In Spain, as elsewhere, the secular battle waged between classicism and romanticism. As poets sided with Boscán and Garcilaso, or with Castillejo, so dramatists declared for the uso antiguo or for the uso nuevo. The partisans of the "old usage" put their trust in prose translations. We have already seen that the roguish Villalobos translated the Amphitruo of Plautus, and Pérez de Oliva not only repeated the performance, but gave a version of Euripides' Hecuba. Encina's successor was found in the person of Miguel de Carvajal, whose Josefina deals, in classic fashion, with the tale of Joseph and his brethren. Carvajal draws character with skill, and his dialogue lives; but he is best remembered for his division of the play into four acts. Editions of Vasco Díaz Tanco de Fregenal are of such extreme rarity as to be practically inaccessible. So are the Vidriana of Jaime de Huete and the Jacinta of Agustín Ortiz—two writers who are counted as followers of Torres Naharro. A farce by the brilliant reactionary, Cristóbal de Castillejo, entitled Costanza, is only known in extract, and is as remarkable for ribaldry as for good workmanship. The Preteo y Tibaldo of Pero Álvarez de Ayllón and the Silviana of Luis Hurtado are insipid pastorals. Many contemporary plays, known only by rumour, have disappeared—suppressed, no doubt, because of their coarseness. Torres Naharro's Propaladia was interdicted in 1540, and, eight years later, the Cortes of Valladolid petitioned that a stop be put to the printing of immoral comedies. The prayer was heard. Scarce a play of any sort survives, and the few that reach us exist in copies that are almost unique. The time for the stage was not yet. It is possible that, had Carlos Quinto resided habitually in some Spanish capital, a national theatre might have grown up; but the lack of Court patronage and the classical superstition delayed the evolution of the Spanish drama. This comes into being during the reign of Felipe el Prudente.
Encina's precedence in the sacred pastoral is granted; but his eclogues were given before small, aristocratic audiences. We must look elsewhere for the first popular dramatist, and Lope de Vega, an expert on theatrical matters, identifies our man. "Comedies," says Lope, "are no older than Rueda, whom many now living have heard." The gold-beater, Lope de Rueda (fl. 1558), was a native of Seville. A prefatory sonnet to his Medora, written by Francisco Ledesma, informs us that Rueda died at Córdoba, and Cervantes adds the detail that he was buried in the cathedral there. This would go to show that a Spanish comedian was not then a pariah; unluckily, the cathedral archives do not corroborate the story. Taking to the boards, Lope de Rueda rose to be an autor de comedias—an actor-manager and playwright. Cervantes, who speaks enthusiastically of Rueda's acting, describes the material conditions of the scene. "In the days of this famous Spaniard, the whole equipment of an autor de comedias could be put in a bag: it consisted of four white sheepskins edged with gilt leather, four beards and wigs, and four shepherd's-staves, more or less.... No figure rose, or seemed to rise, from the bowels of the earth or from the space under the stage, which was built up by four benches placed square-wise, with four or six planks on top, about four hand's-breadths above ground. Still less were clouds lowered from the sky with angels or spirits. The theatrical scenery was an old blanket, hauled hither and thither by two cords. This formed what they called the vestuario, behind which were the musicians, who sang some old romance without a guitar." This account is substantially correct, though official documents in the Seville archives go to prove that Cervantes unconsciously exaggerated some details—a thing natural enough in a man recalling memories fifty years old. A passage in the Crónica del Condestable Miguel Lucas Iranzo implies that women appeared in the early momos or entremeses. But Spaniards inherited the Arab notion that women are best indoors. The fact that Rueda was the first man to choose his pitch in the public place, and to appeal to the general, would explain his substitution of boys for girls in the female characters. Rueda was the first in Spain to bring the drama into the day. One of his personages in Eufemia—the servant Vallejo—makes a direct appeal to the public:—"Ye who listen, go and dine, and then come back to the square, if you wish to see a traitor's head cut off and a true man set free." Thenceforward the theatre becomes a popular institution.
