On this mistake the plot turns. The courtier whom Garcia wrongly supposes to be the king falls in love with Blanca, Garcia’s wife; and, in attempting to enter her apartments by night, when he believes her husband to be away, is detected by the husband in person. Now, of course, comes the struggle between Spanish loyalty and Spanish honor. Garcia can visit no vengeance on a person whom he believes to be his king; and he has not the slightest suspicion of his wife, whom he knows to be faithfully and fondly attached to him. But the remotest appearance of an intrigue demands a bloody satisfaction. He determines, therefore, at once, on the death of his loving wife. Amidst his misgivings and delays, however, she escapes, and is carried to court, whither he himself is, at the same moment, called to receive the greatest honors that can be conferred on a subject. In the royal presence, he necessarily discovers his mistake regarding the king’s person. From this moment, the case becomes perfectly plain to him, and his course perfectly simple. He passes instantly into the antechamber. With a single blow his victim is laid at his feet; and he returns, sheathing his bloody dagger, and offering, as his only and sufficient defence, an account of all that had happened, and the declaration, which gives its name to the play, that “none below the king” can be permitted to stand between him and the claims of his honor.
Few dramas in the Spanish language are more poetical; fewer still, more national in their tone. The character of Garcia is drawn with great vigor, and with a sharply defined outline. That of his wife is equally well designed, but is full of gentleness and patience. Even the clown is a more than commonly happy specimen of the sort of parody suitable to his position. Some of the descriptions, too, are excellent. There is a charming one of rustic life, such as it was fancied to be under the most favorable circumstances in Spain’s best days; and, at the end of the second act, there is a scene between Garcia and the courtier, at the moment the courtier is stealthily entering his wife’s apartment, in which we have the struggle between Spanish honor and Spanish loyalty given with a picturesqueness and spirit that leave little to be desired. In short, if we set aside the best plays of Lope de Vega and Calderon, it is one of the most effective of the old Spanish dramas.[693]
Roxas was well known in France. Thomas Corneille imitated, and almost translated, one of his plays; and as Scarron, in his “Jodelet,” did the same with “Where there are real Wrongs there is no Jealousy,” the second comedy that has kept its place on the French stage is due to Spain, as the first tragedy and the first comedy had been before it.[694]
Like many writers for the Spanish theatre, Roxas prepared several of his plays in conjunction with others. Franchi, in his eulogy on Lope de Vega, who indulged in this practice as the rest did, complains of it, and says a drama thus compounded is more like a conspiracy than a comedy, and that such performances were, in their different parts, necessarily unequal and dissimilar. But this was not the general opinion of his age; and that the complaint is not always well founded, we know, not only from the example of Beaumont and Fletcher, but from the success that has attended the composition of many dramas in France in the nineteenth century by more than one person. It should not be forgotten, also, that in Spain, where, from the very structure of the national drama, the story was of so much consequence, and where so many of the characters had standing attributes assigned to them, such joint partnerships were more easily carried through with success than they could be on any other stage. At any rate, they were more common there than they have ever been elsewhere.[695]
Alvaro Cubillo, who alludes to Moreto as his contemporary, and who was perhaps known even earlier as a successful dramatist, says, in 1654, that he had already written a hundred plays. But the whole of this great number, except ten published by himself, and two or three others that appeared, if we may judge by his complaints, without his permission, are now lost. Of those he published himself, “The Thunderbolt of Andalusia,” in two parts, taken from the old ballads about the Children of Lara, was much admired in his lifetime; but “The Bracelets of Marcela,” a simple comedy, resting on the first childlike love of a young girl, has since quite supplanted it. One of his plays, “El Señor de Noches Buenas,” was early printed as Antonio de Mendoza’s, but Cubillo at once made good his title to it; and yet, after the death of both, it was inserted anew in Mendoza’s works;—a striking proof of the great carelessness long common in Spain on the subject of authorship.
