The Celestina, or Tragi-comedia di Calisto y Melibœa, is the title of a book which appeared at Salamanca in the year 1500. It is named from the principal person, a procuress, who is the instrument by which all the events that it describes are brought about. It is the work of two authors. The name of the first, who wrote the first act only, cannot certainly be determined. Some ascribe it to Juan de Mena, and some to Rodrigo Cota. The language seems to prove that the date of the first act cannot be much earlier than the end of the fifteenth century, or than that of the twenty acts added to it by the Bachelor, Fernando de Rozas, by whom the whole was published. The work was received with universal, but, if its merit be considered, not with excessive approbation. This is testified by the numerous editions which succeeded each other with great rapidity, not only throughout Spain, but in Venice, Milan, and Antwerp; and translations of it were eagerly studied in France, England, Italy, and Germany. The great length of the Celestina proves that it never could have been intended for the stage; but its influence on the dramatic literature of Spain has been, nevertheless, considerable. For the language of the dialogue is so exquisitely beautiful—the representations it contains are so vivid—and the pathos of several passages so touching,—above all, the characters are drawn with so much spirit and truth of colouring, that it became the favourite model of the great Spanish dramatists of the sixteenth century.
To enter into a detailed account of this beautiful composition would be mere pedantry. It might, perhaps, be agreeable to an age which receives with exultation and delight prose translations of the most beautiful poetry, and places equestrian statues over archways; but it must fill every one to whom the rudiments of taste are not absolutely unknown—every one for whom eloquence and poetry are not merely a dead letter—with unspeakable disgust. It would bear the same resemblance to the original that a corpse does to the body animated by an informing spirit. The plot is extremely simple. Calisto, a youth of high birth, cherishes the most passionate love for the beautiful Melibœa. In order to gratify his passion, he has recourse to Celestina, and by her arts and love-potions, and intrigues, he at length accomplishes his object. They meet at her house; and while
"Imparadised in one another's arms,"
the servants of Calisto quarrel, a conflict ensues, in which Celestina loses her life. The law interferes, seizes upon the malefactors, and condemns them to the gallows. The friends of the servants agree to revenge their death. They beset the house, in which Calisto and his beloved have met again. Calisto, who wishes to encounter them, is slain. Melibœa, distracted with remorse and sorrow, and resolved not to survive her lover, ascends a lofty tower, and, after informing her parents of her errors, and of the death of him who shared them, precipitates herself from its summit. Such is the outline of this primitive effort of dramatic art, the eloquence of which is as various and astonishing as the plot is simple and inadequate. There are passages in it which may remind the reader of Clarissa Harlowe; and it is very possible that it may have suggested hints to Richardson. Bouterwek's remarks upon the Celestina are trivial and insignificant.
"I may boldly say it, because I have seen it," says Stephen Gosson, in 1581, writing under the influence of those puritanical feelings which were soon to play so conspicuous a part in our dramatic history, "that the Palace of Pleasure, the Golden Ass, the Æthiopian History, Amadis of France, and the Round Table, indecent histories in Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly ransacked to furnish the playhouses in London." Robert Green, the author of Friar Bacon, one of the most eminent of Shakspeare's immediate predecessors, tells us that he had travelled in Spain. There are several expressions in Shakspeare which indicate an acquaintance with Spanish literature—among others, the remarkable phrase, "this is mischief malikin," which is evidently a corruption of "mucho malhecho." The origin of the Taming of the Shrew is Spanish. The alternate rhymes of Love's Labour Lost prove, beyond a doubt, a Spanish model. The advice from Polonius to his son is said to be a literal translation from a Spanish dramatist. The resemblance between Twelfth Night and an anonymous comedy, La Española in Florencia, is too striking to be merely accidental. It is, indeed, most improbable that Shakspeare who was acquainted with French, and has inserted in his works—in the Tempest for instance—several paraphrases of Montaigne, should have been ignorant of Spanish, which was not only a more popular language, but one which contained far more to reward and stimulate the labour of the student. And here we may observe, that the prodigy of the Spanish stage, Lope de Vega—the "monster of nature," as Cervantes calls him, and certainly the most surprising instance of the combination of facility and genius which the modern world has seen—was born on the 25th November 1562, at Madrid, two years before Shakspeare. If we pursue our examination of the influence of Spanish literature on the English drama, we shall find a close resemblance between Fletcher's beautiful play of the Elder Brother—which was mutilated to please our barbarous grandfathers by Cibber,—and Calderon's Two Effects from one Cause, (De una Causa dos Efectos;) the Maid of the Mill, by Beaumont and Fletcher, and Lope's Quinta de Florencia; Webster's Duchess of Malfi, and Lope de Vega's Mayor Domo de la Duquesa de Amalfi. So the Señora Cornelia, a novel of Cervantes', is the foundation of the brilliant play of the Chances. The third scene of the third act of the Little French