And, when the vase has once been filled, be sure
’T will always savor of what first it held.[355]
The story is less important than it is in many of Lope’s dramas; but the sketches of common life are sometimes spirited, like the one in which Mendo describes his first sight of his future wife busied in household work, and the elaborate scene where his first child is christened.[356] The characters, on the other hand, are better defined and drawn than is common with him; and that of the plain, practically wise Mendo is sustained, from beginning to end, with consistency and skill, as well as with good dramatic effect.[357]
Another of these more domestic pieces is called “The Damsel Theodora,” and shows how gladly and with what ingenuity Lope seized on the stories current in his time and turned them to dramatic account. The tale he now used, which bears the same name with the play, and is extremely simple in its structure, was written by an Aragonese, of whom we know only that his name was Alfonso.[358] The damsel Theodora, in this original fiction, is a slave in Tunis, and belongs to a Hungarian merchant living there, who has lost his whole fortune. At her suggestion, she is offered by her master to the king of Tunis, who is so much struck with her beauty and with the amount of her knowledge, that he purchases her at a price which reëstablishes her master’s condition. The point of the whole consists in the exhibition of this knowledge through discussions with learned men; but the subjects are most of them of the commonest kind, and the merit of the story is quite inconsiderable,—less, for instance, than that of “Friar Bacon,” in English, to which, in several respects, it may be compared.[359]
But Lope knew his audiences, and succeeded in adapting this old tale to their taste. The damsel Theodora, as he arranges her character for the stage, is the daughter of a professor at Toledo, and is educated in all the learning of her father’s schools. She, however, is not raised by it above the influences of the tender passion, and, running away with her lover, is captured by a vessel from the coast of Barbary, and carried as a slave successively to Oran, to Constantinople, and finally to Persia, where she is sold to the Sultan for an immense sum on account of her rare knowledge, displayed in the last act of the play much as it is in the original tale of Alfonso, and sometimes in the same words. But the love intrigue, with a multitude of jealous troubles and adventures, runs through the whole; and as the Sultan is made to understand at last the relations of all the parties, who are strangely assembled before him, he gives the price of the damsel as her dower, and marries her to the lover with whom she originally fled from Toledo. The principal jest, both in the drama and the story, is, that a learned doctor, who is defeated by Theodora in a public trial of wits, is bound by the terms of the contest to be stripped naked, and buys off his ignominy with a sum which goes still further to increase the lady’s fortune and the content of her husband.[360]
The last of Lope’s plays to be noticed among those whose subjects are drawn from common life is a more direct appeal, perhaps, than any other of its class to the popular feeling. It is his “Captives in Algiers,”[361] and has been already alluded to as partly borrowed from a play of Cervantes. In its first scenes, a Morisco of Valencia leaves the land where his race had suffered so cruelly, and, after establishing himself among those of his own faith in Algiers, returns by night as a corsair, and, from his familiar knowledge of the Spanish coast, where he was born, easily succeeds in carrying off a number of Christian captives. The fate of these victims, and that of others whom they find in Algiers, including a lover and his mistress, form the subject of the drama. In the course of it, we have scenes in which Christian Spaniards are publicly sold in the slave-market; Christian children torn from their parents and cajoled out of their faith;[362] and a Christian gentleman made to suffer the most dreadful forms of martyrdom for his religion;—in short, we have set before us whatever could most painfully and powerfully excite the interest and sympathy of an audience in Spain at a moment when such multitudes of Spanish families were mourning the captivity of their children and friends.[363] It ends with an account of a play to be acted by the Christian slaves in one of their vast prison-houses, to celebrate the recent marriage of Philip the Third; from which, as well as from a reference to the magnificent festivities that followed it at Denia, in which Lope, as we know, took part, we may be sure that the “Cautivos de Argel” was written as late as 1598, and probably not much later.[364]
A love-story unites its rather incongruous materials into something like a connected whole; but the part we read with the most interest is that assigned to Cervantes, who appears under his family name of Saavedra, without disguise, though without any mark of respect.[365] Considering that Lope took from him some of the best materials for this very piece, and that the sufferings and heroism of Cervantes at Algiers must necessarily have been present to his thoughts when he composed it, we can hardly do him any injustice by adding, that he ought either to have given Cervantes a more dignified part, and alluded to him with tenderness and consideration, or else have refrained from introducing him at all.
The three forms of Lope’s drama which have thus far been considered, and which are nearly akin to each other,[366] were, no doubt, the spontaneous productions of his own genius; modified, indeed, by what he found already existing, and by the taste and will of the audiences for which he wrote, but still essentially his own. Probably, if he had been left to himself and to the mere influences of the theatre, he would have preferred to write no other dramas than such as would naturally come under one of these divisions. But neither he nor his audiences were permitted to settle the whole of this question. The Church, always powerful in Spain, but never so powerful as during the latter part of the reign of Philip the Second, when Lope was just rising into notice, was offended with the dramas then so much in favor, and not without reason. Their free love-stories, their duels, and, indeed, their ideas generally upon domestic life and personal character, have, unquestionably, any thing but a Christian tone.[367] A controversy, therefore, naturally arose concerning their lawfulness, and this controversy was continued till 1598, when, by a royal decree, the representation of secular plays in Madrid was entirely forbidden, and the common theatres were closed for nearly two years.[368]
Lope was compelled to accommodate himself to this new state of things, and seems to have done it easily and with his accustomed address. He had, as we have seen, early written religious plays, like the old Mysteries and Moralities; and he now undertook to infuse their spirit into the more attractive forms of his secular drama, and thus produce an entertainment which, while it might satisfy the popular audiences of the capital, would avoid the rebukes of the Church. His success was as marked as it had been before; and the new varieties of form in which his genius now disported itself were hardly less striking.
His most obvious resource was the Scriptures, to which, as they had been used more than four centuries for dramatic purposes, on the greater religious festivals of the Spanish Church, the ecclesiastical powers could hardly, with a good grace, now make objection. Lope, therefore, resorted to them freely; sometimes constructing dramas out of them which might be mistaken for the old Mysteries, were it not for their more poetical character, and their sometimes approaching so near to his own intriguing comedies, that, but for the religious parts, they might seem to belong to the merely secular and fashionable theatre that had just been interdicted.