For, till his time, upon all fours they crept,
Like helpless babes that never yet had stepped.
Such plays I wrote, eleven and twelve years old;
Four acts—each measured to a sheet’s just fold—
Filled out four sheets; while still, between,
Three entremeses short filled up the scene.[280]
This was as early as 1574. A few years later, or about 1580, when the poet was eighteen years old, he attracted the notice of his early patron, Manrique, the Bishop of Avila, by a pastoral. His studies at Alcalá followed; then his service under the young Duke of Alva, his marriage, and his exile of several years; for all which we must find room before 1588, when we know he served in the Armada. In 1590, however, if not a year earlier, he had returned to Madrid; and it does not seem unreasonable to assume that soon afterwards he began to be known in the capital as a dramatic writer, being then twenty-eight years old.
But it was during the period of his exile that he seems to have really begun his public dramatic career, and prepared himself, in some measure, for his subsequent more general popularity. Much of this interval was passed in Valencia; and in Valencia a theatre had been known for a long time.[281] As early as 1526, the hospital there received an income from it, by a compromise similar to that in virtue of which the hospitals of Madrid long afterwards laid the theatre under contribution for their support.[282] The Captain Virues, who was a friend of Lope de Vega, and is commemorated by him more than once, wrote for this theatre, as did Timoneda, the editor of Lope de Rueda; the works of both the last being printed in Valencia about 1570. These Valencian dramas, however, except in the case of Lope de Rueda, were of moderate amount and value; nor was what was done at Seville by Cueva and his followers, about 1580, or at Madrid by Cervantes, a little later, of more real importance, regarded as the foundations for a national theatre.
Indeed, if we look over all that can be claimed for the Spanish drama from the time of the eclogues of Juan de la Enzina, in 1492, to the appearance of Lope de Rueda, about 1544, and then, again, from his time to that of Lope de Vega, we shall find, not only that the number of dramas was small, but that they had been written in forms so different and so often opposed to each other as to have little consistency or authority, and to offer no sufficient indication of the channel in which the dramatic literature of the country was at last destined to flow. We may even say, that, except Lope de Rueda, no author for the theatre had yet enjoyed a permanent popularity; and he having now been dead more than twenty years, Lope de Vega must be admitted to have had a fair and free field open before him.
Unfortunately we have few of his earlier efforts. He seems, however, to have begun upon the old foundations of the eclogues and moralities, whose religious air and tone commended them to that ecclesiastical toleration without which little could thrive in Spain.[283] An eclogue, which is announced as having been represented, and which seems really to be arranged for exhibition, is found in the third book of the “Arcadia,” the earliest of Lope’s published works, and one that was written before his exile.[284] Several similar attempts occur elsewhere,—so rude and pious, that it seems almost as if they might have belonged to the age of Juan de la Enzina and Gil Vicente; and others of the same character are scattered through other parts of his multitudinous works.[285]