[441] For example, the ballad in the Romancero of 1555, beginning “Despues que el Rey Rodrigo,” at the end of Jornada II., in “El Ultimo Godo,” Comedias, Tom. XXV., Zaragoza, 1647.
[442] Compare “El Bastardo Mudarra” (Comedias, Tom. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641, ff. 75, 76) with the ballads, “Ruy Velasquez de Lara,” and “Llegados son los Infantes”; and, in the same play, the dialogue between Mudarra and his mother, (f. 83), with the ballad, “Sentados á un ajedrez.”
[443] “El Casamiento en la Muerte,” (Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1604, ff. 198, etc.), in which the following well-known old ballads are freely used, viz.:—“O Belerma! O Belerma!” “No tiene heredero alguno”; “Al pie de un túmulo negro”; “Bañando está las prisiones”; and others.
[444] It is in the last chapter of the “Guerras Civiles de Granada”; but Lope has given it, with a slight change in the phraseology, as follows:—
Cercada está Sancta Fé
Con mucho lienço encerado;
Y al rededor muchas tiendas
De terciopelo y damasco.
It occurs in many collections of ballads, and is founded on the fact, that a sort of village of rich tents was established near Granada, which, after an accidental conflagration, was turned into a town, that still exists, within whose walls were signed both the commission of Columbus to seek the New World, and the capitulation of Granada. The imitation of this ballad by Lope is in his “Cerco de Santa Fé,” Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1604, f. 69.
[445] He says this apparently as a kind of apology to foreigners, in the Preface to the “Peregrino en su Patria,” 1603, where he gives a list of his plays to that date.