60

CHAPTER III.

THE GROWTH AND DECADENCE OF THE

SPANISH DRAMA.

THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF THE SPANISH DRAMA-THE FIRST BEGINNINGS OF THE RELIGIOUS PLAYS THE STARTING-POINT OF THE SECULAR PLAY-BARTOLOMÉ DE TORRES NAHARRO-LOPE DE RUEDA -LOPE DE VEGA'S LIFE-HIS INFLUENCE ON THE DRAMA-THE CONDITIONS OF THE WORK-CONTEMPORARIES AND FOLLOWERS OF LOPE -CALDERON-CALDERON'S SCHOOL.

The national

THE dramatic literature of Spain was, like our own, purely national. The classic stage had no influence on it whatever; the contemporary theatre character of the of Italy very little, and only for a brief Spanish drama. period in the earlier years. There were in Spain translators both of the Greek and Latin dramatic literature, while her scholars were no less ready than others to impress on the world the duty of following the famous rules of Aristotle. But neither the beauty of the classic models, nor the lessons of scholars, nor even the authority of Aristotle-though it was certainly not less regarded in the last country which clung to the scholastic philosophy than elsewhere

had any effect. It would be too much to say that they were wholly neglected. Spanish dramatic writers were, on the contrary, in the habit of speaking of them. with profound respect. Cervantes, in a well-known passage of Don Quixote, reproaches his countrymen for their neglect of the three unities; and Lope de Vega, who more than any other man helped to fix the Spanish comedy in its disregard of the unities of time and place, and its habitual contempt for the rules that the comic and tragic should never be mingled in one piece, or that great personages should never be brought on except with a due regard to their dignity, avowed that he saw what was right, and confessed its excellence. He even boasted that he had written no less than six orthodox plays. But Cervantes, in the little he wrote for the stage, never made his practice even approach his precept, while nobody has ever been able to find of which of his plays Lope was speaking when he said that he had observed the unities. It has even been supposed that when he made the boast, he was laughing at the gentlemen to whom he addressed his Arte Nuevo de Hacer Comedias (New Art of Writing Comedies). Not a little ingenuity has been wasted in attempts to discover what both meant. The good sense of Don Marcelino Menendez1 has found by far the most acceptable explanation of the mystery, and it is this,— that Cervantes, Lope, and their contemporaries had a quite sincere theoretical admiration for the precepts of Aristotle, or what were taken to be such by the commentators, but that in practice they obeyed their own 1 Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España.

impulses, and the popular will, though not without a certain shamefaced consciousness that it was rather wicked in them. Spanish dramatists, in fact, treated the orthodox literary doctrine very much as as the ancient Cortes of Castile were wont to treat the unconstitutional orders of kings,-they voted that these injunctions were to be obeyed and not executed-" obedicidas y no cumplidas," thereby reconciling independence with a respectful attitude towards authority. Some were bold enough to say from the first that the end of comedy was to imitate life, and that their imitation was as legitimate as the Greek. This finally became as fully established in theory as it always had been in practice. Nothing is more striking than the contrast between the slavishness of Spanish learned poetry and the vigorous independence of the native stage.

The first beginnings of the

religious plays.

There was little in the mediæval literature of Spain to give promise of its drama of the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries. Spaniards had mysteries, and they dramatised the lessons of the Church as other nations did; but they had less of this than most of their neighbours, and very much less than the French. In the earlier years of the sixteenth century there was a perceptible French influence at work in Spain.1 The San Martinho of Gil Vicente, a Portuguese, who wrote

1 Autos Sacramentales in Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra. The introduction by Don Eduardo Gonzalez Pedroso gives the early history of these religious plays in Spain, but with scarcely sufficient recognition of the fact that they were common to all western Europe.

both in his native tongue and in Castilian, is a moral play like many in mediæval French literature. It is on the well-known story of Saint Martin and the beggar, is written in flowing verse, and breaks off abruptly with a note that the performers must end with psalms, for he had been asked to write very late, and had no time to finish. The Farsa del Sacramento de Peralforja, which, from a reference to the spread of the Lutheran heresy, seems to belong to the years about 1520, betrays a French model by its very title. Farce had not the meaning it acquired later. The personages are Labour, Peralforja, his son, Teresa Jugon, Peralforja's sweetheart, the Church, and Holy Writ. The subjects are the foolish leniency of Labour to his son, and its deplorable effects (a favourite theme with French writers of farses and moralities), the sorrows of the Church, who is consoled by Holy Writ. These two rebuke Labour for his weakness, and induce Peralforja to amend his ways. There is nothing here particularly Spanish-nothing which might not be direct translation from the French. The religious play was destined to have a history of its own in Spain; but its earlier stage is marked by little national character. Even the Oveja Perdida (the Lost Sheep), written, or at least revised and recast, by Juan de Timoneda about 1570, which long remained a stock piece with the strolling players, is a morality on the universal medieval model. The Lost Sheep is of course the human soul, led astray by carnal appetite, and rescued by Christ the Good Shepherd. The other characters are Saint Peter, the Archangel Michael, and

the Guardian Angel. Except that it has an elaborate introduction, divided between an Introit to Ribera, the Patriarch of Antioch and Archbishop of Valencia, before whom it was played, and an Introit to the people, it does not differ from the San Martinho or the Farsa Sacramental de Peralforja.

It has been customary to treat the Celestina as the foundation, or at least an important part of the foundations, of the Spanish secular drama. This curious story in dialogue is indeed called a "tragi-comedy," and it most unquestionably proves that its author, or authors, possessed the command of a prose style admirably adapted for the purposes of comedy. But the Spanish is a poetic, not a prose drama. The qualities which redeem the somewhat commonplace love-story of Calisto and Meliboa, and the tiresome pedantry of much of the Celestina, its realism, and its vivacious representation of low life and character, are seldom found on the 'Spanish stage. We shall do better to look for the starting point of the comedy of Lope de Vega in the Eclogas of Juan del Encina, who has been already mentioned as one of the last lights of the troubadour school. The model here is obviously the little religious play of the stamp of Vicente's San Martinho, modified by imitation

1 An accessible and still most useful account of the early Spanish drama is to be found in the first volume of Ochoa's Tesoro del Teatro Español, which gives the introduction and catalogue of Don Leandro de Moratin, Paris, 1836; but the standard authority is Schack's Geschichte der Dramatischen Literatur und Kunst in Spanien, Berlin, 1845-46. Yet, here and always, the English reader cannot do better than follow Mr Ticknor.