Como estas cosas representa Heredia,
á pedimiento de un amigo suyo,
que en seis horas compone una comedia.
The meaning of this little outburst is quite simple: it means that Rey de Artieda was no longer popular at Valencia, and that he and his fellows had had to make way on the Valencian stage for such followers of Lope de Vega as Francisco Tárrega, Gaspar de Aguilar, Guillén de Castro and Miguel Beneyto—all members of the Valencian Academia de los nocturnos, in which they were known respectively as ‘Miedo,’ ‘Sombra,’ ‘Secreto’ and ‘Sosiego.’
A very similar denunciation of the new school was published by a much greater writer in the same year. Cervantes ridiculed the comedia nueva as a pack of nonsense without either head or tail—conocidos disparates y cosas que no llevan pies ni cabeza; yet he dolefully admits that ‘the public hears them with pleasure, and esteems and approves them as good, though they are far from being anything of the sort.’ The long diatribe put into the mouth of the canon in Don Quixote is the plaint of a beaten man who calls for a literary dictatorship, or some such desperate remedy, to save him from Lope and the revolution. Whether Cervantes changed his views on the merits of the question, or whether he merely bowed to circumstances, we cannot say. But he tacitly recanted in El Rufián dichoso, and even defended the new methods as improvements on the old:—
Los tiempos mudan las cosas
y perfeccionan las artes ...
Muy poco importa al oyente
que yo en un punto me pase
desde Alemania á Guinea,