History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

At the end he has added a humorous prose dialogue, called the “Adjunta,” defending his dramas, and attacking the actors who refused to represent them. He says that he had prepared six full-length plays, and six Entremeses or farces; but that the theatre had its pensioned poets, and so took no note of him. The next year, however, when their number had become eight plays and eight Entremeses, he found a publisher, though not without difficulty; for the bookseller, as he says in the Preface, had been warned by a noble author, that from his prose much might be hoped, but from his poetry nothing. And truly his position in relation to the theatre was not one to be desired. Thirty years had passed since he had himself been a successful writer for it; and the twenty or more pieces he had then produced, some of which he mentions anew with great complacency,[142] were, no doubt, long since forgotten. In the interval, as he tells us, “that great prodigy of nature, Lope de Vega, has raised himself to the monarchy of the theatre, subjected it to his control, and placed all its actors under his jurisdiction; filled the world with becoming plays, happily and well written; ... and if any persons (and in truth there are not a few such) have desired to enter into competition with him and share the glory of his labors, all they have done, when put together, would not equal the half of what has been done by him alone.”[143]

The number of these writers for the stage in 1615 was, as Cervantes intimates, very considerable; and when he goes on to enumerate, among the more successful, Mira de Mescua, Guillen de Castro, Aguilar, Luis Vélez de Guevara, Gaspar de Avila, and several others, we perceive, at once, that the essential direction and character of the Spanish drama were at last determined. Of course, the free field open to him when he composed the plays of his youth was now closed; and as he wrote from the pressure of want, he could venture to write only according to the models triumphantly established by Lope de Vega and his imitators.

The eight plays or Comedias he now produced were, therefore, all composed in the style and in the forms of verse already fashionable and settled. Their subjects are as various as the subjects of his tales. One of them is a rifacimento of his “Trato de Argel,” and is curious, because it contains some of the materials, and even occasionally the very phraseology, of the story of the Captive in Don Quixote, and because Lope de Vega thought fit afterwards to use it somewhat too freely in the composition of his own “Esclavos en Argel.”[144] Much of it seems to be founded in fact; among the rest, the deplorable martyrdom of a child in the third act, and the representation of one of the Coloquios or farces of Lope de Rueda by the slaves in their prison-yard.

Another of the plays, the story of which is also said to be true, is “El Gallardo Español,” or The Bold Spaniard.[145] Its hero, named Saavedra, and therefore, perhaps, of the old family into which that of Cervantes had long before intermarried, goes over to the Moors for a time, from a point of honor about a lady, but turns out at last a true Spaniard in every thing else, as well as in the exaggeration of his gallantry. “The Sultana” is founded on the history of a Spanish captive, who rose so high in the favor of the Grand Turk, that she is represented in the play as having become, not merely a favorite, but absolutely the Sultana, and yet as continuing to be a Christian,—a story which was readily believed in Spain, though only the first part of it is true, as Cervantes must have known, since Catharine of Oviedo, who is the heroine, was his contemporary.[146] The “Rufian Dichoso” is a Don Juan in licentiousness and crime, who is converted and becomes so extraordinary a saint, that, to redeem the soul of a dying sinner, Doña Ana de Treviño, he formally surrenders to her his own virtues and good works, and assumes her sins, beginning anew, through incredible sufferings, the career of penitence and reformation; all of which, or at least what is the most gross and revolting in it, is declared by Cervantes, as an eye-witness, to be true.[147]

The remaining four plays are no less various in their subjects and no less lawless in the modes of treating them; and all the eight are divided into three jornadas, which Cervantes uses as strictly synonymous with acts.[148] All preserve the character of the Fool, who in one instance is an ecclesiastic,[149] and all extend over any amount of time and space that is found convenient to the action; the “Rufian Dichoso,” for instance, beginning in Seville and Toledo, during the youth of the hero, and ending in Mexico in his old age. The personages represented are extravagant in their number,—once amounting to above thirty,—and among them, besides every variety of human existences, are Demons, Souls in Purgatory, Lucifer, Fear, Despair, Jealousy, and other similar phantasms. The truth is, Cervantes had renounced all the principles of the drama which his discreet canon had so gravely set forth ten years earlier in the First Part of Don Quixote; and now, whether with the consent of his will, or only with that of his poverty, we cannot tell, but, as may be seen, not merely in the plays themselves, but in a sort of induction to the second act of the Rufian Dichoso, he had fully and knowingly adopted the dramatic theories of Lope’s school.

