[1250] Bouterwek.
7. Andrès, favourable as he is to his country, is far from enthusiastic in his praises of the Spanish theatre. Its exuberance has been its ruin; no one, he justly remarks, can read some thousand plays in the hope of finding a few that are tolerable. Andrès, however, is not exempt from a strong prejudice in favour of the French stage. He admits the ease and harmony of the Spanish versification, the purity of the style, the abundance of the thoughts, and the ingenious complexity of the incidents. This is peculiarly the merit of the Spanish comedy, as its great defect, in his opinion, is the want of truth and delicacy in the delineation of the passions, and of power to produce a vivid impression on the reader. The best work, he concludes rather singularly, of the comic poets of Spain has been the French theatre.[1251]
[1251] Vol. v. p. 138.
Lope de Vega. 8. The most renowned of these is Lope de Vega, so many of whose dramas appeared within the present century, that although, like Shakspeare, he is equally to be claimed by the next, we may place his name, once for all, in this period. Lope de Vega is called by Cervantes a prodigy of nature; and such he may justly be reckoned; not that we can ascribe to him a sublime genius, or a mind abounding with fine original thought, but his fertility of invention and readiness of versifying are beyond competition. |His extraordinary fertility.| It was said foolishly, if meant as praise, of Shakspeare, and we may be sure untruly, that he never blotted a line. This may also be presumed of Vega. “He required,” says Bouterwek, “no more than four and twenty hours to write a versified drama of three acts in redondillas, interspersed with sonnets, tercets, and octaves, and from beginning to end abounding in intrigues, prodigies, or interesting situations. This astonishing facility enabled him to supply the Spanish theatre with upwards of 2000 original dramas, of which not more than 300 have been preserved by printing. In general the theatrical manager carried away what he wrote before he had even time to revise it; and immediately a fresh applicant would arrive to prevail on him to commence a new piece. He sometimes wrote a play in the short space of three or four hours.” ... “Arithmetical calculations have been employed in order to arrive at a just estimate of Lope de Vega’s facility in poetic composition. According to his own testimony, he wrote on an average five sheets a day; it has therefore been computed that the number of sheets which he composed during his life must have amounted to 133,225; and that, allowing for the deduction of a small portion of prose, Lope de Vega must have written upwards of 21,300,000 verses. Nature would have overstepped her bounds and have produced the miraculous, had Lope de Vega, along with this rapidity of invention and composition, attained perfection in any department of literature.”[1252]
[1252] P. 361-363. Montalvan, Lope’s friend, says that he wrote 1800 plays and 400 autos. In a poem of his own, written in 1609, he claims 483 plays, and he continued afterwards to write for the stage. Those that remain and have been collected in twenty-five volumes are reckoned at about 300.
His versification. 9. This peculiar gift of rapid composition will appear more extraordinary when we attend to the nature of Lope’s versification, very unlike the irregular lines of our old drama, which it is not perhaps difficult for a practised hand to write or utter extemporaneously. “The most singular circumstance attending his verse,” says Lord Holland, “is the frequency and difficulty of the tasks which he imposes on himself. At every step we meet with acrostics, echoes, and compositions of that perverted and laborious kind, from attempting which another author would be deterred by the trouble of the undertaking, if not by the little real merit attending the achievement. They require no genius, but they exact much time; which one should think that such a voluminous poet could little afford to waste. But Lope made a parade of his power over the vocabulary: he was not contented with displaying the various order in which he could dispose the syllables and marshal the rhymes of his language; but he also prided himself upon the celerity with which he brought them to go through the most whimsical but the most difficult evolutions. He seems to have been partial to difficulties for the gratification of surmounting them.” This trifling ambition is usual among second-rate poets, especially in a degraded state of public taste; but it may be questionable, whether Lope de Vega ever performed feats of skill more surprising in this way than some of the Italian improvisatori, who have been said to carry on at the same time three independent sonnets, uttering, in their unpremeditated strains, a line of each in alternate succession. There is reason to believe, that their extemporaneous poetry, is as good as anything in Lope de Vega.