Lawyer, is taken from the fourth chapter of the second part of the first book of Aleman's Guzman d'Alfarache. The Knight of the Burning Perkle, shows that Don Quixote was commonly read in England. The Spanish Gipsy of Middleton and Rowley, and Beggars' Bush of Fletcher, are taken from the Fuerza de la Sangre, and Gitanilla of Cervantes; and the plan of Love's Pilgrimage is borrowed from the Dos Doncellas of the same author. The Spanish Curate is taken from the Gerardo of Gonzalo de Cerpedes; and The History of Alphonso, or a Wife for a Month, is that related by many Spanish writers of Sancho, the eighth King of Leon. To this list may be added a remarkable passage in Milton's Areopagitica, in which he alludes to Spanish poetry as we should allude to Manzoni and Lamartine. "The villages also must have their visitors, to inquire what lectures the bagpipe and the rebec reads even to the gamut of every municipal fiddler; for these are the countryman's Arcadias and his Monte Mayors." In 1663 was printed, The Adventures of Five Hours, from the Spanish comedy, Los Empeños de Seis Horas. Lord Digby's 'Tis better than it was is taken from Calderon's Mejor está que estaba. His Worse and Worse from Peor está que estaba. His Elvira, or the Worst not always True, from Calderon's No siempre lo Peor es Cierto. There can be little doubt, as a careful and elaborate writer, Shack, remarks in his instructive work on the Spanish stage, that a more accurate inquiry than has yet been instituted into the English drama, would lead to the conclusion, that many of the works of Lope de Vega were familiar to the great writers of Elizabeth's time; not, indeed, that it is contended, or that with any shadow of plausibility it can be maintained, that the Spanish is the origin of the English drama, or, indeed, that it ever exercised a decided influence on the English stage. The rapid intrigue, the brilliant accumulation of incidents, which the peasant of the South follows with delight and ease in scenic representation, would confound and bewilder the most educated classes of which a Northern audience is composed. Let an English or German reader try the experiment of reading one of Calderon's most agreeable plays, Tambien, hay duelo en las Damas, which may be freely translated, "There may be Trust in Women," and see whether, even in the quiet of his study, his brain does not grow dizzy with the complicated intrigue that it describes.
The truth is, that both in Spain and England, the drama, at the period of its greatest splendour, was drawn from the inmost sources of the national character and genius. It spoke the language of the different races amid which it appeared, and the peculiarities of each were wrought into the stamina of its existence. Before that time, and while it was seeking the track which it was to illuminate with such a flood of glory, before the days of Shakspeare and Lope de Vega, its effects had been feeble and unsuccessful. Ferrex and Porrex, Ralph Royster, Doyster, Damon and Pythias, bear, like the contemporary works of Spanish and Italian authors, traces of the attempt to substitute, as in the Sophonisba of Trissino, a cold, stiff, and affected imitation of ancient models for the appeal to those passions, and the image of those manners, with which man has an unchangeable and an everlasting sympathy. In the rude comedies of that day, as in the Spanish farces in the middle of the sixteenth century, coarse buffoonery and the realities of vulgar detail predominate. After this phasis, there may be still observed, in the dramatists of the day, a want of power to manage the materials which they had just begun to discover and appreciate. In the plays of Green, as well as of Juan de la Cueva, the sudden and inartificial incidents, the actions without a motive, and the want of a regularly constructed plot, betray the authors' want of experience and self-command. Marlow and Christoval de Vines resemble each other in their love of what is horrible and extravagant, and their use of a turgid and inflated diction. Neither in Peele, Kyd, or Lily, in our country, nor in Arguesda, Artieda, or Cervantes, (considered exclusively as a dramatist,) in the other, is any fixed, systematic, matured, independent, national drama distinctly to be traced. They were, however, the harbingers, in their respective lands, of the meridian light which was fast travelling to its maturity of splendour, and rejoicing as a giant to run its course. A lustre then was shed over the Western skies, which more than rivalled the earlier glories of the East. How did this come to pass? to what are we to ascribe the surprising resemblance of dramatic literature, in so many essential points, of Spain and England? this simultaneous outbreak of genius, this selection of the same path, and this arrival at the same goal—a goal which the utmost exertions of other modern nations have never enabled them to come within sight of, much less to reach? What is the seed of the noble and stately plant that shot up at once in such prodigality of magnificence? Shall we content ourselves with the cant of a romantic school, which, after it had wearied the Continent, has, of course, been put forward as a great discovery by our wretched sciolists, in explanation of this curious epoch in the history of the human mind? Or shall we look to the national feelings, sympathies, tastes, and legends, which the masters of the Greek, as well of the Spanish and of the English drama, unveiled in their immortal creations to the very depths? This is the true reason why these nations alone possess a drama of their own—this is the reason which accounts for the triumph of ancient as well as modern art—not an ambiguous and obscure phrase, but a principle which must insure the originality of the drama, so long as man is man.
