Candamo, however, should be noted as having given a decisive impulse to a form of the drama which was known before his time, and which served at last to introduce the genuine opera; I mean the zarzuela, which took its name from that of one of the royal residences near Madrid, where they were represented with great splendor for the amusement of Philip the Fourth, by command of his brother Ferdinand.[713] They are, in fact, plays of various kinds,—shorter or longer; entremeses or full-length comedies;—but all in the national tone, and yet all accompanied with music.
The first attempt to introduce dramatic performances with music was made, as we have seen, about 1630, by Lope de Vega, whose eclogue “Selva sin Amor,” wholly sung, was played before the court, with a showy apparatus of scenery prepared by Cosmo Lotti, an Italian architect, and “was a thing,” says the poet, “new in Spain.” Short pieces followed soon afterward, entremeses, that were sung in place of the ballads between the acts of the plays, and of which Benavente was the most successful composer before 1645, when his works were first published. But the earliest of the full-length plays that was ever sung was Calderon’s “Púrpura de la Rosa,” which was produced before the court in 1659, on occasion of the marriage of Louis the Fourteenth with the Infanta Maria Theresa,—a compliment to the distinguished personages of France who had come to Spain in honor of that great solemnity, and whom it was thought no more than gallant to amuse with something like the operas of Quinault and Lulli, which were then the most admired entertainments of the court of France.
From this time, as was natural, there was a tendency to introduce singing on the Spanish stage, both in full-length comedies and in farces of all kinds;—a tendency which is apparent in Matos Fragoso, in Solís, and in most of the other writers contemporary with the latter part of Calderon’s career. At last, under the management of Diamante and Candamo, a separate form of the drama grew up, the subjects for which were generally taken from ancient mythology, like those of the “Circe” and “Arethusa”; and when they were not so taken, as in Diamante’s “Birth of Christ,” they were still treated in a manner much like that observed in the treatment of their fabulous predecessors.
From this form of the drama to that of the proper Italian opera was but a step, and one the more easily taken, as, from the period when the Bourbon family succeeded the Austrian on the throne, the national characteristics heretofore demanded in whatever appeared on the Spanish stage had ceased to enjoy the favor of the court and the higher classes. As early as 1705, therefore, something like an Italian opera was established at Madrid, where, with occasional intervals of suspension and neglect, it has ever since maintained a doubtful existence, and where, of course, the old zarzuelas and their kindred musical farces have been more and more discountenanced, until, in their original forms, at least, they have ceased to be heard.[714]
Another of the poets who lived at this time and wrote dramas that mark the decline of the Spanish theatre is Antonio de Zamora, who seems originally to have been an actor; who was afterwards in the office of the Indies and in the royal household; and whose dramatic career begins before the year 1700, though he did not die till after 1730, and probably had his principal success in the reign of Philip the Fifth, before whom his plays were occasionally performed in the Buen Retiro, as late as 1744.
Two volumes of his dramas were collected and published, with a solemn dedication and consecration of them to their author’s memory, on the ground of rendering unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s. They are only sixteen in number, each longer than had been common on the Spanish stage in its best days, and, in general, very heavy. Those that are on religious subjects sink into farce, with the exception of “Judas Iscariot,” which is too full of wild horrors to permit it to be amusing. The best of the whole number is, probably, the one entitled “All Debts must be paid at Last,” which is an alteration of Tirso de Molina’s “Don Juan,” skilfully made;—a remarkable drama, in which the tread of the marble statue is heard with more solemn effect than it is in any other of the many plays on the same subject.
But notwithstanding the merit of this and two or three others, it must be admitted that Zamora’s plays—of which above forty are extant, and of which many were acted at the court with applause—are very wearisome. They are crowded with long directions to the actors, and imply the use of much imperfect machinery;—both of them unwelcome symptoms of a declining dramatic literature. Still, Zamora writes with facility, and shows, that, under favorable circumstances, he might have trodden with more success in the footsteps of Calderon, whom he plainly took for his model. But he came too late, and, while striving to imitate the old masters, fell into their faults and extravagances, without giving token of the fresh spirit and marvellous invention in which their peculiar power resides.[715]
Others followed the same direction with even less success, like Pedro Francisco Lanini, Antonio Martinez, Pedro de Rosete, and Francisco de Villegas;[716] but the person who continued longest in the paths opened by Lope and Calderon was Joseph de Cañizares, a poet of Madrid, born in 1676, who began to write for the stage when he was only fourteen years old,—who was known as one of its more favored authors for above forty years, pushing his success far into the eighteenth century,—and who died in 1750. His plays are in all the old forms.[717] A few of those on historical subjects are not without interest, such as “The Tales of the Great Captain,” “Charles the Fifth at Tunis,” and “The Suit of Fernando Cortés.” The best of his efforts in this class is, however, “El Picarillo en España,” on the adventures of a sort of Falconbridge, Frederic de Bracamonte, who, in the reign of John the Second, discovered the Canaries, and held them for some time, as if he were their king. But Cañizares, on the whole, had most success in plays founded on character-drawing, introduced a little before his time by Moreto and Roxas, and commonly called, as we have noticed, “Comedias de Figuron.” His happiest specimens in this class are “The Famous Kitchen-Wench,” taken from the story of Cervantes, “The Mountaineer at Court,” and “Dómine Lucas,” where he drew from the life about him, and selected his subjects from the poor, presumptuous, decayed nobility, with which the court of Madrid was then infested.[718]
Still, with this partial success as a poet, and with a popularity that made him of consequence to the actors, Cañizares shows more distinctly than any of his predecessors or contemporaries the marks of a declining drama. As we turn over the seventy or eighty plays he has left us, we are constantly reminded of the towers and temples of the South of Europe, which, during the Middle Ages, were built from fragments of the nobler edifices that had preceded them, proving at once the magnificence of the age in which the original structures were reared, and the decay of that of which such relics and fragments were the chief glory. The plots, intrigues, and situations in the dramas of Cañizares are generally taken from Lope, Calderon, Moreto, Matos Fragoso, and his other distinguished predecessors, to whom, not without the warrant of many examples on the Spanish stage, he resorted as to rich and ancient monuments, which could still yield to the demands of his age materials such as the age itself could no longer furnish from its own resources.[719]
It would be easy to add the names of not a few other writers for the Spanish stage who were contemporary with Cañizares, and, like him, shared in the common decline of the national drama, or contributed to it. Such were Juan de Vera y Villarroel, Inez de la Cruz, Melchior Fernandez de Leon, Antonio Tellez de Azevedo, and others yet less distinguished while they lived, and long ago forgotten. But writers like these had no real influence on the character of the theatre to which they attached themselves. This, in its proper outlines, always remained as it was left by Lope de Vega and Calderon, who, by a remarkable concurrence of circumstances, maintained, as far as it was in secular hands, an almost unquestioned control over it, while they lived, and, at their death, left a character impressed upon it which it never lost, till it ceased to exist altogether.[720]