Of this enormous mass, a little more than five hundred dramas appear to have been published at different times,—most of them in the twenty-five, or more properly twenty-eight, volumes which were printed in various places between 1604 and 1647, but of which it is now nearly impossible to form a complete collection. In these volumes, so far as any rules of the dramatic art are concerned, it is apparent that Lope took the theatre in the state in which he found it; and instead of attempting to adapt it to any previous theory, or to any existing models, whether ancient or recent, made it his great object to satisfy the popular audiences of his age;[308]—an object which he avows so distinctly in his “Art of Writing Plays,” and in the Preface to the twentieth volume of his Dramas, that there is no doubt it was the prevailing purpose with which he labored for the theatre. For such a purpose, he certainly appeared at a fortunate moment; and, possessing a genius no less fortunate, was enabled to become the founder of the national Spanish theatre, which, since his time, has rested substantially on the basis where he placed and left it.
But this very system—if that may be called a system which was rather an instinct—almost necessarily supposes that he indulged his audiences in a great variety of dramatic forms; and accordingly we find, among his plays, a diversity, alike in spirit, tone, and structure, which was evidently intended to humor the uncertain cravings of the popular taste, and which we know was successful. Whether he himself ever took the trouble to consider what were the different classes into which his dramas might be divided does not appear. Certainly no attempt at any technical arrangement of them is made in the collection he printed, except that, in the first and third volumes, a few entremeses, or farces, generally in prose, are thrown in at the end of each, as a sort of appendix. All the rest of the plays contained in them are in verse, and are called comedias,—a word which is by no means to be translated “comedies,” but “dramas,” since no other name is comprehensive enough to include their manifold varieties,—and all of them are divided into three jornadas, or acts.
But in every thing else there seems no end to their diversities,—whether we regard their subjects, running from the deepest tragedy to the broadest farce, and from the most solemn mysteries of religion down to the loosest frolics of common life, or their style, which embraces every change of tone and measure known to the poetical language of the country. And all these different masses of Lope’s drama, it should be further noted, run insensibly into each other,—the sacred and the secular; the tragic and the comic; the heroic action and that from vulgar life,—until sometimes it seems as if there were neither separate form nor distinctive attribute to any of them.
This, however, is less the case than it at first appears to be. Lope, no doubt, did not always know or care into what peculiar form the story of his drama was cast; but still there were certain forms and attributes invented by his own genius, or indicated to him by the success of his predecessors or the demands of his time, to which each of his dramas more or less tended. A few, indeed, may be found so nearly on the limits that separate the different classes, that it is difficult to assign them strictly to either; but in all—even in those that are the freest and wildest—the distinctive elements of some class are apparent, while all, by the peculiarly national spirit that animates them, show the source from which they come, and the direction they are destined to follow.
The first class of plays that Lope seems to have invented—the one in which his own genius seemed most to delight, and which still remains more popular in Spain than any other—consists of those called “Comedias de Capa y Espada,” or Dramas with Cloak and Sword. They took their name from the circumstance, that their principal personages belong to the genteel portion of society, accustomed, in Lope’s time, to the picturesque national dress of cloaks and swords,—excluding, on the one hand, those dramas in which royal personages appear, and, on the other, those which are devoted to common life and the humbler classes. Their main and moving principle is gallantry,—such gallantry as existed in the time of their author. The story is almost always involved and intriguing, and almost always accompanied with an underplot and parody on the characters and adventures of the principal parties, formed out of those of the servants and other inferior personages.
Their titles are intended to be attractive, and are not infrequently taken from among the old rhymed proverbs that were always popular, and that sometimes seem to have suggested the subject of the drama itself. They uniformly extend to the length of regular pieces for the theatre, now settled at three jornadas, or acts, each of which, Lope advises, should have its action compressed within the limits of a single day, though he himself is rarely scrupulous enough to follow his own recommendation. They are not properly comedies, for nothing is more frequent in them than duels, murders, and assassinations; and they are not tragedies, for, besides that they end happily, they are generally composed of humorous and sentimental dialogue, and their action is carried on chiefly by lovers full of romance, or by low characters whose wit is mingled with buffoonery. All this, it should be understood, was new on the Spanish stage; or if hints might have been furnished for individual portions of it as far back as Torres Naharro, the combination, at least, was new, as well as the manners, tone, and costume.
Of such plays Lope wrote a very large number; several hundreds, at least. His genius—rich, free, and eminently inventive—was well fitted for their composition, and in many of them he shows great dramatic tact and talent. Among the best are “The Ugly Beauty”;[309] “Money makes the Man”;[310] “The Pruderies of Belisa,”[311] which has the accidental merit of being all but strictly within the rules; “The Slave of her Lover,”[312] in which he has sounded the depths of a woman’s tenderness; and “The Dog in the Manger,” in which he has almost equally well sounded the depths of her selfish vanity.[313] But perhaps there are some others which, even better than these, will show the peculiar character of this class of Lope’s dramas, and his peculiar position in relation to them. To two or three such we will, therefore, now turn.
“El Azero de Madrid,” or The Madrid Steel, is one of them, and is among his earlier works for the stage.[314] It takes its name from the preparations of steel for medicinal purposes, which, in Lope’s time, had just come into fashionable use; but the main story is that of a light-hearted girl who deceives her father, and especially a hypocritical old aunt, by pretending to be ill and taking steel medicaments from a seeming doctor, who is a friend of her lover, and who prescribes walking abroad, and such other free modes of life as may best afford opportunities for her admirer’s attentions.
There can be little doubt that in this play we find some of the materials for the “Médecin Malgré Lui”; and though the full success of Molière’s original wit is not to be questioned, still the happiest portions of his comedy can do no more than come into fair competition with some passages in that of Lope. The character of the heroine, for instance, is drawn with more spirit in the Spanish than it is in the French play; and that of the devotee aunt, who acts as her duenna, and whose hypocrisy is exposed when she herself falls in love, is one which Molière might well have envied, though it was too exclusively Spanish to be brought within the courtly conventions by which he was restrained.
The whole drama is full of life and gayety, and has a truth and reality about it rare on any stage. Its opening is both a proof of this and a characteristic specimen of its author’s mode of placing his audience at once, by a decisive movement, in the midst of the scene and the personages he means to represent. Lisardo, the hero, and Riselo, his friend, appear watching the door of a fashionable church in Madrid, at the conclusion of the service, to see a lady with whom Lisardo is in love. They are wearied with waiting, while the crowds pass out, and Riselo at last declares he will wait for his friend’s fancy no longer. At this moment appears Belisa, the lady in question, attended by her aunt, Theodora, who wears an affectedly religious dress and is lecturing her:—