On his return home from a successful campaign, the Duke discovers the intrigue. A struggle ensues between his affection for his son and the stinging sense of his own dishonor. At last he determines to punish; but in such a manner as to hide the grounds of his offence. To effect this, he confines his wife in a darkened room, and so conceals and secures her person, that she can neither move, nor speak, nor be seen. He then sends his offending son to her, under the pretence that beneath the pall that hides her is placed a traitor, whom the son is required to kill in order to protect his father’s life; and when the desperate young man rushes from the room, ignorant who has been his victim, he is instantly cut down by the by-standers, on his father’s outcry, that he has just murdered his step-mother, with whose blood his hands are, in fact, visibly reeking.
Lope finished this play on the 1st of August, 1631, when he was nearly sixty-nine years old; and yet there are few of his dramas, in the class to which it belongs, that are more marked with poetical vigor, and in none is the versification more light and various.[335] The characters, especially those of the father and son, are better defined and better sustained than usual; and the whole was evidently written with care, for there are not infrequently large alterations, as well as many minute verbal corrections, in the original manuscript, which is still extant.
It was not licensed for representation till the 9th of May, 1632,—apparently from the known unwillingness of the court to have persons of rank, like the Duke of Ferrara, brought upon the stage in a light so odious. At any rate, when the tardy permission was granted, it was accompanied with a certificate that the Duke was treated with “the decorum due to his person”; though, even with this assurance, it was acted but once, notwithstanding it made a strong impression at the time, and was brought out by the company of Figueroa, the most successful of the period,—Arias, whose acting Montalvan praises highly, taking the part of the son. In 1634, Lope printed it, with more than common care, at Barcelona, dedicating it to his great patron, the Duke of Sessa, among “the servants of whose house,” he says, he “was inscribed”; and the next year, immediately after his death, it appeared again, without the Dedication, in the twenty-first volume of his plays, prepared anew by himself for the press, but published by his daughter Feliciana.[336]
Like “Punishment, not Vengeance,” several other dramas of its class are imbued with the deepest spirit of tragedy. “The Knights Commanders of Córdova” is an instance in point.[337] It is a parallel to the story of Ægisthus and Clytemnestra in its horrors; but the husband, instead of meeting the fate of Agamemnon, puts to death, not only his guilty wife, but all his servants and every living thing in his household, to satisfy his savage sense of honor. Poetry is not wanting in some of its scenes, but the atrocities of the rest will hardly permit it to be perceived.
“The Star of Seville,” on the other hand, though much more truly tragic, is liable to no such objection.[338] In some respects it resembles Corneille’s “Cid.” At the command of his king and from the loftiest loyalty, a knight of Seville kills his friend, a brother of the lady whom he is about to marry. The king afterwards endeavours to hold him harmless for the crime; but the royal judges refuse to interrupt the course of the law in his favor, and the brave knight is saved from death only by the plenary confession of his guilty sovereign. It is one of the very small number of Lope’s pieces that have no comic and distracting underplot. Not a few of its scenes are admirable; especially that in which the king urges the knight to kill his friend; that in which the lovely and innocent creature whom the knight is about to marry receives, in the midst of the frank and delightful expressions of her happiness, the dead body of her brother, who has been slain by her lover; and that in which the Alcaldes solemnly refuse to wrest the law in obedience to the royal commands. The conclusion is better than that in the tragedy of Corneille. The lady abandons the world and retires to a convent.
Of the great number of Lope’s heroic dramas on national subjects, a few should be noticed, in order to indicate the direction he gave to this division of his theatre. One, for instance, is on the story of Bamba, taken from the plough to be made king of Spain;[339] and another, “The Last Goth,” is on the popular traditions of the loss of Spain by Roderic;[340]—the first being among the earliest of his published plays,[341] and the last not printed till twelve years after his death, but both written in one spirit and upon the same system. On the attractive subject of Bernardo del Carpio he has several dramas. One is called “The Youthful Adventures of Bernardo,” and relates his exploits down to the time when he discovered the secret of his birth. Another, called “Bernardo in France,” gives us the story of that part of his life for which the ballads and chronicles afford only slight hints. And a third, “Marriage in Death,” involves the misconduct of King Alfonso, and the heart-rending scene in which the dead body of Bernardo’s father is delivered to the hero, who has sacrificed every thing to filial piety, and now finds himself crushed and ruined by it.[342] The seven Infantes of Lara are not passed over, as we see both in the play that bears their name, and in the more striking one on the story of Mudarra, “El Bastardo Mudarra.”[343] Indeed, it seems as if no picturesque point in the national annals were overlooked by Lope;[344] and that, after bringing on the stage the great events in Spanish history and tradition consecutively down to his own times, he looks round on all sides for subjects, at home and abroad, taking one from the usurpation of Boris Gudunow at Moscow, in 1606,[345] another from the conquest of Arauco, in 1560,[346] and another from the great league that ended with the battle of Lepanto, in 1571; in which last, to avoid the awkwardness of a sea-fight on the stage, he is guilty of introducing the greater awkwardness of an allegorical figure of Spain describing the battle to the audience in Madrid, at the very moment when it is supposed to be going on near the shores of Greece.[347]
The whole class of these heroic and historical dramas, it should be remembered, makes little claim to historical accuracy. A love-story, filled as usual with hairbreadth escapes, jealous quarrels, and questions of honor, runs through nearly every one of them; and though, in some cases, we may trust to the facts set before us, as we must in “The Valiant Cespedes,” where the poet gravely declares that all except the love adventures are strictly true,[348] still, in no case can it be pretended, that the manners of an earlier age, or of foreign nations, are respected, or that the general coloring of the representation is to be regarded as faithful. Thus, in one play we see Nero hurrying about the streets of Rome, like a Spanish gallant, with a guitar on his arm, and making love to his mistress at her grated window.[349] In another, Belisarius, in the days of his glory, is selected to act the part of Pyramus in an interlude before the Emperor Justinian, much as if he belonged to Nick Bottom’s company, and afterwards has his eyes put out, on a charge of making love to the Empress.[350] And in yet a third, Cyrus the Great, after he is seated on his throne, marries a shepherdess.[351] But there is no end to such absurdities in Lope’s plays; and the explanation of them all is, that they were not felt to be such at the time. Truth and faithfulness in regard to the facts, manners, and costume of a drama were not supposed to be more important, in the age of Lope, than an observation of the unities;—not more important than they were supposed to be a century later, in France, in the unending romances of Calprenède and Scudéry;—not more important than they are deemed in an Italian opera now:—so profound is the thought of the greatest of all the masters of the historical drama, that “the best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.”
CHAPTER XVII.
Lope de Vega, continued. — Dramas that are founded on the Manners of Common Life. — The Wise Man at Home. — The Damsel Theodora. — Captives in Algiers. — Influence of the Church on the Drama. — Lope’s Plays from Scripture. — The Birth of Christ. — The Creation of the World. — Lope’s Plays on the Lives of Saints. — Saint Isidore of Madrid. — Lope’s Sacramental Autos for the Festival of the Corpus Christi. — Their Prologues. — Their Interludes. — The Autos Themselves.