At an earlier period, and perhaps as late as the time of Lope’s first appearance, this part of the festival consisted of a very simple exhibition, accompanied with rustic songs, eclogues, and dancing, such as we find it in a large collection of manuscript autos, of which two that have been published are slight and rude in their structure and dialogue, and seem to date from a period as early as that of Lope;[395] but during his lifetime, and chiefly under his influence, it became a formal and well-defined popular entertainment, divided into three parts, each of which was quite distinct in its character from the others, and all of them dramatic.
First of all, in its more completed state, came the loa. This was always of the nature of a prologue; but sometimes, in form, it was a dialogue spoken by two or more actors. One of the best of Lope’s is of this kind. It is filled with the troubles of a peasant who has come to Madrid in order to see these very shows, and has lost his wife in the crowd; but, just as he has quite consoled himself and satisfied his conscience by determining to have her cried once or twice, and then to give her up as a lucky loss and take another, she comes in and describes with much spirit the wonders of the procession she had seen, precisely as her audience themselves had just seen it; thus making, in the form of a prologue, a most amusing and appropriate introduction for the drama that was to follow.[396] Another of Lope’s loas is a discussion between a gay gallant and a peasant, who talks, in his rustic dialect, on the subject of the doctrine of transubstantiation.[397] Another is given in the character of a Morisco, and is a monologue, in the dialect of the speaker, on the advantages and disadvantages of his turning Christian in earnest, after having for some time made his living fraudulently by begging in the assumed character of a Christian pilgrim.[398] All of them are amusing, though burlesque; but some of them are any thing rather than religious.
After the loa came an entremes. All that remain to us of Lope’s entremeses are mere farces, like the interludes used every day in the secular theatres. In one instance he makes an entremes a satire upon lawyers, in which a member of the craft, as in the old French “Maistre Pathelin,” is cheated and robbed by a seemingly simple peasant, who first renders him extremely ridiculous, and then escapes by disguising himself as a blind ballad-singer, and dancing and singing in honor of the festival,—a conclusion which seems to be peculiarly irreverent for this particular occasion.[399] In another instance, he ridicules the poets of his time by bringing on the stage a lady who pretends she has just come from the Indies, with a fortune, in order to marry a poet, and succeeds in her purpose; but both find themselves deceived, for the lady has no income but such as is gained by a pair of castanets, and her husband turns out to be a ballad-maker. Both, however, have good sense enough to be content with each other, and to agree to go through the world together singing and dancing ballads, of which, by way of finale to the entremes, they at once give the crowd a specimen.[400] Yet another of Lope’s successful attempts in this way is an interlude containing within itself the representation of a play on the story of Helen, which reminds us of the similar entertainment of Pyramus and Thisbe in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; but it breaks off in the middle,—the actor who plays Paris running off in earnest with the actress who plays Helen, and the piece ending with a burlesque scene of confusions and reconciliations.[401] And finally, another is a parody of the procession itself, with its giants, cars, and all; treating the whole with the gayest ridicule.[402]
Thus far, all has been avowedly comic in the dramatic exhibitions of these religious festivals. But the autos or sacramental acts themselves, with which the whole concluded, and to which all that preceded was only introductory, claim to be more grave in their general tone, though in some cases, like the prologues and interludes, parts of them are too whimsical and extravagant to be any thing but amusing. “The Bridge of the World” is one of this class.[403] It represents the Prince of Darkness placing the giant Leviathan on the bridge of the world, to defend its passage against all comers who do not confess his supremacy. Adam and Eve, who, we are told in the directions to the players, appear “dressed very gallantly after the French fashion,” are naturally the first that present themselves.[404] They subscribe to the hard condition, and pass over in sight of the audience. In the same manner, as the dialogue informs us, the patriarchs, with Moses, David, and Solomon, go over; but at last the Knight of the Cross, “the Celestial Amadis of Greece,” as he is called, appears in person, overthrows the pretensions of the Prince of Darkness, and leads the Soul of Man in triumph across the fatal passage. The whole is obviously a parody of the old story of the Giant defending the Bridge of Mantible;[405] and when to this are added parodies of the ballad of “Count Claros” applied to Adam,[406] and of other old ballads applied to the Saviour,[407] the confusion of allegory and farce, of religion and folly, seems to be complete.
