is, as Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo says, worthy of Shakespeare; and it long ago reminded Trench of the scene in Cymbeline where Iachimo’s confession—
Whereupon—
Methinks, I see him now—
is interrupted by Posthumus with—
Ay, so thou dost,
Italian fiend!
But, for some reason, Amar después de la muerte is not among the most celebrated of Calderón’s tragic plays, and it is certainly not the most typical—not nearly so typical as Á secreto agravio secreta venganza, and two or three others. Here the note of genuine passion is almost always faint, and is sometimes wanting altogether. Othello murders Desdemona in a divine despair because he believes her guilty, and because he loves her: Calderón’s jealous heroes, with the exception of the Tetrarch in El Mayor monstruo los celos, commit murder as a social duty. In Á secreto agravio secreta venganza Don Lope de Almeida, with his interminable soliloquies, ceases to be human, and becomes the incarnation of (what we now think to be) a silly conventional code of honour. Doña Leonor in this play is not so completely innocent in thought as Doña Mencía in El Médico de su honra; but Don Lope de Almeida murders the one, and Don Gutierre Alfonso Solís murders the other, with the same cold-blooded deliberation shown in El Pintor de su deshonra by Don Juan de Roca, who has some apparent justification for killing Doña Serafina.
With all the skill spent on their construction, these tragedies do not move us deeply, and they would fail to interest, if it were not that they embody the accepted ideas concerning the point of honour in Spain during the seventeenth century. It is most difficult for us to see things as a Spaniard then saw them. He began by assuming that any personal insult could only be washed away by the blood of the offender: a man is killed in fair fight in a duel, but the survivors of the slain must slay the slayer. Modern Europe, as Chorley wrote more than half a century ago, has nothing like this, ‘except the terrible Corsican vendetta.’ And, as stated by the same great authority—the greatest we have ever had on all relating to the Spanish stage—‘beneath the unbounded devotion which the Castilian professed to the sex, lay a conviction of their absolute and universal frailty.’ In Spanish eyes ‘no woman’s purity,’ Chorley continues, ‘was safe but in absolute seclusion from men:—guilt was implied and honour lost in every case where the risk of either was possible,—nay, even had accident thrown into a temptation a lady whose innocence was proved to her master, the appearance of crime to the world’s eye must be washed out in her blood.’ It has often been said that, in Calderón, ‘honour’ is what destiny is in the Greek drama.
This code of honour seems to many of us immoral nonsense, and it is difficult to suppose that Friedrich von Schlegel had El Médico de su honra in mind when he declared Calderón to be ‘in all conditions and circumstances the most Christian ... of dramatic poets.’ It is hard to imagine anything more unchristian than the conduct of Don Gutierre Alfonso Solís which is held up for approval; but no doubt it was approved by contemporary playgoers. In this glorification of punctilio Calderón is thoroughly representative. He reproduces the conventional ideas which obtained for a certain time, in certain complicated conditions, in a certain latitude and longitude. This local verisimilitude, which contributed to his immediate success, now constitutes a limitation. The dramatist may be true to life, in so far as he presents temporary aspects of it with fidelity; he is not true to universal nature, and therefore he makes no permanent appeal. This, or something like it, has been said a thousand times, and, I think, with good reason. Still, it leaves Calderón where he was as the spokesman of his age.
He is no less representative in his comedias de capa y espada—his plays of intrigue, which are really dramatic presentations of ordinary contemporary manners in the vein of high comedy. Opponents of the Spanish national theatre have charged him with inventing this typical form of dramatic art, as though it were a misdemeanour. There is no sense in belittling so characteristic a genre, and no ground for ascribing the invention of cloak-and-sword plays to Calderón. They were being written by Lope de Vega before Calderón was born, and were still further elaborated by Tirso de Molina. Lope’s redundant genius adapts itself easily enough to the narrow bounds of the comedia de capa y espada, but he instinctively prefers a more spacious field. The very artificiality of such plays must have been an attraction to Calderón. All plays of this class are much alike. There are always a gallant and a lady engaged in a love-affair; a grim father or petulant brother, who may be a loose liver but is a rigid moralist where his own women-folk are concerned; a gracioso or buffoon, who comes on the scene when things begin to look dangerous. The material is the same in all cases; the playwright’s dexterity is shown in the variety of his arrangement, the ingenious novelty of the plot, the polite mirth of the dialogue, the apt introduction of episodes which revive or diversify the interest, and prolong it by leaving the personages at cross-purposes till the last moment. Calderón is a master of all the devices that help to make a good play of this kind. Character-drawing would be almost out of place, and, as character-drawing is Calderón’s weak point, one of his chief difficulties is removed. He is free to concentrate his skill on polishing witty ‘points,’ on contriving striking situations, and preparing deft surprises at which he himself smiles good-humouredly. The whole play is based on an idealistic convention, and Calderón displays a startling cleverness in conforming to the complicated rules of the game.