He did not allow himself Molière’s privilege of taking his material wherever he found it. Only once is it known that he used the work of another: his Esclavos in Argel is based on Cervantes’ Trato de Argel. He was an originator—copied, not copying; and if at times his characters seem to lack novelty, it is perhaps in part because we live in the nineteenth century and he wrote in the sixteenth. For two centuries and a half the playwrights of the world have been pillaging him until his people and his plots have become public property. Calderon copied him; Molière and Corneille carried Calderon to France; the English stole from all three; so it is small wonder that what Lope de Vega transcribed from nature is now typical and traditional. He was first in the field; others have stolen his pressed flowers.
A full exposition of De Vega’s ideas of dramatic art can best be found in his own essay on the subject, the Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias. It would seem from this essay that in Lope’s time Spain was slowly freeing herself from the fetters of the unities, first riveted by Aristotle. England had set the example; Spain was fast following. In these two countries the fierce fight was then fought that two centuries and a half later was to agitate France. Spain then had her battle between the Romantics and the Classics, and Lope de Vega, while ironically deferential to the ancient laws, fought foremost on the side of freedom. As in France Victor Hugo in 1830, so in Spain Lope de Vega in 1600. Both were leaders; both have written essays on dramatic art. It is curious to compare the Spanish writer’s Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias with the French author’s elaborate and scientific discussion of dramatic effect contained in the celebrated preface to his never-acted Cromwell.
The Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias was written in 1609 at the request of one of those numerous academies then existing in Spain, and founded in imitation of the Italian Della Cruscans. It contains internal evidence of haste in its construction; although he knew better, Lope carelessly mistakes Terence for Plautus. Capable of composing a comedy in a day, he may easily have dashed off this little essay in a very few hours. It is written in blank verse, only the last two lines of each stanza rhyming. The stanzas, also, are of unequal length. Although the essay seems almost an improvisation, it is extremely interesting not only to the student of his plays but also to the casual reader, as it gives a view of the state of the Spanish stage at the time not elsewhere to be found. The following unabridged English rendering of the essay has been made from the excellent French version of M. Damas-Hinard:
“Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias.
(The New Art of Writing Plays.)
“Noble minds, flower of Spain, who, in this illustrious academy, will soon have surpassed not only those academies of Italy which Cicero, emulating Greece, established in the land where sleep the waters of Avernus, but even that school of Plato in which Athens saw so rare an assembly of philosophers come together, you order me to write you an essay on dramatic art in accordance with the public taste to-day. This task seems easy, and, indeed, it would be to him among you who has worked the least for the stage, and who therefore better knows the rules; but it must be done by me, who have never composed except contrary to the rules of the art. It is not, thank Heaven! that I do not know them: these theories were familiar to me when I was yet a school-boy, and when the sun had not ten times passed from Taurus to Pisces; but at the time when I chose this career I found the stage filled with works very different from those which the first inventors of the art left as models, and such, indeed, as were composed by the barbarians, who had accustomed the vulgar to their crudities. And they have so thoroughly established themselves in this fashion that he who would now write for the theatre according to the precepts of the art dies without glory and without reward; for among those who lack the enlightenment of a superior mind custom always carries the day.
“Several times, it is true, I have written following these principles, which but few people know; but as soon as I see these monstrous compositions appear, full of magical apparitions, to which rush the crowds and the women, always worshipping such absurdities, then I return to my barbarian habits. And when I have a comedy to write I lock up the rules behind triple bolts; I cast Plautus and Terence out of my study for fear of hearing their cries, for truth calls aloud in these dumb books; and I then write according to the art invented by those who wished to gain the applause of the crowd. After all, as it is the public who pays for these absurdities, ’tis but just that it be served to its taste.
“True comedy has one aim, as has every kind of poem, and this aim is to imitate the action of men and to paint the manners of the age in which they lived. Now, every poetical imitation is composed of three things: dialogue, versification, harmony or melody. Comedy and tragedy agree in this; but they differ, inasmuch as the former represents the action of the lower orders, and the latter only concerns itself with kings and high personages. Judge from that how much may be said against our comedies.
“At first our pieces were called autos, because they confined themselves to the imitation of common actions and interests. Among us Lope de Rueda was the model of this style; his comedies, which have been printed, are in prose, and of an order so low that he has introduced artisans and traces the loves of a blacksmith’s daughter. To-day we call them interludes, these antique works in which the rules of art are carefully observed, in which the action is simple and takes place among the middle classes—for an interlude was never seen in which kings figured. And this explains how plays little by little fell into deep discredit because of the lowness of style, and how they put kings and princes into comedy, to the great satisfaction of the ignorant.
“In the beginning of his Ars Poetica Aristotle relates, in a manner quite obscure, it is true, the debate which took place between Athens and Megara touching the originator of the theatre—the Megarians attributing this glory to Epicharmus, while the Athenians claimed it for Magnes. Donat traces back the first attempts to the ancient sacrifices, and, in this respect following Horace, he attributes the origin of tragedy to Thespis, and that of comedy to Aristophanes. The Odyssey of Homer is the result of a comic inspiration, but the Iliad was the noble model of tragedy. It is in imitation of this poem that is composed my Jerusalem, which I have called a tragic epic. They commonly call by the name of comedy the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso of the celebrated poet Dante Alighieri, and Manetti gives the reasons for this in the preface to that poem.