CHAPTER XXI.
Drama, continued. — Tirso de Molina. — Mira de Mescua. — Valdivielso. — Antonio de Mendoza. — Ruiz de Alarcon. — Luis de Belmonte, and Others. — El Diablo Predicador. — Opposition of Learned Men and of the Church to the Popular Drama. — A Long Struggle. — Triumph of the Drama.
Another of the persons who, at this time, sought popular favor on the public stage was Gabriel Tellez, an ecclesiastic of rank, better known as Tirso de Molina,—the name under which he slightly disguised himself when publishing works of a secular character. Of his life we know little, except that he was born in Madrid; that he was educated at Alcalá; that he entered the Church as early as 1613; and that he died in the convent of Soria, of which he was the head, probably in February, 1648;—some accounts representing him to have been sixty years old at the time of his death, and some eighty.[540]
In other respects we know more of him. As a writer for the theatre, we have five volumes of his dramas, published between 1616 and 1636; besides which, a considerable number of his plays can be found scattered through his other works, or printed each by itself. His talent seems to have been decidedly dramatic; but the moral tone of his plots is lower than common, and many of his plays contain passages whose indecency has caused them to be so hunted down by the confessional and the Inquisition, that copies of them are among the rarest of Spanish books.[541] Not a few of the less offensive, however, have maintained their place on the stage, and are still familiar, as popular favorites.
Of these, the best known out of Spain is “El Burlador de Sevilla,” or The Seville Deceiver,—the earliest distinct exhibition of that Don Juan who is now seen on every stage in Europe, and known to the lowest classes of Germany, Italy, and Spain, in puppet-shows and street-ballads. The first rudiments for this character—which, it is said, may be traced historically to the great Tenorio family of Seville—had, indeed, been brought upon the stage by Lope de Vega, in the second and third acts of “Money makes the Man”; where the hero shows a similar firmness and wit amidst the most awful visitations of the unseen world.[542] But in the character as sketched by Lope there is nothing revolting. Tirso, therefore, is the first who showed it with all its original undaunted courage united to an unmingled depravity that asks only for selfish gratifications, and a cold, relentless humor that continues to jest when surrounded by the terrors of a supernatural retribution.
This conception of the character is picturesque, notwithstanding the moral atrocities it involves. It was, therefore, soon carried to Naples, and from Naples to Paris, where the Italian actors took possession of it. The piece thus produced, which was little more than an Italian translation of Tirso’s, had great success in 1656 on the boards of that company, then very fashionable at the French court. Two or three French translations followed, and in 1665 Molière brought out his “Festin de Pierre,” in which, taking not only the incidents of Tirso, but often his dialogue, he made the real Spanish fiction known to Europe as it had not been known before.[543] From this time, the strange and wild character conceived by the Spanish poet has gone through the world under the name of Don Juan, followed by a reluctant and shuddering interest, that at once marks what is most peculiar in its conception, and confounds all theories of dramatic interest. Zamora, a writer of the next half-century in Spain, Thomas Corneille in France, and Lord Byron in England, are the prominent poets to whom it is most indebted for its fame; though perhaps the genius of Mozart has done more than any or all of them to reconcile the refined and elegant to its dark and disgusting horrors.[544]
At home, “The Deceiver of Seville” has never been the most favored of Tirso de Molina’s works. That distinction belongs to “Don Gil in the Green Pantaloons,” perhaps the most strongly marked specimen of an intriguing comedy in the language. Doña Juana, its heroine, a lady of Valladolid, who has been shamefully deserted by her lover, follows him to Madrid, whither he had gone to arrange for himself a more ambitious match. In Madrid, during the fortnight the action lasts, she appears sometimes as a lady named Elvira, and sometimes as a cavalier named Don Gil; but never once, till the last moment, in her own proper person. In these two assumed characters, she confounds all the plans and plots of her faithless lover; makes his new mistress fall in love with her; writes letters to herself, as a cavalier, from herself as a lady; and passes herself off, sometimes for her own lover, and sometimes for other personages merely imaginary.
Her family at Valladolid, meantime, are made to believe she is dead; and two cavaliers appearing in Madrid, the one from design and the other by accident, in a green dress like the one she wears, all three are taken to be one and the same individual, and the confusion becomes so unintelligible, that her alarmed lover and her own man-servant—the last of whom had never seen her but in masculine attire at Madrid—are persuaded it is some spirit come among them in the fated green costume, to work out a dire revenge for the wrongs it had suffered in the flesh. At this moment, when the uproar and alarm are at their height, the relations of the parties are detected, and three matches are made instead of the one that had been broken off;—the servant, who had been most frightened, coming in at the instant every thing is settled, with his hat stuck full of tapers and his clothes covered with pictures of saints, and crying out, as he scatters holy water in every body’s face,—
Who prays, who prays for my master’s poor soul,—
His soul now suffering purgatory’s pains