CHAPTER XVIII.
Lope de Vega, continued. — His Characteristics as a Dramatic Writer. — His Stories, Characters, and Dialogue. — His Disregard of Rules, of Historical Truth, and Moral Propriety. — His Comic Underplot and Gracioso. — His Poetical Style and Manner. — His Fitness to win General Favor. — His Success. — His Fortune, and the Vast Amount of his Works.
The extraordinary variety in the character of Lope’s dramas is as remarkable as their number, and contributed not a little to render him the monarch of the stage while he lived, and the great master of the national theatre ever since. But though this vast variety and inexhaustible fertility constitute, as it were, the two great corner-stones on which his success rested, still there were other circumstances attending it that should by no means be overlooked, when we are examining, not only the surprising results themselves, but the means by which they were obtained.
The first of these is the principle which may be considered as running through the whole of his full-length plays,—that of making all other interests subordinate to the interest of the story. Thus, the characters are a matter evidently of inferior moment with him; so that the idea of exhibiting a single passion giving a consistent direction to all the energies of a strong will, as in the case of Richard the Third, or, as in the case of Macbeth, distracting them all no less consistently, does not occur in the whole range of his dramas. Sometimes, it is true, though rarely, as in Sancho Ortiz, he develops a marked and generous spirit, with distinctive lineaments; but in no case is this the main object, and in no case is it done with the appearance of an artist-like skill or a deliberate purpose. On the contrary, a great majority of his characters are almost as much standing masks as Pantalone is on the Venetian stage, or Scapin on the French. The primer galan, or hero, all love, honor, and jealousy; the dama, or heroine, no less loving and jealous, but yet more rash and heedless; and the brother, or if not the brother, then the barba, or old man and father, ready to cover the stage with blood, if the lover has even been seen in the house of the heroine,—these recur continually, and serve, not only in the secular, but often in the religious pieces, as the fixed points round which the different actions, with their different incidents, are made to revolve.
In the same way, the dialogue is used chiefly to bring out the plot, and hardly at all to bring out the characters. This is obvious in the long speeches, sometimes consisting of two or three hundred verses, which are as purely narrative as an Italian novella, and often much like one; and it is seen, too, in the crowd of incidents that compose the action, which not infrequently fails to find space sufficient to spread out all its ingenious involutions and make them easily intelligible; a difficulty of which Lope once gives his audience fair warning, telling them at the outset of the piece, that they must not lose a syllable of the first explanation, or they will certainly fail to understand the curious plot that follows.
Obeying the same principle, he sacrifices regularity and congruity in his stories, if he can but make them interesting. His longer plays, indeed, are regularly divided into three jornadas, or acts; but this, though he claims it as a merit, is not an arrangement of his own invention, and is, moreover, merely an arbitrary mode of producing the pauses necessary to the convenience of the actors and spectators; pauses which, in Lope’s theatre, have too often nothing to do with the structure and proportions of the piece itself.[420] As for the six plays which, as he intimates, were written according to the rules, Spanish criticism has sought for them in vain;[421] nor does any of them, probably, exist now, if any ever existed, unless “La Melindrosa”—The Prude—may have been one of them. But he avows very honestly that he regards rules of all kinds only as obstacles to his success. “When I am going to write a play,” he says, “I lock up all precepts, and cast Terence and Plautus out of my study, lest they should cry out against me, as truth is wont to do even from such dumb volumes; for I write according to the art invented by those who sought the applause of the multitude, whom it is but just to humor in their folly, since it is they who pay for it.”[422]
