But in 1620 and 1622, he had an opportunity to exhibit himself to the mass of the people, as well as to the court, at Madrid, in a character which, being both religious and dramatic, was admirably suited to his powers and pretensions. It was the double occasion of the beatification and the canonization of Saint Isidore, in whose honor, above twenty years earlier, Lope had made one of his most successful efforts for popularity,—a long interval, but one during which the claims of the Saint had been by no means overlooked. On the contrary, the king, from the time of his restoration to health, had been constantly soliciting the honors of the Church for a personage to whose miraculous interposition he believed himself to owe it. At last they were granted, and the 19th of May, 1620, was appointed for celebrating the beatification of the pious “Ploughman of Madrid.”
Such occasions were now often seized in the principal cities of Spain, as a means alike of exhibiting the talents of their poets, and amusing and interesting the multitude;—the Church gladly contributing its authority to substitute, as far as possible, a sort of poetical tournament, held under its own management, for the chivalrous tournaments which had for centuries exercised so great and so irreligious an influence throughout Europe. At any rate, these literary contests, in which honors and prizes of various kinds were offered, were called “Poetical Joustings,” and soon became favorite entertainments with the mass of the people. We have already noticed such festivals, as early as the end of the fifteenth century; and besides the prize which, as we have seen, Cervantes gained at Saragossa in May, 1595,[255] Lope gained one at Toledo, in June, 1608;[256] and in September, 1614, he was the judge at a poetical festival in honor of the beatification of Saint Theresa, at Madrid, where the rich tones of his voice and his graceful style of reading were much admired.[257]
The occasion of the beatification of the Saint who presided over the fortunes of Madrid was, however, one of more solemn importance than either of these had been. All classes of the inhabitants of that “Heroic Town,” as it is still called, took an interest in it; for it was believed to concern the well-being of all.[258] The Church of Saint Andrew, in which reposed the body of the worthy Ploughman, was ornamented with unwonted splendor. The merchants of the city completely encased its altars with plain, but pure silver. The goldsmiths enshrined the form of the Saint, which five centuries had not wasted away, in a sarcophagus of the same metal, elaborately wrought. Other classes brought other offerings; all marked by the gorgeous wealth that then flowed through the privileged portions of Spanish society, from the mines of Peru and Mexico. In front of the church a showy stage was erected, from which the poems sent in for prizes were read, and over this part of the ceremonies Lope presided.
As a sort of prologue, a few satirical petitions were produced, which were intended to excite merriment, and, no doubt, were successful; after which Lope opened the literary proceedings of the festival, by pronouncing a poetical oration of above seven hundred lines in honor of San Isidro. This was followed by reading the subjects for the nine prizes offered by the nine Muses, together with the rules according to which the honors of the occasion were to be adjudged; and then came the poems themselves. Among the competitors were many of the principal men of letters of the time: Zarate, Guillen de Castro, Jauregui, Espinel, Montalvan, Pantaleon, Silveira, the young Calderon, and Lope himself, with the son who bore his name, still a boy. All this, or nearly all of it, was grave, and beseeming the grave occasion. But at the end of the list of those who entered their claims for each prize, there always appeared a sort of masque, who, under the assumed name of Master Burguillos, “seasoned the feast in the most savory manner,” it is said, with his amusing verses, caricaturing the whole, like the gracioso of the popular theatre, and serving as a kind of interlude after each division of the more regular drama.
Lope took hardly any pains to conceal that this savory part of the festival was entirely his own; so surely had his theatrical instincts indicated to him the merry relief its introduction would give to the stateliness and solemnity of the occasion.[259] All the various performances were read by him with much effect, and at the end he gave a light and pleasant account, in the old popular ballad measure, of what had been done; after which the judges pronounced the names of the successful competitors. Who they were, we are not told; but the offerings of all—those of the unsuccessful as well as of the successful—were published by him without delay.
