Quite different from either of the preceding dramas, and in some respects better than either, is Tirso’s “Bashful Man at Court,”—a play often acted, on its first appearance, in Italy, as well as in Spain, and one in which, as its author tells us, a prince of Castile once performed the part of the hero. It is not properly historical, though partly founded on the story of Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, who, in 1449, after having been regent of Portugal, was finally despoiled of his power and defeated in an open rebellion.[545] Tirso supposes him to have retired to the mountains, and there, disguised as a shepherd, to have educated a son in complete ignorance of his rank. This son, under the name of Mireno, is the hero of the piece. Finding himself possessed of nobler sentiments and higher intelligence than those of the rustics among whom he lives, he half suspects that he is of noble origin; and, escaping from his solitude, appears at court, determined to try his fortune. Accident favors him. He enters the service of the royal favorite, and wins the love of his daughter, who is as free and bold, from an excessive knowledge of the world, as her lover is humble and gentle in his ignorance of it. There his rank is discovered, and the play ends happily.
A story like this, even with the usual accompaniment of an underplot, is too slight and simple to produce much effect. But the character of the principal personage, and its gradual development, rendered it long a favorite on the Spanish stage. Nor was this preference unreasonable. His noble pride, struggling against the humble circumstances in which he finds himself placed; the suspicion he hardly dares to indulge, that his real rank is equal to his aspirations,—a suspicion which yet governs his life; and the modesty which tempers the most ambitious of his thoughts, form, when taken together, one of the most lofty and beautiful ideals of the old Castilian character.[546]
Some of Tirso’s secular dramas deal chiefly in recent events and well-settled history, like his trilogy on the achievements of the Pizarros in the New World, and their love-adventures at home. Others are founded on facts, but with a larger admixture of fiction, like the two on the election and pontificate of Sixtus Quintus. His religious dramas and autos are as extravagant as those of the other poets of his time, and could hardly be more so.
His mode of treating his subjects seems to be capricious. Sometimes he begins his dramas with great naturalness and life, as in one that opens with the accidents of a bull-fight,[547] and in another, with the confusion consequent on the upsetting of a coach;[548] while, at other times, he seems not to care how tedious he is, and once breaks ground in the first act with a speech above four hundred lines long.[549] Perhaps the most characteristic of his openings is in his “Love for Reasons of State,” where we have, at the outset, a scene before a lady’s balcony, a rope-ladder, and a duel, all full of Castilian spirit. His more obvious defects are the too great similarity of his characters and incidents; the too frequent introduction of disguised ladies to help on the intrigue; and the needless and shameless indelicacy of some of his stories,—a fault rendered more remarkable by the circumstance, that he himself was an ecclesiastic of rank, and honored in Madrid as a public preacher. His more uniform merits are a most happy power of gay narration; an extraordinary command of his native Castilian; and a rich and flowing versification in all the many varieties of metre demanded by the audiences of the capital, who were become more nice and exacting in this, perhaps, than in any other single accessory of the drama.
But however various and capricious were the forms of Tirso’s drama, he was, in substance, always a follower of Lope de Vega. This he himself distinctly announces, boasting of the school to which he belongs, and entering, at the same time, into an ingenious and elaborate defence of its principles and practice, as opposed to those of the classical school; a defence which, it is worthy of notice, was published twelve years before the appearance of Corneille’s “Cid,” and which, therefore, to a considerable extent, anticipated in Madrid the remarkable controversy about the unities occasioned by that tragedy in Paris after 1636[550] and subsequently made the foundation of the dramatic schools of Corneille, Racine, and Voltaire.
Contemporary with these events and discussions lived Antonio Mira de Mescua, well known from 1602 to 1635 as a writer for the stage, and much praised by Cervantes and Lope de Vega. He was a native of Guadix in the kingdom of Granada, and in his youth became archdeacon of its cathedral; but in 1610 he was at Naples, attached to the poetical court of the Count de Lemos, and in 1620 he gained a prize in Madrid, where he seems to have died while in the office of chaplain to Philip the Fourth. He wrote secular plays, autos, and lyrical poetry; but his works were never collected and are now found with difficulty, though not a few of his lighter compositions are in nearly all the respectable selections of the national poetry from his own time to the present.
He, like Tirso de Molina, was an ecclesiastic of rank, but did not escape the troubles common to writers for the stage. One of his dramas, “The Unfortunate Rachel,” founded on the fable which represents Alfonso the Eighth as having nearly sacrificed his crown to his passion for a Jewess of Toledo, was much altered, by authority, before it could be acted, though Lope de Vega had been permitted to treat the same subject at large in the same way, in the nineteenth book of his “Jerusalem Conquered.” Mira de Mescua, too, was concerned in the drama of “The Curate of Madrilejos,” which, as we have seen, was forbidden to be read or acted even after it had been printed. Still, there is no reason to suppose he did not enjoy the consideration usually granted to successful writers for the theatre. At least, we know he was much imitated. His “Slave of the Devil” was not only remodelled and reproduced by Moreto in “Fall to rise again,” but was freely used by Calderon in two of his best-known dramas. His “Gallant both Brave and True” was employed by Alarcon in “The Trial of Husbands.” And his “Palace in Confusion” is the groundwork of Corneille’s “Don Sancho of Aragon.”[551]
Joseph de Valdivielso, another ecclesiastic of high condition, was also a writer for the stage at the same time. He was connected with the great cathedral of Toledo and with its princely primate, the Cardinal Infante, but he lived in Madrid, where he was a member of the same religious congregation with Cervantes and Lope, and where he was intimately associated with the principal men of letters of his time. He flourished from about 1607 to about 1633, and can be traced, during the whole of that period, by his certificates of approbation and by commendatory verses which were prefixed to the works of his friends as they successively appeared. His own publications are almost entirely religious;—those for the stage consisting of a single volume printed in 1622, and containing twelve autos and two religious plays.
The twelve autos seem, from internal evidence, to have been written for the city of Toledo, and certainly to have been performed there, as well as in other cities of Spain. He selected them from a large number, and they undoubtedly enjoyed, during his lifetime, a wide popularity. Some, perhaps, deserved it. “The Prodigal Son,” long a tempting subject wherever religious dramas were known, was treated with more than usual skill. “Psyche and Cupid,” too, is better managed for Christian purposes than that mystical fancy commonly was by the poets of the Spanish theatre. And “The Tree of Life” is a well-sustained allegory, in which the old theological contest between Divine Justice and Divine Mercy is carried through in the old theological spirit, beginning with scenes in Paradise and ending with the appearance of the Saviour. But, in general, the autos of Valdivielso are not better than those of his contemporaries.
His two plays are not so good. “The Birth of the Best,” as the Madonna is often technically called, and “The Guardian Angel,” which is, again, an allegory, not unlike that of “The Tree of Life,” are both of them crude and wild compositions, even within the broad limits permitted to the religious drama. One reason of their success may, perhaps, be found in the fact, that they have more of the tone of the elder poetry than almost any of the sacred plays of the time;—a remark that may be extended to the autos of Valdivielso, in one of which there is a spirited parody of the well-known ballad on the challenge of Zamora after the murder of Sancho the Brave. But the social position of their author, and, perhaps, his quibbles and quaintnesses, which humored the bad taste of his age, must be taken into consideration before we can account for the extensive popularity he undoubtedly enjoyed.[552]