The eight Entremeses are better than the eight full-length plays. They are short farces, generally in prose, with a slight plot, and sometimes with none, and were intended merely to amuse an audience in the intervals between the acts of the longer pieces. “The Spectacle of Wonders,” for instance, is only a series of practical tricks to frighten the persons attending a puppet-show, so as to persuade them that they see what is really not on the stage. “The Watchful Guard” interests us, because he seems to have drawn the character of the soldier from his own; and the date of 1611, which is contained in it, may indicate the time when it was written. “The Jealous Old Man” is a reproduction of the tale of “The Jealous Estremadurian,” with a different and more spirited conclusion. And the “Cueva de Salamanca” is one of those jests at the expense of husbands which are common enough on the Spanish stage, and were, no doubt, equally common in Spanish life and manners. All, indeed, have an air of truth and reality, which, whether they were founded in fact or not, it was evidently the author’s purpose to give them.

But there was an insuperable difficulty in the way of all his efforts on the stage. Cervantes had not dramatic talent, nor a clear perception how dramatic effects were to be produced. From the time when he wrote the “Trato de Argel,” which was an exhibition of the sufferings he had himself witnessed and shared in Algiers, he seemed to suppose that whatever was both absolutely true and absolutely striking could be produced with effect on the theatre; thus confounding the province of romantic fiction and story-telling with that of theatrical representation, and often relying on trivial incidents and an humble style for effects which could be produced only by ideal elevation and incidents so combined by a dramatic instinct as to produce a dramatic interest.

This was, probably, owing in part to the different direction of his original genius, and in part to the condition of the theatre, which in his youth he had found open to every kind of experiment and really settled in nothing. But whatever may have been the cause of his failure, the failure itself has been a great stumbling-block in the way of Spanish critics, who have resorted to somewhat violent means in order to prevent the reputation of Cervantes from being burdened with it. Thus, Blas de Nasarre, the king’s librarian,—who, in 1749, published the first edition of these unsuccessful dramas that had appeared since they were printed above a century earlier,—would persuade us, in his Preface, that they were written by Cervantes to parody and caricature the theatre of Lope de Vega;[150] though, setting aside all that at once presents itself from the personal relations of the parties, nothing can be more serious than the interest Cervantes took in the fate of his plays, and the confidence he expressed in their dramatic merit; while, at the same time, not a line has ever been pointed out as a parody in any one of them.[151]

This position being untenable, Lampillas, who, in the latter part of the last century, wrote a long defence of Spanish literature against the suggestions of Tiraboschi and Bettinelli in Italy, gravely maintains that Cervantes sent, indeed, eight plays and eight Entremeses to the booksellers, but that the booksellers took the liberty to change them, and printed eight others with his name and Preface. It should not, however, be forgotten that Cervantes lived to prepare two works after this, and if such an insult had been offered him, the country, judging from the way in which he treated the less gross offence of Avellaneda, would have been filled with his reproaches and remonstrances.[152]

Nothing remains, therefore, but to confess—what seems, indeed, to be quite incontestable—that Cervantes wrote several plays which fell seriously below what might have been hoped from him. Passages, indeed, may be found in them where his genius asserts itself. “The Labyrinth of Love,” for instance, has a chivalrous air and plot that make it interesting; and the Entremes of “The Pretended Biscayan,” contains specimens of the peculiar humor with which we always associate the name of its author. But it is quite too probable that he had made up his mind to sacrifice his own opinions respecting the drama to the popular taste; and if the constraint he thus laid upon himself was one of the causes of his failure, it only affords another ground for our interest in the fate of one whose whole career was so deeply marked with trials and calamity.[153]