None of Cubillo’s plays has high poetical merit, though several of them are pleasant, easy, and natural. The best is “The Perfect Wife,” in which the gentle and faithful character of the heroine is drawn with skill, and with a true conception of what is lovely in woman’s nature. Two of his religious plays, on the other hand, are more than commonly extravagant and absurd; one of them—“Saint Michael”—containing, in the first act, the story of Cain and Abel; in the second, that of Jonah; and in the third, that of the Visigoth king, Bamba, with a sort of separate conclusion in the form of a vision of the times of Charles the Fifth and his three successors.[696]
But the Spanish stage, as we advance in Calderon’s life, becomes more and more crowded with dramatic authors, all eager in their struggles for popular favor. One of them was Antonio de Leyba, whose “Mutius Scævola” is an absurdly constructed and wild historical play; while, on the contrary, his “Honor the First Thing” and “The Lady President” are pleasant comedies, enlivened with short stories and apologues, which he wrote with great naturalness and point.[697] Another dramatist was Cancer y Velasco, whose poems are better known than his plays, and whose “Muerte de Baldovinos” runs more into caricature and broad farce than was commonly tolerated in the court theatre.[698] And yet others were Antonio Enriquez Gomez, son of a Portuguese Jew, who inserted in his “Moral Evenings with the Muses”[699] four plays, all of little value, except “The Duties of Honor”;—Antonio Sigler de Huerta, who wrote “No Good to Ourselves without Harm to Somebody Else”;—and Zabaleta, who, though he made a satirical and harsh attack upon the theatre, could not refuse himself the indulgence of writing for it.[700]
If we now turn from these to a few whose success was more strongly marked, none presents himself earlier than Fernando de Zarate, a poet who was occasionally misled by the fashion and bad taste of his time, and occasionally resisted and rebuked it. Thus, in his best play, “What Jealousy drives Men to do,” there is no trace of Gongorism, while this eminently Spanish folly is very obvious in his otherwise good drama, “He that talks Most does Least,” and even in his “Presumptuous and Beautiful,” which has continued to be acted down to our own days.[701]
Another of the writers for the theatre at this time was Miguel de Barrios, one of those unhappy children of Israel, who, under the terrors of the Inquisition, concealed their religion and suffered some of the worst penalties of unbelief from the jealous intolerance which everywhere watched them. His family was Portuguese, but he himself was born in Spain, and served long in the Spanish armies. At last, however, when he was in Flanders, the temptations to a peaceful conscience were too strong for him. He escaped to Amsterdam, and died there in the open profession of the faith of his fathers about the year 1699. His plays were printed as early as 1665, but the only one worth notice is “The Spaniard in Oran”; longer than it should be, but not without merit.[702]
Diamante was among those who wrote dramas especially accommodated to the popular taste, while Calderon was still at the height of his reputation. Their number is considerable. Two volumes were collected by him and published in 1670 and 1674, and yet others still remain in scattered pamphlets and in manuscript.[703] They are in all the forms, and in all the varieties of tone, then in favor. Some of them, like “Santa Teresa,” are religious. Others are historical, like “Mary Stuart.” Others are taken from the old national traditions, like “The Siege of Zamora,” which is on the same subject with the second part of Guillen de Castro’s “Cid,” but much less poetical. Others are zarzuelas, or dramas chiefly sung, of which the best specimen by Diamante is his “Alpheus and Arethusa,” prepared with an amusing loa in honor of the Constable of Castile. There are more in the style of the capa y espada than in any other. But none of them has any marked merit. The one that has attracted most attention, out of Spain, is “The Son honoring his Father”; a play on the quarrel of the Cid with Count Lozano, which, from a mistake of Voltaire, was long thought to have been the model of Corneille’s “Cid,” while in fact the reverse is true; since Diamante’s play was produced above twenty years after the great French tragedy, and is deeply indebted to it.[704] Like most of the dramatists of his time, Diamante was a follower of Calderon, and inclined to the more romantic side of his character and school; and, like so many Spanish poets of all times, he finished his career in religious seclusion. Of the precise period of his death no notice has been found, but it was probably near the end of the century.