CHAPTER IX
THE DRAMATIC SCHOOL OF CALDERÓN
Lope de Vega, as I have tried to persuade you in a previous lecture, may fairly be regarded as the real founder of the national theatre in Spain. His victory was complete, and the old-fashioned Senecan drama was everywhere supplanted by the comedia nueva in which the ‘unities’ were neglected. Playwrights who could no longer get their pieces produced took great pains to prove that Lope ought to have failed, and dwelt upon the enormity of his anachronisms and geographical blunders. These groans of the defeated are always with us. Just as the pedant clamours for Shakespeare’s head on a charger, because he chose to place a seaport in Bohemia, so Andrés Rey de Artieda, in his Discursos, epístolas y epigramas, published under the pseudonym of Artemidoro in 1605, is indignant at the triumph of ignorant incapacity:—
Galeras vi una vez ir per el yermo,
y correr seis caballos per la posta,
de la isla del Gozo hasta Palermo.
Poner dentro Vizcaya á Famagosta,
y junto de los Alpes, Persia y Media,
y Alemaña pintar, larga y angosta.