nieve, aire y fuego, quedando

agua lo que antes fue nieve,

lo que fue antes fuego, rayo;

exhalación lo que aire,

nada lo que fue caballo.

This is what Ben Jonson would call ‘clotted nonsense,’ and you find the same bombast in another play of Rojas Zorrilla’s—and an excellent play it is—entitled No hay ser padre, siendo Rey, upon which Rotrou’s Venceslas is based. In such faults of taste Rojas Zorrilla leaves Calderón far behind. You have seen him at his strongest in García del Castañar: you will find him at his weakest—and it is execrably bad—if you turn to the thirty-second volume of the Comedias Escogidas, and read La Vida en el atahud. Here St. Boniface goes to Tarsus and is decapitated: in the ordinary course, you expect the curtain to fall at this point. But Rojas Zorrilla prepares a surprise for you. The trunk of the saint is presented on the stage, the martyr holding his head in his hand; and the head addresses Milene and Aglaes in such a startling way that both become Christians. It seems very likely that, if Ludovico Enio had not been converted by the sight of the skeleton in Calderón’s Purgatorio de San Patricio, Milene and Aglaes would not have been confronted with the severed head, talking, in La Vida en el atahud.

Like Calderón, though in a lesser degree, Rojas Zorrilla is not above utilising the material provided by his predecessors: even in García del Castañar there are reminiscences of Lope de Vega’s Peribáñez y el Comendador de Ocaña, of Lope’s El Villano en su rincón, of Vélez de Guevara’s La Luna de la Sierra, and of Tirso de Molina’s El Celoso prudente. But, if he has all Calderón’s defects, he has many of his great qualities. Few cloak-and-sword plays are better worth reading than Donde hay agravios, no hay celos, or than Sin honra no hay amistad, or than No hay amigo para amigo (the source of Lesage’s Le Point d’honneur). Rojas Zorrilla has perhaps less verbal wit than Calderón, but he has much more humour, and he shows it in such pieces as Entre bobos anda el juego, from which the younger Corneille took his Don Bertrand de Cigarral, and Scarron his Dom Japhet d’Arménie. Scarron, indeed, picked up a frugal living on the crumbs which fell from Rojas Zorrilla’s table. He took his Jodelet ou le Maître valet from Donde hay agravios no hay celos, and his Écolier de Salamanque from Obligados y ofendidos, a piece which also supplied the younger Corneille and Boisrobert respectively with Les Illustres Ennemis and Les Généreux Ennemis. But observe that, in Rojas Zorrilla’s case as in Calderón’s, the foreign adapters use only the light comedies. The rapturous monarchical sentiment of García del Castañar no doubt seemed too hysterical for the court of Louis XIV., and hence the author’s most striking play remained unknown in Northern Europe. You may say that he forced the note, as Spaniards often do, and that he has no one but himself to thank. Perhaps: Rojas Zorrilla adopts a convention, and every convention tends to become more and more unreal. Possibly the first man who signed himself somebody else’s obedient servant meant what he wrote: you and I mean nothing by it. But conventions are convenient, and, though nobody can have had much respect for Philip IV. towards the end of his reign, the monarchical sentiment was latent in the people. Moreover, the scene of García del Castañar is laid in the early part of the fourteenth century. When all is said, García del Castañar has an air of—what we may call—local truth, a nobility of conception, and a concentrated eloquence which go to make it a play in a thousand.

Nothing is easier to forget than a play which has little more than cleverness to recommend it, and many of the pieces written by Calderón’s followers are clever to the last degree of tiresomeness. There is cleverness of a kind in El Conde de Sex ó Dar la vida por su dama, and, if there were any solid basis for the ascription of it to Philip IV., we should have to say that it was a very creditable performance for a king. But then kings in modern times have not greatly distinguished themselves in literature. You remember Boileau’s remark to Louis XIV.:—‘Votre Majesté peut tout ce qu’Elle veut faire: Elle a voulu faire de mauvais vers; Elle y a réussi.’ However, if El Conde de Sex would do credit to a royal amateur, it would be a rather mediocre performance for a professional playwright like Antonio Coello, to whom also it is attributed. Coello was already known as a promising dramatist when Pérez de Montalbán wrote Para todos in 1632, but we can scarcely say that his early promise was fulfilled. The air of courts does not encourage independence, and Coello, apparently distrustful of his powers, collaborated in several pieces with fellow-courtiers like Calderón, Vélez de Guevara and Rojas Zorrilla—notably with the two latter in También la afrenta es veneno, which dramatises the malodorous story of Leonor Telles (wife of Fernando I. of Portugal) and her first husband, João Lourenço da Cunha, el de los cuernos de oro.

Shortly before he died in 1652 Coello had his reward by being made a member of the royal household, but he would now be forgotten were it not that he is said to be the real author of Los Empeños de seis horas (Lo que pasa en una noche), which is printed in the eighth volume of the Escogidas as a play of Calderón’s. Assuming that the ascription of it to Coello is correct, he becomes of some interest to us in England, for the play was adapted by Samuel Tuke under the title of The Adventures of Five Hours. This piece of Tuke’s made a great hit in London when it was printed in 1662; four years later Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that ‘when all is done, it is the best play that ever I read in all my life,’ and when he saw it acted a few days afterwards, he effusively declared that Othello seemed ‘a mean thing’ beside it. There is a tendency to make the Spanish author—for Tuke adds little of his own—pay for Pepys’s extravagance. Los Empeños de seis horas is nothing like a masterpiece, but it is a capital light comedy—neatly constructed, witty, brisk and entertaining. It is, indeed, so much better than anything else which bears Coello’s name that there is some hesitation to believe he wrote it. However, he has the combined authority of Barrera and Schaeffer in his favour, though neither of these oracles gives any reason to support the ascription.

As a writer of high comedy Coello had many rivals in Spain—men slightly his seniors, like Antonio Hurtado de Mendoza, who became known in England through Fanshawe’s translations, and who must also have been known in France, since his play El Marido hace mujer was laid under contribution by Molière in L’École des maris; men like his contemporary Álvaro Cubillo de Aragón, whose El Señor de Buenas Noches was turned to account by the younger Corneille in La Comtesse d’Orgueil; men like his junior, Fernando de Zárate y Castronovo, the author of La Presumida y la hermosa, in which Molière found a hint for Les Femmes savantes. But the most successful writer in this vein was Agustín Moreto y Cavaña, who was born in 1618, just as Calderón was leaving Salamanca University to seek his fortune as a dramatist at Madrid. To judge by his more characteristic plays we should guess Moreto to have been the happiest of men, and the gayest; but late in life he gave an opening to writers of ‘hypothetical biography,’ and they took it. For instance, when he was over forty he became devout, took orders, and made a will directing that he should be buried in the Pradillo del Carmen at Toledo—a place which has been identified as the burial-ground of criminals who had been executed. This identification gave rise to the theory that he must have had some ghastly crime upon his conscience, and, as particulars are generally forthcoming in such cases, some charitable persons leapt to the conclusion that Moreto was the undetected assassin of Lope’s friend, Baltasar Elisio de Medinilla.