Where am I borne? What is the road I take?
What track of destiny is this I tread?
And what the impulse that I blindly follow?
Am I not poor, unknown, a broken man,
Depending on the pilot’s anxious trade?
And shall I venture on the mighty task
To add a distant world to this we know?[333]
The conception of the character in this particular is good, and, being founded, as we know it was, on the personal convictions of Columbus himself, might have been followed out by further developments with poetical effect. But the opportunity is neglected, and, like many other occasions for success, is thrown away by Lope, through haste and carelessness.
Another of the dramas of this class, “El Castigo sin Venganza,” or Punishment, not Revenge, is important from the mode in which its subject is treated, and interesting from the circumstance that its history can be more exactly traced than that of any other of Lope’s plays. It is founded on the dark and hideous story in the annals of Ferrara, during the fifteenth century, which Lord Byron found in Gibbon’s “Antiquities of the House of Brunswick,” and made the subject of his “Parisina,”[334] but which Lope, following the old chronicles of the duchy, has presented in a somewhat different light, and thrown with no little skill into a dramatic form.
The Duke of Ferrara, in his tragedy, is a person of mark and spirit; a commander of the Papal forces, and a prince of statesmanlike experience and virtues. He marries when already past the middle age of life, and sends his natural son, Frederic, to receive his beautiful bride, a daughter of the Duke of Mantua, and to conduct her to Ferrara. Before he reaches Mantua, however, Frederic meets her accidentally on the way; and his first interview with his step-mother is when he rescues her from drowning. From this moment they become gradually more and more attached to each other, until their attachment ends in guilt; partly through the strong impulses of their own natures, and partly from the coldness and faithlessness of the Duke to his young and passionate wife.