His dramas (the Spanish word comedias meaning merely plays) may be roughly divided into three classes:
1. Comedies of common life, or domestic dramas;
2. Heroic dramas, which perhaps might sometimes be called tragedies; and
3. Comedies of intrigue, or comedias de capa y espada (comedies of Cloak and Sword, as the Spanish call them, from those frequently-used “properties”).
He also wrote religious plays, some, like the autos, resembling the mysteries and moralities, others more infused with a modern and secular spirit. He often chose Scriptural subjects for his plays, and in some of his heroic dramas the heroes are holy men and saints. But it is especially in the comedias de capa y espada that he excelled. They were interesting stories thrown into dramatic shape and written with the view of exciting surprise and curiosity. Only those ignorant of the Spanish habits and the Spanish customs of that day will reproach him for his frequent use of duels and disguises. He faithfully transcribed the romantic existence of the time. A rigid examiner may declare that his most successful pieces were comedies of intrigue rather than comedies of manners. They please by their plot, always ingenious and almost always original; by their interest, always sustained and exciting. Lope de Vega was a thorough master of stage effect. He weaves and reweaves the web and woof of his story, gaining and retaining the attention of the spectator by the growing interest. We are carried rapidly along by the skill of the dramatist, sometimes in spite of ourselves. Even in the best of his plays the incidents are often improbable, but in our enjoyment we can readily pardon this. When Shakspere has called Bohemia a desert country by the sea, and Beaumont and Fletcher speak of Naples as though it were an island, it would indeed be strange if Lope were exempt from such errors. In one play we find Adam and Eve “dressed very gallantly after the French fashion”; in another Nero sings a serenade in the streets of Rome. The American Indians discourse of Diana and Phœbus; Cyrus the Great, after his ascension to the throne, marries a shepherdess; Job, David, Jeremias, and St. John the Baptist are introduced in one play; and in “The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus,” among the dramatis personæ are Providence, Imagination, The Christian Religion, Idolatry, and a Demon. Haste is hardly an excuse for this, and De Vega worked in haste. The elder Dumas wrote a novel in seventy-six consecutive hours. For fifteen days De Vega wrote an act a day, and more than one hundred of his plays were written within twenty-four hours each. At least this seems to be the meaning of
“Pues mas de ciento en horas veinticuatro
Pasaron de las musas al teatro.”
Mr. Ticknor, however, reads these lines to mean that more than a hundred were performed within twenty-four hours after their completion. Perhaps this interpretation is accurate, but to any one acquainted with the difficulties attending the mounting and rehearsing of a modern comedy it seems, to say the least, improbable; and, at any rate, De Vega’s facility of composition was so great that many writers rashly assert that he could compose a play in three or four hours! Montalvan tells a pleasant anecdote illustrating the rapidity of his work. To oblige a manager Lope and Montalvan agreed to write a piece together. The first two acts of the Tercera Orden de San Francisco were divided between them, each writing an act a day. The third act was to be halved into eight leaves each. Montalvan continues, to quote Lord Holland’s version: “As it was bad weather, I remained in his house that night, and, knowing that I could not equal him in the execution, I had a fancy to beat him in the despatch of the business. For this purpose I got up at two o’clock, and at eleven had completed my share of the work. I immediately went out to look for him, and found him very deeply occupied with an orange-tree that had been frost-bitten in the night. Upon my asking him how he had gone on with his task he answered: ‘I set about it at five, but I finished the act an hour ago, took a bit of ham for breakfast, wrote an epistle of fifty triplets, and have watered the whole of the garden—which has not a little fatigued me.’ Then, taking out the papers, he read me the eight leaves and the triplets—a circumstance that would have astonished me had I not known the fertility of his genius and the dominion he had over the rhymes of our language.” At this period Lope was nearly seventy years old, or such a trifle would scarcely have tired him.
Schlegel draws a brilliant comparison between Lope de Vega and Shakspere, or rather between the Spanish and the English stage. Any such method of measurement injures the Spaniard; it is only in the management of his plots that he is able to rival the Englishman. It is curious, however, to note that each great writer was surrounded by minor lights—set, as it were, with glittering but inferior gems. Shakspere shone in the midst of a glorious company containing Jonson, Ford, Fletcher, Beaumont, Greene, Nash, Marlowe, Massinger, and Webster. Lope de Vega, following Lope de Rueda, was surrounded by a brilliant throng of friendly rivals—Cervantes, Calderon, Montalvan, Moreto, Alarcon, Matos-Fragoso, and Guillen de Castro. It is also remarkable to find that England and Spain, then the possessors of a great drama, are now barren fields; while France, once but the empty echo of the classic muse, is to-day the chief country in possession of a living dramatic literature. For this literature France owes largely to England and Spain; French tragedy and French comedy are directly indebted to Lope’s influence. From a play of Guillen de Castro, one of Lope’s followers, Corneille derived his Cid, the greatest French tragedy; and from a play of Alarcon, another of Lope’s followers (and the first of American dramatic authors, for by birth and education he was a Mexican), Corneille took his Menteur, the earliest of French comedies. In a letter to Boileau Molière said: “I owe much to the Menteur. At the time it appeared I desired to write, but I was uncertain as to what I should write. My ideas were confused; this work came and defined them. Without the Menteur, no doubt, I should have written some such comedies of intrigue as the Etourdi and the Dépit Amoureux, but perhaps I should never have written the Misanthrope.”
The dramatis personæ of Lope’s plays are not character studies, finely and fully polished, like those of Molière; they are rather off-hand sketches, fresh and original. Although they often disclose haste, they always show the firm though rapid touch of a master; and however wanting in completeness of detail, they never lack boldness of outline. The people who walk and talk in Lope de Vega’s comedies are living men and women, speaking and acting like human beings, and true to human nature as it was in Spain in those adventurous times; they were not lay figures, mere puppets, pulled hither and thither by visible wires. He rarely created an eccentric character, never an impossible one.