The Galician Dominican, Gerónimo Bermúdez (1530-89), apologises for his presentation in Castilian of the Nise Lastimosa, which he published under the name of Antonio de Silva in 1577. Bermúdez has seemingly done little more than rearrange the Inez de Castro of the distinguished Portuguese poet, Antonio Ferreira, who had died eight years earlier. Though this "correct" play has tirades of remarkable beauty in the Senecan manner, its loose construction unfits it for the stage. All that it contains of good is due to Ferreira, and its continuation—the Nise Laureada—is a mere collection of incoherent extravagances and brutalities, conceived in Thomas Kyd's most frenzied mood.
The Captain Andrés Rey de Artieda (1549-1613) is said to have been born at Valencia, and he certainly died there; yet Lope de Vega, once his friend, speaks of him as a native of Zaragoza. Artieda was a brilliant soldier, who received three wounds at Lepanto, and his conspicuous bravery was shown in the Low Countries, where he swam the Ems in mid-winter under the enemy's fire, with his sword between his teeth. He is known to have written plays entitled Amadís de Gaula and Los Encantos de Merlín, but his one extant drama is Los Amantes: the first appearance on the stage of those lovers of Teruel who were destined to attract Tirso de Molina, Montalbán, and Hartzenbusch. Artieda is essentially a follower of Cueva's, and he has something of his model's clumsy manipulation; but his dramatic instinct, his pathos and tenderness, are his personal endowment. In his own day he was an innovator in his kind: his opposition to the methods of Lope made him unpopular, and condemned him to an unmerited neglect, which he bitterly resented in the miscellaneous Discursos, epístolas y epigramas, published by him (1605) under the name of Artemidoro.
Another dramatist and friend of Lope de Vega's was the Valencian Captain Cristóbal de Virués (1550-1610), Artieda's comrade at Lepanto and in the Low Countries. Unfortunately for himself, Virués had his share of learning, and misused it in his Semíramis, an absurd medley of pedantry and horror. His Átila Furioso, involving more slaughter than many an outpost engagement, is the maddest caricature of romanticism. He appears to think that indecency is comedy, and that the way to terror lies through massacre. It is the eternal fault of Spain, this forcing of the note; and it would seem that Virués repented him in Elisa Dido, where he returns to the apparatus of the Senecan school. Yet, with all their defects, his earlier attempts were better, inasmuch as they presaged a new method, and a determination to have done with a sterile formula. He essayed the epic in his Historia del Monserrate, and once more courted disaster by his choice of subject: the outrage and murder of the Conde de Barcelona's daughter by the hermit Juan Garín, the Roman pilgrimage of the assassin, and the miraculous resurrection of his victim. As in his plays, so in his epic, Virués is an inventor without taste, brilliant in a single page and intolerable in twenty. His tactless fluency bade for applause at any cost, and his incessant care to startle and to terrify results in a monstrous monotony. Yet, if he failed himself, his exaggerated protest encouraged others to seek a more perfect way, and, though he had no direct influence on the stage, he is interesting as an embodied remonstrance.
His mantle was caught by Joaquín Romero de Cepeda of Badajoz (fl. 1582), whose Selvajía is a dramatic arrangement of the Celestina, with extravagant episodes suggested by the chivalresque novels; and in the opposite camp is the Aragonese Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola (1559-1613), whom Cervantes esteemed almost as good a dramatist as himself—which, from Cervantes' standpoint, is saying much. Cervantes praises Argensola, not merely because his plays "delighted and amazed all who heard them," but for the practical reason that "these three alone brought in more money than thirty of the best given since their time." If it be uncharitable to conceive that this aims at Lope de Vega, we are bound to suppose that Argensola's popularity was immense. It was also fleeting. His Filis has disappeared, and his Isabela and Alejandra were not printed till 1772, when López de Sedano included them in his Parnaso Español. The Alejandra is a tissue of butcheries, and the Isabela is scarcely better, the nine chief characters being killed out of hand. Argensola's excuse is that he was only a lad of twenty when he perpetrated these iniquities; where, for the rest, he already proves himself endowed with that lyrical gift which was to win for him the not excessive title of "the Spanish Horace." But he was never reconciled to his defeat as a dramatist, and he avenged himself in 1597 by inditing a spiteful letter to the King, praying that the prohibition of plays on the occasion of the Queen of Piedmont's death should be made permanent. The urbanity of men of letters is, it will be seen, constant everywhere.
The school founded by Boscán and Garcilaso spread into Portugal, and bifurcated into Spanish factions settled in Salamanca and in Seville. Baltasar de Alcázar (1530-1606), who served under that stout sea-dog the Marqués de Santa Cruz, is technically an adherent of the Sevillan sect; but his laughing muse lends herself with an ill grace to artificial sentiment, and is happiest in stinging epigrams, in risky jests, and in gay romances. Diego Girón (d. 1590), a pupil of Malara's, is an ardent Italianate: prompt to challenge comparison with Garcilaso by reproducing Corydon and Tirsis from the seventh Virgilian eclogue, to mimic Seneca—"him of Córdoba dead"—or to echo the note of Giorolamo Bosso. His verses, mostly hidden away among the annotations made by Herrera in his edition of Garcilaso, deserve to be better known for specimens of sound craftsmanship.
The greatest poet of the Sevillan group is indisputably Fernando de Herrera (1534-97), who comes into touch with England as the writer of an eulogy on Sir Thomas More. Cleric though he were, Herrera dedicated much of his verse (1582) to Leonor de Milán, Condesa de Gelves, wife of Álvaro de Portugal, himself a fashionable versifier. Herrera being a clerk in minor orders, the situation is piquant, and opinions differ as to whether his erotic songs are, or are not, platonic. It is another variant of the classic cases of Laura and Petrarch, of Catalina de Atayde and Camões. All good Sevillans contend that Herrera, as the chief of Spanish petrarquistas, indited sonnets to his mistress in imitation of the master:—
"So the great Tuscan to the beauteous Laura
Breathed his sublime, his wonder-working song."
Disguised as Eliodora, Leonor is Herrera's firmament: his luz, sol, estrella—light, sun, and star. And no small part of the love-sequence is passionless and even frigid. Yet not all the elegies are compact of conceit; a genuine emotion bursts forth elsewhere than in the famous line:—