The extent to which, following this principle, Lope sacrificed dramatic probabilities and possibilities, geography, history, and a decent morality, can be properly understood only by reading a large number of his plays. But a few instances will partially illustrate it. In his “First King of Castile,” the events fill thirty-six years in the middle of the eleventh century, and a Gypsy is introduced four hundred years before Gypsies were known in Europe.[423] The whole romantic story of the Seven Infantes of Lara is put into the play of “Mudarra.”[424] In “Spotless Purity,” Job, David, Jeremiah, Saint John the Baptist, and the University of Salamanca figure together;[425] and in “The Birth of Christ” we have, for the two extremes, the creation of the world and the Nativity.[426] So much for history. Geography is treated no better, when Constantinople is declared to be four thousand leagues from Madrid,[427] and Spaniards are made to disembark from a ship in Hungary.[428] And as to morals, it is not easy to tell how Lope reconciled his opinions to his practice. In the Preface to the twentieth volume of his Theatre, he declares, in reference to his own “Wise Vengeance,” that “its title is absurd, because all revenge is unwise and unlawful”; and yet it seems as if one half of his plays go to justify it. It is made a merit in San Isidro, that he stole his master’s grain to give it to the starving birds.[429] The prayers of Nicolas de Tolentino are accounted sufficient for the salvation of a kinsman who, after a dissolute life, had died in an act of mortal sin;[430] and the cruel and atrocious conquest of Arauco is claimed as an honor to a noble family and a grace to the national escutcheon.[431]
But all these violations of the truth of fact and of the commonest rules of Christian morals, of which nobody was more aware than their perpetrator, were overlooked by Lope himself, and by his audiences, in the general interest of the plot. A dramatized novel was the form he chose to give to his plays, and he succeeded in settling it as the main principle of the Spanish stage. “Tales,” he declares, “have the same rules with dramas, the purpose of whose authors is to content and please the public, though the rules of art may be strangled by it.”[432] And elsewhere, when defending his opinions, he says: “Keep the explanation of the story doubtful till the last scene; for, as soon as the public know how it will end, they turn their faces to the door and their backs to the stage.”[433] This had never been said before; and though some traces of intriguing plots are to be found from the time of Torres de Naharro, yet nobody ever thought of relying upon them, in this way, for success, till Lope had set the example, which his school have so faithfully followed.
Another element which he established in the Spanish drama was the comic underplot. All his plays, with the signal exception of the “Star of Seville,” and a few others of less note, have it;—sometimes in a pastoral form, but generally as a simple admixture of farce. The characters contained in this portion of each of his dramas are as much standing masks as those in the graver portion, and were perfectly well known under the name of the graciosos and graciosas, or drolls, to which was afterwards added the vegete, or a little, old, testy esquire, who is always boasting of his descent, and is often employed in teasing the gracioso. In most cases, they constitute a parody on the dialogue and adventures of the hero and heroine, as Sancho is partly a parody of Don Quixote, and in most cases they are the servants of the respective parties;—the men being good-humored cowards and gluttons, the women mischievous and coquettish, and both full of wit, malice, and an affected simplicity. Slight traces of such characters are to be found on the Spanish stage as far back as the servants in the “Serafina” of Torres Naharro; and in the middle of that century, the bobo, or fool, figures freely in the farces of Lope de Rueda, as the simplé had done before in those of Enzina. But the variously witty gracioso, the full-blown parody of the heroic characters of the play, the dramatic pícaro, is the work of Lope de Vega. He first introduced it into the “Francesilla,” where the oldest of the tribe, under the name of Tristan, was represented by Rios, a famous actor of his time, and produced a great effect;[434]—an event which, Lope tells us, in the Dedication of the drama itself, in 1620, to his friend Montalvan, occurred before that friend was born, and therefore before the year 1602.
From this time the gracioso is found in nearly all of his plays, and in nearly every other play produced on the Spanish stage, from which it passed, first to the French, and then to all the other theatres of modern times. Excellent specimens of it may be found in the sacristan of the “Captives of Algiers,” in the servants of the “Saint John’s Eve,” and in the servants of the “Ugly Beauty”; in all which, as well as in many more, the gracioso is skilfully turned to account, by being made partly to ridicule the heroic extravagances and rhodomontade of the leading personages, and partly to shield the author himself from rebuke by good-humoredly confessing for him that he was quite aware he deserved it. Of such we may say, as Don Quixote did, when speaking of the whole class to the Bachelor Samson Carrasco, that they are the shrewdest fellows in their respective plays. But of others, whose ill-advised wit is inopportunely thrust, with their foolscaps and bawbles, into the gravest and most tragic scenes of plays like “Marriage in Death,” we can only avow, that, though they were demanded by the taste of the age, nothing in any age can suffice for their justification.