[50] Cervantes, Comedias, tom. i. pról.
[51] Pellicer, Orígen de la Comedia, tom. ii. pp. 58-62.—See also American Quarterly Review, no. viii. art. 3.
[52] Oliva, Obras, (Madrid, 1787.)—Vasco Diaz Tanco, a native of Estremadura, who flourished in the first half of the sixteenth century, mentions in one of his works three tragedies composed by himself on Scripture subjects. As there is no evidence, however, of their having been printed, or performed, or even read in manuscript by any one, they hardly deserve to be included in the catalogue of dramatic compositions. (Moratin, Obras, tom. i. pp. 150, 151.—Lampillas, Letteratura Spagnuola, tom. v. dis. 1, sec. 5.) This patriotic littérateur endeavors to establish the production of Oliva's tragedies in the year 1515, in the hope of antedating that of Trissino's "Sophonisba," composed a year later, and thus securing to his nation the palm of precedence, in time at least, though it should be only for a few months, on the tragic theatre of modern Europe. Letteratura Spagnuola, ubi supra.
[53] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. i. p. 386.—Oliva, Obras, pref. de Morales.
[54] The following passage, for example, in the "Venganza de Agamemnon," imitated from the Electra of Sophocles, will hardly be charged on the Greek dramatist.
"Habed, yo os ruego, de mi compassion, no querais atapar con vuestros consejos los respiraderos de las hornazas de fuego, que dentro me atormentan." See Oliva, Obras, p. 185.
[55] Compare the diction of these tragedies with that of the "Centon Epistolario," for instance, esteemed one of the best literary compositions of John II.'s reign, and see the advance made, not only in orthography, but in the verbal arrangement generally, and the whole complexion of the style.
[56] Notwithstanding some Spanish critics, as Cueva, for example, have vindicated the romantic forms of the drama on scientific principles, it is apparent that the most successful writers in this department have been constrained to adopt them by public opinion, rather than their own, which would have suggested a nearer imitation of the classical models of antiquity, so generally followed by the Italians, and which naturally recommends itself to the scholar. See the canon's discourse in Cervantes, Don Quixote, ed. de Pellicer, tom. iii. pp. 207-220,—and, more explicitly, Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, tom. iv. p. 406.
[57] "Ya en Italia, assi entre Damas, como entre Caballeros, se tiene por gentileza y galania, saber hablar Castellano." Diálogo de las Lenguas, apud Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, tom. ii. p. 4.