[525] “Orfeo en Lengua Castellana,” por J. P. de Montalvan, Madrid, 1624, 4to. N. Ant., Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 757, and Lope de Vega, Comedias, Tom. XX., Madrid, 1629, in the Preface to which he says the Orfeo of Montalvan “contains whatever can contribute to its perfection.”
[526] His complaints are as loud as Lope’s or Calderon’s, and are to be found in the Preface to the first volume of his plays, Alcalá, 1638, 4to, and in his “Para Todos,” 1661, p. 169.
[527] The date of the first volume is 1639 on the title-page, but 1638 at the end.
[528] It should perhaps be added, that another religious play of Montalvan, “El Divino Nazareno Sanson,” containing the history of Samson from the contest with the lion to the pulling down of the Philistine temple, is less offensive.
[529] I shall have occasion to recur to this subject when I notice a long poem published on it by Yague de Salas, in 1616. The story used by Montalvan is founded on a tradition already employed for the stage, but with an awkward and somewhat coarse plot, and a poor versification, by Andres Rey de Artieda, in his “Amantes,” published in 1581, and by Tirso de Molina, in his “Amantes de Teruel,” 1635. These two plays, however, had long been forgotten, when an abstract of the first, and the whole of the second, appeared in the fifth volume of Aribau’s “Biblioteca” (Madrid, 1848); a volume which contains thirty-six well-selected plays of Tirso de Molina, with valuable prefatory discussions of his life and works. There can be no doubt, from a comparison of the “Amantes de Teruel” of Tirso with that of Montalvan, printed three years later, that Montalvan was largely indebted to his predecessor; but he has added to his drama much that is beautiful, and given to parts of it a tone of domestic tenderness that, I doubt not, he drew from his own nature. Aribau, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, Tom. V. pp. xxxvii. and 690.
[530] “El Principe Don Carlos” is the first play in the twenty-eighth volume of the Comedias Escogidas, 1667, and gives an account of the miraculous cure of the Prince from an attack of insanity; the other, entitled “El Segundo Seneca de España,” is the first play in his “Para Todos,” and ends with the marriage of the king to Anne of Austria, and the appointment of Don John as generalissimo of the League.
[531] Henry IV. is in “El Mariscal de Viron”; Don John in the play that bears his name.
[532] Both of them are in the fifth day’s entertainments of his “Para Todos.”
[533] Preface to “Para Todos.”
[534] The story of “El Zeloso Estremeño” is altered from that of the same name by Cervantes, but is indebted to it largely, and takes the names of several of its personages. At the end of the play entitled “De un Castigo dos Venganzas,” a play full of horrors, Montalvan declares the plot to be—