Lope de Rueda is often called el excelente poeta, and his verse is exampled in the Prendas de Amor, as also in the Diálogo sobre la Invención de las Calzas. The Farsa del Sordo, included by the Marqués de la Fuensanta del Valle in his admirable new edition of Rueda's works, is almost certainly due to another hand. Cervantes commends Rueda's versos pastoriles, but these only reach us in the fragment which Cervantes himself quotes in Los Baños de Argel. Still, it is not as a poet that Rueda lives: he is rightly remembered as the patriarch of the Spanish stage. For his time and station he was well read: López Madera will have it that he knew Theocritus, and it may be so. More manifest are the Plautine touches in the paso which Moratín names El Rufián Cobarde, with its bully, Sigüenza, a lineal descendant of the Miles Gloriosus. It has been inferred that, in choosing Italian themes, Rueda followed Torres Naharro. This gives a wrong impression, for his debt to the Italians is far more direct. The Eufemia takes its root in the Decamerone, being identical in subject with Cymbeline; the Armelina is compounded of Antonio Francesco Ranieri's Attilia, with Giovanni Maria Cecchi's Servigiale; the Engaños is a frank imitation of Niccolò Secchi's Commedia degli Inganni; and the Medora is conveyed straight from Gigio Arthenio Giancarli's Zingara.[8]
Neither in his fragments of verse nor in his Italian echoes is the true Rueda revealed. His historic importance lies in his invention of the paso—a dramatic interlude turning on some simple episode: a quarrel between Torubio and his wife Águeda concerning the price of olives not yet planted, an invitation to dinner from the penniless licentiate Xaquima. Rueda's most spirited work is given in the Deleitoso Compendio (1567) and in the Registro de Representantes (1570), both published by his friend, Juan de Timoneda. In a longer flight the effect is less pleasing; the prose Coloquio de Camila and its fellow, the Coloquio de Timbria, are long pasos, complicated in development and not drawn to scale. Still, even here there is a keen dramatic sense of situation; while the comic extravagance of the themes—farcical incidents in picaresque surroundings—is set off by spirited dialogue and vigorous style. Rueda had clearly read the Celestina to his profit; and his prose, with its archaic savour, is of great purity and power. The patriotic Lista comes as near flat blasphemy as a good Spaniard may by mentioning Rueda in the same breath as Cervantes, and that the latter learned much from his predecessor is manifest; but the point need be pressed no further. Considerable as were Rueda's positive qualities of gay wit and inventive resource, his highest merit lies in this, that he laid the foundation-stone of the actual Spanish theatre, and that his dramatic system became a capital factor in his people's intellectual history.
He found instant imitators: one in a brother actor-manager, Alonso de la Vega (d. 1566), whose Tolomea is adapted from Medora; the other in Luis de Miranda (fl. 1554), who dramatised the story of the Prodigal, to which, in a monstrous fit of realism, he gave a contemporary setting. Of Pedro Navarro or Naharro, whom Cervantes ranks after Rueda, naught survives. Francisco de Avendaño's verse comedy concerning Floriseo and Blancaflor had long since been forgotten were it not for the fact that here, for the first time, a Spanish play is divided into three acts—a convention which has endured, and for which later writers, like Artieda, Virués, and Cervantes, ingenuously claimed the credit. Juan de Timoneda (d. ? 1598), the Valencian bookseller who printed Rueda's pasos, is a sedulous mimic in every sort. He began by arranging Plautus' Comedy of Errors in Los Menecmos; his Cornelia is based upon Ariosto's Nigromante; and his Oveja Perdida adapts an early morality on the Lost Sheep with scarcely a suggestion of original treatment. Torres Naharro is the inspiration of Timoneda's Aurelia; but his chief tempter was Lope de Rueda. In the volume entitled Turiana (1565), issued under the anagrammatic name of Joan Diamonte, he attempts the paso (which he also calls the entremés) to good purpose. An imitator he remains; but an imitator whose pleasant humour takes the place of invention, and whose lively prose dialogue is in excellent contrast with his futile verse. His Patrañuelo, a collection of some twenty traditional stories, is a well-meant attempt to satisfy the craving created by Lazarillo de Tormes. If Timoneda experimented in every field, it is not unjust to infer that, taking the tradesman's view of literature, he was moved less by intelligent curiosity than by the desire to supply his customers with novelties. Withal, if he be not individual, his unpolished drolleries are vastly more engaging than the ambitious triflings of many contemporaries.