A greater jubilee followed two years afterwards, when, at the opening of the reign of Philip the Fourth, the negotiations of his grateful predecessor were crowned with a success he did not live to witness; and San Isidro, with three other devout Spaniards, was admitted by the Head of the Church at Rome to the full glories of saintship, by a formal canonization. The people of Madrid took little note of the Papal bull, except so far as it concerned their own particular saint and protector. But to him the honors they offered were abundant.[260] The festival they instituted for the occasion lasted nine days. Eight pyramids, above seventy feet high, were arranged in different parts of the city, and nine magnificent altars, a castle, a rich garden, and a temporary theatre. All the houses of the better sort were hung with gorgeous tapestry; religious processions, in which the principal nobility took the meanest places, swept through the streets; and bull-fights, always the most popular of Spanish entertainments, were added, in which above two thousand of those noble animals were sacrificed in amphitheatres or public squares open to all.
As a part of the show, a great literary contest or jousting was held on the 19th of May,—exactly two years after that held at the beatification. Again Lope appeared on the stage in front of the Church of Saint Andrew, and, with similar ceremonies and a similar admixture of the somewhat broad farce of Tomé de Burguillos, most of the leading poets of the time joined in the universal homage. Lope carried away the principal prizes. Others were given to Zarate, Calderon, Montalvan, and Guillen de Castro. Two plays—one on the childhood, and the other on the youth of San Isidro, but both expressly ordered from Lope by the city—were acted on open, movable stages, before the king, the court, and the multitude, making their author the most prominent figure of a festival which, rightly understood, goes far to explain the spirit of the times and of the religion on which it all depended. An account of the whole, comprehending the poems offered on the occasion, and his own two plays, was published by Lope before the close of the year.
His success at these two jubilees was, no doubt, very flattering to him. It had been of the most public kind; it had been on a very popular subject; and it had, perhaps, brought him more into the minds and thoughts of the great mass of the people, and into the active interests of the time, than even his success in the theatre. The caricatures of Tomé de Burguillos, in particular, though often rude, seem to have been received with extraordinary favor. Later, therefore, he was induced to write more verses in the same style; and, in 1634, he published a volume, consisting almost wholly of humorous and burlesque poems, under the same disguise. Most of the pieces it contains are sonnets and other short poems;—some very sharp and satirical, and nearly all fluent and happy. But one of them is of considerable length, and should be separately noticed.
It is a mock-heroic, in irregular verse, divided into six silvas or cantos, and is called “La Gatomachia,” or the Battle of the Cats; being a contest between two cats for the love of a third. Like nearly all the poems of the class to which it belongs, from the “Batrachomyomachia” downwards, it is too long. It contains about twenty-five hundred lines, in various measures. But if it is not the first in the Spanish language in the order of time, it is the first in the order of merit. The last two silvas, in particular, are written with great lightness and spirit; sometimes parodying Ariosto and the epic poets, and sometimes the old ballads, with the gayest success. From its first appearance, therefore, it has been a favorite in Spain; and it is now, probably, more read than any other of its author’s miscellaneous works. An edition printed in 1794 assumes, rather than attempts to prove, that Tomé de Burguillos was a real personage. But few persons have ever been of this opinion; for though, when it first appeared, Lope prefixed to it one of those accounts concerning its pretended author that deceive nobody, yet he had, as early as the first festival in honor of San Isidro, almost directly declared Master Burguillos to be merely a disguise for himself and a means of adding interest to the occasion,—a fact, indeed, plainly intimated by Quevedo in the Approbation prefixed to the volume, and by Coronel in the verses which immediately follow.[261]
In 1621, just in the interval between the two festivals, Lope published a volume containing the “Filomena,” a poem, in the first canto of which he gives the mythological story of Tereus and the Nightingale, and in the second, a vindication of himself, under the allegory of the Nightingale’s Defence against the Envious Thrush. To this he added, in the same volume, “La Tapada,” a description, in octave verse, of a country-seat of the Duke of Braganza in Portugal; the “Andromeda,” a mythological story like the Filomena; “The Fortunes of Diana,” the first prose tale he ever printed; several poetical epistles and smaller poems; and a correspondence on the subject of the New Poetry, as it was called, in which he boldly attacked the school of Góngora, then at the height of its favor.[262] The whole volume added nothing to its author’s permanent reputation; but parts of it, and especially passages in the epistles and in the Filomena, are interesting from the circumstance that they contain allusions to his own personal history.