark shadow is cast over the whole action from its opening.
When Montalvan took historical subjects, he endeavoured, oftener than his contemporaries, to observe historical truth. In two dramas on the life of Don Cárlos, he has introduced that prince substantially in the colors he must at last wear, as an ungoverned madman, dangerous to his family and to the state; and if, in obedience to the persuasions of his time, the poet has represented Philip the Second as more noble and generous than we can regard him to have been, he has not failed to seize and exhibit in a striking manner the severe wariness and wisdom that were such prominent attributes in that monarch’s character.[530] Don John of Austria, too, and Henry the Fourth of France, are happily depicted and fairly sustained in the plays in which they respectively appear as leading personages.[531]
Montalvan’s autos, of which only two or three remain to us, are not to be spoken of in the same manner. His “Polyphemus,” for instance, in which the Saviour and a Christian Church are introduced on one side of the stage, while the principal Cyclops himself comes in as an allegorical representation of Judaism on the other, is as wild and extravagant as any thing in the Spanish drama. A similar remark may be made on the “Escanderbech,” founded on the history of the half-barbarous, half-chivalrous Iskander Beg, and his conversion to Christianity in the middle of the fifteenth century. We find it, in fact, difficult, at the present day, to believe that pieces like the first of these, in which Polyphemus plays on a guitar, and an island in the earliest ages of Greek tradition sinks into the sea amidst a discharge of squibs and rockets, can have been represented anywhere.[532]
But Montalvan followed Lope in every thing, and, like the rest of the dramatic writers of his age, was safe from such censure as he would now receive, because he wrote to satisfy the demands of the popular audiences of Madrid.[533] He made the novela, or tale, the chief basis of interest for his drama, and relied mainly on the passion of jealousy to give it life and movement.[534] Bowing to the authority of the court, he avoided, we are told, representing rebellion on the stage, lest he should seem to encourage it; and was even unwilling to introduce men of rank in degrading situations, for fear disloyalty should be implied or imputed. He would gladly, it is added, have restrained his action to twenty-four hours, and limited each of the three divisions of his full-length dramas to three hundred lines, never leaving the stage empty in either of them. But such rules were not prescribed to him by the popular will, and he wrote too freely and too fast to be more anxious about observing his own theories than his master was.[535]
His “Most Constant Wife,” one of his plays which is particularly pleasing, from the firm, yet tender, character of the heroine, was written, he tells us, in four weeks, prepared by the actors in eight days, and represented again and again, until the great religious festival of the spring closed the theatres.[536] His “Double Vengeance,” with all its horrors, was acted twenty-one days successively.[537] His “No Life like Honor”—one of his more sober efforts—appeared many times on both the principal theatres of Madrid at the same moment;—a distinction to which, it is said, no other play had then arrived in Spain, and in which none succeeded it till long afterwards.[538] And, in general, during the period when his dramas were produced, which was the old age of Lope de Vega, no author was heard on the stage with more pleasure than Montalvan, except his great master.
He had, indeed, his trials and troubles, as all have whose success depends on popular favor. Quevedo, the most unsparing satirist of his time, attacked the less fortunate parts of one of his works of fiction with a spirit and bitterness all his own; and, on another occasion, when one of Montalvan’s plays had been hissed, wrote him a letter which professed to be consolatory, but which is really as little so as can well be imagined.[539] But, notwithstanding such occasional discouragements, his course was, on the whole, fortunate, and he is still to be remembered among the ornaments of the old national drama of his country.