Tragedy. 37. Those who attempted the serious tone of tragedy were less happy in their model; Seneca generally represented to them the ancient buskin. |Sperone. Cinthio.| The Canace of Sperone Speroni, the Tullia of Martelli, and the Orbecche of Giraldo Cinthio, esteemed the best of nine tragedies he has written, are within the present period. They are all works of genius. But Ginguéné observes how little advantage the first of these plays afforded for dramatic effect, most of the action passing in narration. It is true that he could hardly have avoided this without aggravating the censures of those who, as Crescimbeni tells us, thought the subject itself unfit for tragedy.[795] The story of the Orbecche is taken by Cinthio from a novel of his own invention, and is remarkable for its sanguinary and disgusting circumstances. This became the characteristic of tragedy in the sixteenth century; not by any means peculiarly in England, as some half-informed critics of the French school used to pretend. The Orbecche, notwithstanding its passages in the manner of Titus Andronicus, is in many parts an impassioned and poetical tragedy. Riccoboni, though he censures the general poverty of style, prefers one scene in the third act to any thing on the stage: “If one scene were sufficient to decide the question, the Orbecche would be the finest play in the world.”[796] Walker observes, that this is the first tragedy wherein the prologue is separated from the play, of which, as is very well known, it made a part on the ancient theatre. But in Cinthio, and in other tragic writers long afterwards, the prologue continued to explain and announce the story.[797]
[795] Della volgar Poesia, ii 391. Alfieri went still farther than Sperone in his Mirra. Objections of a somewhat similar kind were made to the Tullia of Martelli.
[796] Hist. du Théâtre Italian, vol. i.
[797] Walker, Essay on Italian Tragedy. Ginguéné,vi. 61, 69.
Spanish drama. 38. Meantime, a people very celebrated in dramatic literature was forming its national theatre. A few attempts were made in Spain to copy the classical model. But these seem not to have gone beyond translation, and had little effect on the public taste. Others in imitation of the Celestina, which passed for a moral example, produced tedious scenes, by way of mirrors, of vice and virtue, without reaching the fame of their original. But a third class was far more popular, and ultimately put an end to competition. |Torres Naharro.| The founders of this were Torres Naharro, in the first years of Charles, and Lope de Rueda, a little later. “There is very little doubt,” says Bouterwek, “that Torres Naharro was the real inventor of the Spanish comedy. He not only wrote his eight comedies in redondillas in the romance style, but he also endeavoured to establish the dramatic interest solely on an ingenious combination of intrigues, without attaching much importance to the development of character, or the moral tendency of the story. It is besides probable, that he was the first who divided plays into three acts, which, being regarded as three days’ labour in the dramatic field, were called jornadas. It must therefore be unreservedly admitted, that these dramas, considered both with respect to their spirit and their form, deserve to be ranked as the first in the history of the Spanish national drama; for in the same path which Torres Naharro first trod, the dramatic genius of Spain advanced to the point attained by Calderon, and the nation tolerated no dramas except those which belonged to the style which had thus been created.”[798]
[798] P. 285. Andrès thinks Naharro low, insipid, and unworthy of the praise of Cervantes. v. 136.
Lope de Rueda. 39. Lope de Rueda, who is rather better known than his predecessor, was at the head of a company of players, and was limited in his inventions by the capacity of his troop and of the stage upon which they were to appear. Cervantes calls him the great Lope de Rueda, even when a greater Lope was before the world. “He was not,” to quote again from Bouterwek, “inattentive to general character, as is proved by his delineation of old men, clowns, &c., in which he was particularly successful. But his principal aim was to interweave in his dramas a succession of intrigues; and as he seems to have been a stranger to the art of producing stage effect by striking situations, he made complication the great object of his plots. Thus mistakes, arising from personal resemblances, exchanges of children, and such like commonplace subjects of intrigue, form the groundwork of his stories, none of which are remarkable for ingenuity of invention. There is usually a multitude of characters in his dramas, and jests and witticisms are freely introduced, but these in general consist of burlesque disputes in which some clown is engaged.”[799]
[799] P. 282.
Gil Vicente. 40. The Portuguese Gil Vicente may perhaps compete with Torres Naharro for the honour of leading the dramatists of the peninsula. His Autos indeed, as has been observed, do not, so far as we can perceive, differ from the mysteries, the religious dramas of France and England. Bouterwek, strangely forgetful of these, seems to have assigned a character of originality, and given a precedence, to the Spanish and Portuguese Autos which they do not deserve. The specimen of one of these by Gil Vicente in the History of Portuguese Literature, is far more extravagant and less theatrical than our John Parfre’s contemporary mystery of Candlemas Day. But a few comedies, or, as they are more justly styled, farces, remain; one of which, mentioned by the same author, is superior in choice and management of the fable to most of the rude productions of that time. Its date is unknown: Gil Vicente’s dramatic compositions of various kinds were collectively published in 1562; he had died in 1557, at a very advanced age.
41. “These works,” says Bouterwek of the dramatic productions of Gil Vicente in general, “display a true poetic spirit, which however accommodated itself entirely to the age of the poet, and which disdained cultivation. The dramatic genius of Gil Vicente is equally manifest from his power of invention, and from the natural turn and facility of his imitative talent. Even the rudest of these dramas is tinged with a certain degree of poetic feeling.”[800] The want of complex intrigue, such as we find afterwards in the Castilian drama, ought not to surprise us in these early compositions.