It was with considerable difficulty that the theatre established itself at all in Spain, the church setting itself against theatrical representations. This prejudice has continued even to modern days. No Spanish monarch since Philip IV. has entered a theatre; and Philip V., when he found in Farinelli the solace of his painful distemper, not only never heard him in a theatre, but caused him to give up the public stage, when he was admitted to sing privately before him. In the early day of which we are writing, the clerical outcry was furious, and the drama only became tolerated by making over the theatres to two religious corporations, one a hospital, and the other of flagellants; and the wickedness of the stage was permitted[102] for the sake of the benefits to charity and religion to result therefrom. The sites of the theatres then consisted of two open court yards, corrales—corral is the Spanish term for farmyard, or any enclosure for cattle, and long continued to be synonymous with a theatre. The representations took place at first in the open air. Alberto Gavasa, an Italian, who brought over a company of buffoons, was enabled by the greatness of his success to cover his corral with an awning, the court yard itself was paved and provided with movable benches, and called the patio, or pit, which no women ever entered. The grandees sat looking out of the windows of the houses that looked into the court yard, which government appropriated and distributed on this occasion. A prince or very great man having a room allotted to him, and minor gentlemen a single window, and this primitive arrangement was we are told the origin of our boxes. In addition, there were several galleries, into some of which women only were admitted. It was called the cazuela, and open to all classes.
Yet even this pious dedication of the proceeds of the theatre did not silence the clergy. In 1600, Philip III. ordered the subject to be referred to a junta of theologians. This council established certain conditions on which the performances were to be tolerated, the principal being that women were not to act, nor to mingle with the audience. It was at this time, and with this licence that Lope's career was run. He alone furnished all Spain with plays; and so great a favourite was he, that none but his were received with any approbation. On the accession of Philip IV., a man of pleasure, the theatre was more frequented than ever. Yet still, it maybe observed, the clergy nourished a prejudice against it, censured Lope for being the occasion of much sin, and caused him on his death bed to express his regret at having written for the stage, and to promise that if he recovered he would do so no more.
Cervantes boasts of the improvements he occasioned in theatrical representations. Still his plays, though they have great merit from the passion and poetry they display, are inartificial in their construction, while Lope on the contrary, became popular from the admirable nature of his plots. His dramas are praised by a Spanish critic for "the purity and sweetness of his language, for the vivacity of his dialogue, for the propriety of many of the characters, for his invention, his exact description of national manners, for his serious passages, his merriment and his wit." There is often something barbaric in his carelessness of time and place, and also in the hinging on of his incidents: still the plot was preserved carefully throughout, and the catastrophe showed the intention of the author to have been always in his mind, even when he most seemed to swerve from it. The number of plays that Lope wrote has been alluded to, and is really astonishing: there is something of sameness, perhaps, at the bottom of all, but this is joined to prodigious variety and novelty within the circle by which his invention is circumscribed. He says himself—
"Should I the titles now relate
Of plays my endless labour bore,
Well might you doubt, the list so great,
Such reams of paper scribbled o'er;
Plots, imitations, scenes, and all the rest,
To verse reduced, in flowers of rhetoric drest.
The number of my fables told
Would seem the greatest of them all;
For strange, of dramas you behold
Full fifteen hundred mine I call,
And full an hundred times—within a day,
Passed from my muse, upon the stage, a play."
And so entirely did he possess the ear and favour of the audience, that many a play of which he was innocent was brought out under his name, and thus obtained applause.
The causes of his success are easily discovered. The Spaniards had hitherto wanted a national literature. Their poetry and their pastorals did not express the heroism, the bigotry, the tenacious honour and violent prejudices that formed their character. Their ballads did, and so did the romances of chivalry; but the latter had become mere imitations, and while they echoed some of the sentiments they entertained, did not mirror their manners. It was like a new creation when the poetic genius of Spain embodied itself in the drama, and under the guise of tragedy and comedy, each romantic, made visible to an audience the ideal of their prejudices and passions, their virtues and vices; and these, in connection with a story that engaged their interest and warmed their hearts with sympathy.
The plays of Lope were either romantic tragedies, or plays of la Capa y Espada, of the sword and cloak, sometimes tragic and sometimes comic, but which were founded on the manners of the day. Of course there is a great deal of killing and slaying, but none of the horrors that startle the reader of Titus Andronicus, and other English tragedies of that period.
The point of honour, loyalty, love, and jealousy, form the standard groundwork of the dramas of Lope. Lord Holland has analysed the "Star of Seville," in which the interest depends on an affianced lover killing the brother of his betrothed at the instance of the king, and then refusing to betray his royal master's secret. Love and jealousy take singular forms. It was the custom of the lover to watch beneath the barred windows of the house of his lady, and she, if she favoured him, descended and conversed with him from her casement. They never hesitate to acknowledge their love, but it must never be suspected by others. Were it known that a cavalier were thus favoured, the relations of the lady would at once assassinate him, and stab her or shut her up in a convent. Yet when the lovers have escaped these dangers, they marry, and at the sound of wedlock the honour of the family is secured; the injury, to be so mortally avenged, is no longer an injury, and all is well and happy. If a husband is jealous, it is not that he doubts the fidelity of his wife, or even her attachment, but that she has been placed in a situation which might have led to dishonour. Others know this, and she must expiate the fault with her life. In the "Certain for the Doubtful," a lady wishing to dissuade the king from marrying her, confesses that his brother, who is his rival, had once kissed her without her permission. The king instantly resolves to have him assassinated, since he cannot marry the lady till his brother's death has freed her from the dishonour that must accrue, while the perpetrator of such an act lives. He says at the same time "I know that there is no reality in what you tell me, but, although this strange incident be a falsehood invented for the purpose of inducing me not to marry you, it suffices that it has been said, to force me to revenge it. If love makes me in any manner give credit to your story—Henriquez shall die, and I marry his widow; for then, if what you tell me shall be discovered, we shall neither of us be dishonoured; for you will be the widow of this kiss, as others are of a husband." Accordingly assassins are commissioned to waylay his brother. Meanwhile Henriquez and the lady marry, and the king seeing the evil without remedy, and his honour safe, pardons the lovers.
Schlegel observes, "Honour, love, and jealousy are uniformly the motives: the plot arises out of their daring and noble collision, and is not purposely instigated by knavish deception. Honour is always an ideal principle, for it rests, as I have elsewhere shown, on that higher morality which consecrates principles without regard to consequences: the honour of the women consists in loving only one man, of pure, unspotted honour, and loving him with perfect purity: inviolable secrecy is required till a lawful union permits it to be publicly declared. The power of jealousy, always alive, and always breaking out in a dreadful manner,—not like that of eastern countries, a jealousy of possession, but of the slightest emotions of the heart, and its most imperceptible demonstrations, serves to ennoble love. In tragedies, this jealousy causes honour to become a hostile destiny for him who cannot satisfy it, without either annihilating his own felicity, or becoming even a criminal."