Pacheco, the father-in-law of Velázquez, notes that Juan de Malara (1527-71) composed "many tragedies" both in Latin and Castilian; and Cueva, in his Ejemplar poético, gives the number hyperbolically:—
"En el teatro mil tragedias puso."
That Malara, or any one save Lope de Vega, "placed a thousand tragedies on the boards," is incredible; but by general consent his fecundity was prodigious. None of his plays survives, and we are left to gather, from a chance remark of the author's, that he wrote a tragedy entitled Absalón and another drama called Locusta. His repute as a poet must be accepted, if at all, on authority; for his extant imitations of Virgil and renderings of Martial are mere technical exercises. For us he is best represented by his Filosofía vulgar (1568), an admirable selection made from the six thousand proverbs brought together by Hernán Núñez, who thus continued what Santillana had begun. A contemporary, Blasco de Garay (fl. 1553), had striven to prove the resources of the language by printing, in his Cartas de Refranes, three ingenious letters wholly made up of proverbial phrases; and in our own day the incomparable wealth of Castilian proverbs has been shown in Sbarbi's Refranero General and in Haller's Altspanische Sprichtwörter. But no later and fuller collection has supplanted Malara's learned and vivacious commentary.
His friend, Juan de la Cueva de Garoza of Seville (?1550-?1606), matched Malara in productiveness, and perhaps surpassed him in talent. Little is known of Cueva's life, save that he had certain love passages with Brígida Lucía de Belmonte, and that he became almost insane for a short while after her death. He distinguishes himself by his independence of the Senecan example, which he roundly declares to be at once inartistic and tedious (cansada cosa), and by urging the Spanish dramatists to abjure abstractions and to treat national themes without regard for Greek and Latin superstitions. Incident, character, plot, situation, variety: these are to be developed with small regard for "the unities" of the classic model. And Cueva carried out his doctrines. Ignoring Carvajal, he took a special pride in reducing plays from five acts to four, and he enriched the drama by introducing a multitude of metrical forms hitherto unknown upon the stage. The cunning fable of the people—la ingeniosa fábula de España—is illustrated in his Siete Infantes de Lara, in his Cerco de Zamora (Siege of Zamora), where he utilises subjects enshrined in romances which half his audience knew by heart. It is literally true that he had been preceded by Bartolomé Palau, who, as far back as 1524, had written a play on a national subject—the Historia de la gloriosa Santa Orosia, published in 1883 by Fernández-Guerra y Orbe; but this was an isolated, fruitless essay, whereas Cueva's was a deliberate, well-organised attempt to shape the drama anew and to quicken it into active life. Nor did Cueva's mission end with indicating the possibilities of dramatic motive afforded by heroico-popular songs and legends. His Saco de Roma y Muerte de Borbón exploits an historical actuality by dramatising Carlos Quinto's Italian triumphs (1527-30); and his El Infamador (The Calumniator) not merely foreshadows the comedia de capa y espada, but gives us in his libertine, Leucino, the first sketch of the type which Tirso de Molina was to eternalise as Don Juan.
It is certain that Cueva was often less successful in performance than in doctrine, and that his gods and devils, his saints and ruffians, too often talk in the same lofty vein—the vein of Juan de la Cueva. It is no less certain that he improvises recklessly, placing his characters in difficulties whence escape is impossible, and that he takes the first solution that offers—a murder, a supernatural interposition—with no heed for plausibility. But his bombast is the trick of his school, and, to judge by his epical Conquista de la Bética (1603), he showed remarkable self-suppression in his plays. In his later years, after visiting the Western Indies, he seems to have abandoned the theatre which he had so courageously developed, and to have wasted himself upon his epic and the poor confection of old ballads which he published in the ten books entitled Coro Febeo de Romances historiales. Yet, despite these backslidings, he merits gratitude for his dramatic initiative.