If we pursue the comparison between the drama of Spain and England, we shall find the period of its golden age far more circumscribed in the latter than in the former. In the latter, it cannot be said to reach beyond the time of Charles the First; and from the time of Shakspeare its decline is visible. But in Spain, from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the eighteenth century, during a period when poetry was almost forgotten throughout the rest of Europe, the stream of the Spanish drama held on its majestic course, supplied from an ever-gushing fountain, and reflecting from its radiant surface all the varieties of human life. If Shakspeare has reached the very summit of all poetry, and a height to which no Spanish dramatist has ascended, the interval which divides him from every other of his countrymen is enormous. But the drama in Spain is not bound up with a single name, or with individual genius; it can exhibit a galaxy of light, and many constellations contribute to its lustre.
The starry host, of which Lope de Vega and Calderon de la Barca are the Lucifers, far surpasses in numbers and splendour that which any other country can exhibit; nor would the dull, brutal, stupid, hard-hearted, and obscene ribaldry which (Congreve excepted) is the prevailing characteristic of the popular writers of Charles the Second's time, and especially of Wycherley, have been endured by the Spanish peasant for a moment.
Christoval Suavey de Figueroa, who lived towards the end of the sixteenth and about the beginning of the seventeenth century, was of all enemies to the theatre of his day the most bitter and the most implacable. The influence of the priesthood had been early turned against the drama, especially on the grounds which had induced the Catholic Church of all ages to oppose itself to the drama, but in reality because the secular plays had superseded the rude and gross religious representations from which they sprang in Spain, as well as in France and England, and which had long been a principal means by which the priests had preserved their influence over the vulgar. Figueroa's animadversions are to be found in two works, one, the Playa universal de todas las Ciencias, published at Madrid, 1615; the other, Advertencios utilissimas a la Vida humana, Madrid, 1617. The writer complains that the nourishment which the writers of plays furnish for the diseased appetites of the vulgar is poisonous; and that, far from intermixing with their levity any moral or instructive sentences, the sole object of the writers is to provoke the laughter of the audience. Hence men, who are scarcely able to read, venture to write comedies, as is proved by the Tailor of Toledo, the Weaver of Seville, and other instances of success equally disgraceful. "Hence it happens that scandalous comedies, full of obscene language and trivial conceptions, are represented on the stage, in which all respect for sovereigns is trampled under foot, together with the rules of reason and morality. In these pieces the valet speaks without shame, the maid without modesty, and the old man without discretion."
In the Pasagero, which is a dialogue, the principal person says that "if Plautus and Terence were now living they would be driven from the stage, as a certain person, (Lope de Vega,) who considers himself beyond all rule, has invented a particular kind of farce, as lucrative as it is monstrous." But the exhortations of Figueroa were in vain. The passion for writing plays, far from diminishing, increased with tenfold fury, in spite of the Church and the critic, and even Philip the Second's edict. Nor can it be denied that, amid the prodigious and almost incredible mass of plays which increased with every year, some were of a very moderate description. But the very worst were above the level of the great majority of plays in other countries, and especially in our own. It would be difficult to find a single play in the time of Lope de Vega or of Calderon, in which some redeeming quality, happy incidents, or fiery invective, or beautiful language did not appear. Some of these writers, however, acquired an imperishable reputation. Of these, Gabriel Tellez, who wrote under the name of Tirso de Molina, was the most illustrious.