Where none knows the stings of remorse,
With a wind fair and free takes her flight;—
Who embarks? who embarks, then, I say?[290]
A new world is announced as their destination, and the Will asks whether it is the one lately discovered by Columbus; to which and to other similar questions Satan replies evasively, but declares that he is a greater pilot of the seas than Magellan or Drake, and will insure to all who sail with him a happy and prosperous voyage. Memory opposes the project, but, after some resistance, is put asleep; and Understanding, who follows as a greybeard full of wise counsel, comes too late. The adventurers are already gone. But still he shouts after them, and continues his warnings, till the ship of Penitence arrives, with the Saviour for its pilot, a cross for its mast, and sundry Saints for its sailors. They summon the Soul anew. The Soul is surprised and shocked at her situation; and the piece ends with her embarkation on board the sacred vessel, amidst a feu de joie, and the shouts of the delighted spectators, who, we may suppose, had been much edified by the show.
Another of these strange dramas is founded on the story of the Prodigal Son, and is said to have been represented at Perpignan, then a Spanish fortress, by a party of soldiers; one of the actors being mentioned by name in its long and absurdly learned Prologue.[291] Among the interlocutors are Envy, Youth, Repentance, and Good Advice; and among other extraordinary passages, it contains a flowing paraphrase of Horace’s “Beatus ille,” pronounced by the respectable proprietor of the swine intrusted to the unhappy Prodigal.
The fourth Morality, found in the romance of the Pilgrim, is entitled “The Marriage of the Soul and Divine Love”; and is set forth as having been acted in a public square at Valencia, on occasion of the marriage of Philip the Third with Margaret of Austria, which took place in that city,—an occasion, we are told, when Lope himself appeared in the character of a buffoon,[292] and one to which this drama, though it seems to have been written earlier, was carefully adjusted.[293] The World, Sin, the City of Jerusalem, and Faith, who is dressed in the costume of a captain-general of Spain, all play parts in it. Envy enters, in the first scene, as from the infernal regions, through a mouth casting forth flames; and the last scene represents Love, stretched on the cross, and wedded to a fair damsel who figures as the Soul of Man. Some parts of this drama are very offensive; especially the passage in which Margaret of Austria, with celestial attributes, is represented as arriving in the galley of Faith, and the passage in which Philip’s entrance into Valencia is described literally as it occurred, but substituting the Saviour for the king, and the prophets, the martyrs, and the hierarchy of heaven for the Spanish nobles and clergy who really appeared on the occasion.[294]
Such were, probably, the unsteady attempts with which Lope began his career on the public stage during his exile at Valencia and immediately afterwards. They are certainly wild enough in their structure, and sometimes gross in sentiment, though hardly worse in either respect than the similar allegorical mysteries and farces which, till just about the same period, were performed in France and England, and much superior in their general tone and style. How long he continued to write them, or how many he wrote, we do not know. Few of them appear in the collection of his dramas, which does not begin till 1604, though an allegorical spirit is occasionally visible in some of his plays, which are, in other respects, quite in the temper of the secular theatre. But that he wrote such religious dramas early, and that he wrote great numbers of them, is unquestionable.
In Madrid, if he found little to hinder, he also found little to help him, except two rude theatres, or rather court-yards, licensed for the representation of plays, and a dramatic taste formed or forming in the character of the people. But this was enough for a spirit like his. His success was immediate and complete; his popularity overwhelming. Cervantes, as we have seen, declared him to be a “prodigy of nature”; and, though himself seeking both the fame and the profit of a writer for the public stage, generously recognized his great rival as its sole monarch.[295]
Many years, however, elapsed before he published even a single volume of the plays with which he was thus delighting the audiences of Madrid, and settling the final forms of the national drama. This was, no doubt, in part owing to the habit, which seems to have prevailed in Spain from the first appearance of the theatre, of regarding its literature as ill-suited for publication; and in part to the circumstance, that, when plays were produced on the stage, the author usually lost his right in them, if not entirely, yet so far that he could not publish them without the assent of the actors. But whatever may have been the cause, it is certain that a multitude of Lope’s plays had been acted before he published any of them; and that, to this day, not a fourth part of those he wrote has been preserved by the press.[296]
Their very number, however, may have been one obstacle to their publication; for the most moderate and certain accounts on this point have almost a fabulous air about them; so extravagant do they seem. In 1603, he gives us the titles of three hundred and forty-one pieces that he had already written;[297] in 1609, he says their number had risen to four hundred and eighty-three;[298] in 1618, he says it was eight hundred;[299] in 1619, again in round numbers, he states it at nine hundred;[300] and in 1624, at one thousand and seventy.[301] After his death, in 1635, Perez de Montalvan, his intimate friend and executor, who three years before had declared the number to be fifteen hundred, without reckoning the shorter pieces,[302] puts it at eighteen hundred plays and four hundred autos;[303] numbers which are confidently repeated by Antonio in his notice of Lope,[304] and by Franchi, an Italian, who had been much with Lope at Madrid, and who wrote one of the multitudinous eulogies on him after his death.[305] The prodigious facility implied by this is further confirmed by the fact stated by himself in one of his plays, that it was written and acted in five days,[306] and by the anecdotes of Montalvan, that he wrote five full-length dramas at Toledo in fifteen days, and one act of another in a few hours of the early morning, without seeming to make any effort in either case.[307]