His popularity. 10. The immense popularity of this poet, not limited, among the people itself, to his own age, bespeaks some attention from criticism. “The Spaniards who affect fine taste in modern times,” says Schlegel, “speak with indifference of their old national poets; but the people retain a lively attachment to them, and their productions are received on the stage, at Madrid, or at Mexico, with passionate enthusiasm.” It is true that foreign critics have not in general pronounced a very favourable judgment of Lope de Vega. But a writer of such prodigious fecundity is ill appreciated by single plays; the whole character of his composition manifests that he wrote for the stage, and for the stage of his own country, rather than for the closet of a foreigner. His writings are divided into spiritual plays, heroic and historical comedies, most of them taken from the annals and traditions of Spain, and lastly, comedies of real life, or, as they were called, “of the hat and sword,” (capa y espada) a name answering to the comœdia togata of the Roman stage. These have been somewhat better known than the rest, and have, in several instances, found their way to our own theatre, by suggesting plots and incidents to our older writers. The historian of Spanish literature, to whom I am so much indebted, has given a character of these comedies, in which the English reader will perhaps recognise much that might be said also of Beaumont and Fletcher.
Character of his comedies. 11. “Lope de Vega’s comedies de Capa y Espada, or those which may properly be denominated his dramas of intrigue, though wanting in the delineation of character, are romantic pictures of manners, drawn from real life. They present, in their peculiar style, no less interest with respect to situation than his heroic comedies, and the same irregularity in the composition of the scenes. The language, too, is alternately elegant and vulgar, sometimes highly poetic, and sometimes, though versified, reduced to the level of the dullest prose. Lope de Vega seems scarcely to have bestowed a thought on maintaining probability in the succession of the different scenes; ingenious complication is with him the essential point in the interest of his situations. Intrigues are twisted and entwined together, until the poet, in order to bring his piece to a conclusion, without ceremony cuts the knots he cannot untie, and then he usually brings as many couples together as he can by any possible contrivance match. He has scattered through his pieces occasional reflections and maxims of prudence; but any genuine morality, which might be conveyed through the stage, is wanting, for its introduction would have been inconsistent with that poetic freedom on which the dramatic interest of the Spanish comedy is founded. His aim was to paint what he observed, not what he would have approved, in the manners of the fashionable world of his age; but he leaves it to the spectator to draw his own inferences.”[1253]
[1253] Bouterwek, p. 375.
Tragedy of Don Sancho Ortiz. 12. An analysis of one of these comedies from real life is given by Bouterwek, and another by Lord Holland. The very few that I have read appear lively and diversified, not unpleasing in the perusal, but exciting little interest and rapidly forgotten. Among the heroic pieces of Lope de Vega a high place appears due to the Estrella de Sevilla, published with alterations by Triquero, under the name of Don Sancho Ortiz.[1254] It resembles the Cid in its subject. The king, Sancho the Brave, having fallen in love with Estrella, sister of Don Bustos Tabera, and being foiled by her virtue,[1255] and by the vigilance of her brother, who had drawn his sword upon him, as in disguise he was attempting to penetrate into her apartment, resolves to have him murdered, and persuades Don Sancho Ortiz, a soldier full of courage and loyalty, by describing the attempt made on his person, to undertake the death of one whose name is contained in a paper he gives him. Sancho is the accepted lover of Estrella, and is on that day to espouse her with her brother’s consent. He reads the paper, and after a conflict which is meant to be pathetic, but in our eyes is merely ridiculous, determines, as might be supposed, to keep his word to his sovereign. The shortest course is to contrive a quarrel with Bustos, which produces a duel, wherein the latter is killed. The second act commences with a pleasing scene of Estrella’s innocent delight in her prospect of happiness; but the body of her brother is now brought in, and the murderer, who had made no attempt to conceal himself, soon appears in custody. His examination before the judges, who endeavour in vain to extort one word from him in his defence, occupies part of the third act. The king, anxious to save his life, but still more so to screen his own honour, requires only a pretext to pardon the offence. But the noble Castilian disdains to save himself by falsehood, and merely repeats that he had not slain his friend without cause, and that the action was atrocious, but not criminal.