Others of the autos are more uniformly grave. “The Harvest” is a spiritualized version of the parable in Saint Matthew on the Field that was sowed with Good Seed and with Tares,[408] and is carried through with some degree of solemnity; but the unhappy tares, that are threatened with being cut down and cast into the fire, are nothing less than Judaism, Idolatry, Heresy, and all Sectarianism, who are hardly saved from their fate by the mercy of the Lord of the Harvest and his fair spouse, the Church. However, notwithstanding a few such absurdities and awkwardnesses in the allegory, and some very misplaced compliments to the reigning Spanish family, this is one of the best of the class to which it belongs, and one of the most solemn. Another of those open to less reproach than usual is called “The Return from Egypt,”[409] which, with its shepherds and gypsies, has quite the grace of an eclogue, and, with its ballads and popular songs, has some of the charms that belong to Lope’s secular dramas. These two, with “The Wolf turned Shepherd,”[410]—which is an allegory on the subject of the Devil taking upon himself the character of the true shepherd of the flock,—constitute as fair, or perhaps, rather, as favorable, specimens of the genuine Spanish auto as can be found in the elder school. All of them rest on the grossest of the prevailing notions in religion; all of them appeal, in every way they can, whether light or serious, to the popular feelings and prejudices; many of them are imbued with the spirit of the old national poetry; and these, taken together, are the foundation on which their success rested,—a success which, if we consider the religious object of the festival, was undoubtedly of extraordinary extent and extraordinary duration.
But the entremeses or interludes that were used to enliven the dramatic part of this rude, but gorgeous ceremonial, were by no means confined to it. They were, as has been intimated, acted daily in the public theatres, where, from the time when the full-length dramas were introduced, they had been inserted between their different divisions or acts, to afford a lighter amusement to the audience. Lope wrote a great number of them; how many is not known. From their slight character, however, hardly more than thirty have been preserved. But we have enough to show that in this, as in the other departments of his drama, popular effect was chiefly sought, and that, as everywhere else, the flexibility of his genius is manifested in the variety of forms in which it exhibits its resources. Generally speaking, those we possess are written in prose, are very short, and have no plot; being merely farcical dialogues drawn from common or vulgar life.
The “Melisendra,” however, one of the first he published, is an exception to this remark. It is composed almost entirely in verse, is divided into acts, and has a loa or prologue;—in short, it is a parody in the form of a regular play, founded on the story of Gayferos and Melisendra in the old ballads.[411] The “Padre Engañado,” which Holcroft brought upon the English stage under the name of “The Father Outwitted,” is another exception, and is a lively farce of eight or ten pages, on the ridiculous troubles of a father who gives his own daughter in disguise to the very lover from whom he supposed he had carefully shut her up.[412] But most of them, like “The Indian,” “The Cradle,” and “The Robbers Cheated,” would occupy hardly more than fifteen minutes each in their representation,—slight dialogues of the broadest farce, continued as long as the time between the acts would conveniently permit, and then abruptly terminated to give place to the principal drama.[413] A vigorous spirit, and a popular, rude humor are rarely wanting in them.
But Lope, whenever he wrote for the theatre, seems to have remembered its old foundations, and to have shown a tendency to rest upon them as much as possible of his own drama. This is apparent in the very entremeses we have just noticed. They are to be traced back to Lope de Rueda, whose short farces were of the same nature, and were used, after the introduction of dramas of three acts, in the same way.[414] It is apparent, too, as we have seen, in his moral and allegorical plays, in his sacramental acts, and in his dramas taken from the Scripture and the lives of the saints; all founded on the earlier Mysteries and Moralities. And now we find the same tendency again in yet one more class, that of his eclogues and pastorals,—a form of the drama which may be recognized at least as early as the time of Juan de la Enzina.[415] Of these Lope wrote a considerable number, that are still extant,—twenty or more,—not a few of which bear distinct marks of their origin in that singular mixture of a bucolic and a religious tone that is seen in the first beginnings of a public theatre in Spain.
Some of the eclogues of Lope, we know, were performed; as, for instance, “The Wood and no Love in it,”—Selva sin Amor,—which was represented with costly pomp and much ingenious apparatus before the king and the royal family.[416] Others, like seven or eight in his “Pastores de Belen,” and one published under the name of “Tomé de Burguillos,”—all of which claim to have been arranged for Christmas and different religious festivals,—so much resemble such as we know were really performed on these occasions, that we can hardly doubt, that, like those just mentioned, they also were represented.[417] While yet others, like the first he ever published, called the “Amorosa,” and his last, addressed to Philis, together with one on the death of his wife, and one on the death of his son, were probably intended only to be read.[418] But all may have been acted, if we are to judge from the habits of the age, when, as we know, eclogues never destined for the stage were represented, as much as if they had been expressly written for it.[419] At any rate, all Lope’s compositions of this kind show how gladly and freely his genius overflowed into the remotest of the many forms of the drama that were recognized or permitted in his time.